Two-Headed Babies and monstrous births of all kinds preserved in bottles with formaldehyde or alcohol were a mainstay of the show scene from a very early era.

Modern showmen coined the term picked punks, and it stuck. Various other names for these shows included “baby show,” “unborn show,” “bottle show.”

Lou Dufour made a career (and a fortune) by gussying up the pickled punk show into his famed “LIFE Show” beginning in the 1920s. Dufour’s LIFE Show at the 1933-34 Century of Progress world’s fair was rumored to be the highest grossing enterprise on the entire midway.

Captain Henry Boswell did the same in the 1940s, 50’s and 60s. As did Ward Hall in the late-60s and early-70s.

The showing of unborn babies in jars goes back to the earliest museums, including The Kunstkamera (or Kunstkammer; Russian: Кунсткамера) in Saint Petersburg Russia, established by Peter the Great and completed in 1727.

From the 1930’s, up until they were sporadically banned in the late-1960s and early-1970s, “pickled punk” shows were on nearly every carnival show in America. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s these shows were linked to drug abuse, citing the connection between the damage drugs caused to unborn children and the supposed chromosome damage caused by drug usage.

Later, and continuing into the 1990s, fake babies, made mainly of rubber, were displayed in jars. These specimens were called by showmen “bouncers,” and were manufactured from rubber and latex by entrepreneurial artisans who serviced the show trade.

Today, showing even bouncers will get you too much heat, and the few shows still on the road tend to shy away from these kinds of displays.