The Camel Girl

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. They said the camel girl was a funny looking object. Whenever she walks, she walked away from herself. They said that from the thighs down, her legs were turned the wrong way. They said if she stooped over, her knees would stick out behind like a camel's.

They always stared with their hard, hard eyes. There were those who saw her and felt disgust at her wrongness. Sometimes they laughed. There was pity too. She did not like that. She did not want their pity. The people paid their money just to stare at the camel girl. But you can call her Miss Harper. Miss Ella Harper.

Because that is my name and this is my story. In 19th century America, before radio became the first mass medium to captivate the public's attention and before movie theaters opened their doors, there was another form of cheap, super popular entertainment. They called them dime museums. These were places that offered the kind of diversions and exhibits that today we think of as sideshow material.

In the late 1800s, every city and even good sized town was likely to have a dime museum. By 1930, only New York City could make that claim. It wasn't just competition from radio and movies that ended this brief and weird chapter in American pop culture. There was also the problem of the freaks, as journalist Grant Dixon put it, writing for the Tennessean newspaper in 1929.

The dime museum's bill of fare usually consisted of dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, fat men and women, living skeletons and tattooed men and women. Today, we call those folks people and not freaks. In those days, there were few medical options to treat a deformity or a disability. You had to adapt, figure it out, make the best of it.

If just navigating daily life was a struggle, imagine how hard it was for many of these people to earn a living. Not to mention the ignorance and cruelty they faced on the regular, the ugly names they were called, the fear and superstition they inspired. The circus offered them a haven from that. Yes, the crowds could turn nasty and their fascination was more dehumanizing than devoted.

But the sideshow paid well. Beyond even that, it was a welcoming community for people who would live their entire lives as different, as other, as a spectacle. At least in the circus, being a spectacle paid. There was big money to be made by exploiting everything from congenital anomalies to hormonal disorders to conjoined twins.

And it wasn't just the impresarios who made bank off their human commodities. The performers themselves cashed in to earning far more than they'd ever be able to in the outside world. The salaries of the freaks were governed by the law of supply and demand. The rarer the freak, the greater the salary did he command. And there weren't enough freaks to go around.

To meet the shortage, many unscrupulous managers hired bogus freaks. Their wild men of Borneo were in many cases harmless men born on American soil. In the galaxy of bogus freaks, there were homo equus, the half man, half horse, the monstrous double headed giants, the four legged and three legged freaks. And the man with the bullet hole through his body, which was in reality only an optical illusion.

It all began with P.T. Barnum. Long before there was a Barnum and Bailey circus. There was the American Museum in New York. Barnum opened it in 1840 and stuffed it full of all sorts of curiosities. There were scientific instruments, historical dioramas, a dog powered loom, wax figures, taxidermy, live animals, including trained bears and big cats and beluga whales.

They lived in two small tanks in the building's basement and they never lived for long under those conditions. There were human performers as well, like magicians and ventriloquists and the world famous General Tom Thumb, who stood at just thirty five inches tall. For twenty four years, the American Museum entertained people coming from everywhere.

Thirty eight million visitors in all, which was six million people more than the entire population of the United States at the time. Then tragedy struck on July 13th, 1865. The museum went up in flames. It was one of the most disastrous fires ever battled in New York. Most of the animals trapped in their enclosures died in the blaze.

Others jumped through windows to escape the flames, only to be shot by police. It was hellish, but it wasn't over for P.T. He vowed to rebuild and just two months later opened Barnum's new museum on Broadway. When that, too, burned to the ground in March 1868, Barnum was like, screw this. So he made a slight change in his career, turning to politics and the circus business, which back then were apparently two different things.

How times have changed. P.T. Barnum may have abandoned his museums, but the template he'd create it was a winner. The very first dime museum opened for business on the Bowery in New York City in 1876. It was founded by a circus hand named George Middleton. Middleton had traveled the world with one circus or another and gathered himself quite a collection of freaks, genuine freaks.

Once he opened a show on the Bowery, the business did OK, but just OK. And then Middleton took his idea to Chicago and the windy city couldn't get enough. Here were people who could appreciate a bearded lady, people willing to drop their dimes into Middleton's hand just to get a peek. It didn't take long for George Middleton to permanently relocate his operation to Chicago.

I was barely six years old when Mr. Middleton opened his dime museum in Chicago. My family lived in Tennessee, far from any big city. I never heard the word freak. I did not know that I was a freak. Middleton soon partnered with another circus veteran named Charles Cole. Now they had three dime museums operating in Chicago and eventually expanded to Minneapolis, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

The men made more money than they knew how to spend, building themselves palatial mansions in Chicago's finest neighborhoods. Success like that invites imitation. And it wasn't long before copycat dime museums were popping up all over the United States and overseas. In Memphis, Eugene Robinson's dime museum boasted headliners Madam Jane, Fat Lady and Dot Littlefinger Midget.

Sackett's dime museum in St. Louis offered a tattooed lady and twin dwarves. Philadelphia upped the ante, as it often does, with a monster baby show promising scores of babies, remarkable and interesting, with prizes awarded to the biggest, the smallest and fattest babies. Boston had the three headed songstress. Baltimore advertised Sammy Bishop, the handsome fat boy, the armless man and the wild warrior chieftains of King Setawayo's army.

