Category Archives: Freaks

Today’s De-fleshed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

During World War II it was not unusual for American soldiers to collect enemy teeth. Human trophy-taking escalated in the Pacific War, and in later wards in Korea and Vietnam, where there were more opportunities for small patrols to scavenge in heavily forested terrain. Human trophies also betray the physicality of these conflicts. They suggest face-to-face fighting and raw struggles at close quarters where physical prowess and mental strength set the victor apart. The classic image of the triumphant warrior holding his enemy’s head aloft on the battlefield draws its power from the intensity of the contest, because man to man it might have unfolded differently. In this war, the jungle separated soldiers from their comrades and thrust them together with their enemies and trophies like teeth and skulls, that were paraded in camps and sent back home to loved ones as proof of having been there and survived, were stark reminders of the fierce intimacy of battle.

There were practical considerations too. Teeth lent themselves to collection, because they were small and light and they could be knocked out and cleaned pretty easily. Fingers, ears and heads were another matter. They had to be hacked off, and they were messy and smelly; the practicalities were enough to put most people off. One group of American marines returning from the frontlines in early 1944 had dug up a dead Japanese soldier and hacked off his head, because ‘Jack wanted a Jap skull’, but the head did not come off cleanly, the jaw was broken, and it smelled so badly that the marines settled for taking its three gold teeth instead. Lindbergh told a similar story of a man who had tried to get ants to clean the flesh of a Japanese soldier’s head, until his comrades took it away from him because it smelt so bad. Mack Morriss saw an ear being passed around in one division but said that the men did not have much stomach for it.

There were, however, a few men who were unfazed by the horrors of de-fleshing a human head. In October 1943, the US Army’s high command was alarmed at newspaper reports concerning a soldier ‘who had recently returned from the southwest Pacific theater with photos showing various steps “in the cooking and scraping of the heads of Japanese to prepare them for souvenirs”‘.  Today, it is easy to find photographs online of Allied soldiers boiling human heads in old fuel drums to remove the flesh, and pictures of severed Japanese heads hanging from the trees. Nonetheless, most of those soldiers who took Japanese heads scavenged skulls  from deserted battlegrounds, or came across them in the jungle, by which time the tropical conditions had already done the work for them and cleaned them to the bone. Generally, a dry skull made more attractive, and more manageable, trophy than a rotting human head.

American soldiers boiling the flesh off a trophy head.

Culled from: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!

Sophia Schultz was a frequent patron of the photographic studio. She had many pictures taken by C.F. Conly in Boston and a very fine portrait done by the Wilkes Studio in Baltimore. However, she seems to have patronized Chas. Eisenmann’s studio most frequently. After her initial visit some time around 1880 when she posed with her mother, Sophia began to sprout a moustache and beard. The growth was frequently helped along in her subsequent portraits by a little careful pencil work.

The various photographs of Sophia record the presence of most of the external abnormalities associated with hypothyroidism – short extremities, large, head, widely spaced eyes, swollen eyelids, short thick neck, broad hands with short fingers, low hairline, obesity and stunted growth (Sophia was thirty inches tall). If this was the case, she would have quite probably been mentally retarded as well. The condition is much rare now; thyroid hormone is available to correct the abnormalities if diagnosis is made early.

Sophia Schultz, “Dwarf Fat Lady,” 1880.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age

Today’s Oxygen-Deprived Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Here’s another excerpt from Minnesota 1918:When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State, about the Cloquet fire that devastated much of Northern Minnesota.

A Minnesota  Forest Fires Relief Commission later estimated that at least half of the 453 lives lost in the fires on October 12, 1918, died in the Moose Lake and Kettle River area.  Among them were at least 15 volunteer firefighters west of Kettle River, 75 to 100 people at Dead Man’s Curve, 67 near what was called Eckman’s Corner, 37 in root cellars at the Niemi, Soderberg, and Williams farms, and countless others in various buildings, wells, streams, fields, and woods.

The disaster at the Niemi farm – about five miles west of Moose Lake – might be the most heartrending of all the numbing tales of loss. Hulda Portinen Koivisto, who lost seven of her eight children on October 12, 1918, shared her memories with Edwin Manni fifty-seven years later for a story that ran in the Moose Lake Star Gazette in 1975.

