Camp Gagnon - The CREEPY Man Who Collected Circus Freaks

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Today, we explore the life of P.T. Barnum—from his early life and the creation of freak shows to his lasting legacy. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Mars Men -Visit https://mengotomars.com and get 50% Off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, and 3 Free Gifts with Code 'CAMP' at Checkout. Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Christos Back YAPPIN 1:20 P.T. Barnum’s Early Life 3:19 Purchasing Joice Heth 5:36 The Fiji Mermaid 8:32 William Henry Johnson 9:16 Conjoined Twins 11:24 Animal Attractions + Jumbo the Elephant 13:49 Pushback Against The Occult 16:28 Fake Giant Replica 17:20 Barnum & Bailey + Albino Brothers 19:58 Legacy of P.T. Barnum 21:41 Exploitation of People 24:27 Is Reality TV Manipulated? #foryou #history #freak #freakshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone thinks they know the man that history calls the greatest showman, the man who taught America to dream big, immortalized by Hugh Jackman in a hit movie musical with a top hat, lots of colorful friends, and singing about following your dreams and the magic of being yourself. But here's what you didn't know. He got a dying, enslaved woman drunk so that he could yank her teeth out and make her look older for a better story. He caged a man born with a disability and told the public that he was the missing link

between man and monkey. He watched two whales boil alive in their tanks, and he called it a marketing opportunity. In one of the darkest twists in American history, the man famous for exposing fake ghosts, staged his own fake ghost photo to do it. Today we're telling the complete and complicated history of the marketing genius, the manufacturing wonder, and the manipulated people and the animals who paid for it. Because the greatest showman on earth needed someone to run it, and P.T. Barnum was far closer to a monster than a human.

hero. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history, from all time forever. Yes, that is my goal at this show. That is what I'm trying to do every single Wednesday, as I want to know everything that's ever happened. And there's all sorts of stuff happening all the time. Oh, man, every single day, there's new history being made and new episodes of this. the show that we need to make because history's happening all the time. And today is no different.

We have a fascinating episode about the greatest showman, possibly America's greatest con man, perhaps the greatest marketer to ever live and some of the more morbid details of his life, none other than P.T. Barnum. Now before we begin, I just want to say a few things. First off, thank you. Yeah, dude, or woman. Let me actually, let me do it the other way. I want to thank you, lady or dude. How about that? I'm progressive. I just want to say thanks for tuning into the show. Whatever you're doing right now, whether you're driving, whether you're at work, whether you're mowing the lawn. I just want to say thanks for being a part of the camp family. And every time you click on an episode or like or comment or anything like that, you help keep the lights on here in the campsite

and you help keep their fire burning in the tent. I also want to give a big thanks to my pal. Christos Papparapados. Christos, how are you? I'm back this week. All right, Christos, no time for that. All right. I'm glad you got your mic. But I don't want you to derail this episode anymore. because we're talking about P.T. Barnum. Now, what does the P.T. stand for? I'm glad you asked. Finius Taylor Barnum. Born July 5th, 1810 in a town called Bethel, Connecticut, to a father who had a bunch of different jobs. His dad was a tailor, then a storekeeper, an innkeeper, and never really had, like, one consistent thing that he was doing. And it was actually his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, who really shaped him. He was a local politician. He kind of ran the town

of Bethel, and he taught his grandson about the most valuable thing in life, the thing that could make people love you, give you power, and build you a legacy. And it's not like being a good person, it's money. That's really the most important lesson. You see, Barnum's father died when he was 15, and suddenly the entire family's survival sort of fell on him. And as a result, he picked up different jobs. He clerked in different stores. He ran a small lottery network at one time. And in his early 20s, he founded a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom. That was very much like a kind of a liberal reform newspaper against a lot of, you know, basically thought that the church at the time had too much power and was very much pro separation of church and state. And even the newspaper, ironically,

had a lot of abolitionist themes in the 1800s and, you know, touted a lot of, you know, basically the freedom of enslaved Americans. And the newspaper was actually aggressive enough in its accusations of different people that it landed Barnum in jail for two months on libel charges. So even before show business, he was a man who understood the value of provocative headlines, and it seemed like it was doing the right things. I mean, an abolitionist newspaper is a pretty honorable, honorable job in the 1800s. And then in 1829, he married Charity Halet. And by 1834, now with four daughters and no money, he moved to New York City in search of it. And he found it in possibly the worst place possible.

