Tag Archives: circus

253 – Haunchyville: Wisconsin’s Miniature Murderers

I grew up in a tiny town called Big Bend on the outskirts of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While we could get to the city in less than a half an hour, it was also incredibly rural with half my fellow classmates living on farms and the rest families who had left Milwaukee proper in the migration out of the Rust Belt cities that happened in the 60s and 70s.

One of my favorite things to do was to go our for what we used to call “Fright Nights”, which is find abandoned places that had urban legends associated with them and check them out. One of my friends who often came out on Fright Nights worked in the little hamlet of Muskego, Wisconsin at a Supper Club. Muskego was only a few minutes away from Big Bend towards Milwaukee, we passed through it all the time just to go get groceries. So when he told me about a supposed village of little people that are bent on revenge, I was like “how have I never heard this story before?!” and “When are we going?!”

His workmates who went to Muskego High School told him about the legend of Haunchyville. And here’s the story as it was told to me:

Near the end of Mystic Drive in Muskego is a barn where a farmer hanged himself. Underneath the body, in the dirt, you could see many child-sized footprints all around where he was hanging. On the wall there was a message written in his own blood that said “The Haunchies made me do it. The Haunchies made me do it.” If you go down to the end of Mystic Drive, you can still see the barn and sometimes people report the phantom of a hanging body at night. And as you go down the road, you’ll see houses with small doorways and the stop signs are at a much smaller height.

The Legend of The Haunchies

What?! Of course, I wanted to check that out, so we picked a night and went out to Haunchyville to find out what we could see. It was a hot night and we parked our car before we got to the No Trespassing sign and just started walking down the road and it was mostly just an empty field. We did see a few signs that maybe were lower than normal, but nothing special and some backyard shacks, but no hanging ghost body!

As we got farther down the road, we heard a powerful scream that sounded like a gigantic bird. And that was it for me, I ran back, abandoning my friends and being a gigantic wussy for which I was mercilessly ridiculed by my friends for awhile afterwards (sigh, I deserved it!)

But we weren’t the only people who ventured down Mystic Road to Haunchyville, on the hunt for a paranormal experience (I really wanted to see the hanging body more than I wanted to see any murderous little people!) In fact, it was a popular Milwaukee area legend that started in the 1950s. And it was more than the colony of little people, there was the idea that:

  • They were former circus sideshow dwarves that murdered the ringmaster
  • They would attack you with burning torches
  • They would saw off your legs at the knees and make you live with them
  • They had a full-size protector who was an albino(!) that would fire off shotgun warnings to make you leave the land
  • The legend was invented as a front for a distillery/liquor operation during the 1920s

In this episode, we discuss the various aspects of the urban legend, as well as similiar legends throughout the United States (we tackled San Antonio’s Midget Mansion in a previous episode on location in Texas!) as well as some other Wisconsin cases with witnesses who actually claim they’ve seen groups of little people doing mysterious things.

For the song this week, what else could we call it? Let Sunspot take you to “Haunchyville”!

Going down the old farm road
and you’re not alone
there’s something in the cornfield
Are you fast enough to outrun
an albino with a shotgun
He’s got a secret he ain’t gonna reveal

watch out for the little guys
they’ll cut you down to size
you don’t want to pursue it
the haunchies made me do it
Trespass on Mystic Drive
now you’re playing with your life
no one will hear your cries
When they drag you straight to Hell
don’t go down to Haunchyville

You should have stayed away
and now their debt has been repaid
a trail of tiny footprints left in the mud
You might hear their evil laughter
when you’re hanging from the rafters
there’s a message for you written in blood

watch out for the little guys
they’ll cut you down to size
you don’t want to pursue it
the haunchies made me do it
Trespass on Mystic Drive
now you’re playing with your life
no one will hear your cries
When they drag you straight to Hell
watch out for the little guys
they’ll cut you down to size
you don’t want to pursue it
the haunchies made me do it
Trespass on Mystic Drive
now you’re playing with your life
no one will hear your cries
When they drag you straight to Hell
don’t go down to Haunchyville
don’t go down to Haunchyville
don’t go down to Haunchyville
When they drag you straight to Hell
don’t go down to Haunchyville

