10 Famous Human Oddities | Random Thursday

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

the 1930s was a simpler time the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression the Dust Bowl was wiping out livelihoods all across the plains and entertainment was hard to come by okay I guess it wasn't that simple this was the heyday of the Traveling Circus when most people couldn't travel to go find entertainment and see things the Traveling Circus brought the entertainment to them one of the most popular circus attractions was of course the Freak Show this wasn't like today when all you had to do was fire up the internet and blast your eye holes with all manner of human depravity in the comfort of your own home back then you had to actually leave your house to see this kind of stuff and they did in droves sideshow attractions of the day ran the gamut from seemingly impossible physical feats to titillating thinly veiled burlesque shows - well straight up exploitation of people with physical and mental disabilities you know I can't do this video without acknowledging there is a very very dark side to this you know a lot of people made a lot of money by exploiting people with physical and mental challenges and disabilities by promoting them with misleading insulting and even racist themes it's fair to say people had a different sensibility back then but it's also fair to say that some of these sideshow performers did pretty well doing this some of them made a lot of money and made a very good living became absolutely celebrities at a time when most people were struggling to find any kind of work whatsoever and they did this with physical disabilities it would have made finding a job nearly impossible even at the best of times the fact is we as humans have a certain curiosity toward the unusual and the grotesque that carries on today with our obsession with celebrities plastic surgery disasters and heartwarming BBC stories about children with two butts so with that in mind here are some of the most famous human oddities of all time Robert Wadlow the tallest man of all time born in 1918 Robert Wadlow was normal-sized at birth but by one year old he was already over three feet tall at eight years old he was 5 foot 11 and at 13 years old he was 7 feet tall he was a tallest boy scout of all time he was diagnosed with hyperplasia of the pituitary gland something that's fairly common for people who are extremely tall this is also known as gigantism and it caused him to never stop growing throughout his entire life he was hired to tour with Ringling Brothers Circus in 1936 knew was often paired with little people on stage just to exaggerate his height even further and he became a celebrity and made a good living doing this he was eventually actually hired as a sponsor for the international shoe company who provided him free size 37 shoes of course living in a world that is built for people far smaller than you posed many challenges for him he actually had a lot of trouble walking around but he refused to use a wheelchair because he just you know didn't want to be a guy in a wheelchair but he wore braces on his legs to help him stand up straight another side effect of his size is that he lost a lot of feeling in his legs and this is actually what did him in these braces that he wore actually wore an ulcer into his ankle which he didn't know about until it got infected and his mean system was already pretty compromised because he was so large and this is what caused his death he died in 1940 at only 22 years old as most people with this condition die very young he was measured only 18 days before he died at 8 foot 11 point 1 inches tall making him the tallest verified human being that has ever lived General Tom Thumb from the biggest to the smallest General Tom Thumb was born Charles Sherwood Stratton in 1838 he stopped growing after only a couple of years for reasons that were unknown at the time but he was discovered by PT Barnum and was taken to New York to feature in his famous American Museum at the time he was five years old but was only 25 inches tall and weighed 15 pounds Barnum renamed him General Tom Thumb and created this whole mythology around and they claimed that he was actually more like 11 years old and then he brought him over at great expense from Europe and then he was descended from royalty PT Barnum was a giant liar by the way PT Barnum looked like this and he was portrayed in the movie the greatest showman with this guy so the lying continues Barnum and Stratton actually became very close friends and business partners they crafted this whole performance together and drew people by the thousands Stratton was a natural performer he did accents he did impressions he did song and dance Nick performed for Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln in the early 1860s he met Lavinia Warren another little person and they got engaged and PT Barnum of course turned their marriage into this complete spectacle it became a media sensation everybody paid attention to it and you know it was a nice little escape from all the horrors of the civil war that was going on at the time Tom and Lavinia spend the next three years touring the world at some of the biggest celebrities of their time they retired a few years later and Tom Thumb died in 1883 a very very rich man Grady Stiles jr. the lobster boy one that story about Tom Thumb heartwarming this is the opposite Grady Stiles jr. was born with a condition called ectrodactyly which basically makes your hands fuse into things that resemble claws but this wasn't unexpected for him actually his entire family had this condition and they toured the sideshow circuit as the lobster family and they did really well they made 50,000 to 80,000 dollars every season and that was back in the 40s Grady later fell in love with one of the carnival workers named Mary Theresa and they got married and had two kids but as Grady got older he developed a drinking problem and became violent abusive to his wife and to both of his daughters but things finally came to a head when Grady's daughter Donna fell in love and got engaged to a guy that Grady didn't particularly like so the details are sketchy nobody knows exactly what happened but one way or another Grady confronted this soon-to-be son-in-law and shot him dead Grady with the trial and totally admitted