You see, in 1835, Barnum wound up buying the exhibition rights to a woman named Joyce Heth. You see, the story with Joyce is pretty dark. She was enslaved, blind, and paralyzed, and by most accounts, somewhere in her 70s or 80s. It's pretty brutal. Barnum paid $1,000 to own her and then told the public that she was 161 years old and the former nursemaid of a young George Washington. Now, obviously, there was no truth to any of it, but that didn't matter to P.T. Barnum.

And I'm sure you're wondering, like, oh, he was doing a newspaper that had abolitionist themes, and now he's buying a woman and saying that she was George Washington's made? Like, how does that make any sense? For me, I don't think Barnum was really concerned about, you know, abolitionism or, you know, anti-slavery views. I just think he was kind of pissed off and saw an opportunity and took it. So he was using the same promotional instincts that he built running lotteries and newspapers.

Barnum turned Joyce Heth into the first real hit of his career. And as a result, she was put on display for 12-hour days, six days a week. And according to Barnum's own accounts, when her age started to look implausible to skeptical audiences, he got her drunk, specifically so that he could pull several of her teeth to make her look even older. More convincing and more shocking and, of course, more priestly. She ended up dying in 1836, but Barnum's response wasn't to mourn her death. It was to monetize her one more time. Yes, get this. He staged a public autopsy, charging spectators 50 cents ahead to watch a doctor cut her open on stage. The autopsy revealed what skeptics had suspected all along is that she was no older than 80 years old. Now, this wasn't just an isolated bad decision early in a young man's career. This is an order. story. This was just the start of an entire business model. You manufacture a sensational lie and you extract every possible dollar you can before you discard it, you know, once it stops being profitable,

and then you start over. And it was this formula that would make him one of the wealthiest men of his century. So by 1841, still scraping by Barnum wound up buying Scudder's American Museum in Manhattan. And he renamed it after himself. Now at the time, museums, Barnham were pretty boring, kind of sleepy academic spaces, but Barnum blew that entire model apart. He had five floors of live animals and wax figures and theatrical performances and scientific instruments and most profitably human beings that he build as curiosities. Now, the clearest window into how Barnum's mind actually worked is what he did with one of these curiosities, the Fiji mermaid.

So in the summer of 1842, Barnum leased a supposed mermaid. from a Boston museum owner named Moses Kimball. And he leased it for about $12.50 a week. He already had a naturalist look at it first, and the naturalist told him, hey, this is obviously a fake. Now, Barner's reply, according to his own memoir, is that basically, that is no reason at all, and therefore I'll believe in the mermaid and hire it.

So literally said, it doesn't matter to me. I'm going to believe it's a mermaid anyway. And then he built an entire fictional universe around it. He planted letters in Southern newspapers describing a British naturalist. This guy, Dr. J. Griffin, who supposedly possessed a genuine mermaid caught near Fiji. But Dr. Griffin didn't exist at all. He was a guy named Levi Lyman, one of Barnum's own employees, the very same guy who helped stage the Joyce Heth hoax. Now, Barnum even orchestrated a fake public feud between himself and Dr. Griffin over whether the mermaid could even be displayed just to,

build up some tension. So when the mermaid finally went live and it was on view for everyone, it was by Barnum's own description an ugly dried up black-looking diminutive specimen, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony. In reality, it was just a torso of like a juvenile monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish. We have a picture of it up on a screen so you can see what it was. It looks exactly what you think it looks like. Now, none of that mattered, though, to P.T. Barnum, The exhibit doubled his museum's profits in a month. Barnum had a word for all of this, and he used it proudly, humbug.

Later in his own book, The Humbugs of the World, he defined the word as glittering appearances by which to suddenly arrest public attention. So a very fancy way of saying, a lie. But to him, a lie wasn't a moral problem at all. It was just a way to market something. It was a tool. He believed genuinely that the public got what they paid for. right? They thought they were seeing a mermaid and they paid money for it and they left entertained.