208 – State Fair of the Strange: Sideshows, Weird Foods, and The Minnesota Iceman

We’ve been regular performers at the Wisconsin State Fair for the last eight years and have grown to love the goofy mix of agricultural excellence, carny spectacle, and sheer gluttony that comes with the celebration of all things Wisconsin. They even have a complete list of all the foods “on a stick” that you can enjoy.

Here’s a video of our first show at the State Fair (which is also the first place I ever performed Karaoke – “Born To Be Wild” if you must know…)

And the thing is, many of the things to do at the State Fair are innocent and fun, I mean just look at the intro to Rogers & Hammerstein’s State Fair musical (that Wendy still can remember all the words to!)

But the State Fair has always had a lot of weirdness to it. First of all, it’s a place where people make giant things just for the Hell of it. In Wisconsin, we just made the world’s largest cream puff that’s three and a half feet long and weighs over 125 pounds. Why? Why the Hell not?!

But it’s also the longtime home of the sideshow, there used to be over a hundred traveling sideshows touring American State Fairs in the 1950s and 60s and there even was a town where the sideshow performers lived during the Winter (Gibtown, Florida, where The X-Files got the inspiration for their Season 2 classic, “Humbug”.)

Jim Rose and the Geek

The sideshows were still around when I went to the fair as a kid, but you’re not going to find shows that feature genetic abnormalities anymore. Some states have passed laws against exploring people with deformities and even though sideshows may not have been as exploitative as we think, there’s still an icky aftertaste in gawking at other human beings that we feel today. (At least in person, here’s a great article from Variety that compares modern reality TV to the old-time sideshow and well… see if you can tell the difference.)

But one of the traveling exhibits that I wished I would have seen as a kid is  the “Minnesota Iceman”. Was it the corpse of the famous “Missing Link” that traveled the country? Was it the last living Neanderthal?

Found in Wisconsin… of course!

Well, there’s lots of conflicting stories when it comes to the Iceman and we go over them in the episode. The FBI and the Smithsonian even get involved.  Wendy and I finally saw him in March when we were down at SXSW and made a visit to The Museum of the Weird in Austin. You can hear our verdict in the podcast.

In this episode you’ll:

