This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

There were all types of people at the freak shows, in the dime museums, and the side shows

along the midways of the fairgrounds with the bright painted signs promising human oddities

within the bearded lady, the dog face man and his dog face boy, the four-legged girl from Texas.

There were those who came to Gawk and to Lear and to Laf, of course. People are the worst.

People are people. There are those who came to measure themselves against their own species,

to know how tall one could be, how fat, how thin, how much hair one could grow and from where.

Those who came to know the range of humanity, its scale and its variance,

and the cards one can be dealt at birth instead of whatever you got.

And there were those who came wondering if there was a place for them inside.

Because they had red stories and newspapers about how well the freak's did.

Obviously, they weren't all Tom Thumb. The three-foot tall man whom PT Barnum made astoundingly

famous and astoundingly wealthy. Nor Anna Jones, a young woman with a full and handsome beard,

who was living a full and enviable life, touring the world, wearing nice clothes,

married to a good and decent man. But there were the Martin sisters.

Albinos born into the business, to parents who were Albinos too and who blazed the trail,

and who lived comfortably in a home with their own in Brooklyn. There were stories about bequests.

Anuities handed out by some of the most successful side-cho attractions to their less successful

colleagues. There was tale told of two old men, a giant in a so-called human skeleton living out

the retirement in a comfortable cottage in Connecticut. And there was even, in his way, Jonathan Bass,

the ossified man who had gotten arthritis as a teenager. It started slow but it didn't stop and

his tendons and his muscles and his joints became anchellotic. Begin to harden and fuse until

...