So what's the problem? No one's getting hurt. It's a philosophy that sounds almost charming in a way until you realize that he was willing to do it for anything and that he would make many people suffer in order to do that. Barnum also acquired a man named William Henry Johnson and put him in a cage. This one is pretty messed up. Johnson had what they call microcephaly, a congenital condition where the head and the brain inside of it develops smaller than the typical brain, which in his case gave his skull a distinctive tapered shape. And Barnum jumped on it and built an entire fiction around it, Billing Johnson as Zip, the missing link between man and monkey,

supposedly found in the wilds of Africa. In reality, Johnson was American-born. Barnum had him speak a nonsense gibberish language that Barnum himself invented, basically, just to sell the lie that he wasn't fully human after all. And then, of course, there were Millie and Christine McCoy, conjoined twin girls born enslaved in North Carolina in 1851. They were sold away from their family for $1,000 before they were even one years old.

And they were kidnapped at least twice by rival showmen trying to steal these valuable attractions in the business. And in many ways, I mean, it's beyond inhumane, but they were subjected to these invasive public medical examinations to prove that their condition was real and that it wasn't a hoax before they even reached 13 years. Barnum's American Museum was one of several venues that exhibited them as children. Now, to be fully honest with you,

it doesn't actually go the way you expect at the end of the story. After emancipation, Millie and Christine actually chose to remain with the family that had enslaved and employed them. And they went on to earn as much as $25,000 a season. they learned five languages and once again performed for Queen Victoria and eventually used their earnings to buy the very plantation where their family had once been enslaved. Yeah, that's a crazy story. It's a genuine, like, complicated version of exploitation and eventual self-determination.

And honestly, we should do a whole episode on that because that's crazy to even think about, right? But their childhood, including the years that Barnum actually profited off them, were built on kidnapping and coercion. and abuse. I mean, with these conjoined girls, it's very sad, but I wonder if it's almost like a Stockholm kind of thing where they, you know, they're, I guess maybe the pain you know is better than the one you don't know. And even if, you know, what they're going through is so terrible, they see a path here and it's something that's familiar to them. I don't know, but we'll do a whole episode on. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break real quick because I want to tell you a little story, all right? I don't know if this is just what happens once you hit like your late

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Now, let's get back to the show. Barnum wasn't just exploiting disability and race. He also displayed people with albinism and giants and so-called Aztec children. These are basically children who really just once again had microcephaly and basically used them in similarly dehumanizing pseudo-scientific brands to sell them to the American public. The human curiosity business had just a limitless appetite, and for PT Barnum, he still wanted more.

The people weren't the only ones who paid for these attractions. His animal exhibits were some of the most closely documented in the history of animal abuse, basically. I mean, I don't know what else to call it. In 1861, Barnum acquired two belugal whales for his American Museum, keeping them in small glass tanks completely unsuitable for their size. The first two died within a matter of days. And when the museum caught fire in 1865, the tank shattered, and the water in them literally began to boil from the heat. and the whales boiled to death in the wreckage and their bodies lay in the street for days afterwards

as the building burned around them. Now, while that case was an accident and probably due to a lot of negligence, his circus, once it launched, built cruelty directly into the training. So, for example, elephants were tethered with heavy steel chains. Trainers would use something called the burning method,

basically forcing a hot poker into the elephant's trunk, one of the most sensitive parts on the bodies to force submission. And Barnum Circus is widely credited with popularizing the bull hook, a heavy, sharp-hooked baton used to beat elephants into compliance. And this is a tool that stayed the standard in the American circus industry for over a century after Barnum's death. And the most infamous case in all of this is Jumbo.

In 1882, Barnum purchased Jumbo, a massive African elephant from the London Zoo over enormous public protest in Britain. But Jumbo developed severe dental pain from visitors constantly feeding him sweets and sugar and was documented grinding his tuss against his enclosure in visible distress. In 1885, Jumbo was tragically struck and killed by a freight train in Canada. But rather than treating this death of this elephant as a tragedy, Barnum manufactured a heroic death story for his programs, claiming that... Visit Bette MGM Casino and check out the newest.

