Chilling truth: Rare photos reveal 19th century ‘freak shows’ – where disabled people were put on display!

LIFE can be hard when you’re different, but things were hellish 100 years ago.

Photos showing ‘freak show’ performers shed a light on society’s changing attitude to people with disabilities, and highlights the terrible fate that awaited people born with birth defects or learning difficulties.

Parents would often ‘sell’ their child to a travelling circus or freak show, signing them up for a lifetime of exploitation and ridicule.

Performers travelled the country – and sometimes the world – with others like them, hidden in the shadows until their curtain call should they be seen by a member of the public and the mystery around them destroyed before showtime.

Circus staff would walk through the town putting up posters that crudely exaggerated their charges’ issues, riling up interest and enticing the public to visit the show before it moved on the next day.

It wasn’t uncommon for some circuses to also feature other acts and oddities, including wax models and wild animal shows.

While some performers could only be gawped at due to the nature of their disability, some performed tricks for the stunned and baying crowds.

One such example was limbless man Prince Randian, who was also known as The Snake Man, The Human Torso and The Human Caterpillar.

He was born in Guiana but brought to the US in 1889 by his parents and put to work ‘performing’ at dime shows and theatres.

Despite his extreme disability, he was profoundly self-sufficient, and was able to roll a cigarette, light it with a match and shave.

He went on to father five children with his wife, and died aged 63 shortly before a scheduled comeback.

Another performer who stunned audiences was Carl Unthan, who toured under the guise ‘the Armless Fiddler’.

Born in Prussia, there is much mystery around his childhood, but it has been claimed that the midwife who delivered him tried to smother him shortly after birth – but his father saved him.

It was claimed that his father encouraged him to use his feet as he would his hands, and he was able to write legibly and grasp objects easily.

During his twenties, he began learning the violin, and it was this skill that replaced shuffling cards and smoking cigarettes for an intrigued audience.

It is also claimed that during WW1 he served with the German Army in a morale-role, visiting hospitals and demonstrating his abilities to recent amputees and inspiring them to embrace their new disabilities.

He went on t0 publish his memoirs, typed with his feet and wittily titled Das Pediscript, before he died a very rich man aged 80.

But for most performers, their special talent was the genetic condition they had been born with.

Stephan Bibrowski was dubbed Lionel the Lion Boy due to the long hair that covered his body.

It is claimed that when he was born in Poland he was covered in 1″ hair all over his body – which his mother blamed on seeing his father being mauled by a lion while she was pregnant.

At age 4 little Stephan was sold to a German impresario called Sedlmayer and travelled the world performing gymnastics and speaking to crowds to show that despite his ‘ferocious’ appearance, he was a gentle soul.

By the late 1920s he had retired from the circus, and reportedly died aged 41 at home in Berlin.

Hairy men weren’t the only ones paraded around, with a German bearded lady called Barbara Urslerin a popular attraction in the seventeenth century.

She was know as the Hairy Maid, and along with her husband and ‘normal’ child toured Europe performing at different shows.

One distasteful account claims that during a visit to London a Danish doctor examined her and declared that she was the result of a “mating between human and ape”.

Shortly after this she disappeared from record, and no one knows what happened to her.

American Johnny Eck was born with malformed legs. and toured the country claiming that he had been “snapped off at the waist”.

He was a skilled painter and carpenter, and even moonlighted as a preacher in his youth, and later played piano in an orchestra.

Along with his ‘normal’ twin Robert, he toured the country and developed such a reputation as “the most remarkable man alive” that he was asked to star in 1932 film Freaks.

When the film was released on VHS in the eighties, fans tracked the Eck twins down to their home – but sadly they became victims of a terrifying hours-long robbery, aged 76.

One of the intruders sat on Johnny while the other stole his things and ridiculed him.

The ordeal forced the brothers in to seclusion, with Johnny telling friends “if I want to see freaks, all I have to do is look out the window.”

He died in 1991 aged 79, with Robert dying four years later.

Other siblings who enjoyed success and recognition were dwarf brothers Waino and Plutanor were known as the Wild Men of Borneo – although they were born in the US.

Standing at 100cm tall and weighing no more than 20kg, they impressed audiences with their wrestling and lifting skills – and went on to earn $200,000 (£153,000) between 1882 and 1905 – a huge sum of money  for that time.

The brothers are now buried in an Ohio under a grave marked ‘Little Men’.

Perhaps the most famous of all ‘little people’ who performed at freak shows was General Tom Thumb, who was born as Charles Sherwood Stratton in 1838.

He stopped growing when he was six months old, and only ever added one more inch to his height of 25″ before his fourth birthday.

Circus owner Phineas T. Barnum, a famous showman of the time, heard about Charles and approached his parents to see if he could take him on as one of his acts.

He taught the lad how to sing, dance, mime and impersonate celebrities of the time, and brought him in to his multi-million dollar ‘freak empire’.

Charles’ first tour of the US was when he was just 5-years-old, and saw him impersonating Napoleon and cracking gags with a straight man.

It wasn’t long before he took his act to Europe, where he performed for Queen Victoria.

Charles hit the headlines when he wed fellow little person Lavinia Warren, and the pair were later invited to meet President Lincoln at the White House.

When he died aged 45, Charles was a rich man and was the proud owner of a New York townhouse, a yacht, and an expensive wardrobe.

Sadly not every ‘freak’ found their fortune in the big tent and sideshows, and for most performers, they were dragged from pillar to post for looking different.

Babies born with microcephaly, a pre-natal condition that means their head and brain has not grown properly and left them with several mental disability, were a frequent sight in the shows, their parents dumping them on showmen’s doorsteps at birth.

For most performers, life was one of uncertainty, suffering and ridicule, their lives punctuated by strangers gawping, pointing and laughing.

As medical science developed and there were more explanations and cures for the ills that had once given these travelling shows a constant cast, these human circuses fell out of fashion.

The rise of television and movies also gave the general public a new way to stretch their imaginations – and by the 1950s, freak shows had all but vanished.

This mum was left horrified when cruel children mocked her disabled daughter… with their MUM.

And this boy has been labelled ‘The Devil’ by cruel villagers scared of his deformed hands.