And in Detroit, a dime would buy you a glimpse of the world's ugliest dwarf. If you're thinking, oh, my God, the cruelty, the ableism, right? But don't leave out the racism. A dime museum in Rochester, New York, advertised the singing Indians, the only educated Indians on the American stage. Most heartbreaking was Big Winnie, a black performer whose claim to fame was her size.

At 600 pounds, she was unable to manage the stairs to enter the dime museums. But even that was turned by management into an opportunity to turn a profit. When Big Winnie was scheduled to appear, word would go out heralding her arrival. Crowds would gather to see her hoisted into the buildings via rope and tackle. I could cry at what they did.

And unlike her fellow performers, many of whom became incredibly wealthy, Winnie died in her first year on the circuit before she could sock away the small fortune that could have been hers. There was a gentleman named F.D. Coyle who made his living as a dime museum lecturer. In a nutshell, it was his job to tell the customers stories about the exhibits.

Facts didn't matter, he explained. It was all about coming up with a ripping good yarn right off the top of your head. Just had to be interesting. Coyle considered himself an expert on the population of freaks who earned their paychecks in museums. He noted that poor families made easy targets when it came to recruiting talent because the money that could potentially be earned on the dime museum circuit was staggering.

It was life changing. The problem was, he said, was that it was getting too easy to pull off a fake and that with so many fraudulent freaks saturating the market, supply was exceeding demand. The fact that Coyle himself was in on creating these fakes didn't faze the man a bit. He shared this story. The most successful gorilla ever known in this country was an educated German who was a chemist and spoke four languages.

He arrived here with his wife and not but 50 cents in money. He wanted to open a school for languages. He consulted a man named Dr. McClellan with the idea of getting advice on the subject. The doctor learned that the German's body was covered in hair. The German was advised to hire out in a dime museum at the corner of Broadway and Ninth Street.

False nails were put in his fingers and his wild, weird and woolly aspect was heightened by all the arts then known to the dime museum profession. He drew crowded houses in the city for a long time. Then he went with me to Chicago, where I fixed him up as a gorilla. We chained him to the floor with heavy shackles and his roars of anger could be heard a mile away.

Strong men grew weak looking at him. And at last, the authorities stopped the performance. The gorilla is now a reputable manufacturer of pocketbooks. OK, so super fun, but there's a very good chance that someone living today has an ancestor who came to this country, a highly educated chemist, but kicked open the door to the American dream by pretending to be a gorilla.

Where's Ancestry.com when you need the most, right? Also, it's so on brand, isn't it? Like, hi, were you like super smart and multilingual and a credentialed professional in your country of origin? Yeah, about that. Welcome to America. Now you're a gorilla. But young Ella Harper, Ella was no fake, no gaffe. She was born in Sumner County, Tennessee, on January 5th, 1870.

Her parents, William Harper and Minerva Ann Childress, were farmers. She had a twin brother named Everett, who died when he was just three months old. There were four more children in the family, two girls, Sally and Jessie, and two boys named Willie and Earl. My brothers, Earl and Willie, and my sisters, Sally and Jessie, were strong and fine with legs straight as tree trunks.

I do not know if my twin shared my affliction. Was he my mirror reflection or would he have been whole, able to run and climb fast and strong enough for both of us? Ella's affliction was an extremely rare orthopedic condition called congenital genu recurvitum. It's a deformity of the knee joint, which causes the knee to bend backward, if you can picture that.

It occurs once in every 100,000 births, and it's more common in women than in men. And as you might guess, it can be painful. That's just the start. Other symptoms include weakness and instability, decreased range of motion and discrepancies in the length of the legs. Ella's was a congenital case, something she was born with.

But don't think that means you're out of the woods. Genu recurvitum can also develop because of trauma and even from too much time spent in a cast. And this isn't something that's easily treated, not even today, with all the advances medicine has made. Surgery is an option now, a surgery called anterior opening wedge proximal tibial osteotomy.

That's the most common surgical procedure, and it's every bit as hardcore as it sounds. In Ella's time, the late 1800s, are you kidding? Amputation was pretty standard treatment then for a badly injured or infected limb. What in the world could be done for little Ella? There was no orthopedic specialist to consult, no St. Jude's Hospital to take her to.

Leg braces existed back then. But what brace could address the fact that Ella's knees were backward? Was I revolting a thing to be pitied or feared or despised? What would become of me? What choices were mine to make? Pinpointing the moment that Ella became a performer is tricky. Her family was well known in Sumner County.

But what historical records exist don't fill in many details. Well, I take that back. There is this juicy bit ferreted out by a hobby genealogist and blogger named Ray M. Ella's brother Earl, thought by some to be a foster brother, was actually her half brother. Ella's father had apparently stepped out on his wife, and the result of that affair was left in a basket on the Harper doorstep.

A descendant of Ella's sister, Jesse, told Ray that the family still has that basket to this day. You can wish the family had been as keenly interested in Ella's show business career. But how was she supposed to compete with a scandal like that? What we do know is that at age 12, in October 1882, Ella joined the sideshow.

People were fascinated by her appearance. Yes, she was a lovely girl with long, thick, wavy curls and an open, pleasant face, big, bright eyes. But that's not what provoked the open mouth stares. It was easier for Ella and more comfortable for her to move about on all fours, something that only accentuated the strange configuration of her legs.

