The practice of preserving and displaying prodigious births is centuries old. In the 1600’s King Frederick III of Denmark has a personal collection of punks numbering in the thousands - a collection started in the 1500’s by Frederick II. and during that same timeframe Ulisse Aldrovandi, an Italian naturalist, had a collection consisting of eighteen thousand various specimens.
The deformities present in pickled punks are incredibly varied. As varied as the nature of human inflictions.
The earliest and most well documented pedigree for a deformed punk display dates back to 1582 when Mme Colombe Chatri died at the age of sixty-eight - and a twenty-eight year old fetus was removed from her womb. The Stone-Child of Sens should have been born in 1554, however labor came and went with no delivery and in the resulting decades the fetus was calcified and ossified within the womb – which actually formed a shell. Mme Chatri seemed to have lived a normal life, with the exception of regular abdominal pains. Following her death and the ‘delivery’ of the Stone-Child – naturalists clamored to claim the fetus and the right to display the tiny marvel. Jean d’Ailleboust wrote a detailed pamphlet in 1582 – complete with illustrations - about the case, which became an instant best seller. Pare featured the infant in his book Des monstres et prodiges and reveals that the child was sold to M. Prestesiegle, a wealthy merchant in the 1590’s. He sold it to a goldsmith named M. Carteron who in turn sold it in 1628 to M. Bodey, a jewel merchant complete with a sort of ‘certificate of authenticity’. In 1653, the Stone-Child came into the possession of King Frederick III as well as a handwritten copy of the d’Ailleboust paper. By this point, the child was heavily damaged, with both arms broken and the marble-like skin worn off in places.
The Stone-Child remained in the possession of the Royal Museum for decades, cataloged in 1696, 1710, 1737 and was transferred to the Danish Museum of Natural History in 1826. The Stone-Child went missing sometime in the late 1800’s – it is believed that is was literally scrapped by Professor Reinhardt when he was director of the museum as he believed it was not a ‘scientific display’.
Strangely enough, the Stone-Boy condition – known today as lithopedion – is not all that rare as some 290 cases exist in modern medical literature.
The classic pickled punk – floating in a jar of preserving fluid - became most popular during the golden age of sideshow and experienced a great resurgence in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During that era many punks were linked to drug abuse, at least in the banner lines outside. Several sideshows featured extensive punk displays – some authentic and others gaffed (faked). Following this era, laws began to restrict the display of punks. To complicate matters, laws differed from state to state – making traveling displays almost impossible. Furthermore, the question of whether punks qualify as 'human remains' further complicates the laws.
The great modern showman, Ward Hall, once had one of the largest punk shows in the United States. During one season he was fined due to the fact that the display of human remains was illegal in the state he had set up his show in. He replaced his punks with rubber replicas – called 'bouncers' – and continued his tour only to be fined again in another state for being a ‘conman’, displaying ‘fakes’ and ‘false advertising’.
While there are still a few stationary legitimate pickled punk shows in the sideshow tradition. Today the best place to find pickled punks is in research or university laboratories or medical museums – like the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. The world's largest collection of pickled punks, once owned by Peter the Great, is currently on display at the Kuntskammer Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Image: Late Sideshow owner Captain Harvey Lee Boswell's favorite Picked Punk
– a fetus with anencephaly –currently for sale at Madame Talbot’s.
M>uch of what we know of ancestral Maori tattoo and tradition comes from the studies and documentations made by Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley. While in New Zealand, Robley befriended the Maori there and used his artistic skills to illustrate and paint scenes of the Maori way of life. Currently the Dominion Museum in Wellington house seventy of his paintings and his sketches provided a basis for Cassells' publication Races of Mankind.
However, Robley is perhaps most well known for his eccentric collection.
The Maori mummified the tattooed heads of their tribesmen and Robley decided to acquire as many as possible. Over the years he built a collection of 35. In 1908 he offered them to the New Zealand Government for £1,000 but his offer was denied. Today, 30 of his heads are in the collection of the Natural History Museum in New York.
Read more about the life of Robley here.
image: Robley and his collection, from the book Medicine Man.
In March of 1512 a well respected Florentine apothecary named Lucca Landucci made quite a startling entry into his diary. He described a monster born in Ravenna. He described The Monster as having a single horn upon its head, two bat-like wings, and markings upon its chest, a serpentine and hermaphrodic lower body, a single eye set in its knee and an eagle like claw for a foot. While Landucci had only seen a painting of the marvel, the creature likely did exist. Records indicate that Pope Julius II ordered the child starved to death. The account of Landucci is one of the earliest reliable recordings of a prodigy at the dawn of a new era of recognition and understanding. It also documents the first definable instance of real prodigious birth elevated to mythic proportions.
