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 returned 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 in fault 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.

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror. And they're going to run. True, weird, weird, stuff.

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

Tennessee and newspaper in 1929.

The Dime Museum's Bill of Fair usually consisted of dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, fat men and women,

...