That was a thing we didn't see every day. It seemed that their eyes were curious, but without pity. There was something else in the way those eyes fixed on me. Though I could not name it, I felt it sting. It was also new and so very strange. Ella's early career took her on the road, performing around New Orleans and St. Louis.

How did she manage being away from home? So young, so unworldly. Who looked after her? Who looked out for her? Where did she sleep? Who taught her the ropes? Who, if anyone, helped keep her safe? I want to imagine that another performer, maybe the tattooed lady, took her under her wing, batted away the roughnecks and rubes who saw Ella as something they could take and use in whatever vile way they pleased.

A trophy. I was homesick sometimes and I was scared sometimes. But for the first time, I saw that there might be a use for me. And I was seeing places and wonders. I had no idea the world could be so big. Then Ella's world got even bigger. A man by the name of W.H. Harris came calling. Harris was the owner of the Nickel Plate Circus.

Harris's show was a one ring circus, but no less stuffed with marvels than any bigger competitor. The mightiest popular price in all the swinging universe, barring none. It is unapproachable. It is incomparable. It is unassailable. It is colossal above all others. Harris was born to be a showman, clearly, but he was also a shrewd businessman.

The question is often asked, how can you afford to put on a show for 10 or 20 cent cost of admission? The answer is plain. The Nickel Plate Show makes use of 70 horses, midget Shetland ponies and trick mules. The biggest performing elephant that walks the earth and the largest and finest den of acting lions and tigers in the known world.

I believe the shortest cut to honest wealth is to give the people plenty for their money. The rich patronize this great moral show, not because the admission is low, but because it's a good show. Others visit it because it's both cheap and good. A pleased patron of the Nickel Plate Show is ever after a firm friend of myself, W.H. Harris.

Here's a guy who was born to be a circus barker. Harris founded the Nickel Plate Show in 1883 in Chicago. He understood his audience. He was a master at creating excitement and enthusiasm for a spectacle. His animal menagerie was matched by equally provocative human menagerie. Where else could the public hope to lay eyes upon the wonderful tattooed Fiji Island cannibal or the only male and female Samson's on the continent matching their enormous strength against teams of horses and elephants?

Harris had an eye for talent, and it didn't take long for word to reach him that there was a young girl down south, a girl with a most peculiar deformity, one who would draw crowds of the curious to the Nickel Plate Circus. Harris did more than offer Ella Harper a job. He made her a headliner. The Camel Girl became a star almost overnight.

In the circus world, performers had something called pitch cards. Think of like a baseball card. One side featured a photo of the performer. On the reverse, there will be a blurb, often the story of how they came to be. These cards would be passed out to promote the show. But some performers also had a side hustle, autographing and selling their pitch cards.

The card Harris created for Ella Harper, the Camel Girl, said this, I am called the Camel Girl. Because my knees turn backward, I can walk best on my hands and feet, as you can see me in the picture. I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years, and now this is 1886, and I intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation.

Miss Girl, look at you talk about self-assured and empowered at a time when people saved up their dimes just to gawk at you. There you are dreaming and planning another kind of future for yourself. W.H. Harris was kind of a genius for that pitch card. With it, he launched his newest star and created scarcity. Better get out and see the Camel Girl now while you still can.

Here's the thing. That wasn't just good marketing on Harris's part. It was Ella's truth. Harris was just clever enough as a showman to capitalize on it. Here's another thing he did to boost ticket sales for Ella. He gave her a camel, not as a gift, but as a co-star. There they were side by side, the Camel Girl and the creature who inspired the name.

A camel is not a pleasant animal. You may not know that. I did not know that. It was a terribly rude thing and had such enormous teeth. I feared being kicked by it or spat upon. Before 1860, biology did not exist as a science. Then in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One year later, an English biologist and anthropologist named Thomas Huxley coined the term Darwinism.

That was the beginning of humanity's more nuanced understanding of the animal kingdom, including ourselves. I tell you this so that it will make a little more sense when you hear that many of the people who traded their coins for a peek at the Camel Girl were convinced that she was, in fact, part camel and not in an, oh, it's so fun to be fooled, playing along with a joke kind of way.

Some genuinely believed it possible that Ella was the result of an unthinkable, unimaginable union between human and camel. The Des Moines Register ran this in April 1886. The most unfathomable mystery science has ever looked upon on Earth. There is nothing like a marvel among the marvels. This is no fancy picture, but an exact portrait of one of nature's most wonderful creatures with the lovely face of a woman and limbs and humps of a camel.

The Cleveland Leader and Morning Herald ran this in September 1886. A cheerful, charming and entertaining young lady now first exhibited in Cleveland and pronounced by scientists the greatest living curiosity. She walks exactly like a camel. She is half human. She is half camel. Tickets to see her just about sold themselves.

The performance, such as it was, featured the camel parading around the stage while Ella stood by, inviting comparison. That was it. And apparently that was enough to satisfy the throngs who pushed their way into the tent. For this, Ella earned two hundred dollars per week. That's a whopping six thousand six hundred and eighty two dollars per week in today's money.

But there was an ugly side to fame for Ella Harper. People have a way of fearing what they don't understand, and that fear can morph so easily into hatred and so fast. At the same time, the crowds were forming lines to see the camel girl. There were those who loudly proclaimed that she was a monster, a disgrace and an offense to both God's design and basic decency.