The rumor of The Monster spread across
While no one is certain as to what the monster really was but it was almost certainly a child born with a severe and unusual genetic disorder. Upon its birth, people could not stop taking about The Monster. People simply had to see the illustrations. They had to hear the stories. Even now, hundreds of years after the original event, people are still talking.
It is human nature to be curious of the wondrous.
You can see more unusual monsters in Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures.
image: Portrait of The Monster from Paré's ; this illustration includes the odd chest markings.
A Human Marvel, perhaps?Oliver was different from all other apes, very different.
During his initial run in the freak shows of the 1970’s Oliver was billed as a missing link, as a hybrid of man and chimpanzee, a ‘humanzee’. This claim was substantiated with a bold medical statement claiming that Oliver possessed 47 chromosomes, one more than man and one less than a typical chimpanzee.
Forgoing the medical claims, the sheer appearance and demeanor of Oliver set him apart from other primates. His peculiar human-like facial features, light eye color, pattern baldness and soft voice were often enough to convince spectators of his unusual pedigree. His mannerisms were extremely human and the fact that Oliver was bipedal, that he walked upright unlike other chimps and apes, certainly furthered all claims. He was not trained to walk upright; it was simply his natural and favored means of movement.
When he was first brought over from the Congo by Frank and Janet Burger, famous animal trainers often featured on the Ed Sullivan Show, his uniqueness was quickly identified. The Burger family claimed that their other chimps wanted nothing to do with Oliver, that he was shunned by their society. Surprisingly, Oliver was fine with the arrangement as he preferred the company of his human handlers. He proved to be a great asset to them as he spontaneously began doing their chores. He would often feed the animals and even used tools, like a wheelbarrow, when loads were too much to handle. His intelligence and ability to learn was astounding. As he grew older, Oliver acquired the human habits of morning coffee drinking and evening cocktails, often mixing his own drinks. His behavior was not just mimicry either as Oliver demonstrated on numerous occasions his ability to overcome obstacles and extrapolate solutions using his logic or previously learned behavior and concepts.
Oliver was sexually attracted to human females as well and, due to his strength, was considered a danger to handlers and spectators. He was passed around between various promoters and animal handlers for a number of years, all of them unable to cope with his unusual habits and personality. In 1986 Oliver was sold to a lab. Amazingly, Oliver was spared from typically torturous and fatal laboratory experimentation due to his unique characteristics. He was simply not considered a viable specimen because there were too many variables in his genetics when compared to other chimps in the lab. Any experimentation performed on him would have been tainted in the eyes of researchers. Instead, Oliver spent seven years in a tiny five by seven cage.
In 1996 Oliver was rescued and lived the remainder of his days in a chimpanzee retirement villa. While there formal tests performed by the University of Chicago revealed that Oliver had the same number of chromosomes as all other chimps. It was noted during testing, however, that something in his genetic code was indeed different.
Is a human/ape hybrid possible? Many think so. In 1929 Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was allegedly very close to creating such a creature. Frightening those in power, he was exiled to the Kazakh SSR during the Great Purge where he died two years later.
In 1977, researcher J. Michael Bedford discovered that human sperm could penetrate the protective outer membranes of a gibbon egg, which genetically is the ape furthest from humans.
Was Oliver a hybrid? Likely not, but at the very least, he was most certainly a extraordinary mutant.
The topic of faked marvels has been touched upon before. However, one would be foolish not to include the most famous gaff (fake) of all. The history of The Feejee Mermaid was, and continues to be, one of the most unique and enduring of all sideshow frauds.As the picture above illustrates, The Feejee (Fiji) Mermaid did not represent the popular ideal of the mermaid of folklore. Far from being a beautiful fish maiden, The Feejee Mermaid was essentially a disgusting abomination of taxidermy often described as a ‘salmon with sagging breasts’. The face, while moderately human in appearance, carried an indescribable look of horror that terrified many an observer.
The great P. T. Barnum is often credited as being the originator of The Feejee (Fiji) mermaid. The creature was not entirely his creation but he was responsible for popularizing the sapien-fish during the crux of Darwinism.
