E268: This Is The Saddest Show (part I)
Fresh Hell Podcast
freshhellpodcast
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we’re bringing you two of the most fascinating and deeply unsettling stories from the world of freak shows: Chang & Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, and Julia Pastrana, the so-called ‘Bear Woman.’
Chang and Eng weren’t just a medical curiosity—they were brilliant businessmen, plantation owners, and, oh yeah, enslavers. Their story is full of contradictions—two men who were once paraded as human oddities but ended up profiting off of the very same system that exploited them.
And then there’s Julia Pastrana. Her story? No happy endings. Labeled “The Ugliest Woman in the World”, Julia was abused, exploited, and even put on display after her death—because apparently, 19th-century showmen didn’t believe in letting their performers stay dead.
These are the stories of three performers whose lives couldn’t have been more different—but both prove one thing: once the world decides you’re an exhibit, getting your humanity back is nearly impossible!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the Fresh Hell podcast. |
| 0:14.6 | Fresh Hell contains stories of a disturbing and often graphic nature and is intended for a mature audience. |
| 0:20.6 | Please don't let your kids listen to this, |
| 0:22.4 | or they might turn out like us. |
| 0:30.3 | Hi, I'm Annie in Massachusetts in the USA. And I'm Johanna from Austria, and you're listening to |
| 0:37.3 | your favorite international podcast. |
| 0:40.5 | Thank you so much everyone for tuning in for another episode today. |
| 0:45.2 | One quick announcement that we have for you, |
| 0:47.5 | if you're a member of our Patreon Murder tier, |
| 0:50.0 | you already find two parts of our cinema macabre where we discuss true crime shows, true crime |
| 0:57.9 | documentaries, and we started with Candy, the TV show, covering the murder of Betty Gore by |
| 1:04.4 | Candy Montgomery. That's right. Yeah, go check that out. That's fun. It's video, which is new for us and we're working on it. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. So welcome. If you're confused by the title of today's episode, when we say this is the saddest show, we don't mean our little show here, even though, I mean, obviously, it's often very sad. When we talk about the |
| 1:28.8 | history of the so-called freak shows, there's always tension between two sides of the story. |
| 1:35.1 | On one side, you have people like P.T. Barnum, the showmen who turned human oddities into a business |
| 1:41.9 | empire and made himself a household name in the process. On the other side, |
| 1:47.1 | you have, of course, the performers, the people whose lives were put on display, often sensationalized |
| 1:54.0 | or just outright exploited for the sake of profit. And honestly, it is the life of the performers |
| 2:00.4 | who should be getting way more |
| 2:03.2 | attention than they do. Their stories are the ones filled with resilience and tragedy and incredible |
| 2:09.0 | humanity, despite what's been done to them. So why do we spend so much time talking about someone like |
| 2:16.6 | Barnum instead? Well, because he was the one who |
| 2:20.3 | made the fortune, right? He was the one who controlled the narrative. Barnum wasn't just a showman. |
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