From a newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, called the Gazette. There is a show traveling through Iowa called a circus which advertises a camel girl. It is a horrible picture. The animal stands on four legs like a lion and the build is something like one, except that the face is that of a beautiful girl. Long hair hangs over its neck from the head.

The hind feet are patterned after a cross between the lion and a camel, and the four feet look like little human hands. There is no tail on the thing and the back is hollow like a swayback horse. Such a picture as that should never be allowed in a newspaper. And the man who attempts to display such a monstrosity should be tarred and feathered and driven from down.

The Chicago Tribune called the people who lined up to see performers like Ella crude, unbaked ignoramuses and described the camel girl as one of the pitiful and repulsive monstrosities whose effigies are allowed to insult decency and refinement from every dead wall on our city streets. In Ella's day and right up through the 1940s, freaks were not just a big job for the circus.

They were kind of like royalty. Look at the amount of money Ella was earning, a fortune back then and honestly, a big old payday now. Who wouldn't like to bring home nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year? But stepping forward into the stage lights to earn that money was almost a kind of masochism, because what were you there for?

But to be ogled and othered, to be the target of gasps and sometimes screams, to be mocked. An audience isn't a mob, but it is a crowd. And like a crowd, it can turn dark. One voice in the darkness hollers a cruel slur. Maybe that gives another person permission to do the same and another and another. And so on. It wasn't uncommon for people to throw things at the sideshow performers to treat them not as human beings, but as objects, as a spectacle.

I grew to despise the stares and the unkind words. It was as though I were an animal that could not understand. But I did understand. And just as they observed me, I observed them. One town was the same as any other. The people were the same. I did not care for what I saw in so many of those faces. Ella Harper, the Camel Girl, made good on her promise to retire from the sideshow.

She was 16 years old with more money than she'd ever dreamed possible. She returned to her childhood home in Sumner County, Tennessee, and she went to school. She was nothing if not determined. And when she left the stage, she left it for good. Ella vanished into private life. She was determined to live not as a monster or an oddity, but simply as a woman like any other.

Just a few years after Ella came home, her father died in a house fire. Five years later, her brother Willie passed away. Still, she persevered. And then a wondrous thing happened. Ella fell in love. Are you shocked? Yes, I think you are. You who see me only as a thing, a deformed and hopeless thing. Robert is not like you.

Robert is good and a kind man. And in his eyes, I'm only myself. And that is enough. On June 28th, 1905, Ella Harper married schoolteacher Robert Savely. At 35 years old, Ella was a newlywed. And 10 months later, in April 1906, she became a mother. The couple was ecstatic, doting on the baby daughter they'd named Mabel.

Then the cruelest of tragedies. At just six months old, baby Mabel died. The grieving couple tried, but were never able to conceive another child. By this point, they were sharing their home with Ella's widowed mother. How they yearned for a family to raise. How Ella ached to be a mother. Eventually, they made the decision to adopt.

There was a baby girl, an orphan. We named her Jewel, Jewel Savely. We brought her home. And at last, we were a family. But once again, Ella and Robert's joy was short-lived. Baby Jewel died at three months old. Crib death is what they used to call it. Today, we call it SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Two years later, the couple relocated to Nashville.

Maybe they hoped a fresh start would ease their grief. Maybe they were running from memories too painful to carry. Maybe Ella could no more bear the pity in her neighbor's eyes after the loss of her children, than she could bear the pity in the eyes of the townspeople who'd once saved up their dimes just for a chance to behold the camel girl.

Years passed. Ella and Robert never again tried to become parents. They lived quietly, just the two of them. And if the people of Nashville wondered at Ella's condition, if there were any who knew of her past on the sideshow circuit, history doesn't say. The camel girl was forgotten. Her fall from public acclaim was as rapid as her rise to fame had been.

When the symptoms began, it was unpleasant, but not remarkable. She had pain in her belly. She was often fatigued. Weight fell off her already slight frame, something she chalked up to tiredness and poor appetite. She may have suffered from constipation, something generally treated then by enema. It's unknown if Ella sought medical treatment for the colon cancer that took her life.

Ella died at home on the morning of December 19th, 1921. She was 51 years old. Her death certificate lists her occupation as housekeeper. Her obituary makes no mention of her career as the camel girl. To this day, she's an enigma, a beautiful, mysterious enigma. She's buried in Nashville at the Spring Hill Cemetery, interred with her father, William, and her mother, Minerva, who passed away three years later in 1924.

Ella's beloved husband, Robert, remarried a woman named Elizabeth Gabbard in 1924, and then he died in 1932. Some stories are beyond understanding. Maybe there's a reason why things happen in the way they do. A larger pattern that would make sense if only we could see it whole. It just isn't how it works, though. The big picture isn't ours to know.

We spend our lives struggling to fit the pieces of a puzzle we can never see. If life was fair, then Ella would have had the happiest of endings. Didn't she deserve that? Hadn't she suffered enough? Freak shows have made a resurgence in pop culture, but it's a very different world than the one Ella knew. People with disabilities or medical disorders are no longer forced into the sideshows to make their living.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law on July 26, 1990, it became illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities across all aspects of life, including the workplace. Ella would have marveled that such a thing might someday be possible. She knew only stigma and hardship and the brutal calculus of trading her human dignity for a fistful of coins.

