Wacky World of Wonders

By Mike Strobel

Step right up...
"Ladies , a warning! Hold on tight to your partners!"
The voice booms over the midway.
"Her alluring beauty has brought men with the strongest consitutions to their knees!
"She is ab-so-lute-ly be-oooootiful!"
Scott McClelland, 38 smiles on a bench beside me. The recorded voice is his. We watch Ex-goers stream into his Carnival Daiblo, World of Wonders.
Anthony Desantis, 13, and brother Philip, 9 stumble out the exit. "Mermaid's the freakiest thing," Anthony tells his waiting dad, Tony, 43, a school caretaker.
Is she real, Anthony? "I dunno," says the boy, "Might be a hoax."
Says his dad: "It's gotta be fake or some kind of scientific experiment. Otherwise it would be in all the papers.
"Was she in water, flopping around, or what?" "She's just a mummy, dad," says Anthony.
Scott McClelland smiles again. "Stuffed sea bass tail sewn on to a stuffed, shaved monkey," he tells me. So much for "be-oooootiful!" Just an old piece of bass.

P.T. Barnum himself foisted the Feejee Mermaid on America in 1842. Made millions on her. I suspect historians would dispute that the true original is today at the CNE midway, but what the heck.
It's a freak show, after all.
The experts also might have trouble buying into the ventriloquist's dummy that reputedly killed 10 people. (It is safely chained up in McClelland's trailer.)
But the two-headed pig sure looks real, albeit stuffed. So does the shrunken head of a medicine man who ran afoul of an Amazon tribe in 1830.

Got his wish.
And you can say howdy to the corpse of Clement Tiberius Sloane. He struck it rich in the California gold rush and got his wish of being mummified and displayed under glass. Now, he looks a little like he regrets putting this in his will. "As you look into the dead sockets of his eyes," says the sign, "imagine what stories he could tell,"
McClelland's story is quite something too.
His grandfather was carnival leglend "Professor" Nicholas Lewchuk, who ran a show out of Saskatchewan. He invented the teacup ride and a mechanicsm to make merry-go-round horses go up and down. He died at 103 in 1989.
Grandson Scott bought the freak collection. After seven years on the Conklin midway-starting as a haunted house barker-he launched his weird little museum last year.
It was a surprise hit. "They didn't think a freak show would work in the 21st century," he tells me, as a line snakes into the trailer.
Entry is four coupons-about $2.75. The Doppel Loop rollercoaster squeals nearby.
So why is a dead pig and a fishy mermaid packing them in, Scott?
"We live in a society based on Nintendo," he says. "People want something a little more real, more visceral."
A stuffed pig with three eyes and two snouts?
He shrugs. "Welcome to the 21st century. We now have The Osbournes."
True. But even that TV family might cringe at McClelland's home, a rented west-end mansion. There's a stuffed two-headed calf in the living room.

EATS LOCUSTS

Scott is trying to decide where to put the syphilitic body parts from Grandpa Nick's collection. (Before penicillin, syphilis could make your nose fall off.)
I hopehe rules out the dining room table.
There's also a Carnival Diablo stage show. A woman eats locusts and worms. A guy impales himself with bicycle spokes. McClelland's specialty is hammering nails into his head.
He used to play Russian Roulette with a buck knife. Until he miscued at a show in Edmonton in July and stabbed his hand. Bled like a stuck pig. It cut a tendon.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! See the man who can no longer snap his fingers!
"I love this life," he says, as the Ex pulses around us.
I head out into the din. I stop at one of those guess-your-age booths.
"Uh, 41," says Ricky Manson, 17.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! See the 47-year old man who passes for 41.
You wont believe your eyes!