You may be familiar, dear reader, with the traveling shows, carnivals and even houses of “oddities” of yesteryear. Those peddlers of myths and horror to fascinate and perhaps even, scandalize their audience. The most famous of which would have been P.T. Barnum’s, Barnum & Bailey Circus home to such attractions as Myrtle Corbin the Four Legged Woman (a woman born with two pelvises and four legs), Fedor Jeftichuw, The Dog Boy (an individual with hypertrichosis), Isaac Sprague, the Feejee mermaid (a small monkey glued to the tail of a large fish), and many more. Though the “freak show” has been around since the medieval era (and probably before) where crowds would gather to see humans with deformities, it wasn’t until the Victorian Era that they fully matured into a for profit exhibition. It was Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” that truly brought it to the forefront of American culture. Though not all abnormalities were real and were actually made up for the purposes of the show. While freak shows and circuses were exploitative, some, like P. T. Barnum’s Circus did pay well and was (for the time) quite progressive in its treatment of its “human oddities”.
Under brightly colored fabric and dazzling lights, crowds of spectators stared in amazement at the parade of “strangeness” before them. This was in a time before movies and colored photographs where one might see such things otherwise. It was certainly before commercial flight where far flung places such as Siam and Turkey were easily accessible. Certainly before the internet where one could fact check to see that, there was no missing Albanian prince who was raised in a harem and that woman he claims is 160 years old, is in fact only 80. I imagine quite a few left the shows believing they had seen something truly remarkable and perhaps even mythical. Is it any wonder this was the same era for seances and contacting the dead?
When perusing freak shows and museums of strangeness, visitors unfamiliar with taxidermy were easily fooled by the macabre art of combining parts of different animals to support outlandish claims of myth come true such as the Jackalope. They may also display artifacts such as cursed monkey paws or pictures. As America expanded its colonization of the New World, so too did folk stories of the legendary creatures and strange happenings such as sasquatch or the vampires of New England. All adding to the idea that the world is truly far stranger than science can account for.
For the most part it seems that over the years, such places have dwindled down. The circuses no longer showcase individuals with abnormalities for exploitation and with medical advancements many are able to be addressed to improve quality of life. Nor are abnormalities viewed with such suspicion and fear, but are increasingly welcomed as a part of life. Most of the oddities have been lost, destroyed or merely forgotten. Although there are a few small roadside attractions which have collected or perhaps re-created various pieces of history in the same spirit of P. T. Barnum who when accused of duping the public with hoaxes responded “I don’t believe in duping the public, but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them.” So it made no difference to me if what I was looking at was truly the same pair of pants from Barnum’s giant or just a really large pair of pants. That’s part of the charm, it is a house of hoaxes. Perhaps, it is fun to pretend for a bit.
It was with this strange and controversial history in mind, that I went to the House of Oddities and Curious Goods in Elizabethtown, PA. This free museum was the beneficiary of a now closed down Gettysburg Dime Museum preserving Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy (from P. T. Barnum’s circus) and Edgar the Alligator Man. The house certainly captures the odd mixture of barely contained horror and ridiculousness. Like almost all museums of this nature there is little rhyme or reason to the displays as everything is haphazardly squeezed together. Everywhere one looks there is a new, at times stomach churning, oddity as music reminiscent of the circuses of old plays in the background.
It was a small place of barely two rooms, though the second room was more of a back hallway. Most of it were obvious hoaxes that at one time fascinated the public and led the more easily duped into belief that monsters truly do exist. There were a few genuine gems such as the alligators who had been deformed due to improper disposal of chemicals in the neighboring bayous. Some of the items had small paper “plaques” with explanations of what they were, but most were left to my imagination. I found most of it to be a strange mix of delight and eerie. It was truly like stepping into the beginning of a horror movie. The only thing missing was the creepy person offering to tell your fortune or to sell you some cursed object. Actually, there was a small offer to purchase some cursed objects at the front, but I kindly passed and instead put a small donation in the box (after all, one should probably avoid the ire of the owner of so many “cursed and powerful objects”).
The museum was less a museum of true oddities and more an experiential museum of what people may have seen in decades past and how they thought of seemingly unexplainable phenomena. It was intriguing to see how people interpreted scant pieces of data and extrapolated it out as evidence for monsters. I wondered how many people walk away from it truly believing in what they see or if, like me, they find it a fascinating piece of living history of a time and phenomena of when such shows were taken seriously. Of a time when the world still held a hint of magic before all the maps were filled in and science explained most of what we experience. Do not get me wrong, I like living in the era I live in now, but we don’t have a must mystery as we once did. Still, I can now tell people I have beheld one of the legendary Giants of Lovelock Cave and a Wolpertinger!
Ready for your own adventure into the macabre, mysterious and strange?
Obviously a google search of your local area would be easiest. However, it can be a bit difficult to know precisely what to google “freak show”, “museum” “house of oddities”, “curiosity house”. You may need to play around with the precise terms of your search as they are not (to my knowledge) the most popular of attractions. I have stumbled upon the site https://www.roadsideamerica.com which may be a good source for not only such places as these but also other fun attractions not readily advertised. I was surprised by the number of curiosity houses listed nearby that I had never heard of before.
Budget Bliss: Bucket List 