But she also knew freedom. The sideshow gave her the chance to step out of hiding to earn her independence. And if her life after the circus was marked by grief, it wasn't the grief of helplessness or of shame. It wasn't grief caused by her deformity, by her difference. It was just life in the way that life can be random and achingly cruel, completely inexplicable, just life.

And in that way, Ella was no different than any of us, no different than anyone. The very thing she dreamed of, just not the way she dreamed it. Next time on True Weird Stuff, we're going back to the circus, back to W.H. Harris's one ring nickel plated show. Harris was famous for the Camel Girl and infamous for Gypsy the Elephant.

Maybe he should have stuck to parading his human menagerie around the ring because it turns out the animals of the nickel plated show weren't nearly as cooperative. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Vivian Fischer, who portrayed young Ella, her mother, Ashley Palmer Fischer, who portrayed adult Della, also Stuart Watson, Don Morgan and Kary "Doc" Bowser.

So we did something very different with this episode that I want to disclose right now. Very, very little is known about Ella Harper. She vanished from public life. And the only information that you can really find is like census data, death records, you know, that sort of thing. And I wanted to tell Ella's story, but there was no way to tell Ella's story using Ella's words because nothing like that apparently exists.

So I created Ella for this episode because I wanted her to tell her own story. And I tried to imagine what 12 year old Ella would say about herself and her life and the circus sideshow. So usually in true weird stuff, if a character speaks, they're speaking words they actually said. But in this episode, Ella, the Camel Girl, is a fictionalized version of the real person.

And I would give anything to have a diary or a biography or anything to know what she actually had to say about herself, because it's pretty amazing as stories go. It is a fascinating story, and I knew that sideshow performers did well financially because I had read about the Hilton sisters. We're not talking about Nikki in Paris.

These are the Hilton sisters who were sideshow performers and appeared in a movie. I want to say it came out in the 1920s called Freaks. It probably somewhere in their 1920s, 1930s. I'm doing off the top of my head. Anyhow, and they apparently at one time did well, but I don't know what happened to their money, but they were abandoned by their last manager.

Here where I live, and they worked at a park and shop grocery store. Yeah, they worked in the produce department and they were conjoined twins. I don't know if I mentioned that, but they were conjoined and they were conjoined in such a way that they would have been easily separated with today's technology. But it was a really kind of sad story because they never they never broke out of that.

They never were able to to break out of that. And at least Ella was able, despite all the hardships in her life, was able to at least find a life after that where she was no longer defined by this this physical abnormality. That's what makes her story so compelling for me, is that she at a very young age and she's clearly so, so smart and so self-aware and so thoughtful, meaning that she she took the world in and and really measured it.

She left home at 12 and was traveling around on this rinky dink dime museum circuit in the South before W.H. Harris found her. And as soon as she started making the big money, she was like, I'm getting out of this. And she did like she actually did exactly what she said she would do at 16 years old. She took her money and went home and went back to school and and the rest of her life unfolded just as she daydreamed that it would, except so much tragedy.

And, you know, infant mortality, mother and mother and infant mortality rates were so, so, so high. And and people died of things, you know, this is pre antibiotics. Right. And of course, DNA hadn't been discovered yet. Folks were just figuring out that you couldn't actually mate with a camel and have a baby. OK, like that is a legitimate thing.

People actually thought it was possible that Ella was half camel. So there there weren't the kinds of medical options then not for Ella or any person born with a disorder, deformity. And, you know, babies died, women died in childbirth, babies died. It was harsh and terrible. And there's Ella. And what did she ever want, but just a regular life?

Yeah. And it looked like she was on track to get it, you know. And here we are. She must have grown up in a home where she was fairly well adjusted because despite the fact that her father had a child out of wedlock, but she must have she seemed to have a really good sense of herself. And generally, I mean, that's not always the case, but it could be how she was raised, that she was treated with respect by her family.

And that's where she had that at her core was was how she was. The idea of I'm going to do this for a while, but I'm also going to find a normal life because this is what is comfortable for me. This is what is familiar for me. And I like being around my family, so I'd like one of these of my own. You nailed it. And I think that's what makes her so intriguing and remarkable is not only was she dealing with a pretty rare and extraordinary condition that even today is difficult to treat.

Never mind when she was born in 1870. But she was a woman. She was a girl at a time when that was just a recipe for powerlessness. So here we have a young girl with a significant disability who is just not going to be stopped. She knows what she wants and she's going to figure out how to get it. And what I would give to know more to have to be able to lay hands on something and go, oh, look right here.

But I will tell you that I stumbled across a really interesting gentleman. He's a blogger. His name is Ray. And according to his bio, he and his wife sold their house. He's retired military. They sold their house and they traveled the country in an RV. And he is a he's a hobby genealogist. He's obsessed with genealogy.

And don't roll your eyes, because many of these amateur genealogists are the reason that long, cold cases have been. Oh, yeah. OK, like these people are brilliant. Ray. Ray, he became obsessed with the camel girl and he drove to her grave and spring in the Spring Hill Cemetery in Nashville and and discovered that, you know, there was a stone that was toppled over.

And I mean, he just like he he really was pretty awesome. And he was able to track down descendants of Ella's family sisters, you know, her siblings. And for the most part, they did not want to participate in telling her story and publicizing it for whatever reason. I don't know what the reasons were. You could guess probably a dozen different things.

