HeyJaredFreak Show
Freak Show explores the true historical lives of individuals once displayed as curiosities in sideshows, exhibitions, and public spectacles.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 11, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Myrtle Corbin: The Four-Legged Woman Who Became a Victorian Sensation (opens the original)
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In spring 1887, nineteen-year-old Josephine Myrtle Corbin Bicknell became dangerously ill in Blount County, Alabama. A physician discovered that the former sideshow performer known across America as “The Four-Legged Girl from Texas” was pregnant. The medical crisis would place Myrtle in American and British journals, exposing the extraordinary internal anatomy behind the public image audiences had paid to see. Myrtle Corbin’s life began in medical reporting, moved into childhood exhibition and p
Grady Stiles Jr.: The Lobster Boy and the Murder Behind the Sideshow (opens the original)
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Grady Franklin Stiles Jr. performed on the American carnival circuit under the billing “Lobster Boy,” a stage identity connected to split-hand/foot malformation, or SHFM. The condition appeared in multiple members of the Stiles family across generations, and relatives participated in sideshow work as part of a family livelihood. Medical sources caution, however, that SHFM has varied genetic causes and inheritance patterns; the family history should not be reduced to a simple genetic narrative. I
Joseph Merrick: The Real Man Behind the “Elephant Man” (opens the original)
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In June 1886, contemporary reports described Joseph Carey Merrick arriving at Liverpool Street Station in distress after returning from continental Europe. A crowd gathered, police became involved, and later accounts connected his return to a visiting card for London Hospital surgeon Frederick Treves. Merrick’s life has often been reduced to a stage name, medical photographs, and a death surrounded by retelling. But he was a young man from Leicester who experienced family loss, worsening disabil
Chang and Eng Bunker: The Original Siamese Twins and the Birth of a Term (opens the original)
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Chang and Eng Bunker were born in Siam, now Thailand, in 1811, joined at the chest by tissue, cartilage, and connected liver tissue. They were not the first conjoined twins in recorded history. But after arriving in Boston as teenagers in 1829, their fame made the historical expression “Siamese twins” widespread throughout English-language popular and medical usage. Their lives began in the nineteenth-century marketplace of human exhibition, where audiences paid to see them, advertisers turned t
General Tom Thumb: The Tiny Superstar Who Made Barnum Famous (opens the original)
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Charles Sherwood Stratton was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in eighteen thirty-eight. By age four, his growth had slowed dramatically, and P. T. Barnum saw in him the makings of a sensation. Barnum renamed the child General Tom Thumb, altered his public biography, trained him to sing, dance, joke, and impersonate Napoleon, then carried the act from Barnum's American Museum to Buckingham Palace and beyond. This episode follows Stratton from childhood exhibition to international fame, from manu
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