  • Learn what Abe Lincoln was up to at the 1959 Wisconsin State Fair
  • Be regaled by the strange history of The Minnesota Iceman
  • learn about the ghostly specters that haunt the Minnesota State Fairgrounds
  • understand our own famous Wisconsin cryptid hoax, The Hodag
  • Hear about the weirdest foods at State Fairs across America
  • Finally get to understand what a “Buckeye” is
For this week’s song, I thought it would be sweet if I tried to sing as many of the foods that I could rhyme that are served at the Wisconsin State Fair “on a stick”. We make fun of the unhealthy foods you can devour at festivals and sometimes I hear people bemoaning the culture of deep frying and mobile cuisine. Not me, though. There is something uniquely and wonderfully American about all of it. There are wonders to see and things to explore. We’re the descendants of the people who weren’t satisfied with what they had and they needed to move to create a better life. That’s ingrained in our culture and sometimes we have to walk when we eat, dammit. “Life On A Stick” isn’t as bad at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7g6YS_OD0
It’s All-American like Apple pie,
waving to the fire trucks on the Fourth of July.
Time keeps moving on,
you don’t let it pass you by,
you take a big bite out of it.
You keep on walking, that’s the trick,
and know that life can be beautiful
on a stick.
They’ve got
ants and bacon
tator tots
BBQ pork chop
beer battered cheddar sausage
corn dogs and cake pops
candy apples caramel apples
cheese balls and shish ka bob
coconut shrimp and boneless chicken wings
bacon wrapped pork that’s pig inside a pig
They’ve got
colby cheese and
cookie dough
a spiral cut potato
dill pickles, crab cakes
fish and chips, donut holes
Super Dog, Twisted Dog,
Tijuana Bacon Dog
Pizza in a waffle,
meatballs and Milky Ways,
a snickers and a twinkie,
you’ll be in the john for days.
It’s All-American like Apple pie,
waving to the fire trucks on the Fourth of July.
The time keeps moving on,
you don’t let it pass you by,
you take a big bite out of it
You keep on walking, that’s the trick,
and know that life can be beautiful
on a stick.
They’ve got
shrimp tempura
battered shark
cotton candy
ice cream bars
olives, stuffing,
root beer pops
steak and egg,
Pretzel brats
S’mores, sliders, deep friend fruit,
scotch eggs, french onion soup
Wisconsin Grilled Cheese or a Swiss & Rye,
Turducken on a stick to make you think you’re gonna die
They’ve got
Fried Elvis, Fat Elvis,
Salad and Sheboygan brats
cream cheese and spaghetti
bacon-wrapped chestnuts,
Door County Cherry Pie,
Mac & Cheese and lug nuts
Chocolate covered ‘nanas, peanut butter jelly,
flaming hot corn cobs rumblin in your belly
It’s All-American like Apple pie,
waving to the fire trucks on the Fourth of July.
Well time keeps moving on,
you don’t let it pass you by,
you take a big bite out of it
You keep on walking, that’s the trick,
and know that life can be beautiful
on a stick.

164 – The World’s Largest Ghost Hunt: Live From The Old Baraboo Inn

September 30th, 2017 was National Ghost Hunting Day (for real!) and we got to be a part of it with a massive investigation that was happening at the same time all over the world. We took our part of the World’s Larges Ghost Hunt at the Old Baraboo Inn in Baraboo, Wisconsin. We visited there before in episode 89 of the podcast where we did a live performance and interview.

The OBI, as they like to call it, stands across the street from where the Baraboo train station used to be, and serving as the local watering hole and brothel (well, no brothel anymore) across from the point where most people entered the town in its late Nineteenth Century heyday (when Baraboo was the winter headquarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus.) Built over 150 years ago, there are many people who’ve reported haunted experiences there, from a cowboy hanging out by the jukebox, to the spirits of the ladies of the night inhabiting apartments upstairs.

So, we returned to the OBI to be part of a ghost hunt that was a worldwide endeavor, with 90 different haunted venues participating in countries from the United Kingdom to India to Tasmania. The idea was to harness the energy of thousands of people all over the world and hopefully that would help get some spirits out.

Scotty Rorek, the medium at the Metaphysical Command Center

Also exciting was that the OBI was going to host one of the founding members of the event, Scotty Rorek from Z-Talk Radio and Psychics Unite. Scotty’s presence turned the venue into the Metaphysical Command Center of all of the events and he helped direct mediums from around the world to concentrate their energies at the same time.

Everyone getting ready for the big event…

We all started out the night with a meditation that was all about protecting ourselves “psychically”. Usually, I kinda make fun of that part because I just don’t believe that anything can follow me home or hurt me. When was the last time someone was killed by a ghost? Was it The Bell Witch? That was forever ago, c’mon. But I wanted to throw all of my doubts aside for the night. I even changed from my show/rocker outfit to the red t-shirst everyone was wearing because I really wanted to be on the same wavelength. I went all in on the protection meditation and everything throughout the night because I didn’t want my natural skepticism to get in the way.

They even told us to turn our phones off, so I took mine back out to the Sunspot van and turned it off. And then we proceeded to investigate the three different rooms of the Old Baraboo Inn.

interviewing Old Baraboo Inn owner, B.C. Farr

After the event, Wendy and I played a few songs and then interviewed some of the World’s Largest Ghost Hunt participants to see if they experienced anything.

interviewing Baraboo native Cora Parchem about anything she experienced that night…

So, what did we experience? 

