Circus Secrets | Visit to Gibtown - Stories of the Supernatural

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hi everybody. This is Marlene with Miami Ghost Chronicles Stories
of the Supernatural, and I hope you enjoyed this new
show or whether you're viewing it on the Internet or
listening to a podcast version of the episode. I do
want to thank you for being part of my audience.
You can also find links to videos or podcasts on
Miami ghost Chronicles dot com, as well as where you

(00:38):
can submit your story about any airy experiences you've had
which I would love to hear about. Just go to
submit your storytap. Please subscribe to our channel so that
you receive notification of when we release a new show,
and find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And this
is where I usually live stream and where I give

(01:01):
you a behind the scenes look at locations where new
episodes are being filmed at. I also tell you about
all the interesting guests that will be appearing soon on
the Stories of the Supernatural. I hope you enjoy the
show and I think you are all wonderful. In Hillsborough County,

(01:28):
on Highway forty one, just ten miles south of Tampa
sits Gibsonton. Once known as the strangest town in America,
It's been called Gibtown or Showtown, USA. By it's nearly
fourteen thousand residents. It has always been the retirement or
wintering home of traveling show folks for over seventy years.

(01:50):
It's also the location of the International Independent Showmen's Association
and Gibtown's International Independent Showman's Museum. Wich houses a wide
assortment of antique equipment and exhibits that tell the Carnival story.
On the surface, Gibsonton appears to be yet another nondescript

(02:11):
backwater town, a town frozen in times since the Interstate
System replaced the original US highways. But Gibsonton has a secret,
a hidden identity to be discovered if one ventures down
the side streets of town. It is near the winter
home for the Ringling Brothers circus at Tampa, Sarasota, and

(02:34):
Venice in various times. Hi, everybody, this is Marley re
Mimimi goes chronicle stories of a supernatural and today I
have a show. You just saw me. Take a drive
through a very small town in central Florida called Gibsonton

(02:55):
and present day. If you drive through Gibson, you might
get an idea kind of what there is about this town,
but not really, and I wanted to go ahead and
tell you what the fantastic and intriguing story there is
behind the town of Gibsonton, which as I said before,

(03:19):
is just south of Tampa. A lot of mystery, a
lot of history also, and it's so fascinating that even
several shows and movies have used this town as a
backdrop for their stories. And I think you're going to

(03:40):
find it just as fascinating as I did. Now. During
the Depression, carnival and circus people would use this as
their winter home and what they would do is they
would park their trailers in their off season near the

(04:00):
Alafia River. Now, this was the days of the Big
ten and one side shows that what they featured would
be the human oddities like the Bearded Lady, Inferno the
fire Eater, Grace McDaniel's, the mule Faced Woman, Priscilla the

(04:21):
Monkey Girl and her husband he was known as Alligator
Man or Lizard Man, the Lobster family, and Dotty the
Fat Lady. Now, besides the great weather that Florida offered
during the winter, Gibsonton offered something very unique was that
they had a zoning law that allowed the residents to

(04:46):
keep elephants and circus trailers on their front lawn. This
was done to accommodate the majority of the residents that
thronged to this area because of how they made their living. Now,
in other places, these strange people would have met with
a degree of social rejection. But in Gibtown, as it

(05:09):
was known, they were treated as average people, first of all,
bonded by their nomadic lifestyle of the traveling show, and
just because they were in and of themselves, because of oddities,
because they might have some type of impairment, because they

(05:30):
would have been rejected by society at large during those times. Now,
in nineteen forty nine, there was a gentleman by the
name of al Tomiini, and he measured eight and a
half feet tall. He was considered a giant, and he
wore twenty two inch shoe size. Now, once he retired

(05:50):
from the road, he settled there in Gibsonton. Now he
had a wife named Genie who measured two and she
was billed as the half girl. Now, once they moved
there and they retired from going on the road, they
started a trailer park and a fishing camp that became

(06:12):
legendary among Tampa Bay fishermen known as Giants Camp Now
Alan Jeannie were known as the world's strangest couple. And
not only did he start that fishing camp, Al served
as Gibtown's police and fire chief, and he continued to

(06:33):
operate the fish camp until he died in nineteen sixty two. Now,
in its glory days, Gibtown had the only post office
in the United States with a specially made low counter
for midgets. Now, the local fruit stand was operated by
the fame Hilton Siamese Twins, and down at the Showman's lounge,

