Like Robert Ripley, I have always been attracted to the odd and the curious.
God, I miss the sideshow. Telling my age, here, but I can remember—barely—when sideshows were still a part of traveling fairs. These days only vestiges remain, and these few and far between. You might still find a “Giant Maneating Rat” or snake, or if you’re really fortunate a “Headless Woman.” But gone are the pickled punks (deformed babies, usually fashioned out of rubber, preserved in jars), the bearded women, the “freaks,” relegated to the annals of history, while folks like me, with a hint of the Carnie in our blood, pine for them. Oh, to see those days again!
Some attractions were genuine and some were “gaffes,” or fabricated. One of the coolest of the latter, although it cannot be said to constitute a true “fake” in that the audience knows that it is an illusion, is the “living vampire.” In the same vein (pun intended) as the aforementioned Headless Woman, the trick is effected by use of mirrors. You start out with a skeleton lying prone, and then slowly the bones take on flesh, becoming a cadaverous wraith, with copious amounts of fake blood smeared around the lips, fake fangs optional. What self-respecting vampire-lovin’ “rube” WOULDN’T pay to see that?!