to his crime but get this he talked his way out of it he actually argued that no jail could accommodate for his disability and therefore going to jail would be considered cruel and unusual punishment and it worked he got off on 15 years probation and this story is just getting started with the crazy Marie Teresa couldn't take it anymore she divorced him took the kids with him he got remarried had a couple more kids that one fell apart because he continued to be abusive and then for reasons that not even anybody in the family can explain Marie Teresa remarried him but after decades of getting away with literal murder Grady had become a monster that thought he was above the law and eventually Mary couldn't take it anymore she and her son Glenn paid their next-door neighbor their 17-year old neighbor $1500 to murder him so in the night of November 29 1992 their 17 year old neighbor Chris Wyant snuck into Grady's room with a 32 caliber Colt revolver and shot him at point-blank range the family was put on trial and despite their testimony of years of abuse by Grady and even Grady's own daughter testifying against him the mother and the design were both given 12 years in prison and the neighbor was given life in prison for murder Grady Stiles the lobster boy was so disliked that the funeral home couldn't find anybody to be pallbearers at his funeral Francisca Lentini the three legged man Francisco Lentini was born in Sicily in 1889 one of 12 children technically 12 and a half because attached to the bottom of his spine was a parasitic twin this gave Francisco a third leg although there was a fourth foot attached to the top of that leg which gave him in total three legs four feet 16 toes and yes two sets of functional male genitalia this face it he's twice the man you are he's been part of his childhood in a school for disabled children which actually exposed him to kids who had things much worse off than he did they kind of gave him some motivation to do something with his life he came to the u.s. at the age of 8 and became an immediate sensation in the sideshow circuit not content to just be stared and gawked at he also did little physical feats around the stage he would jump rope he'd ride a bike and he would kick a soccer ball around with his third leg while he was talking to the crowd he was known for his wit and charm on stage would often give interviews while sitting on his third leg just like it was a stool and when people asked him how he bought shoes and pairs of three he would say that he would buy two pairs of shoes and give one to a one-legged friend of his Francisco got married and had four healthy kids and spent the rest of his life touring the country until he died at 78 in 1966 he was so well respected amongst his peers on the scishow circuit that many of them simply called him the king myrtle Corbin the four legged lady anything boys can do girls can do better am i right myrtle Corbin was born in team 268 in Tennessee and much like Francisco she had a parasitic twin that was only developed from the waist down which gave her two extra legs she did have the ability to control her twins legs but they were very malformed and in fact each foot only had three toes on it and she had trouble getting around not just because of the extra legs but she also had a clubfoot on her right leg so even though she was called the four legged woman she technically only had one good one she toured with PT Barnum the Ringling Brothers and was a featured attraction in Coney Island where she at her height made up to four hundred and fifty dollars a week which is twelve thousand dollars a week in today's money girl got paid at nineteen she married a doctor named Clinton Bick well who upon consummating the marriage learned a little secret that much like Francisco her twin was fully sexually developed meaning she had two vaginas together they had four daughters and one son and the rumor is that she gave birth to three of them from one vagina and two of them from the other now I don't know if this is true or not but according to the book anomalies and curiosities in medicine by George Gould and Walter Pyle it had been observed that she did men straight from both so I guess it's possible just imagine if she and Francisco had gotten together huh-huh damn it now it's out there I've said it now there's porn of it out there somewhere Haji Ali the regurgitator some human oddities are born with physical deformities and then they are the real freaks Haji Ali was known as the regurgitator because he had a particular set of skills I don't know who you are but I will find you I will drink you and I will be you yeah how do you basically drink a three gallon pitcher of water and then spouted that water and six foot arcs all around the stage with pinpoint accuracy and that's just how he started the show he also had the ability to swallow several objects and then hook them up in any order you wanted and he would swallow puzzles and hack them up solved and for his finale he would swallow a gallon of water and then a gallon of kerosene then spout up the kerosene in front of a match basically turning himself into a human flamethrower he'd used this to burn down a miniature castle before using the rest of the water in his stomach to put out the flames regurgitation acts were not unheard of at the time but most of them are considered very lowbrow gross-out kind of performances but how do you took this to a whole other level and made it an art form own zone now from blowing stuff out your mouth to blowing stuff out your ass LaPenta mein the fart east okay so for anybody out there who thinks that modern entertainment has become way too juvenile and dumbed down here's the guy who made a living literally playing music out of his ass it's kind of the Victorian version of Al Michaels born joseph pujol in marseille france in 1857 the story goes that he realized he had this ability when he was swimming one day and realized he could suck it water in and out at his own will glad I wasn't in that pool so he began to experiment down there and realize that over time and with practice he could actually make it perform all kinds of different sounds he started doing this just for fun as a comedy act around town and then he decided to get serious about it it's so moving that moment when he realized your true calling within five years he was