But that's how we know that they have the basket that baby Earl was left on the porch steps. And so I shout at Ray out in the episode, I'm going to shout him out again because he really has done the bulk of the legwork tracking Ellen Robert through census records address to address. He was able to find Ella Harper's death certificate.

I mean, she died. She died young. Fifty one colon cancer. Like so many of the things that took people out back then. Now we have treatment for and, you know, you get going to colonoscopy to catch it early and it's it's very caught early. It's very easily treated. Yeah. So I really I loved her. And and it made me so sad.

Like I wrestled with this one because I kept setting it aside because I couldn't I couldn't think of any way to tell Ella's story where she wasn't. So follow me on this. As the camel girl, she was an object on stage and people talked at her and about her. But no one ever once asked her, hey, camel girl. And and I thought, well, it's not fair to tell her to do that to her again.

You know, it's to to put her on display again. But maybe it's also unfair to have invented that 12 year old version of her. So to have made that fiction part of it, I don't know. What do you think? No, I think that you honored her. I do think in writing that I think that you it was well handled and and you. It's not a matter of pity, but I think you were able to have an empathy for her differentness because we all we all have our differentnesses.

Do you know what I mean? And hers just was much more obvious. I do think that despite the sadness that she had in her life, I I'm glad that the story went that way rather than she she was she was cast aside by somebody, a manager or something at some point along the line and left destitute. Do you know what I mean? I think that would have been a far sadder story, which is which is what happened, which is really what happened with the Hilton sisters.

And I knew somebody that was interested in the Hilton sisters. You ever heard the story? I said, yeah. Do you know do you know where this is where they lived? OK, this is where they worked. Would you like to go say, all right, fine. So we went to the abandoned building where the parking shop was, where they worked in the produce department of the grocery store.

And then walking distance from there was the residence where they lived. And what happened was they got the flu and they died, you know, in that residence. So we're we're in the car and we are going to then we're going to go to the cemetery to find their their graves. So we slowed by the house and look up at the house.

And there was a man in the front yard. He said, can I help you? And they said, yeah, there was some famous women who lived in this house. And he said, what famous women? And I said, well, it was the Hilton sisters. And of course, they died in that house. And so the one guy yelled at the other guy and said, somebody famous died in this.

Somebody famous lived in this house. And he yelled back, they didn't die in here, did they? And of course, they had. And I said, I'm not sure. Bye bye. And we drove off. I wouldn't do that today. People are so trigger happy. No, no, I wouldn't do that today. No. Well, you know what, Max? It's funny because I had that same thought in my time with Ella.

I was like, you know, first of all, I was so impressed by her. I was so dazzled by her. And I thought she did not get the ending I wanted her to have. But the ending she got, you're right. It had nothing to do with her differences and everything to do with just life's a real bitch sometimes. Just it's just a real bitch.

And she caught a really bad hand. And the same thing that could happen to anyone. And I think that for Ella, being able to find love and disappear into private life and be left alone and to not have every conversation begin or end with her condition was probably intoxicating. Because not only you have to think that, you know, she grew up in a family of able bodied siblings.

Not only was she conscious of her difference at every turn and it was difficult to walk upright. It was uncomfortable. And and genuine recurve dim is a painful condition that does not get less painful as you get older. So she had all of that to deal with all of it. And to be able to. Be Ella, Mrs. Robert Savely, Ella Savely, Robert's wife, her mother's daughter, to be able to be all of those things and not have her condition be the headline.

I don't think we can. We are privileged and able bodied. I don't think we can imagine that. No, I don't think I just don't think we can imagine that. But I did. I did want I wanted a couple of things that were not mine to wish for. OK, I did want a very happy ending for Ella. And I wanted there to be someone. Who talked about her or wrote about her.

Where they wrote about her, like the girl, the girl, the person, you know, who was the act. And I couldn't find that. And I mean, I just couldn't find it. Are you surprised? No, because somebody would only do that in retrospect, like Guy Ray, you were talking about, because I don't think at that time anybody could have seen her as anything other than that.

And I don't know that you like it would. I don't I'm not a biographer. I don't even know how those people do what they do. It's so the material, the source material is so thin that there have been a number of novels that take you inside the circus. Water for Elephants, which was also made into a movie, is such a wonderful book.

It is. And and that's the thing about fiction, is that sometimes when we only have like the bare skeleton of facts, the only way to go inside that story and and feel like you're walking in the shoes of those people is to make is to fictionalize it, to make up a story. And I kept thinking, like, all right. I spent so much time with Ella, the performer, Ella as an idea, Ella's grit and determination.

So who who was she as a 12 year old girl in the late 19th century, which is very different from a 12 year old girl today. And she was incredibly smart. She was incredibly well read even before she left the circus and went back to school. What what would she make of her circumstances and how in the wide world do you let your 12 year old go off and join the sideshow?

So these are these are modern parent questions that didn't apply back then. Right. Right. But I I did because of her disability, because it was difficult to move and certainly to move at any kind of a speed. And she was so young and so, so very, very pretty. I just felt like she was extremely vulnerable away from home, traveling with the with the sideshow, you know, with that care of her.

And that looked after her at that time. And her family were farmers, right? Yeah. So they the children, even at that time, this is. You know, at a time when they thought of children as little adults and they worked on the farm and they may have gone to school, but they still worked on the farm. And because of that, because they worked on the farm when the industrial age came, they said, well, if they're working on the farm, they can work in the factory.

