Let’s talk about the most uncomfortable question in sideshow history: when you bought a ticket to see Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese Twins,” what exactly were you looking at? Two people? One person with extra parts? Or something else entirely—a living metaphor for every folklore tradition about split souls, shadow selves, and the horror of being neither one thing nor another? The Bunker brothers wintered in Florida when they could, seeking warmth for their aging bodies that had been on display since they were teenagers. But here’s what the gawkers never understood: the real freak show wasn’t their connected liver. It was the fact that society couldn’t decide if they were looking at people or puppets, souls or soulless curiosities, humans or hollowed-out vessels for public consumption.
Chang and Eng were born in 1811 in Siam (now Thailand), connected at the sternum by a band of cartilage and sharing a liver. But their biology was the least interesting thing about them. They were discovered by a British merchant who saw dollar signs, not souls, and spent their teenage years being displayed across the world as “The Double Boy” or “The United Brothers.” Language matters here—notice how they went from plural to singular and back again, as if the English language itself couldn’t figure out what they were. By the time they settled in America, married sisters (yes, really), and fathered twenty-one children between them (yes, REALLY), they’d become walking, talking changeling tales—familiar enough to recognize as human, different enough to make people question what “human” meant.
The folklore parallels are delicious and disturbing. Nearly every culture has stories about doubles, shadows, and split souls. The Germanic doppelgänger who appears before death. The Egyptian ka that could separate from the body. The Jewish traditions of ibbur, where one soul attaches to another like a supernatural conjoined twin. And of course, changeling tales—where something that looks like your loved one is actually hollow, wrong, inhabited by something else. The circus audiences looking at Chang and Eng were unconsciously processing all these ancient fears. Were they seeing two souls in one body? One soul stretched between two minds? Or—and this is where it gets dark—were they seeing proof that bodies could be hollow vessels, that personhood was just a performance, that maybe we’re all just meat puppets waiting for something to pull our strings?
The brothers themselves played into the horror and the fascination, because that’s how you survive as a professional freak. They developed an entire vaudeville act where they’d demonstrate their coordination, their disagreements, their simultaneous yet separate existence. But the real performance was pretending to be okay with being treated like dolls in a collection. P.T. Barnum, who promoted them later in life, literally displayed them alongside automatons and wax figures in his American Museum. The message was clear: here are things that look human but aren’t quite. Here are bodies that move and speak but might be hollow inside. Step right up and see the living puppets.
What Florida’s winter circus community understood—what Gibsonton and Sarasota’s sideshow families knew in their bones—was that being displayed hollows you out whether you’re conjoined or not. Every performer who’d stood on a platform while people paid to stare knew the feeling: the slow drain as you become less person and more object, less soul and more spectacle. The Bunker brothers died in 1874, three hours apart (Chang first, then Eng, who reportedly died of terror), but their real death was decades earlier when they became empty vessels for other people’s fears and fantasies. The sideshow didn’t display conjoined twins; it created hollow men, walking changelings who looked like people but had been emptied out and refilled with whatever the audience needed to see.
The descendants of sideshow families in Florida will tell you the truth if you know how to listen: every “freak” was a changeling story. The real person hidden or hollowed out, replaced with a character, a curiosity, a collectible human doll. The Lobster Boy wasn’t Grady Stiles Jr.; he was a hollow costume Grady wore until he forgot there was anything else inside. The Monkey Girl wasn’t Percilla Bejano; she was an empty vessel filled with other people’s revulsion and fascination. This is why these communities were so fiercely protective of their winter quarters—it was the only place they could stop being hollow, stop being changelings, and remember they had souls that belonged to themselves.
The final horror? Sometimes the hollow wins. Sometimes you perform the empty vessel so long that you forget you were ever anything else. Chang and Eng’s descendants (all seventy-plus of them) will tell you their ancestors were businessmen, farmers, devoted fathers. But history remembers them as The Double Boy, The United Brothers, The Siamese Twins—hollow titles for hollow men who were never allowed to be full. They became their own shadow selves, their own changelings, their own cautionary tale about what happens when you let the world turn you into a doll in someone else’s collection. And that, my friends, is the real sideshow: watching souls get scooped out one ticket at a time, until all that’s left is the performance of being human, echoing around inside an empty shell.