playing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris under the name lahpet Amin which is French for fart maniac from there he became one of the most successful and wealthiest performers of his day so much so that he was able to open up his own theatre has that consisted of fart impressions of famous people blowing out candles hitting targets and of course lots of fart jokes his big finale was he would stick a tube up his anus and then attach the other end of a tutu an ocarina and then play music and have the audience sing along with him like you do his popularity began to wane around World War one for some reason people just weren't in the mood for fart jokes and he retired from public life in 1914 when he died in 1945 at the age of 88 many medical schools clamor to get a hold of his body so they could figure out how he was able to do all this but his family refused saying quote there are some things which simply must be treated with reverence quick bonus fact Mel Brooks named his character and Blazing Saddles Governor J LaPenta Maine after the great firt East always makes me laugh Alfred Langevin old smokey eye so puking guy kind of gross guy playing music out of his butt weird this guy is just what not much is known about Alfred Llangollen he spent some time at Robert Ripley's auditorium from 1933 to 1940 he was featured in their pamphlets and their materials their marketing and whatnot because he did this thing and he was kind of a one-trick pony he smoked out of his eyes he could also blow up balloons and play a recorder with his eyes okay here's a three trick pony it was thought that he could do this because of an anomaly and his tear duct that actually allowed air to flow between his eye and his sinuses otherwise he had perfectly functional eyes it should be noted there is currently a Guinness World Record for squirting milk out of your eye and the record is eight point seven four five feet so apparently this is the whole thing it's probably hipster out there vaping from his eye right now let's see the pinhead alright so yeah this one is a bit more questionable but again these were different times pinheads were a carnival attraction that featured people with microcephaly which causes your cranium to be smaller and grow to a point hence the name microcephalic Saul so usually feature developmental disabilities as well often having the cognitive ability of around a four-year-old and this is also what makes Zika so dangerous pregnant women who get Zika can have microcephalic babies now pinheads in the best of cases played characters and performances clowns and the like and in the worst case they were depicted as aliens or Amazons or Aztecs usually with extremely racist overtones because of course they went there but Schlitz he became an actual star let's see was a guy but he was billed as a woman because he wore this dress like garment because he was incontinent which Litzy was loved by his fans and his friends alike because he had this sort of childlike innocence and exuberance that just rubbed off on everybody around him a ray of sunshine is the term that got used a lot and he just seemed to have this unconditional love for everybody that he met that was really endearing he just he just made you feel good Leslie was even featured in movies including Tom Browning's freaks of course with a lot of other sideshow performers but he also was featured and the island of lost souls of Bela Lugosi sadly his caretaker died in the sixties and she literally got put into an institution he was discovered years later by Bill Oakes another sideshow performer who found Schlitz E depressed and upset he missed the his friends on the sideshow he missed the attention from fans and bill basically worked with the hospital and the hospital decided the best thing for him was to put him on her bills care and let him go back to the carnival slits he never stopped performing it was said that in his final years you could see him in the park outside his Los Angeles apartment feeding pigeons and performing for anybody who happened to walk by he just lived to make people smile Chang and Eng the Siamese twins you've probably heard of Chang and Eng bunker they're so famous that this very day conjoined twins are often called Siamese twins but their story is amazing they were born in modern-day Thailand that was the kingdom of Siam back then in 1811 and as conjoined twins go their conjoining was not that extreme they just had a four inch band of flesh that connect them at the bottom of their ribcage it looked like something you could just cut with some garden shears they lived in a fishing village until they were discovered by a Scottish businessman named Robert hunter who decided you can make a lot of money off of these guys so he whisked them away to the United States the land of freedom where they were basically slaves they lived with hundreds business partner Abel coffin who toured them around the country as a standalone acts but coffin and his wife pocketed all their money and they did all the work so at the age of 21 they'd had enough they wrote an fu letter to the coffins and found a business manager who would work for them instead of the other way around and they took their show on the road over time they became wealthy and famous and eventually settled down in South Carolina married two sisters and had 21 kids between them I know like how apparently they had a setup where they both had different houses on different plots of land and every three days they would go back and forth between those houses and when they were at Shane's house you know everything they did whatever he wanted to do he was like the the head of the household and when they went to Aang's house the same thing so basically every three days they just kind of like shut down for the other guy and the sex thing has been described by other conjoined twins apparently there's just a way that they have of just you know tuning it out but they were incredibly successful both professionally and personally I mean what's not to like about these guys oh they own slaves Oh Chiang No yeah after living for years in indentured servitude they decided yeah let's just pay that forward evidently slavery was more of an investment strategy for them because they would buy kids when they were younger than eight years old and then sell them for more money when they got older of course