(06:57):
the late Melvin Burkhart would linen up the bar. He
would hammer six inch spikes of his nose on the road.
He had been known as the human blockhead and the
rubber faced man. Now, of course, because this is how
the majority of the residents made their living, every spring,

(07:18):
the town's population would draw by more than half as
they would go out to work the affairs and festivals
throughout the country. And it's probably the only place in
America where your local police chief was once a dwarf
and your former fire chief was over eight feet tall. Now,

(07:39):
like I said, Gibsonton really started becoming popular about seventy
years ago. This was during the nineteen forties. And you
have to understand back then, this area that they settled in,
which was right next to the river was yes, it
was south of Tampa, BA. It wasn't really that populated,

(08:02):
which is also I think what attracted them to stay there,
because not only could they make rules as they went along,
like what they did with the zoning, they were able to,
I guess, feel freer versus if they had moved to
a regular town or city. Now, the heyday of the

(08:28):
sideshow business was in the nineteen twenties, in the nineteen thirties,
and ever since then it's been declining because back then,
Carnival's sideshows were one of the few forms of entertainment
for small town America. Now, after World War Two, people's
tastes gradually became more sophisticated, and then that was the

(08:51):
introduction of movies and television and entertainment like what you
would see in a side show. They just could not compete.
And also it became politically incorrect to market people or
in other words, to exploit them because they had some
type of deformity. Now, the last of these sideshow people, freaks,

(09:18):
whatever you want to call them, because that's how they,
you know, build themselves when they went throughout the country.
This is how they made their living for many years.
Most of them are dying off. Genie Tomioni died in
nineteen ninety nine. Melvin Burkhardt he passed way in two
thousand and one, little by little. And when you drive

(09:44):
down through Gibsonton like I did, you might see some
of the residents that still store like carnival rides and
things like that, but mostly what you see is maybe
like broken down pieces of circuits equipment, but nothing like
what you saw on its heyday. And as to the

(10:06):
part that I said that, you know, sometimes some movies
and shows have taken inspiration from Gibsonton. One of the
examples is the fourth season of the series American Horror Story,
which was called Freak Show, and it took much of
its inspiration directly from this town. They called it Jupiter, Florida.

(10:29):
But indeed, because of course it was fictionalized, a lot
of the storyline. For example, one of them was based
on Lobster Boy in the Freak Show American Heart Story.
His name is Jimmy Darling. Now the show, of course
was set during the nineteen fifties, again when the freak

(10:50):
shows were on the decline, and of course this is
added to the drama of that show. And of course
you know all the people, all the characters now mentioning
that story about a Lobster Boy. Now we're going to
cross into, believe it or not, there was a murder

(11:15):
that was tied into a very long time family that
was involved in side shows, which was the Styles family.
And I'm gonna go ahead and get into that because
unfortunately it ended very very tragically for some of the
members of this family. Hi, everybody, So now we're going

(11:39):
to get into what's considered by many as I refer
to a tragedy that ended in murder, and not only
of one person, but of two people. And it started
in other words, there was so many signs along the

(12:01):
way that this was exactly where eventually this was going
to lead to. And mainly this deals with a man
named Lobster Boy. His real name was Grady Styles Junior,

(12:21):
and he was born into his family. The Styles family
were already involved in what they called the side show
or the freak show circuit. All right. He was born
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he really didn't get too much

(12:46):
of a choice of what he was going to do
with his life. He had a rare condition known as electrodactyly. Now,
this ailment, it's something that's genetic. It's where your fingers
are fused together and they give the appearance of having
claws instead of hands. And his family had been affected

(13:10):
by this since at least the eighteen forties, according to
what his own father claimed and of there's a fifty
percent chance more or less that offspring from one of
the parents will come out with this genetic trait. So

(13:31):
when he was born this way, by the time that
he was seven years old, his own father had introduced
him into the family business, which was touring the country
the side shows as the Lobster family. And he not
only had it on his hands, he also had it

(13:54):
on his legs, and which this forced him to use
a wheelchair. The thing was that they used this hereditary
condition to their advantage. His father had it, and he
called himself lobster manned. So when he brought in his
son at the age of seven, he gave him the

(14:15):
name or the Moniker of lobster boy, and so, like
I said, at a very young age, he was introduced
into and became a sideshow performer. Now, when they weren't
on the road, they would be living in Gibsons in Florida,
which where a lot of the other carnival performers would

(14:38):
spend the winners. And this is where all these different
performers basically knew all the other families there, including like
Al and Genie Tomiani, which was a sheriff, and they
had their fish camp. And in other words, they saw

(15:00):
how these families, even if they didn't tour together, they
all would come back and winter there. Now he grew up,
this was, in other words, his lifestyle. And when he
was very young, there was a young lady by the

(15:20):
name of Mary Teresa Stiles. Now she had run away.
She was a runaway. She came and tried to join
the circus because she had a very bad, a broken
home life, and the two fell in love. They were
very young, and they got married in nineteen fifty eight.