So they were thought of as little moneymakers, little adults. So I'm sure that that was part of the decision that led her parents to let her go with the circus. And I'm guessing I can. I mean, I guess one of them couldn't. She had a whole family. I guess one of the parents couldn't stop what they were doing and go with her.

And I guess they figured, well, this is her best chance, given what the circumstances are. That's from what I've read. That is exactly what they thought. I mean, it was an incredibly good living for people who might not otherwise be able to work. I mean, you think about like this is the late 19th century, early 20th century.

There was no like data entry remote from home situation back then. Work was physically demanding and difficult, whether it was in a farm or a factory or in the general store or on the railroad. Right. Work was difficult. And for a woman, careers were so limited at that point. Like how many things could Ella be? Like she says in the episode, what choices were hers to make?

Very few. And, you know, no doubt her parents looked at her. I mean, let's just be real. Looked at her and thought her marriage prospects were poor. So when the carny comes knocking with an opportunity. Well, this is maybe the best opportunity that Ella will ever, ever have. And I'll say this. She took it and she made the most of it and got out when she was ready to go.

Like she is so amazing for that. Now, she's on the road and 12 years old in 1882. Yeah. Is not the same thing as 12 years old in 2024. But a young, beautiful, vulnerable girl is the same throughout time. And that's what that's what scared me. There must have been someone from everything I've read and understand the sideshow performers of that time were incredibly tight.

They did look out for each other. Many fell in love and married each other. And it's possible that someone, some adult on on that particular show circuit in New Orleans and Louisiana and Tennessee and Mississippi took Ella under her wing. So I've read I read a really interesting interview between like a circus. I don't know if ringmasters the right word, but a circus manager and a newspaper reporter from this era talking about the people that were, quote unquote, real freaks, not the fakes.

Like, how about that multilingual, brilliant German chemist who broke into America by being a gorilla? OK, like what? That's probably a family secret somewhere. But he was talking about real freaks and they and the language that was used back then to describe people is really hard. It's it's hard to take the the racist stereotypes, the body shaming, the ableism.

And I'm like, I'm a social worker and people first language is just my thing. And so to to see people like called by their diagnoses made me really uncomfortable. So in this interview, the guy is asked, well, tell me tell me about fat people. Oh, my God. So that was a very big sideshow attraction back then. Very, very big.

And here's what this person said like 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago. He said, you would be surprised at how the fat man and fat lady really don't eat very much. Like you would think that all they did was eat, but but they don't. And so they're not fat because of gluttony. They're fat for some other reason. Right.

Which think about it, Max, is pretty evolved for 1902, isn't it? Right. It is. And that guy went on to say he said the problem is not the fat man and the fat lady. The problem is skeleton man, because if skeleton man starts eating, he stops being skeleton man. And he told the story of this one human skeleton, you know, who was on the circuit and was doing really well, who fell in love and got married and started eating.

And he lost his career. And so these are the kinds of wild, crazy like you can't even like your jaws dropped. I cannot even believe I'm reading this. And like the bearded lady. Well, that was a hormonal disorder. That was an endocrine disorder that caused excessive hair growth. But that wasn't they didn't know that back then.

Nobody knew that. But listening to to the way that these circus directors and owners talked about their sideshow performers was fascinating because they were so they were the attraction, right? They were so incredibly valuable and important for these circuses. That's what people came to see. And so in the same way that they're talking and using words and terms that today we'd be like, excuse me, that's offensive.

Like, I'm going to need you to apologize. And that's not political. I don't mean political correctness. But when you describe someone as the fattest, ugliest boy, that's not political correctness, OK? That's just mean stuff. It is. So on the one hand, they're like, oh, yes, we want you to meet Dudley, the fattest, ugliest baby.

Right. And on the other hand, they're incredibly protective. And they paid these people really, really well and treated them really, really well, not in all cases, obviously, but in most cases, fascinating stuff. Max, I guess whatever inappropriate nickname they gave you, you would tolerate as long as you're getting paid.

You know, I guess the one thing that all of those sideshow performance would probably have is they have a sense of, well, this this doesn't define me. And so they have that in common. So I imagine that's part of the thing that they bonded over at that time. Well, and they were born into a world that viewed them as defective, that that viewed them as a spectacle where people would pay money just to see how defective they were.

I mean, sit with that for a minute to be born and to discover as you become aware that there's something so profoundly wrong with you that people would pay money just to look at it. To be born into that world and then have somebody come knock on the door and say, I can make you a star and you'll make more money than you could ever dream.

It's it's hard, I think, for us as modern people to wrap our heads around that, isn't it? Yeah. If you want to know what it was like to be a sideshow performer, there's a movie about I'll come back to the Hilton sisters again. There was a movie. It's called Bound by Flesh. It came out. Probably a little over 10 years ago.

And it was it was it's it's an amazing movie. It's it was critically acclaimed. It was not a commercial success, but certainly it was because there was so much research that went into it. So if you want to know what life was like for these people, that would that would be a great movie to to get. You get the feeling and, you know, you don't want to romanticize something that you have no firsthand understanding of, but you get the feeling that they were a tight community.

And with some exceptions, this was and it's it's a weird irony because they're up on stage being heckled and stared at. But this was a really dignified way for some of these folks to earn a living and get through life that they had. Not only did they have money, but they had autonomy and they had some power because once you became a star on the circuit, you called the shots.