the Civil War came along and put the squash and all that and they lost all their investments so for those of you out there thinking of investing in slavery maybe stick to an index fund in 1870 Chiang had a stroke and his health declined from there from that point on Aang basically had to just carry him around everywhere they went and four years later Chang died in his sleep Aang survived for another three hours before you joined him now it turns out that multiple times in their lives they considered getting separated especially after they retired from performing and were settling down with their wives but their wives didn't want to do it because they were afraid it was too risky they didn't want to lose them so after they died not Topsy was done and they actually it turns out they they both shared one liver that was separated between their their bodies and today they probably could be separated and would have been just fine but back then they probably would have died so the wives were right and last but not least Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man few stories are as tragic as the true life story of Joseph Merrick his story's been immortalized in plays books and films often calling him John Merrick but his actual name was Joseph born in 1863 in Lister England he was actually normal at birth but after about a year he started to see lumps and weird gross show up on his face by all accounts his mother loved him and cared for him but she died when he was 11 years old leaving him with his abusive father his father got remarried to a woman who was awful to Joseph she insisted that he worked for a living even at the age of nine 10 and he went to work at a tobacco factory and he rolled cigars until his hand was so malformed that he couldn't do that anymore and then he traveled around and sold magazines door-to-door wearing a sack over his face to not scare the people yeah he still scared people and he eventually left his family to make money in the only way he knew how you guessed it as a human oddity he toured around England for a while with a local promoter named Sam tour and eventually made his way into a shop run by a guy named Tom Norman where he basically had an ADIZ Curiosity Shop where he would shuttle people in and look at the horrible Elephant Man the shop was right across the street from spittle in East London and one of the doctors there Frederick Treves became interested in Joseph he came over and asked if he could examine him Joseph refused but Frederick left him his card just in case during this time Joseph actually made some pretty good money but the public attitude toward freakshows was starting to shift the morality police started going around shutting down shops like his so he wound up touring throughout Europe where he took out a new manager that left him in Brussels and stole all of his money he made his way back to London absolutely penniless and wound up causing a big commotion at a train station the police took him in and the only thing they found on him was the card of Frederick Treves the doctor so they called up Frederick and Frederick took him into the hospital and examined him on examination dr. Treves realized that this condition was slowly killing Joseph and he probably didn't have that much more time so he and the hospital put together a campaign where they raised money from the public to put him up in accommodations in the hospital for as long as possible and it was actually a huge success they raised enough money to put him up indefinitely and this is where Joseph's life finally sort of came around they put him up with some really nice accommodations in a big room in the hospital it didn't have any mirrors on Joseph's request which is heartbreaking and at one point Frederick brought in a woman to meet Joseph and she shook his hand and he broke down crying because he said that that was the first time a woman had ever smiled at him and shaking his hand Joseph actually had a pretty good life at this point he spent his time reading writing his memoirs building model buildings he had visitors from royalty like the Prince and Princess of Wales and Frederick Treves and him became good friends Frederick found him charming and witty and highly intelligent on the morning of April 11th 1890 a nurse came in to Joseph's room and found him dead in his bed he was only 27 years old now the cause of his death was a dislocated neck because his head was so heavy when he laid down now dr. Treves believes that he did this on purpose because he normally slept sitting up with his head resting on his knees the fact that he was laying in bed when he died made Frederick Treves believe that he did it on purpose he just wanted to sleep like a normal now for years people attributed Joseph's condition to neurofibromatosis although later they decided that was probably Proteus syndrome some though believe that he may have had both or he may have had a whole unique thing that nobody else has ever had his story while tragic and heartbreaking is also a testament to the indomitable nature of the human spirit so that was depressing so which of these are your favorite human oddities do you have a favorite that I didn't mention are you horribly offended that I even talked about this subject let me know in the comments I know you will I've got links to stories about all these people in the description down below so if you want to know more definitely go check that out please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here check out some of my other stuff it's usually not this depressing and if you like those please do subscribe I come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday thanks so much for watching you guys go out have an eye-opening rest of the week I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Info

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 716,313

Rating: 4.9033728 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, human oddities, freakshows, carnival sideshow, robert wadlow, pt barnum, general tom thumb, Grady stiles jr, lobster boy, francisco lentini, myrtle corbin, Hadji Ali, Le Petomane, Alfred Langevin, Schlitzie the pinhead, Todd Brownings freaks, Robert Ripley, chang and eng, conjoined twins, parasitic twin, Joseph Merrick, the elephant man

Id: 8Saf8AclgJU

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018

Reddit Comments