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to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Jumbo had died trying to save a smaller elephant and jumped in front of the train. I mean, rather than let, you know, a profitable asset go, Barnum had jumbo's skin stuffed and his skeleton mounted so that the dead elephant could keep on touring with the circus as

the brave elephant that sacrificed its life. Even in death, none of them actually got to leave him, not jumbo, not any of them, really. Barnum found a way to keep every one of his attractions working long after their usefulness had ended. Which brings us to something genuinely strange. The one place that Barnum drew a hard line. The one. spectacle that he himself actually tried to debunk. And that's spirits and ghosts and broadly speaking the occult. Yeah, it's pretty ironic actually. The man who spent his entire career manufacturing fake mermaids and missing links and buying slaves and fake ages and all that stuff, the man who was the king of fakes, a man who built an entire empire and convincing people that the impossible was real

didn't believe in ghosts or anything like that, like at all. In fact, Barnum spent much of his later life as a very public aggressive opponent of the spiritualism movement. So things like seances and mediums and, you know, ghost tours and photographers who claimed that they could contact the dead. In his book, The Humbugs of the World, Barnum offered $500, which was a lot of money at the time, to any medium who could prove that they could genuinely communicate with the deceased, and no one ever collected.

In 1869, Barnum testified in the fraud trial of a spirit photographer named William Mumler, who sold grieving, often widowed customers' photographs, supposedly showing the ghosts of their dead loved ones hovering beside them. And this was a big industry back in the day. You would have a woman come in, say my husband died, I miss him so much, and he would take a photo of the woman, and then behind her would be the ghost of the man who passed away. And P.T. Barnum saw this as a trick, and to prove just how easily this trick was to fake, Barnum commissioned his own fraudulent spirit photographs, one that appeared to show himself, standing next to Abraham Lincoln, and presented it in a courtroom as evidence.

I mean, thinking about how ironic that is. The man most famous for manufacturing fake mermaids and missing links spent his later career building an entire second reputation as a debunker of fakes. I mean, the same skill set just pointed in the opposite direction, which is pretty funny. And maybe to his credit, perhaps he saw these guys as, you know, like, you know, maybe making money off of the emotionally distressed and he thought that that was completely unfair, which is, I mean, ironic for many reasons, but his crusade against the occult wasn't applied evenly. Historians note that Barnum's disapproval towards non-Christian spiritual traditions like voodoo and

other types of indigenous shamanism was far more vicious than his treatment of, you know, these white mediums. So it's pretty consistent with some of the racial kind of hierarchies that ran through the human exhibits. And even his hoax-busting swing basically went right back into creating another hoax. So in 1869, a farm near Cardiff, New York discovered a 10-foot giant buried on the land. And it turned out to be one of the most famous hoaxes in all of American history staged by a man named George Hull. But at the time, Barnum offered $50,000 to buy a share of it. And when the owners refuse, Barnum just built his own replica and then advertised his fake as the real one, claiming that the original giant was actually the forgery. And this instance is often cited as

the origin of the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute. It's a line that's popularly attributed to Barnum himself, though I have to say there's no direct evidence of that, but that's typically where the saying is credited to. It's one of the most quoted lines in American showmanship, and it appears to be exactly what Barnum himself would have called it a humbug. Now, Barnum didn't actually launch his famous circus until 1871 when he was 60 years old. P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie Caravan, and Hippodrome, debuted in Brooklyn that year. And within just a year, he pioneered something that would change the entire industry, moving the whole operation, the entire circus by railroad instead of horse and wagon,

letting him hit way more cities, way faster, with shows large enough to see 10,000 people. In 1880, to kill off all of his fiercest opponents, Barnum merged with a rival showman James Bailey, and the result became Barnum and Bailey Circus. And this is the version that most people actually picture when they hear his name, and they coined it the greatest show on Earth. Barnum spent his final years laundering his own reputation

about as effectively as he had built his fortune. He actually served two terms in the Connecticut legislature. For a time, he was the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he made public donations, a self-styled turn as a philanthropist. Now, finally, he suffered a stroke in 1890 and died at his home in Bridgeport on April 7, 1891, at 80 years old. But Barnum's name didn't retire when he did. There was still an entire empire with his name attached to it.

16 years after his death in 1907, the Ringling Brothers bought Barnum and Bailey outright, eventually merging the two into the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus in 19, an operation that ran under that name all the way until 2017. And under that name in 1890, two Black brothers with albinism named George and Willie Mews were taken from a tobacco field in Truevine, Virginia. And some accounts say that they were kidnapped. Others say they were lured with candy.