(15:41):
And what she did was that she got involved with
the sideshow life because she could there's a lot of
work there that doesn't necessarily have to be as a performer. Now,
the I think was that not too long after they
became married, she realized that, despite how sweet he was

(16:06):
during the time that they were courting each other, if
he drank alcohol, he became transformed into a very violence
and abusive man. And unfortunately, as more time passed by,
the more of an alcoholic that he became. Now because

(16:29):
he had the deformed legs, he had an extremely powerful
upper body and he was able to basically crawl even
if he wasn't in his wheelchair, and eventually his alcoholism
led into physical abuse of his wife, Mary Now. They

(16:53):
had two daughters before they divorced in nineteen seventy three.
Mary then went off married another sideshow performer named Harry
Glenn Newman, and he was billed as the World's Smallest man.
Now together they had a son called Harry Glenn Newman

(17:16):
the Third, who also became a performer in the show.
And what he would do is he would pound nails
into his nostrils and he became known as the human Blockhead.
This was his performance name. Now. In nineteen seventy eight,
one of Mary and Grady Styles's daughters, seventeen year old Donna,

(17:39):
tells her parents that she's pregnant, and she's going to
marry the young man that was responsible, the father the child,
and who she was in love with. Now Grety Styles
wants to meet him, and because he wants to talk
to him privately the day before the wedding. Now, when

(18:02):
this man arrives to meet with mister Styles, lobster boy,
what did he do? He shot and killed the eighteen
year old in cold blood, killed him. Now, later on Donna,
his daughter, said that her father sat on the porch

(18:23):
smiling and said, I told you I would kill him.
Of course, there was no doubt whatsoever that he was
the one that had committed the murder, and he went
to trial forward, he was convicted of third degree murder
and was sentenced to fifteen years of probation, mostly because
his deformities kept him from going to prison, as no

(18:47):
state prison it was equipped to deal with his physical needs. Also,
by this time he not only had the deform of
it ease that he had been born with, he was
suffering from sirrhosis from his alcoholism, as well as emphysema
from smoking pre packs of cigarettes a day. And at
this time he was only in his early forties, so

(19:10):
believe it or not, even though he was clearly clearly
guilty of killing a young man, the father of his grandchild,
in cold blood, because no prison felt that they could
house him or imprison him, he got off only with
fifteen years of probation. Now in the meantime, he goes

(19:35):
on and marries another woman and has two more children,
and despite the many, many years of physical abuse, well,
that second marriage that he has also ends in divorce,
and then him and Mary reconcile and marry again in

(19:57):
nineteen eighty eight, and of course lobster boys, promising to
marry that his drinking days are behind them, but of
course easier said than done, and soon after they remarried,
he was back to drinking whiskey, letting his temper get

(20:19):
out of control, and of course which resulted in physical
abuse against his wife. And at this point, not only
it becomes later on it becomes obvious that not only
did he abuse his wife, he abuses children as well
as they were growing up. And at this point Mary

(20:42):
was very scared of leaving her husband because she was
afraid of what he was going to do to their children,
two of who were born with the deformity the Electrodocylie.
Now for the next few years, she suffers in silence
because he he's drinking heavily, of course, every day, and he

(21:04):
inflicts on her physical and mental abuse again on a
daily basis. Now for her, the final straw came on
Thanksgiving week in nineteen ninety two, and later on you
know what ended in murder. She testifies that she wakes

(21:26):
him up and he's drunk, and he's holding a butcher
knife to her throat and he says to her, one
of these days, I'm going to kill you and your family,
but the time isn't right. And then what he did
was he crawled away. Now, two days later, on the
night of November twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two, she it's

(21:53):
a hold of a hit man. And what because at
this point and later on she testifies that she did
this under extreme duress because she's concerned not only for
her life, but mostly for the life of her children.