Because you were the draw. Yeah, that's right. You were the that's an amazing amount of money that she was earning, you know, at the height of her popularity. I mean, that's it's an amazing amount of money. The so in the beginning of this story, we you know, we talked about P.T. Barnum's American Museum. So it was first P.T. Barnum had this American Museum, which was basically an a 19th century Ripley's, believe it or not.

If you've ever been to a Ripley's, believe it or not, it like, I don't know, Myrtle Beach or Panama City, New Orleans, Panama City, wherever. The American Museum felt a lot like a modern Ripley's, believe it or not. And that was P.T. Barnum's thing. And it wasn't until the second location burned down that he was like, oh, my God, I'm I'm going I'm starting a circus.

What happened at that first American Museum? Max, they had tanks full of whales in the basement and they would the whales would would die like so fast because a whale can't live in a tank in a windowless basement in New York City. And Barnum would just replace them. And like it was it was so crazy. Like you look back when you look back in time, you go, how how are we even here?

How do those people successfully breed and throw us into the future? Like there was so much insanity and lawless, crazy. Like like who? What? What do you mean you have whales in the basement of your building? Like you've got to be kidding. Just like anything goes, like absolutely anything goes back then. Yeah, yeah. But you have to think that there were some people that were saying this is wrong at the time.

We did. Where was PETA? We did. We did eventually change. By the way, he did not. He did not say there's a sucker born every minute minute. P.T. Barnum was credited with saying that he did not say that. Do we know who did say that? I don't know, but I know that that is that's an urban legend that he said that. So the the the Dime Museum is actually a really cool, really cool concept.

At the same time that there were museums with like precious artworks and stuff, the Dime, those were considered very highbrow and, you know, for the educated upper classes, the Dime Museum. And they called it that because it cost the Dime to get in. But the Dime Museum was for everyone. And it was a really democratic form of entertainment at a time when people didn't have that many entertainment options.

And it's really fun to look at old time ads for Dime museums. They make a lot of them, especially in the bigger cities, make a big fuss about women and children. Please come during the daylight hours. Oh, yes. I remember that. Yes. Right. Goodness knows what shenanigans we get up to after dark. So that was that was really interesting.

And you can watch some of the more famous sideshow performers. You can watch them making these big loops on the circuit, you know, New York and Buffalo and Cleveland and Minneapolis and Chicago and Omaha. But here's a fun fact that I didn't put in the story because there just wasn't a place for it. So as it turns out, the Dime museums on the West Coast, like in San Francisco.

Yeah. Had a had a very hard time populating their exhibits with freaks because the majority of the freaks were on the East Coast. And that wasn't because there was something in the water on the East Coast. You have to remember the way the population was distributed across the United States back then. The people, where did the people live on the East Coast?

Yeah. And so it just you're going to have you're going to have if you're going to have these congenital situations and these disorders, you need to have people having babies. And so if there weren't as many freaks native to the West Coast to fill those dime museums and for whatever reason, Chicago was just like ground zero for this.

The people of Chicago just loved it, loved it. Wouldn't you think the Midwest would be the least likely place that would love that? Oh, my God. Chicago, Ohio. There were so many dime museums in Ohio. And Philadelphia, Philadelphia had some crazy. Well, not surprisingly, Philadelphia had some crazy things. The dime museum in Philly that would do the monster baby shows.

They they would literally fan out. Talent scouts would fan out looking for people with babies that had something going on that made them a little bit worth like if you had a baby with hydrocephaly, you can make money on that baby in Philadelphia at the monster baby show. If people with vitiligo were called the human leopards.

Oh, and they made they made bank like you name a condition. How about severe, severe, terrible psoriasis? That's alligator man. Name a medical condition. And there was a performer that was able to exploit that medical condition on the side shows to earn a living. It's just absolutely a crazy chapter in our history and an important one, because it reminds us that the ADA, the American Disabilities Acts Act, was not signed until 1990. Yeah.

Which was if we look at our history, watches about 10 minutes ago. Prior to 1990, it was anything goes with for a person with a disability. You can't get up the stairs. Guess you're not coming inside. Not going to hire you. Not going to rent you this apartment. Not going to let you have children. Think about that, Max.

That's 1990. I mean, you worked at a radio station in 1990, did you not? I did. Weren't you in hip hop in 1990? I was doing hip hop then. That's how that's how not that long ago it was. Max was spinning like Baby Got Back. That's right. That's right. At the same time that people were legally allowed to discriminate against anyone with a disability like what the actual America.

So there you go. That is the story of Elvis Presley. Ella Harper, the Camel Girl, and what we're going to do next week, we're going to stay at the circus because and some of you will have a dim idea of this story, this incredibly horrific true story. W.H. Harris and his one ring nickel plated show, the circus proprietor who made Ella famous also was famous for his animal acts.

Lions and tigers and elephants and horses and acrobats performing tricks on those animals and dancing bears. And it was at Harris's nickel plated show that a number of horrific events happened with his circus animals, including his prized elephant Gypsy, who at the time was the most famous elephant in the world. And Gypsy was executed for the crime of murder.

Yes. And we're going to go back to the nickel plated show and we're going to leave the sideshow tent and we're going to walk across the midway and we're going to go in to the animal tent. And your mind is going to be blown. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner.

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True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird Original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.