Number 6.
“Schlitze”: In the 1930s, the Barnum and Bailey circus was known throughout the country
for its spectacular traveling freak shows, and Schlitze was one its top attractions.
Standing only 4 feet tall, the little person was plagued by a host of deformities, most
notably his tiny, shrunken head, which was only a fraction of normal size and rose to
a pointed tip.
His appearance was made even more bizarre when the Barnum and Bailey circus decided
to put him on the freak show roster as a girl, first billing him as “Maggie, Last of the
Aztec Children”, and later, more famously, as “Schlitze Surtees the Pinhead”.
For this second persona, they gave Schlitze a flowery dress and a little tuft of hair
that they pulled back into a girl’s ponytail, ribbon and all.
His legend grew as he traveled from town to town, scaring and intriguing everyone in sight.
While Schlitze did not necessarily do anything scary in his act, the medical explanation
for his condition is the real reason why he makes the list here on Chills.
Poor Schlitze was born with microcephaly, which has recently made headlines again with
the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil.
This virus, which is transmitted by mosquito bite, caused over 5 thousand cases of microcephaly
this year in Brazil alone, and many more throughout South America.
In severe cases of microcephaly, like with Schlitze, the baby has an unformed brain,
which can result in seizures and problems with motor coordination, vision, and hearing,
along with mental retardation.
Sufferers of this condition are severely mentally unstable and often require lifelong supervision.
With that said, Schlitze’s mother probably did not get bitten by a Zika-infected mosquito
when she was pregnant.
There are other ways to develop microcephaly besides mosquito bites, such as alcohol abuse
and malnutrition during pregnancy, or birth complications during the delivery itself.
Still, the thought that Brazil could have an entire generation of upcoming Schlitzes
on their hands is disturbing enough to make him number six on this list.
Number 5.
Chang and Eng: You may have heard of two people who are joined together at birth being referred
to as “Siamese twins”.
Well, the term directly refers to these two brothers in particular, named Chang and Ang.
In 1811, the brothers were born in a remote fishing village in Siam (now known as Thailand).
They were almost two fully separate people except for a giant chunk of flesh that connected
them at the torso, more specifically at the liver.
As a result of this mutation, they lived their entire lives facing chest-to-chest, with Chang
on the left, who was shorter than his brother and seemed to permanently lean in.
Despite their low chance of survival, especially in their small village just outside of Bangkok,
their mother did not give up on them.
Instead, she encouraged them to exercise and stretch until they could run, swim, and even
steer a boat together.
They probably would have been stuck selling duck eggs with their mother in Thailand if
a British merchant hadn’t seen them swimming in the river one day.
At first he thought they were some sort of animal he had never seen before, but after
meeting them in person, he convinced their mother to sell them for $500 and take them
back home for side shows.
Together, they toured all over London and made a good deal of money.
At one point, top scientists even paid to curiously study them, finding that Chang could
sense when Ang was tickled, or when he ate something, and vice versa.
Eventually they toured America with the Barnum and Bailey circus until they had enough money
to settle down on their own as adults.
They picked a spot in North Carolina, and here is where things get really bizarre even
for Siamese twins.
Chang and Ang were in their 30s by now.
It was in the 1800s, and slavery was still in full effect.
Under a North Carolina legal loophole, Chang and Ang were classified as white and could
legally own slaves – which they did, and by the dozens.
That’s right, despite being sold by their parents themselves, the twins grew up to become
wealthy slave-driving businessmen on a large plantation.
They even got married to two sisters.
In fact, Chang and Ang had 21 kids between the two of them, though I suppose the babies
all technically came the same father (there’s a thought).
Being one of the first documented cases of conjoined twins is strange enough, but the
way Chang and Ang died is definitely enough to earn them the number five position.
They were 62-years old when Chang came down with a severe case of bronchitis.
He had not been feeling well for a long time when the two went to bed one night as usual.
When Ang woke up, however, he was horrified to see that he was now lying in bed attached
to a dead body.
Ang struggled and struggled, but there was nowhere for him to go.
He died an hour later, medical examiners say, from fright.
Just imagine waking up next to your dead brother and knowing you will soon be next.
Number 4.
“The Egyptian Enigma”: Hadji Ali was born in 1800s Egypt, and he had the amazing ability
to spit out vast quantities of water, along with anything else he swallowed.
He would commonly gulp down entire fishbowls of water and spit them back out in high arcs
like an elegant human water fountain sculpture.
Sounds interesting, right?
Maybe even charming or, dare I say, beautiful?
Wrong.
The audience may have been delighted, they may have clapped and cheered Hadji on, but
in reality, there’s nothing attractive about what Hadji was actually doing.
Hadji was a master of controlled regurgitation.
What does this mean?
He was vomiting everywhere.
The vomit was incredibly accurate and precise, but he was still using intense stomach spasms
to eject the contents of his stomach into containers and all over people as they cheered
and begged him for more.
Hadji could even vomit a gallon of kerosene into a powerful geyser that he would set on
fire, but that’s not the point.
The point is, if the audience knew that Hadji’s water-spouting act was actually the same as
throwing up, there probably would have been far more empty seats at his shows.
That’s just gross, Hadji.
Number 3.
“The Elephant Man”: Born Joseph Merrick in 1862, the “Elephant Man” did not get
his nickname from the condition known as elephantitis.
Contrary to popular belief, the name has nothing to do with his appearance at all.
Rather, it is the result of a medical diagnosis that a doctor gave to his mother after he
explained that her son was deformed because she was scared by an elephant when she was
pregnant.
This is a true fact.