Well, the weirdest thing that happened to me was during the second hour of the event. Shelly Wells, who’s the sister of the owner, B.C. Farr asked if I would help do some Facebook Live stuff for the event, which I was happy to do because they’re always really nice to us. My phone was in the van, so I needed to use a different device. The technology guy for the night, Justin Richards, handed me a tablet upstairs and I logged on to Facebook.

Now when I started the Facebook Live feed, but it was really dark in the room and I had a hard time getting much of any details in the video. And after five minutes, the video stopped working completely. The tablet just reset. Here’s the full Facebook Live video, I don’t hear anything too unusual in it so far, but I’d love to see if I got any EVPs after further investigation!

The thing was, that the tablet had plenty of battery when I first started using it. And when I tried to restart it, I just kept getting some kind of battery error and it wouldn’t go past the startup screen. So, what was that about? During the investigation upstairs we had moved from trying to capture EVPs to using this thing called a SB-7 Spirit Box which sweeps the FM radio spectrum and will stop every once in awhile on some sounds, the idea is that the spirits can manipulate the frequencies or even use snippets of the radio to send a message.

Everyone was asking questions and my question was “What do you do all day?” which I thought was a fair question of a spirit. To which the Spirit box seemed to say “F$%#” and “You” a few seconds later. Now, everyone else really heard it, and I kinda think I heard it, but you know the power of suggestion and all that. It was more funny than anything else, but I still got a chill from it and felt a little scared.

I kinda ghosted for a second and went downstairs to tell Shelly that I had to let her down and when I came back up and opened the door, everyone told me that they heard the Spirit Box say the name “Mike” three times. That scared me again, ha, because now I felt like it wanted something from me.

That was about the last of anything in the actual bar that I thought was kinda unusual. They also set up a Spirit Chamber (like the glass box in the third season of Twin Peaks) and tried to see if anything came through, but nothing weird showed up.

The Spirit Chamber

So then we played some songs, finally had a couple of beers (no drinking during the investigation for me, I wanna see something dammit and not have to worry anyone would question my veracity!) And that was about it. I got back in the van and turned my phone back on.

And my phone just wouldn’t turn on. I turned it off at 25% battery four hours earlier and I’ve done that a million times. This time after a few minutes it finally showed me that the battery was gone, but I needed the GPS to get home! So I just drove around until I found a gas station where I could buy an overpriced charger and when I plugged it back in and tried turning it on, it immediately was at 25%. So what was draining the battery? That’s never happened to me before where it went from completely trained to quarter-charged, instantly.

I know, just a coincidence and it might be the new iOS that I just installed less than two weeks ago. But then on the drive home, the tire alert comes on saying that the left rear tire is flat.  We just got brand new tires on the van in March so I’m thinking, “Great!” Plus I’m driving alone at 3:30am between Madison and Baraboo and there’s nothing out there near the freeway.

Well, I thought I’d give it a a few minutes and see… When I looked at the tire sensors, it didn’t show that the tire just was losing pressure (as I’ve experienced in my own 2009 GM car, which is the same year as our van when it had a tire go flat), it didn’t show any reading at all for that left rear tire. But after a night of talking about scary things and thinking that spirits could invade our electronics, I was prone to flights of fancy. First the Facebook Live stream, then the phone, and now the van?

What do these guys want from me!?!

Nothing probably. Maybe they wanted to be heard. But I lived to tell you the tale. Didn’t see the tire alert when I moved the van today, though, so I’ll be keeping an eye on that!

Well, considering we were at a saloon right by the old train station at a bar filled with outlaws, we thought this old classic folk song about trains, prison, and redemption would be a good way to end the night and the podcast. And of course it will always make me think of the opening of Twilight Zone: The Movie with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks, here’s just a clip of them singing along, but don’t worry, it won’t ruin the fun if you haven’t seen it yet!