“The forenoon was beautiful,” Hulda said. With eight kids ranging from age one to thirteen, she and her family tackled the Saturday chores and washed clothes. They knew fires were burning a couple miles south at Tomczak’s mill. When they realized the danger was approaching, they wrapped valuables in a bedspread and buried them in a half-acre potato field. A child’s bike, some furniture, a buggy, and  wagon would somehow remain unburned on a nearby rock pile. The family planned to escape to the south because they didn’t see any more smoke coming from the direction of Tomczak’s mill. “Suddenly, the wind shifted and increased in velocity and it was obvious disaster was upon us,” said Hulda, who was thirty-six at the time. “Despite the shock, confusion and fear, survival was a decision to be made in seconds.”

Her dad, Henry Portinen, ran over and encouraged the children to join him at his home nearby. Only seven-year-old Arnold ran through the swampy area with his grandfather. They made it to the gate, where his grandfather’s burned body was later discovered. An uncle, Urho (Corny) Porinen, tossed Arnold and another nephew in a Model T. A huge gust of wind lifted the car, throwing it on a stone fence. The three survived in a low spot in a nearby field.

By 7:00 PM on that day of horror, one of the Koivisto’s neighbors, Ida Niemi, had hustled the children to her root cellar for what she believed would be safety. With winter coming on, the cellar was jammed with potatoes, but fifteen people managed to squirm inside: seven Koivisto kids – Leonard (twelve), Ellen (eleven), Ester (nine), Ethel (nine), Elsie (five), Wilbert (three), and Evelyn (one); Ida Niemi (fifty) and four of her children, Helmi (fourteen), Alexander (twelve), Bernhardt (ten), and Martha (five); and three members of the neighboring Berkio family, Christina (fifty-seven), Clara (sixteen), and Reino (seven).

Hulda, her husband, Nick, and one of the Niemi boys, John, stayed outside, wrapped themselves in blankets, and tossed bucket after bucket of water on the root cellar door. “With the terrific wind, dust, smoke, and burning debris landing on the root cellar roof, it was a constant battle to keep the fire out,” Hulda said.

Every root cellar had an air vent. “Finally in all the confusion, it dawned on us to call down this vent to inquire about the welfare of the people inside,” she said. They received no answer, so they opened the door. “You can imagine the horror when we discovered all of the people we had desperately tried to save were dead – suffocated from lack of oxygen. Even some of the potatoes were baked. There was nothing more to be done for them.”

The fatal root cellar.

Hulda and Nick pulled the bodies from the cellar, arranged them in a long row, and placed their arms across their children’s bodies – “hoping and praying for some sign of life, with no success.” They remained with the bodies until Sunday afternoon, when guardsmen stopped at the farm after retrieving bodies from roadsides. All the bodies were brought to the new Elm Tree Hotel, which had avoided the flames in Moose Lake.

When Hulda heard her children would be buried in the mass grave, she threw a fit. She was a devout Christian and told three officers that her children would be buried in the family plot at St. Peter’s Lutheran Cemetery in Moose Lake “even if she had to push them there in a wheelbarrow.” The guardsmen yielded to her request. Coffins were furnished, and army trucks had to stop at each stream crossing to unload because the bridges were burned. But Hulda’s children were buried in the family plot at St Peter’s, as were the three Berkios. The Niemis were buried in the mass grave.

Lowering the bodies into the mass grave.

Hulda’s father was never seen alive again after Arnold lost sight of him at the farm gate. Presumably his body went in the mass grave. Hulda’s mother, Lydia, badly burned, died three weeks later at St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth. And eighteen-year-old John Niemi, who tossed the buckets of water on the cellar door, died from influenza and smoke inhalation that November.

Culled from:  Minnesota 1918:When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State

Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!

Myrtle Corbin came from Texas. She was one of several similar freaks on the circuit at the end of the century. Francisco Lentini, “The Human Tripod,” had three legs, while the Indian freak Laloo had a diminutive second body growing from his chest. All were abnormal Siamese twins in which one member of the pair had not only failed to separate but had also suffered imperfect development. The result was a parasite-autosite pairing in which the host twin (autosite) bore the burden of consciousness and nurture for both. Although the publicity accompanying Laloo’s appearances attempted to add further kinkiness to the arrangement by maintaining this parasite was female, such twins are always of the same sex. In Myrtle’s case both her lower body and that of her twin were said to be fully functional. Consequently, after she married she bore children  from both vaginas, two from one and three from the other.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age

Today’s Unpleasant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

When Julia Martha Thomas hired Kate Webster as a housekeeper, she didn’t realize what an unpleasant, and ultimately gruesomely fatal, decision it would be.