The first man to exhibit the mermaid was an American sea captain named Samuel Barret Eades. The mermaid was first brought to his attention by a merchant in the Dutch West Indies territory and it was purported to have be caught off the coast of Japan. The merchant demanded such a high price for his bizarre discovery that Captain Eades actually sold his ship to raise the funds needed to purchase it.
His venture to exhibit the mermaid never really got off the ground. First, after booking passage back to England with his purchase in tow, the mermaid was confiscated by customs. When it was returned to him he ran several ads in local papers purporting his mermaid as the most important discovery ever made. The ads drew a great deal of attention, including the attention of the man who purchased his ship and financed the procurement of the mermaid. The buyer was dissatisfied with the vessel he bought from Eades and he sued for the return of his money. Eades was, of course, completely broke at this time. To add insult, the ads also drew the attention of naturalists who determined that the mermaid was a fraud.
The ‘human’ portion of the mermaid was determined to be the body of an orangutan and the bottom belonged to a large salmon. While the taxidermy appeared to be quite gruesome, it was actually masterfully done and no seams were visible to the naked eye.
Despite this revelation, Eades continued to show the creature as real. However, the public was not very interested. His exhibit ran from 1823 to 1825 before closing and Eades spent the rest of his life trying to pay of his large debt and legal fees.
In 1842 Moses Kimball, curator of the Boston Museum, was contacted by an unknown Englishman who had inherited an unusual item from his father. When Kimball saw the specimen he bought it for a very small sum. He then contacted his good friend P. T. Barnum.
Barnum leased the creature, the Eades Mermaid, from Kimball and went into publicity mode.
Barnum named the creature The Feejee Mermaid and created a story involving its capture in the Fiji Islands. The reason for the spelling of Feejee is unknown, but is assumed to be due to a misprint in a various newspaper articles. In what would be a very famous publicity stunt, Barnum visited every newspaper in the area and presented each with a woodcut of a beautiful and bare-breasted mermaid. He told each paper that the image was exclusive and that it depicted his mermaid discovery. Each paper, believing that they had an exclusive story ran the image and article on the same day. Thus, all of New York was a buzz with news of the discovery, a discovery so legitimate that every paper in the city found it necessary to make mention of it.
When the exhibit opened, to huge crowds, the mermaid was accompanied by Dr. J. Griffin a naturalist and member of the British Lyceum of Natural History. Dr. Griffin proclaimed the mermaid to be authentic. In reality, Dr. Griffin was really a man named Levi Lyman and he was in the employ of Barnum. There was no such society as the British Lyceum of Natural History. Lyman was not even English.
Despite being a huge initial success, the novelty of the exhibition quickly wore of and New Yorkers became indifferent to the mermaid exhibition. Barnum eventually moved on to other fantastic displays. For the next twenty years the mermaid split its time between Barnum’s museum in New York and Kimball’s museum in Boston. It did have one unsuccessful tour of the south and one tour or London which also proved uneventful.
Today, The Feejee Mermaid is lost. No one is quite sure as to its whereabouts. Its last documented location was in Kimball's museum in 1859. Common theory supposes that the mermaid was destroyed when Barnum's museum burned down in 1865 or when Kimball’s did the same in 1880. There are several sideshows and private collectors claiming possession of the original mermaid most notably Canada’s Carnival Diablo's World of Wonders Freakshow and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
The term ‘Feejee Mermaid’ now essentially refers to any gaffed mermaid, of which there are now many.
Image: a famous artists representation of Barnum's Feejee Mermaid. No photos exist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Pasqual Pinon, was known as The Two-Headed Mexican and he was a featured attraction with the Sells-Floto Circus in the early 1900s. The story went that Pinon had fled
The entire story of his origin was, of course, false. While it is quite possible to have two complete heads, a condition known as craniopagus parasiticus, a true parasitic head is always situated upside-down on top of the main head - as is the case with The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal. The second head of Pinon was a gaff – a fake.
The true story of Pasqual Pinon is actually more interesting in its strangeness. Pinon was actually a railroad worker from
What is factual is that after several years of popular touring, the Sells-Floto Circus manager paid to have the cyst removed and Pinon returned to
Image scanned from the reminants of a French magazine in author collection.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Hungarian Sisters - The Scottish Brothers - The Biddenden Maids
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Dedicated to vindicating those people who were once labeled as freaks. Within this page 'Human Marvel' replaces the terms freak and human oddity.The Human Marvels Website is Licensed.
Please credit any reproductions to J. Tithonus Pednaud, cited sources or www.thehumanmarvels.com.