Well, you wake up in the mornin’, you hear the work bell ring
And they march you to the table, you see the same old thing
Ain’t no food upon the table and no pork up in the pan
But you better not complain, boy, you get in trouble with the man

Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me

Let the midnight special, shine a ever lovin’ light on me

Yonder come Miss Rosie, how in the world did you know?
By the way she wears her apron and the clothes she wore
Umbrella on her shoulder, piece of paper in her hand
She come to see the governor, she wants to free her man

Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a ever lovin’ light on me

If you’re ever in Houston, oh you better do the right
You better not gamble and you better not fight
Or the sheriff will grab you and the boys, will bring you down
The next thing you know, boy, oh you’re prison bound

Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a light on me
Let the midnight special, shine a ever lovin’ light on me

 

120 – Inside the Wondertorium: Paranormal Circus Tales with Logan Marvel

Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts met Logan Marvel when she stood on his neck on a bed of broken glass. Since then, we knew we had to have him on the show.

logan marvel wondertorium
Boy meets girl, girl steps on boy’s neck while he puts his face on broken glass

It’s an old cliche that every kid dreams about running away and joining the circus, but Logan Marvel actually did it. In fact, he was so inspired, that he started to stretch for four hours a day when he was twelve years old. He couldn’t wait for the day where he could finally join the Greatest Show on Earth as a contortionist.

logan wondertorium
One fish, two fish, red fish, OHMYGOD IT’S A PIRHANA

And Logan made the circus his life’s work, working in several different circuses as well as side (freak) shows. Along the way, he’s learned superstitions and paranormal tales from Skin-Walking Were-Panthers to ghosts of the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944. Mr. Marvel is an expert in circus and side show history and he shares with us his stories from the Big Top and beyond in this in-depth interview.

logan mr marvel wondertorium
Not sure if this is what Taco Bell means by “fire” sauce…

To get you in the circus mood, here’s the promo for one  of my favorite X-Files episodes (featuring Jim Rose, whose book Freak Like Me was one of my high school favorites), the freakshow-themed “Humbug”.

Logan eventually made his way to Baraboo, Wisconsin, which for several decades was the headquarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus. If you’re interested in meeting Logan in person, you can watch his show live in the Wisconsin Dells. His Mr. Marvel’s Wondertorium combines the history of the circus, amazing feats of human physical prowess from fire eating to contortion, and of course, a healthy heaping of Barnum-eqsue showmanship. Learn more about it by clicking right here.

For the Sunspot track this week, we were inspired by Logan’s bravery and ambition to seek the circus life. As rockers, we definitely understand that drive. And if someone gives us a choice between living a stable “normal” life or going off and trying to make it on our art (living without a net!), well, all we have to say is “I’d Rather Be A Freak”.

I’d rather be a freak
I’d rather be a freak
Well, I’ve seen a million snowflakes who just aren’t that unique,
So I’d rather be a freak.

Let’s hear it for the weirdos who never wanted to fit in,
we ran away and joined the circus,
we ran to find our brethren.
Let’s hear it for the geeks,
let’s hear it for the damned,
we don’t ask for your permission,
we don’t care if you understand.

you can laugh and have a good time
it don’t matter much to us cuz we still got your dime

I’d rather be a freak
I’d rather be a freak
Well, I’ve seen a million snowflakes who just aren’t that unique,
So I’d rather be a freak.

Bottoms up for bearded ladies who have no f^&*s to give
It might seem that we’re all crazy but better than the alternative,
you climb the corporate ladder or try to keep up with a Jones,
I can watch you all scatter, and watch you fight amongst the clones.

you can laugh and have a good time
it don’t matter much to us cuz we still got your dime

I’d rather be a freak
I’d rather be a freak
Well, I’ve seen a million snowflakes who just aren’t that unique,
So I’d rather be a freak.

We’d rather be some freaks
We’d rather be some freaks
We’ve seen a million snowflakes who just aren’t that unique,
So, we’d rather be some freaks.