The unsuspecting Julie Martha Thomas.

In 1879, Julia lived alone in a small cottage outside London. She was an eccentric widow who traveled frequently and dressed well above her status as a lower middle-class lady. She had a bad temper and couldn’t keep a servant for long. So when a friend told her about an Irish woman who was looking for a job, Julia hired her without question. Unfortunately, she didn’t know about her new employee’s reputation.

Kate Webster: Doesn’t She Look Like a Nice Girl?

In Ireland, Kate had made a living as a pickpocket and went to prison for the first time at 15 years old. She arrived in England a few years later, and eventually fell in love with another robber, Mr. Strong. After Kate got pregnant, Mr. Strong left, and she started taking jobs as a house cleaner. She would steal items from her employers and sell them off, then move on to the next home. Apart from stealing, Kate had two hobbies: drinking and fighting.

Naturally, the women did not get along.

After months of constant quarreling, Julia fired Kate. Kate begged to stay on for a few more days, and Julia agreed to pay her through the weekend. At church that Sunday, Julia told her friends she was scared of being alone with Kate, and she was going to end their professional relationship once she got home.

The exit interview did not go well. Kate threw Julia down the stairs, and before Julia could scream for help, Kate jumped on top of her and strangled her to death. The housekeeper then grabbed a razor and a saw, dismembered the body, boiled it, and stuffed it into a wooden box; everything fit except the head and one foot.

It took Kate days to clean up the mess in the small cottage. Once she was finished, she changed into one of Julia’s dresses, put the head in a black bag, and took the morbid fashion accessory to a local pub for drinks with friends.

Kate still had to dispose of the body, so she convinced a neighbor to help her carry the sealed wooden box to a bridge on the Thames. The man heard a splash shortly after he left but said he thought nothing of it.

Julia’s body was discovered the next morning, but without the head, police couldn’t identify the victim.

For the next few weeks, Kate continued to live as Julia, sleeping in her bed, wearing her clothes and jewelry–and selling her worldly possessions, of course. She sold it all: the furniture, the house, and the gold fillings from Julia’s teeth. She even tried to sell the fat rendered from boiling Julia’s body to a restaurant in town. When that didn’t work, she fed it to some young boys, who ate two bowls full.

Finally, a neighbor put two and two together, and Kate fled to Ireland to escape the police. She was quickly caught and sent back to England, where a jury convicted her of murder in less than an hour. Before she was hung, she confessed everything to a priest … everything except where she hid the head.

Goodbye, Kate  In 2010, beloved BBC naturalist David Attenborough was excavating his yard to build an addition on his house, and he discovered a broken skull in the ground. It didn’t have any teeth.

The skull found in Attenborough’s garden. How come I don’t find skulls in my garden???

After reviewing police records, census reports, and carbon dating, a London coroner identified it as the missing head of Julia Martha Thomas. It had been buried in almost the exact spot her little cottage had stood more than 130 years earlier.

Culled from: Gizmodo
Generously submitted by: Mike

The Good Old Creepy Circus Days!

Here are some vintage circus photos to give you nightmares, or to give you inspiration, whichever it may be! (Thanks to Mike Marano for the link.)

24 Haunting Photos of Vintage Circus May Give You a Nightmare

Today’s Blood-Soaked Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA) might never have existed had it not been for one nightmare Wednesday in 1950. On Thanksgiving eve, the commute home was well under way. Thousands of train riders were heading from Penn Station back to Long Island, anticipating the long holiday weekend. Then came the screech of steel against steel — and the worst accident in Long Island Railroad (LIRR) history.

“It was a scene of utter horror,” a reporter wrote of the carnage he witnessed after a Babylon-bound train rear-ended a disabled locomotive, which had been headed for Hempstead, just east of Kew Gardens, Queens.  Nearly 80 riders were crushed to death.

The mammoth crash of the two trains, then part of the privately owned Pennsylvania Railroad system, is rarely talked about today. No memorial marks the spot. But at the time, the crash was so horrific that it sparked a series of government takeovers, eventually forging the giant public authority known as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Susan Nelson says her father responded to the blood-soaked scene that night as a member of the NYPD’s first paramedic unit.  “My father distinctly remembered a gentleman sitting in a seat, holding a bouquet of flowers,” Nelson, 58, recently recalled to The Post, referring to her late dad, Andrew W. Eyell. “He said when he went up to talk to [the man], he realized he’d been severed in half, his top from his bottom. He was just sitting there, holding a bouquet of flowers as if he was asleep.”

