Thanks for confirming this - it could have been at Ripley’s. One reason my wife didn’t want to talk with her is she (my wife) is shorter than 5 feet tall and somewhat self-conscious about it.
I love freak shows and I love carnies. I haven’t been to a fair in a long time though, so I haven’t seen traditional old school freak shows, but I do go to more modern performances that feature suspension. BDSM and fetish conferences are also good places to see freaky stuff, and not just of a sexual nature.
I saw one when I was a kid. It was around 1970. A lot of the usual acts: a sword swallower, a fire breather, a man who hammered nails up his nose. They had a bearded lady, who I suspected was a man in a dress (I got a close look at “her” because I was the kid invited up on stage to pull “her” beard). The only genuine “freak” was a man with some foot condition - his feet were swollen up to about three times normal size. They billed him as the Abominable Snowman or something like that, although as I recall he was Hispanic.
Are you talking about Sandy Allen? She was indeed the world’s tallest woman ever, at that time anyway, and died a few years ago.
A young woman from China is even taller than Allen was.
She would have been at that time. She died in 2008 still holding the record at that time.
She was very approachable and had a great sense of humor.
I’m not sure it counts as a freak show, but in Beijing, China just three weeks ago, I was touring the Forbidden City and we went out the back entrance where the bus meets you and walked past an endless array of people, each on their own blanket/platform. Some were beggars and some ‘performers’, but all had something horribly wrong with them. There were people with the thalidomide malformed limbs, hump-backed midgets, people with terrible birth defects, and then a number of people who looked like they had probably been horribly maimed in factory accidents that were missing limbs and had horrendous chemical burns. In a few cases they just had cups in front of them and just looked sad. In others, they had speaker systems and were singing or dancing (to the degree they could dance). One man who looked like a real life “The Thing” from Fantastic 4, was doing a whole karaoke routine and had a decent crowd in front of him. I even gave some money to the guy we called ‘snake man’. He had no arms and would kind of slither up to you and then just say ‘Hello!’ and ‘take picture!’. So my wife took a picture of me with him and I gave him 20 yuan (about $3.00). He took the money with his feet.
When I was a kid one of my friends mom took us to the fair. We went to the freak show. The only one I remember was the “Alligator Woman”. Some poor lady that had a skin disease that gave her a scaly appearance. The highlight of her act was when she pulled her wig off revealing a totally bald head. Even at age 9-ish I realized how sad it was.
I have seen three. The first was a giant steer. I can’t really say how big he was compared to normal bovines, but he seemed big enough. The second was a man with “the biggest feet in the world.” Dude had some seriously huge and malformed feet. This poor guy was hipanic and this was about 1986- I wonder if he was Little Nemo 's snowman guy after his feet grew more? The third had the big canvas signs proclaiming wondrous and horrible sights- inside were a few pictures clipped from medical publications.
I went to the freak show at a Missouri State Fair once. It had some pickled animal oddities (I remember a five legged calf in particular), and a few humans on display. The humans, for the most part, looked bored out of their minds. All of them had informational placards about their condition and their bios. One guy was a midget, from Africa, it said, and he was gazing at the people who shuffled by him even more avidly than we were looking at him. He had a half-smile on his face, so I gave him a little wave and said “Hi”, and he gave me a big grin and said “HI!!!” back.
The human freak show made me feel quite uncomfortable. Maybe they enjoyed being stared at more than they would have enjoyed serving up yet another order of burgers and fries, maybe that was the best job they could get, I dunno. But it seemed wrong to me. I think that the little African guy was enjoying himself, but even so, I was uneasy about the notion that I was staring at him like he was an exhibit in a museum.
A color TV? Maybe in 1970, but not in 1990.
I saw Ronnie and Donnie Galyon, now the world’s longest living conjoined twins also on the Royal American Shows. At the time they were about ten years old.
They were able to self-support and were not part of a ten-in-one sideshow. Their trailer was air-conditioned. They sat on the floor watching TV and paid no attention to the line of people filing past them.
It may have been in the seventies or eighties that I saw the Minnesota Iceman. He was supposed to be a prehistoric human found frozen in a block of ice. I think he’s stored away right now but occasionally makes the faux news.
And once in a small county fair in Iowa I did see what appeared to be an obvious case of exploitation. This would have been in the sixties. The show was billed as the Two-headed Woman.
It appeared to be of European, perhaps Austrian origin. Inside, behind a glass screen you could see the upper half of a large woman with the appearance of two heads looking like twins, put not identical.
Both heads were alive and could speak but I believe that the women were developmentally disabled. There seemed to be something strange about the glass, like perhaps somehow a mirror was involved.
I remember that I didn’t like the looks of the man and woman who were running the exhibit. That one was creepy. And sad.
My buddy and I were at the Michigan State fair back in the early 70’s. We were about 11 years old at the time.
Anyway, there was this ominous looking display: “SEE THE RAVAGING EFFECTS OF A DRUG USER” or some such, with plenty of that creepy style airbrush art that’s typical of state fair spook houses.
So we pay the 25 cents to get in, wide-eyed about what we’re about to see…
Inside, in a cage about 6x6, is this hippie looking dude sitting in a La-Z-Boy. Reading the newspaper. With a Boa Constrictor resting on his shoulders.
This was boring and an obvious ripoff even for two 11 year olds in 1972.
My buddy was normally inclined to incite, and he didn’t disappoint this time…he wound up and threw his sno-cone through the cage bars at the hippie, pasting him square in the face. The snake went flying, the hippie went completely spaz, and we hauled our asses out the door.
The ensuing hullabaloo and then getting chased around the fairgrounds for the next hour made the 25 cent investment well worthwhile. 
Actually I don’t know if she only appeared at Ripley’s. Your wife should have talked to her, Sandy was very-self concious about her great height, but all reports indicate she was a very nice person.
I saw the Jim Rose Circus at the Huntridge Theatre in Las Vegas. I can’t remember the year. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Jim Rose lighting a cigarette using the sparks created by his topless wife using a side grinder on a patch of steel covering her cootch. Mr. Lifto, picking stuff up with his penis. Two extremely fat, topless women wrestling. Two guys chasing each other around with strap on dildos. The guy with the puzzle tattoos. Some guy that pumped all kinds of weird liquid shit down his gullet then brought it all back up then drank it. Weird.
Freaks? They were all in the crowd…
My then-wife would never admit to having been there.
She decided that if people were going to stare at her, she might as well get paid for it in the process. In addition to doing Ripley’s appearances, she was also a motivational speaker. The last TV interview and show she did before her death included footage of her going into an elementary school and talking to the kids about how it’s OK to be different - that we’re all different in some way, even if it isn’t visible.