A doctor really believed that the Elephant Man looked that way as a direct result of
his mother having been scared by a circus elephant while pregnant.
Obviously, medical science was somewhat lacking back then.
To clear up another common misconception, Merrick did not have elephantitis at all,
but rather Proteus syndrome, which is marked by an overgrowth of skin, bone, and organ
tissue throughout the body.
Merrick’s deformities are not what places him on this list, but rather how sad and lonely
his life was.
He started life looking completely normal as a child.
Then at the age of five, he began developing horrible tumors and lesions all over his body
and face as the disease began to steadily take over.
His disfigured appearance displeased his stepmother so much that he was kicked out of the home
as a young boy – his biological father simply stood back and allowed for this to happen.
During this time, he attempted door-to-door sales while wearing a burlap mask, which worked
about as well as you would expect.
Things just continued to get worse for the poor Elephant Man.
He traveled to Belgium for work at a freak show, but was robbed and left for dead by
his promoter.
When he went back to London, he had grown so grotesque that he nearly started a riot
at the train station by just standing around.
By this point, the Elephant Man couldn’t even speak, and only had a doctor’s business
card to show authorities as an explanation.
At one point, he was eventually noticed and pitied by Queen Victoria herself, and he lived
a higher quality of life with the upper class thanks to her sympathy.
Still, he grew so lonely that he hoped to find love at a blind home out of desperation
(this never happened).
You would hope that a person who had this rough of a life would at least get to die
a peaceful death.
The truth is, Merrick did die in his sleep, but probably not in the way that you were
hoping for.
Merrick always slept sitting upright, but one night he decided to try something different
and slept laying down.
Unfortunately, his head had grown so ridden with tumors at this point that it was extremely
heavy, heavy enough to dislocate his neck during his sleep.
Was the Elephant Man still mercifully asleep when his neck snapped under the weight of
his own misshapen head, or was he awake and fully conscious to experience all of the pain?
There is no way to tell for sure, but based on all of the previous suffering that he had
to endure, there’s no reason to suspect that his luck suddenly changed for the better
in those final few moments.
Number 2.
“The Lobster Boy, Grady Stiles”: “I’m not a fan of my dad as a person,” said the
son of Grady Stiles to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, going on to call his father “racist and
abusive”.
His daughter, Cathy, on the other hand, prefers to describe her father as “Satan himself”.
Grady Stiles, otherwise known as the “Lobster Boy”, was born with a special defect that
mutated his hands and feet into single-pincher “claws”.
Most of the family is afflicted with the same genetic disease.
Apparently, Grady’s claws grew to become extremely muscular and powerful, which, when
combined with a sadistic temper and alcoholism, was a recipe for mistreatment for his poor
family.
Though he appeared friendly enough at the sideshow attractions he worked at, it was
not uncommon, according to family members, for the “Lobster Boy” to choke people
with his claw-like hands and head-butt them in the stomach whenever he got angry or upset.
The “Lobster Boy” himself, however, did not admit this.
Instead, he preferred to talk at length about other uses for his wriggling appendages, which
he says the women especially enjoyed.
Either way, the family grew fearful of his constant threats, and one day, Grady’s wife
had enough.
She contacted a neighborhood friend and said she didn’t feel safe, that something needed
to be done, and that she was willing to pay.
According to Grady’s wife, she had meant just to have him beaten up and taught a lesson,
but one night, as Grady pinched a cigarette between his claws and drank Seagrams 7 on
the sofa, a man entered his home and shot him in the head multiple times.
The Lobster Boy was no more.
He was hated by the local community so much that hardly anybody attended his funeral,
and absolutely nobody would volunteer as a pallbearer to carry his coffin.
Ironically enough, his tombstone is marked by two praying hands.
Whether or not this was done intentionally to spite and mock him forever remains unknown.
Number 1.
“The Running Man”: No one on earth was more glad to be stabbed than Arnold Gerrit
Henskes, aka Mirin Dajo, a European from the Netherlands.
One day in the early 1900s, he traveled abroad to live with monks (at least according to
his story).
When he returned, he had learned a new skill that was unbelievable: he could stab himself
without injury.
Now when I say “he could stab himself without injury”, we’re not talking about some
horizontal slash across the wrists.
No, I mean this guy would stab a sword straight through himself and not even blink.
After a while, he changed his name to Mirin Dajo and started making a living.
He was such a medical marvel that doctors had to take a look for themselves.
On multiple occasions, doctors from around the world performed a variety of medical tests
on him while he stuck swords through his body over and over again.
They even took an X-ray to verify that this wasn’t one of the world’s best optical
illusions, but it certainly wasn’t fake.
Somehow, he was truly able to impale himself without dying.
Mirin Dajo had such confidence in his abilities, and was so eager to show that this was not
a trick, that he encouraged doctors to run the blade through themselves.
He even told them, at times, to be rougher and not so gentle.
As if this weren’t enough, on one occasion he began to jog laps with a sword sticking
straight through him.
That’s right, this man was literally running swords through himself and then going running.
Doctors have no easy explanation as to how he made this possible.
Their best guess is that he was able to create tunnels of scar tissue for the sword to pass
through by slowly inserting the blade inside of himself repeatedly over a number of years.
Other monks are sometimes able to do something similar to this, but they can only run a sword
through fatty areas such as their arms, never through vital organs (pretty much making him
certifiably insane).
In 1948, a voice in his head told him to swallow a steel needle and he died of a ruptured heart.
When you already have a propensity for stabbing yourself the last thing you want to hear is
voices encouraging you to do more, but he did, and there’s number one for you.