The outcry over the incident was near-instantaneous. “People were furious,” said CUNY historian and librarian Derek Stadler, who has written about the horror and its aftermath. “How could something like this happen?”

It was the second massive fatal crash for the railroad that year. On Feb. 17, 1950, 32 passengers perished when two LIRR trains collided head-on. Another crash occurred on Aug. 5 that year when an LIRR train ran through an open switch near the Huntington station and smashed into a sidelined freight train. No one was killed, but 46 passengers were injured. Then there was the Thanksgiving-eve horror.

It was a mechanical problem — typical to the LIRR and the nation’s other railroads, all straining under the pressure of decreased ridership during the rising reign of the automobile — that set the Thanksgiving-eve crash in motion.

Train 780 from Penn Station to Hempstead had just passed through Kew Gardens, its seats and aisles packed with 1,000 commuters. The motorman saw a caution signal ahead. He pumped the air brakes. But the brakes jammed. The rear brakeman was sent outside to stand behind the train with a red lantern, to warn any approaching trains.

But soon, he heard his train powering back up. “He thought the braking problem was solved and the train was about to get under way,” according to a comprehensive 2010 account by the Kew Gardens Civic Association. “So he extinguished the lantern and reboarded the rear car. That was a mistake,” it says. The brakes on the Hempstead train were still jammed.

It was around 6:30 p.m., the height of rush hour, a time when eastbound commuter traffic was four times heavier than during off-peak hours. “Probably seconds after the brakeman extinguished the warning lantern, a New York-to-Babylon train came around the bend about 4,600 feet back,” according to the account on KewGardensHistory.com. The oncoming Babylon train’s motorman saw a “Go Slow” signal due to the congestion ahead and cut speed to about 15 mph.  But then he caught sight of a second signal a half-mile ahead showing “all clear.”  So he sped up.

“It never dawned on him that the ‘all clear’ signal was meant for the Hempstead train stalled in darkness only a third of a mile ahead,” according to the account. The Babylon train was going around 35 mph when the motorman saw the Hempstead train’s tiny red “marker lights,” and by then, it was too late. “In the last seconds of his life, the motorman of the Babylon train had tried to apply his emergency brakes,” the account says. “He succeeded only in slowing the Babylon train to about 30 mph before impact.”

The brakeman from the stalled Hempstead train, meanwhile, had realized that his train wasn’t ready to get under way after all.  At the moment of collision, he had just stepped back off the train, a move that saved his life. “The rear brakeman,” notes the account, “was injured but survived.”

One image from the carnage stood out to a United Press reporter: a head that jutted from a window of the train wreckage. Wide-eyed, and streaked with blood, it would stare lifelessly at rescuers as they struggled to reach the faint cries of “help” from those imprisoned inside. “That horror-stricken mask stared at clawing workmen for four hours,” recalled the reporter, John Marka.

“Doctors hung precariously from ladders, from windows of the train, and they perched upon bent girders holding plasma bottles whose little red tubes fed to within the mass of steel where the injured lay pinned. Sturdy arms would reach into the twisted steel and pull out the body,” Marka wrote. “They carried out a man who smiled after they amputated his leg to free him,” Marka wrote. “[Then] they carried out just a leg.”

On impact, the front car of the oncoming train and the back car of the stalled train had fused into a single mass of twisted metal and trapped bodies. A witness described seeing riders “packed like sardines, in their own blood.” It would take all night, in freezing weather, for emergency workers — working by floodlight with acetylene-fueled cutting torches and wooden ladders — to free the survivors and pull the 78 dead men and women from the wreckage.

Additional photos of the aftermath of the crash:

Culled from: New York Post

Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!

Willis Carver was born in 1868. His career apparently began at the age of twelve when he spent the 1880 season with both the Van Arnburgh & Co. Circus and Menageries and Dan Rice’s Circus. The following year he joined the Pullman and Hamilton Circus; in 1884 he toured with the famous Sells Brothers’ Show. Willis also worked the dime museum circuit. He appeared in Kohl and Middleton’s Museum and was presumably photographed by Chas. Eisenmann (who took the photos below) while booked into New York’s Morris & Hickman Museum in 1882.