Either way, they were forced into a sideshow as Echo and Eco, billed as various points as Martians or Cannibals or Missing Links, and obviously they were not paid. weren't allowed to go to school. They were told their mother had died, specifically to stop them from trying to escape or reconnecting with their family or even wanting to go home. And what's sad is that it took their mother, Harriet Mews, nearly three decades to track them down and force the circus into court. Now, to be precise, Barnum was dead before George and Willie Mews were even born. So this one never directly is on him, but it is the result of the machine that he built,

or at least was complicit in, the name that he put on it in the kind of business that he often imposed, a company that kept running the same exact playbook on real people for over a century after the man himself was gone. But the truth is, this carnal, manipulative style of P.T. Barnum is more intertwined with American culture than you might realize. It's not just the circus. Right? I mean, look at, like, reality TV that profit off of, like, contestants signed into contracts. they don't necessarily understand or, you know, the edits that they give or, you know, intentionally keeping people awake and giving them alcohol so they say crazy stuff on camera or family vlogging channels where parents build entire fortunes like filming their own kids

and forcing them to do stuff. The kids obviously don't consent to it, right? Like, it's not the exact same, but different decades, different platforms, but it's a similar formula, right? You manufacture a spectacle. You find the people with, you know, the inability to say no necessarily or, you know, a really high desperation to make things work, and you let the audience's excitement do the rest of the work for you. Every genuinely brilliant marketing tactic he had, the manufactured mystery, the stage controversies, the relentless understanding of what would make a stranger handover money was pointed again and again at those who couldn't refuse him. Like, you know, an enslaved woman, a four-year-old kid, children who had been kidnapped, animals.

Barnum understood that his wealth, fame, and fortune ran on entertainment and intrigue. No matter what it took to get there, it ran on the you have to see it to believe it. On the story so good, the audience doesn't stop to ask who's actually paying for it or who's getting hurt in the process. It's that pattern that didn't die when Barnum died in 1891. It just kind of changed. And over 100 years later, I mean, we're still kind of buying tickets for the same show just with different people. people. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history on the sinister dark side of P.T. Barnum and the circus industry in general. I mean, it's a crazy story. I mean, I'm curious if later in

P.T. Barnum's life, he had any regrets. Did you, can you look that up and see if there's anything that he've regretted later on his life? He didn't regret using the humbugs, but he did regret how he treated them. I see. Which, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's not really a great explanation. Now, to his credit, he did oppose slavery later on in life, which is pretty interesting. Like when he became the mayor of Bridgeport, he gave like a big, you know, public declaration that humanity shouldn't be trifled with is the term he uses and that human beings have an innate moral dignity that shouldn't be exploited by slavery, which is maybe convenient later in life. and he never really recanted or, you know,

expressed any type of regret over the way he treated his public human exhibits. But it's interesting that he drew the line on, like, the spirits and the mediums and stuff, you know? Like, he was, he reminds me almost of, like, there's a few guys kind of like this. Like, I don't know if you know the great Randini, James Randy.

He's, like, another big, like, he's a magician, but also is, like, I don't like that people are using mediumship and clairventsia. to try to exploit people that are mourning. Another great guy for this is Darren Brown. Darren Brown's a brilliant magician and like an illusionist. But he does this thing in a show where he basically shows how mediums will fake stuff and does a fake medium thing.

And while he's doing it, he's telling the girl, hey, this isn't real. And the people that are going to try to profit off of this? Like he's like, oh, there's someone in your family that died. It's your aunt. She says she misses you. The woman starts to cry and he goes, you need to know that this isn't real. You know that. He keeps on saying it over and over to illustrate how these mediums and these clairvoyance are basically exploiting hurt people and people that are in like states of grief and trying to take their money from them.

And I'm assuming that's how P.T. Barnum saw it. He was like, look, my lies are for entertainment and to make people have fun. Your lies are basically robbing people that are grieving. And that's his line. It's pretty convenient, but it's a line. Now, some of the stuff early in his career is like pretty unforgivable. I don't know. I'm not one to draw like a strong moral line here, but like taking human beings and putting them in cages and saying that they're missing links between humans and animals is, that's pretty tough. So I might say he opened the door for a lot of bad use of people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not great. But also like, what's up with the American public? Why are we so obsessed with this bullshit, right? Like, why are we so obsessed with just like the most atrocious things that humans can offer and be like, yeah, I'll pay 20 bucks to see

161 year old woman with no teeth, like laying in a room, like, that's absurd. It's the same reason we don't scroll away from a fight on social media. Yeah, I guess. Like, it's just something that's innate in us. And I'm like, I got to get better at that. I got to do better of trying to uphold a moral standard, but I don't, you know, I'm not obsessed or I'm not fetishizing the objectification and exploitation of people, you know? It's just a bad look for your spirit.

