The Wierd Wierd World of Carnival Diablo

By Thane Burnett

Lets take a walk.
As we travel, open your mind to a world of might-have-been. Leave behind the safety of logic and skepticism.
Reason has no place where we're going. Carnival Diablo is the creation of Calgary magician Scott McClelland. The Carnival Diablo (means devil in Spanish) is built in the tattered remains of an abandoned liquor store downtown at 826 5St. S.W.

Opened April Fool's Day, it's a surreal menagerie of freakish objects; many of which were passed down by McClelland's late grandfather, Nicholas P. Lew'chuk.
It's a gallery of the ghoulish only accessible through a back-alley door Wednesday through Sunday nights.
From there, it's up a bare-bones staircase and onto the black asphalt floor of the second storey with its endless jumble of water pipes running overhead.

Tiny windows squeeze out what little light could filter in from the streetlights outside.
There's a smell of decay and mould inside - a collection of odors from an old building and the stuffy fragrances of McCelland's pride and joys.
From a two-headed calf to a Tibetan talisman, to the severed hand of a hanged criminal - said to embody powers which enable it to open any lock - the 27-year-old has brought together the odd and the macabre. "We live in a society of skeptics - this is a place to escape and let down your guard," he says, standing among his prizes.

While the displays are often crude and makeshift, walking along them almost makes you belive anything is possible in the Carnival Diablo.
Even with its modern theatre lighting and background soundtracks, it's a bizarre throback to the turn-of-the-century, when freak shows were family entertainment. Those were the days when natural deformities and the wares of charlatans were viewed with equal amazement.

The Carnival Diablo is a tribute to a more gullible era, a monument to a time when we were more willing to belive in possibilities.
McClelland's grandfather Lew'chuk certainly believed - at least in the drawing card of showmanship and freakish delights.
As late as the 40's, his vaudevile show was reportedly the largest of its kind travelling across the country. But it was his touring freak show - said to be bought from an American musueum and now a century old - that realy drew them in.
The albino skunk and the pig with two heads were well worth the pennies charges to see them. Even those who scoffed were often hard-presssed to explain how the freaks came to be - after paying for a ticket, of course.

Today, McClelland is banking on the same human desire to be taken by the hand and let to someplace a little risky and a little unusual.

Best know for his Stampeded Vaudeville performances as Prof. Crookshank, McClelland has been performing on stages for the past 16 years.
Part Dreamer and part schemer, he likes to think of himself as a protege of his late grandfather.
Like Lew'chuk himself, McClelland is pure showman. He doesn't just sell you on the freaks he presents - he pulls you in with the ideas they represent.
They are, he points out, great historical mysteries. Among the oddities on display - none of which McClelland will swears is the real McCoy - are:
* The remains of a mummy puported to be a lost pharaoh of Egypt.
* The " original Feejee Mermaid as displayed in the American Museum by P.T. Barnum." The story goes that the mermaid - a clever fake which attracted scientists from around the world - vanished in 1897, six years after Barnum's death. It was said to have turned up at a white eleaphant sale years later.
* A ventriloquist's dummy which was previously owned by a man found dead in his dressing room in 1923. He was found behind a locked door with no windows. Strangely, the coroner's report said the man was violently beaten to death and inexplicably, the marks on his body were the size of a child's fists.
The dummy was then given to the man's niece - who was soon killed when her house burned down.
Even the museum which bought it at an auction didn't have better luck. It blew up thanks to a strange gas leak. They dummy, according to the lore, was the only object saved from the fire.
All this might explain why, in the Carnival Diablo, the dummy is 'securely changed to a seaman's trunk", filled with 300 lbs. of lead shot.

But perhaps the oddest of the odd is McClelland himself. He plants himself at the end of the line in his row of freaks, where, from under the naked glow of a single bulb, he performs his shows of magic and mystery.
At first, he makes you feel safe with some friendly card tricks and slight-of-hand. Theyn he makes you twist in your seat - if you can trust your eyes - by piercing long needles through parts of his anatomy.
In a flash, he changes from the grinning midway barker who draws yo into the show, to the freak who makes you sorry for your stares.
McClelland knows what you want for the $5. He'll lead you down the garden path, through the locked gates of belief and into a world far different than the one you left behind.
You may not believe the sights he'll show you - and you may not even want to look at some of them - but you can't help wanting to know what possibilities are being reborn inside Carnival Diablo.