In the 1880s young Willis always appeared with his mother who billed herself somewhat grandly as Madame Carver. Although she had many Eisenmann carte de visites made of herself Willis was never photographed alone.

Here he stands between his mother and father, both of whom are obviously normal. This fact, along with Willis’s short arms, small face and slight swayback, evident in the other photographs, suggest he was a Russel-Silver dwarf – the victim of intrauterine growth retardation – rather than a true genetic dwarf.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age

Today’s Deformed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The Egyptian government had long hesitated to let geneticists have at their most precious mummies. Boring into tissues or bones inevitably destroys small bits of them, and paleogenetics was pretty iffy at first. Only in 2007 did Egypt relent, allowing scientists to withdraw DNA from five generations of mummies, including  pharoahs Tut and his daddy Akhenaten. When combined with meticulous CT scans of the corpses, this genetic work helped resolve some enigmas about the era’s art and politics.

First, the study turned up no major defects in Akhenaten or his family, which hints that the Egyptian royals looked like normal people. That means the portraits of Akhenaten – in which he looks other-worldly – were probably propaganda. Akhenaten apparently decided that his status as the sun god’s immortal son lifted him so far above the normal human rabble that he had to inhabit a new type of body in public portraiture.

Pharoahs – they’re just like us!  (Akhenhaten and his wife Nefertiti)

All that said, the mummies did show subtler deformities, like clubbed feet and cleft palates. And each succeeding generation had more to endure. Tut, of the fourth generation, inherited both clubfoot and a cleft palate. He also broke his femur when young, like Toulouse-Lautrec, and bones in his foot died because of poor congenital blood supply. Scientists realized why Tut suffered so when they examined his genes. Certain DNA “stutters” (repetitive stretches of bases) get passed intact from parent to child, so they offer a way to trace lineages. Unfortunately for Tut, both his parents had the same stutters – because his mom and dad had the same parents. Nefertiti may have been Akhenaten’s most celebrated wife, but for the crucial business of producing an heir, Akhenaten turned to a sister.

This incest likely compromised Tut’s immune system and did the dynasty in. While working on Tut’s mummy, scientists found scads of malarial DNA deep inside his bones. Malaria wasn’t uncommon then, similar tests reveal that both of Tut’s grandparents had it, at least twice, and they both lived until their fifties. However, Tut’s malarial infection, the scientists argued, “added one strain too many to a body that” — because of incestuous genes — “could no longer carry the load.” He succumbed at age nineteen. Indeed, some strange brown splotches on the walls inside Tut’s tomb provide clues about just how sudden his decline was. DNA and chemical analysis has revealed these splotches as biological in origin: Tut’s death came so quickly that the decorative paint on the tomb’s inner walls hadn’t dried, and it attracted mold after his retinue sealed him up. Worst of all, Tut compounded his genetic defects for the next generation by taking a half sister as his own wife. Their only know children died at five months and seven months and ended up as sorry swaddled mummies in Tut’s’ tomb, macabre additions to his gold mask and walking sticks.

King Tut: Fantasy and Reality.

One of Tut’s deformed children.

After the bandages were removed.

Culled from: The Violinist’s Thumb

Sideshow Freak Du Jour!

MADAME DEVERE: THE BEARDED LADY

When Jane Devere’s beard was measured in 1884 at fourteen inches it set a record that still stands. She was born in Brooksville, Kentucky, in 1842. When a beard sprouted on little Jane’s face, the Dime Museums beckoned and she set off on an exhibition career. She went out on the road in 1884 with Sells Brothers Circus and again in 1891. She joined the Sells’ Australian tour the following year. After the turn of the century she toured with Campbell Brothers’ Circus (1906) and the Yankee Robinson Show in 1908. In Chas. Eisenmann’s photograph she stands beside her husband Bill.

Circa 1878

Circa 1878

Today’s Homemade Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Authorities say an eastern Iowa woman was killed when a homemade cannon exploded at a backyard gathering. 55-year-old Lori L. Heims of Edgewood was flown to an Iowa City hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Heims was injured at the gathering with friends in Greeley around 11:40 p.m. Saturday, July 2, 2016. Investigators say the cannon was loaded and fired, and when it went off, the rear portion of the barrel blew out and sent fragments toward Heims. One of the fragments struck Heims in the head. Heims was taken to a hospital in Manchester before being flown to Iowa City, but doctors were unable to save her.

