FORTEAN TIMES UNCONVENTION 1997

Ian Simmons, who writes for FORTEAN TIMES, gives us a run through the history of freaks and prodigies, human and animal, living and inanimate.

During the Renaissance in Europe there was the resurgence of interest in freaks for the first time since Roman times (during the reigns of Caligula, Heliogabolus, etc.) Freaks were very popular - sects such as the Dacianos in the 17th century would make "freaks to order" for the aristocracy or for the begging trade by disfiguring children.

What we now recognise as a museum has its origins in the 17th century. Before that, collectors of "freakish" or "prodigious" material would display them in "Cabinets of Curiosity." Oddities were seen as "wonders" - they served to remind the person watching the Cabinet that there was no limit to what God could do.

We are shown a slide of an early Cabinet, from Naples in the 1590's.

Ferdinand II of Tirol (1529-95)'s art collection, the Kunstkammer (see FT 87:24) contains many portraits of human prodigies, a subject Ferdinand was particularly fond of. The idea was that man was God's greatest creation and so there were many wonders and varieties in man , just as there was in the rest of creation. The portraits included depictions of Der Haarmensch (the Hairy-faced Man of Tenerife), Der Kruppel (the Cripple) and Gregor Baci, the man whose head is transfixed by a lance who is nevertheless still alive.

A few years after Ferdinand II of Tirol's death, the first museum for the paying public opened in London. This was Tradescant's Ark (see FT 66:32), founded by John Tradescant, father and son, who collected materials during their travels and through connections with the courts of Charles I. Though most of these prodigies were lost, Tradescant had the holdings documented very thoroughly, so there are accounts of the hand of a mermaid, a giant's bone, a piece of the True Cross (which "fell off" a larger piece Charles I's wife had Tradescant take to the King of France), a sample of blood that rained on the Isle of Wight (with a certificate of authenticity from the local MP), a vegetable lamb (we are shown a slide of this - a Chinese tree fern?), a dragon's egg, a three-toed elk's hoof (a cure for elks with epilepsy!) and a horned hare's skull (horned hares are apparently still popular today in Germany and the US). This collection was later acquired by "shady means" from Elias Ashmole who founded the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where some of Tradescant's material can still be seen.

In the late 17th Century a "genuine werewolf" was put in a Cabinet of Curiosity. In 1685 a large wolf had been tracked down and killed, put in a suit, tried, hanged and stuffed!

The Russian Emperor Peter the Great (1672-1725) established a Wonder Cabinet. On Peter's death the un-displayed material alone was estimated to fill thirty large rooms. Much material survives in the St Petersburg Museum today. This Cabinet included living wonders, such as a hermaphrodite (who escaped!), two-headed sheep and so on. The most extraordinary material, which survives in the St Petersburg Museum, was supplied by the Dutch anatomical preparator, Frederick Ruysch, who did his work in Leiden in the 17th Century. He used dead babies and had the official right to unclaimed corpses of children drowned in the canals. He made bizarre preparations in jars, such as the arm of a child suspending an eye socket from fingers (we are shown a slide of this) and the head of a foetus with its brain exposed and membranes arranged in a petal-like design (...and a slide of this as well) [Pictures of Ruysch's material can be seen in FINDERS, KEEPERS by Stephen J. Gould and Rosamund Wolff Purcell].

In 1752 the British Museum opened and still had much of the flavour of the Cabinets of Curiosity (see FT 81:32), for example "monsters" preserved in spirits, a landscape painted on a spider's web and an un-burnt brick from the Tower of Babylon.

The tide was beginning to turn at the close of the 18th Century when the Royal Society started to voice doubts about the value of the contents of its own depository. It solved the problem by giving its vegetable lamb etc. to the British Museum.

In the 19th Century there was a new approach. Museums became "3D catalogues" of orderly creation. Views of "God's Creation" changed radically. "Wonders" were now abominations against God's Order and scientific classification. Much of Tradescant's stuff had already been burned in the 18th Century by the Ashmolean Museum. The British Museum had an "extended bonfire of zoological rubbish."