(22:13):
And what they do is that they hire someone to
come and shoot him. And what he does is he
creeps up behind Styles as he said, and his trailer
there in Gibsonton in his underwear, and this was an

(22:34):
eighteen year old by the name of Christopher Wyatt. He
also lived in Gibsonton, and they paid him fifteen hundred
dollars to kill Styles and he did just that. He
fired two shots into his head and Lobster Boy was
dead at the age of fifty five. Now, the three

(22:55):
people who were responsible for the murder, of course, they
were arrested, and the ones that they accused, of course
were married Teresa Stiles's wife and her son by the
other marriage, and the eighteen year old that they had

(23:15):
hired Christopher Wyant as the hit man. And of course
her defense was that if she hadn't killed him first,
she knew that he was going to kill her and
her family as well, based on the many years of
abuse that she had gone through. As a matter of fact,

(23:38):
during the trial, she said, my husband was going to
kill my family. I believe that from the bottom of
my heart. Now her what ends up happening is they're
all found guilty. They're all found guilty, and they all
received prison sentences. She was sentenced to twelve years, Harry

(24:02):
receives a twenty five year term, and Wyant was hit
with a twenty seven year sentence. Behind bars, But the
unlikely story of Grady Styles Junior aka Lobster Boy, remains
one of the most unusual American true crime cases of

(24:24):
the twentieth century, with one of the most unusual cast
of characters. So now we're gonna get to the good part.
And the good part is called the ghost stories, or
in this case, some urban myths. Now, this is a
story that's on the internet right now that comes from

(24:47):
somebody that lives in Gibsonton, and this is what they're retelling.
I've lived in Gibsonton for nineteen years. I live right
off US forty one on Crack Revenue. Night, me and
my roommate were walking down the street on our way
to the store, and as we got near US forty one,

(25:08):
we heard a loud scream. We looked around and saw nothing,
so we kept walking, and again we heard a loud scream,
and yet again we saw nothing. We were scared to
death and we started running. As we neared the ditch,
we saw what appeared to be a transparent woman in pieces.

(25:30):
Me and my friend looked at each other and we
turned back, but she was gone. We did some research
and there was a murder there twenty years ago where
they found a woman dismembered and put into pieces in
a trash bag. Now, I did a little bit of research,
and that story is absolutely true. Back in February of

(25:52):
two thousand and three, they did find the dismembered body
of a woman right there on Crackgrabb west of US
forty one. A few months later, her killer was identified
as her husband who after killing her, he used a
small kitchen knife and box cutter to cut her to pieces.

(26:16):
So that urban myth is absolutely true. Now let's go
on to another ghost story. A few years ago, I
lived in the basement of a house on Malvina Street
with my boyfriend. This was his mother's house and it
was at least over one hundred and twenty years old.

(26:38):
After living there a while, I realized that I never
felt alone. My boyfriend, George confessed something he hadn't told
me until then, which is that he had his own
experiences with the ghost. Right after moving in, he told
me his cousin Earl, had been staying with him and
they were both using the attic and said it had

(27:00):
two bedrooms up there. Right after staying at the house,
one night, he went to the bathroom, which was downstairs
and even though he was half asleep, he felt right
away that he wasn't alone. When he got down to
the bottom step of the stairway, he felt grab by

(27:21):
unseen hands all over his body, grabbing him really tight.
His screams brought all the family out of their bedrooms.
In the next few hours, he had bruises all over
his body. He was so scared that he slept downstairs
on the couch until they got a bed ready for him. Downstairs.
No more attic for him. Instead, he ended up sleeping

(27:46):
in the basement. This is when I came into the picture.
To me, the basement was always creepy and dark. I
kept hearing things that didn't make sense, and every once
in a while I would hear a shuffling step at
the other end of the basement. Even though I was
alone there, I could feel something brush up against my arm,

(28:10):
and sometimes I would smell cheap men's cologne. My boyfriend
said that that smell probably was his grandfather, who was dead.
Once I went upstairs to Earle's room in the attic
after having a fight with my boyfriend, Earle was hardly

(28:30):
ever home and I was alone there. This is when
I had my encounter with something really evil. Suddenly I
heard a creaking sound coming from some wooden floorboards right
next to the small sofa I was sitting on. I
was so scared I couldn't move, and then I saw

(28:53):
the imprint of someone sitting next to me on the cushion.
I was really scared, but I went into peer terror
when I felt pressure on my chest and arms when
I tried to get up. When I felt it lessen,
all I could do was scream for my boyfriend. That

(29:13):
was the last time I ever went to the attic.
Then one night, around two am, I started to hear
what I realized was circus music, like an old time
sideshow circus music. Then I heard kids laughing, and I
could feel the hair in my head stand up since