Who has blue eyes, glasses, and dies from a cannon in 2016?
This lady!

Culled From: The Associated Press
Submitted by: Aimee

Always better to go out with a bang then a whimper, right? – Aimee

“Freak” Du Jour!

Charles Tripp

Charles Tripp was a Canadian. He was born armless on July 7, 1855 in Woodstock, Ontario. As a boy he learned to write, shave and comb his hair – all with his feet. He mastered woodworking tools and became an accomplished cabinetmaker and carver. When he was seventeen he prevailed upon his parents to take him to New York to meet P. T. Barnum. When the showman saw what Tripp could do with his feet he hired him on the spot for his circus on Forty-Second Street. Tripp’s subsequent career remained closely tied to Barnum enterprises. He toured the world three times with Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers and various other circuses. In late middle age Tripp married and thereafter restricted his touring to North American carnivals so that his wife could accompany him. She sold the tickets. When he was fifty-four Tripp caught pneumonia in Salisbury, North Carolina, and died on January 26, 1939.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann

Today’s Electrified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On the evening of October 29, 2012, as Superstorm Sandy devastated the mid-Atlantic coast with high winds, torrential rain and massive storm surges, 23-year-old Lauren Abraham stepped outside of her home on Staten Island to take some pictures of the storm damage. She didn’t see the downed power lines and stepped directly onto them. The lines were live, and Abraham burst into flames. Emergency crews arrived within minutes, but couldn’t get close enough to help her. She burned for at least half a hour before she died, and Con Edison wasn’t able to turn off the power for two hours. Neighbors said later that they would never forget the smell.

Culled from: Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy by Kathryn Miles
Submited by: Aimee

I also read online that her mother came home to find her charred body in the yard.  Can you imagine?

Sideshow “Freaks” Du Jour!

The Wild Men of Borneo were captured after a deadly struggle by a ship’s crew in search of water. They were of a distinct human race, spoke no intelligible tongue and uttered a strange mixture of gibberish and gutteral howls. So wild and ferocious were they that they could easily subdue tigers.

In the accompanying Eisenmann portrait the two midgets are about sixty years old. They performed for at least another decade, Hiram living until 1905 and Barney until 1912. They are buried in Mount Vernon, Ohio, under a tombstone inscribed “Little Men”.
Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann

Today’s Legless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Eli Bowen and family.

Eli Bowen was born in Richland County, Ohio, in 1844, the only abnormal child in a family of ten.  His condition, known as phocomelia (seal limbs) was probably a spontaneous, intrauterine growth abnormality occurring in the first six weeks of gestation.  Though different in size his feet were otherwise normal.  They were attached directly to his pelvis without the normal interposed tibia, fibula and femur, the bones which make up the leg.  Bowen was obliged to learn to walk with his arms using wooden blocks in each hand to elevate his hips.  Consequently, his arms developed enormous strength which he later used onstage to tumble and do ascents and swings on a tall pole.  His show career began in the late 1850s when at thirteen he went on tour with Major Brown’s Colosseum, a small-town wagon show.  As an adult he played the Pullman Brothers, Forepaugh and Campbell Circuses along with the Greatest Show on Earth which took him to England in the late ’60s and again in 1897.  He married a sixteen-year-old girl in 1870 and the two raised a family in Ogden, California.   On May 24, 1924, Eli Bowen died at the Dreamland circus in Coney Island from pleurisy,  which was caused by pneumonia. He was laid to rest in Lowell, Indiana.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann

Today’s Hyperactive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Shortly after Charles Eisenmann photographed circus sideshow fat lady Rose Leslie in the attached photo  (in 1881) she married John McLaughlin, a performer with the John B. Doris Circus.  The couple toured together until the late winter of 1886 when Rose caught a severe chill at a fat women’s convention.  After being laid up for several months in Lowell, Massachusetts, she died in June 1886 of pneumonia and heart complications.  At the time of her death the five-foot three-inch Mrs. McLaughlin weighed 615 pounds.  She was twenty-five.

Eisenmann’s photographs of Rose suggest she probably had Cushing’s Disease – hyperactivity of the cortex of the adrenal glands.  The deposition of fat at the base of her neck (the so-called “buffalo hump”), moon face and extreme truncal obesity, all external clues to the presence of the disease, were established as diagnostics by Harvey Cushing some decades after her death.  The disorder is now treated through surgical removal of the glands.

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann