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Picture of the Day

mary ann bevan

Mary Ann Bevan, after developing acromegaly, toured the sideshow circuit as “The Ugliest Woman in the World”, November 1919

Mary Ann Webster was born in 1874 in London into a large family and was quite an ordinary girl. Aged 29, she married Thomas Bevan and the couple went on to have four children, but Mary Ann’s appearance was drastically changing due to acromegaly, a disorder caused by the body producing too much growth hormone.

After the death of her husband in 1914, she no longer had the income to support herself and her four children. Bevan decided to capitalize on her appearance and entered a “Ugliest Woman” contest which she won.

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Picture of the Day

ella harper camel girl

Born with a rare condition that caused her knees to bend backward, Ella Harper, known professionally as The Camel Girl, received a $200 per week as the star of a touring freak show in the 1880s.

In 1886 she was featured as the star in W. H. Harris’s Nickel Plate Circus, appearing in newspapers wherever the circus visited. The back of her pitch card reads:

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Picture of the Day

Stephan-Bibrowski

Barnum & Bailey Circus’Sideshow performer Stephan Bibrowski, also known as Lionel the Lion-Faced Man.

Stephan Bibrowski was born in Bielsk, Poland in 1890 with stunning blonde hair — that covered his entire body from head to toe. Aghast at this so-called abomination, his mother gave him up and turned him over to a businessman who paraded him across Europe as a sideshow attraction before taking him to America in 1901.⁠

Once in the U.S., Barnum & Bailey quickly snatched Bibrowski up and put him on display as “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” describing him as “half-man half-lion.” For 20 years, Bibrowski was exhibited as a “freak,” with audiences scarcely realizing that the gentle soul behind the hair was a soft-spoken man who knew five languages and nurtured a secret dream of leaving the stage and becoming a dentist.⁠

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Picture of the Day

Isaac W. Sprague was an entertainer and sideshow performer, billed as the living human skeleton

At age 12, after developing normally as a child, Isaac Sprague of Massachusetts began irreversibly losing weight for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Though he was otherwise healthy and maintained a normal appetite, his weight dropped until he was skeletal — and it never rebounded.

As an adult measuring 5’6″, he weighed just 43 pounds. Though this didn’t prevent him from marrying and having three healthy children, it did limit his career prospects.

For almost all of his life, he worked as a sideshow attraction for P.T. Barnum and was billed as the “Living Human Skeleton.” However, his popularity eventually waned and he died alone and in poverty at age 45 in 1887.

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Picture of the Day

Billed as “The Sheep-Headed Men,” “The White Ecuadorian Cannibals Eko and Iko,” and “The Ambassadors From Mars,” George and Willie Muse were world-famous sideshow performers in the early 1900s.

Born black with a rare form of albinism, the two brothers were kidnapped as boys in Truevine, Virginia, in 1899 by bounty hunters and forced into the circus.

Upon their capture, they were falsely told that their mother was dead and that they would never return home.

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