I don't think it's good for my soul, you know? It's not nice. It's not, like, reality TV sometimes does this. I've heard different things about different reality TV shows where it's like, hey, they take people and they put them in these really complicated, like, ten situations. And then the people will try to, like, decompress

and, like, work through their thoughts. And the producers will be like, no, no, no, just do it on camera, do it on camera. And they're like, I just want to journal. And they're like, no, there's no journaling. You have to do it on camera. And then, like, these people have, like, these, like, big emotional outbursts

and, like, they're crying. And the people are, like, kept up for hours of time at night, and given alcohol and like just put in bad situations to get these like big emotional reactions from which is kind of ironic because I was watching the documentary Chimp Empire about like the turf war between all these different like apes out in the minnow jungle and the producers were like they never interrupted the apes when they were interacting they were like we never intervened if something happened we never touched them we we stayed a mile away and filmed with these crazy lenses I'm like, it's pretty crazy that, like, they treated, like, the apes in the jungle with a higher level of dignity and respect than, like, human beings on a reality show.

Like, they're both reality shows the end of the day, but, like, the animal one, they were like, no, we got to be good. But the humans, yeah, we'll just pump them with alcohol and make them feel terrible. Kind of funny. Yeah. I mean, maybe they're just, they think that chimps will eventually do something crazy as opposed to humans. Yeah, I guess, right? Also, people that do watch reality TV, I love. love my girlfriend to death, but she just will not admit that producers have a big role in

what happens. Yes. And don't even wrong. I like my fair share of reality TV. I'm not bagging on it, but I think there's a spectrum. Some are worse than others. Like, you'll watch early Jerry Springer and you're like, oh, this feels bad. I mean, even the stuff with Summer House now.

Maybe. Again, I don't know Summer House well enough, but sure, I've heard different things. But, like, there's even a good example. Like, you were seeing the video of the little kid? It's an infamous video. I mean, I'm gonna pull it up right now. So this is a video from a reality TV show where they bring a little kid that's a bad kid.

He's like disobeying his mom and he's like causing trouble, yada, yada, yada. And he gets put on a reality daytime TV show that's supposed to be like one of these shocking shows. And they bring a drill sergeant on to like whip the boy into shape. And this is the moment that transpires and it's truly heartbreaking. And I've tried to look into this like find the kid or like find out what happened to him

because it will truly make you so sad. This is the clip. Do you want me to be your daddy for the kid? the next eight years son? Huh? Yes, sir. You do? Why do you want me to be your daddy?

I have no daddy. You have no daddy? Well, let me tell you something. Come here, give me a hug. I mean, that is heartbreaking. But this is what's going on. This is who is getting brought on these shows. It's like a kid with no dad that's in a heartbreaking situation that's tragic.

And he's acting out to get attention from the people that he loves because he's broadly neglected and then a drill sergeant comes on and says do you want me to be your daddy and he says yes i mean come on bro it's kind of like the stock hope syndrome thing of the chick that didn't want to leave the circus i mean kind it's like to me this is more like a kid getting what he wants he's like i want a person in my life that i can look to for advice and that i can lean on that can like give me guidance and put borders on my existence i mean like oh my gosh it's like so tragic we're cooked as a society oh man i don't know i think there's a way out. And like I always say, love your family, love your kids, take care of your people,

love your parents, and just try to focus on the things you can control. I hope this little boy's doing well. And all the people that were involved in PT Barnum's circus, I hope their descendants are doing all right too. I kind of doubt it, but you can always hope. I don't know. What do you guys think? Sort of depressing episode, my bad, dude. But I love to know what you think. Drop a comment below. Am I missing something on PT Barnum? Was he maybe a better guy than I think? Maybe I need to read his whole book to get a better read. In fairness, I haven't done an entire deep dive on every little thing that P.T. Barnum ever did. So maybe I'm labeling in a little bit of an unfair light. But I'm curious to know what you guys think. Drop a comment, YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them.

And even if I don't get back to you, someone else will. And the conversation will be tintillating in scintillating? Cintillating? Tittalating? I wonder if cintillating is a word. We'll find out next episode. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you all dearly. And I will see you next time for another episode of History Camp. God bless you all. And I will see you in the future to talk about the past. Peace. Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.