The disappearance of freaks and prodigies "officially" did not mean the Cabinet of Curiosity "style" vanished entirely in the 19th Century. For example, there was Mr Potter's Museum of Curiosities in Sussex. He used taxidermy to make tableau of animals, such as the "rabbits' schoolroom" and the "kittens' wedding." This type of thing also exists in contemporary times, with the Gopher Hole Museum in Alberta and a 1910 stuffed frogs museum that has re-opened in Croatia.

A new phase of freaks arrived after the age of the Cabinets. Informal exhibitions in inns, coffee-houses and fairs had always been popular, since the early 17th Century. Prodigies at Bartholomew Fair in West Smithfield, London, drew vast crowds in the 18th and 19th Centuries. In the late 19th Century this kind of exhibition was formalised into a more commercial form by an Englishman, Sergeant Major Philip Ashby, who was born in 1742. He is reputed to have originated the three-ring circus and the circus side-show. His shows were always accompanied by exhibitions of human and animal anomalies. This paved the way for Phileas T. Barnum of Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show On Earth. Barnum made his name exhibiting the midget Tom Thumb (1838-83), who became hugely famous. Similar shows copying Barnum's style ran. The hairy woman, Julia Pastrana and the Hottentot Venus were two freaks who continued their careers after their deaths, when they were stuffed by unscrupulous showmen. The money Barnum made set up even greater shows which reached their peak with the massive Paris Show of 1901. This was a show of "living phenomena and human prodigies" including the Man With The Ostrich Stomach (who consumed glass, metal, pebbles, petrol and ammonia), the Skeleton Dandy, the Rubber Man, the Bearded Woman, Queen Mab the Midget and many more. Other, smaller, side-shows toured Britain and the US, where, for instance, the Elephant Man and the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, would have been publicly displayed.

The culture of travelling side-shows thrived in the US until the 1960's. Rides in fairgrounds were once few and far between because they had to be handmade, so instead fairs had more tents. Weird tents included Wild West Shows, highdiving exhibitions, bathing beauties, optical illusions (for example the Headless Girl that was still alive) and genuine human and animal prodigies and self-created "wonders", such as sword swallowers - or "geeks", who were usually old alcoholics tied naked in pits, biting the heads off live chickens for an audience.

Mr Simmons shows us some slides of such tents. There is "One Trip Too Many" - a drugged out acid casualty show from the late 1960's. There are "Punk Shows" - jars of pickled babies with various deformities (in later years replaced by latex versions). There are animal shows with five-legged cows and the like. Big sharks in tanks of formaldehyde were included after the success of JAWS in the 1970's. There are illusion shows which include Spidora, the girl with the spider body, and the Headless Girl who apparently blossomed in popularity after the Jayne Mansfield crash!

Of Fortean interest is the career of Frank Hansen, who began by touring historical tractors and in the late 1960's graduated to touring the Minnesota Iceman (see FT 83:34). This Iceman may or may not have been an example of the real Bigfoot, preserved in ice. From 1970 on, it was definitely a rubber replica that was on show. As for the original, which was returned to its owner, even Hansen claims to not know if it was real and says he never saw it out of the ice.

Ward Hall's Last American Freakshow closed in 1994. Most of his team are now in retirement in Gibsontown, Florida - a retirement resort of choice by old freakshow hands. Their day has passed, the tawdry and lurid no longer popular taste although with things like Jim Rose's Circus Side-show there is a revival of the self-created wonders.

Perhaps prodigies haven't gone away, they have just changed shape. We haven't lost the idea of the freak as the transgressive threat to our normality. For such challenges we look to TV and cinema. From the 1930's, with Browning's FREAKS, to the 1970's with ERASERHEAD and the 90's with BOXING HELENA, and of course then there are the films of Fellini, and there are even pornographic videos involving "freaks."

A few years ago a circus came to Liverpool with two "dog-faced" acrobats. There were Politically Correct complaints against this show. Simmons says the situation with "freaks on display" is not clear-cut. The circus funded the dog-faced acrobats' families, while on the other hand if you look at the case of the Elephant Man and other cases of prodigies being "owned" and exploited. Then there were the ethnographic shows at the World's Fair. This crossed a line between entertainment and racism. Then there was always the blurred line between the freakshow and the scientific anatomical collections...

UnConvention '97 reviews

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