(29:37):
there were no kids living in the house. Suddenly my boyfriend, George,
who I thought was asleep, said do you hear that?
All I could say was yes. We were both so
scared that we didn't even dare to move. Finally it
stopped and we both fell asleep. The next morning, to

(29:57):
our surprise, George's mom angrily asked us why we had
company over at two am in the morning. She wanted
to know what was up with the music and hearing
children laughing. She was really angry, and normally she was
a very nice lady. Even when we told her our experience,

(30:17):
she didn't believe us. Eventually, Georgie's mom sold the house.
And even now I wonder if the people of that
body experienced the haunting the way we did. Why the circus,
music and the kids, I still don't know. And I
think that there was at least three or four spirits
living in that house. Maybe before the house was built,

(30:41):
when it was maybe just a field, some type of
circus had been erected there. So many things could have
happened that trap those spirits there. Now, the last story
is about a haunted location slash urban myth. Now the

(31:04):
location is in a town called Barriboo. It's in Suck County, Wisconsin. Now,
the history on this is that, or the story that's
behind this is that several years ago there was an
employee of the Ringling Brothers circus who owned property on

(31:25):
Wringling Road. Now, the reason why there's a Ringling Road
is that this is where the family that established the circus,
this is where they're from. Now, the story goes that
this employee, one day he murdered a couple of children
by throwing them into his well, and later on he

(31:47):
committed suicide by hanging himself. Now, the phenomena is that
there is a trail off of Wringling Road that leads
to a well, and the reports say that a white
image of a woman, supposedly the mother of the children
that were killed, can be seen visiting the well at night,

(32:10):
usually between midnight and three am. It also says that
beyond the well is a shack and inside the shack
is a stool that supposedly the man used to hang himself,
and of course he's supposed to be haunting the shack. Now,

(32:30):
from what I understand, several people have found through some
woodland offeringly road the actual well, and it's not like
a regular well. It's described as being made of stone,
and it's like a gazebus. It's about sits in the
middle of the woods. It looks like a little schoolhouse,

(32:53):
and it's got a pavilion and it's made of stone.
And about fifty yards past it where the well is at,
is the shack. Now, as to finding out whether this
any truth to the story about this circus employee who

(33:13):
killed the children and threw them in the well and
then killed themselves. I researched it, I couldn't find anything. However,
that doesn't mean anything happened, but and I don't know
if this might be the house in question. Back in
August of nineteen thirty three, a lady by the name
of Alberta Goldmar was butchered in the kitchen of her home.

(33:40):
She lived in the same little town of Baraboo. Now,
her husband and her had always been involved in the
circus business. That she had lived in Baraboo for over
thirty years, and she had survived, as a matter of fact,
a very famous circus train wreck that occurred in nineteen eighteen.

(34:03):
Now her husband had died nine years before, and she
used to live alone in this little house in Bearaboo. Now,
through all these years that she had been involved with
the circus business, her husband had owned a circus. She

(34:24):
had become familiar to a lot of the people in
the different circuses. As a matter of fact, for over
twenty years she would travel with her husband. But like
I said, he had died nine years before, so she
lived there alone. Now what happened was they found her
stabbed over fifteen times with a butter knife that was

(34:46):
found right next to her in the kitchen of the house.
The walls in the ceilings were splattered with blood. First
it was thought that it was robbery, only they could
only find the a coat was missing. Now the police
looked for connection between this crime and a robbery which

(35:08):
which had happened only a month before and about four
blocks away, where a former chauffeur for our Wringling from
Wringling Brothers fame was bruly beaten and robbed. However, within
less than forty eight hours, the killer, who happened to
be a painter who had been working near the Goldmar home,

(35:30):
was shot dead when he returned to his hotel room.
Police had staked him out and when he tried to run,
he was shot dead and several of her items were
found inside his room. Now, the question is is this
the house that is referred to by people that have
gone off of Wringling Road. Is there somehow or other

(35:54):
where one story was maybe made up to be another.
Who knows, or maybe that story about the guy that
killed the kids is actually true. But this is one
of the ones that I could find is absolutely factual
as to something that really happened there off Wrangling Road

(36:18):
Inbearable So any way, guys, thank you so much for listening.
You've been wonderful. Please don't forget to look me up
on Facebook, on Twitter. This is where I live stream
a lot. I've got a lot of wonderful shows coming
up for you. Guys. Thank you so much again for
being part of my audience.

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Circus Secrets | Visit to Gibtown

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