‘The Human Owl’: The Twisted Life of Sideshow Star Martin Laurello

Osteopathic conventions are not exactly hotbeds of excitement. But for the 300 or so medical providers gathered at a conference in Philadelphia in May 1926, the meeting would prove extremely memorable. In front of observers was Dr. Horace Flack, a former dean of the Philadelphia School of Osteopathy. Next to him was a guest who stood 5 feet, 5 inches tall, with a slicked-back shock of brown hair and an affable enough demeanor. His name was Martin Laurello.

Laurello positioned himself so his back was toward the audience and, at the prompting of Dr. Flack, began to turn his head. Like most people, there was no issue at 45 degrees. At 90 degrees, where the chin begins to meet the shoulder, he continued to rotate his head. To the astonishment of onlookers, Laurello kept going until, finally, his face was above his shoulder blades, an incongruous appearance normally seen only in cartoons.

Dr. Flack observed that such contortion should normally be present in the context of an accident, and that a person presenting as such was probably on their way to dying from a spinal injury. But Laurello seemed no worse for the wear.

In fact, it was just the opposite: Appearing as “the Human Owl” or “The Man With the Revolving Head” was no burden. It was Laurello’s primary source of income.

Sideshow Business

Once a fixture of traveling circuses and carnivals, the sideshow promised a lurid glimpse of participants with unique talents or physical characteristics. They were billed with names like Dirty Dora (“She eats mud!” promised one banner); Vicho, Strongest Man in the Galaxy; Leon Kongee the Human Pincushion; Johnny Eck the Half-Boy; and other self-explanatory attractions. It was possible to make a living this way, provided one was willing to travel the country or the world and tolerate a gawking public.

Martin Laurello was up for it. Born Martin Emmerling in Bavaria, Germany, in 1885, Laurello was initially a balance specialist and contortionist said to be so physically malleable he could squeeze through rungs on a ladder. A genealogy blogger, Lost2History, looked into Laurello’s murky history and found that he likely suffered a fall during a performance, injuring himself, which possibly led to a recuperative period in which he realized bone fractures permitted more flexion in his neck.

What is known for certain is that Laurello—who may have taken his stage name from his first wife, Laura—worked diligently at his parlor trick, practicing turning his head from side to side for hours each day and even rigging iron and leather straps to force further movement. By the end of the first year, he could tuck his chin over his shoulder. Come 1906, after another two to three years of studious exertion, he could reliably fix his head somewhere between 120 and 180 degrees, using his hands to complete the rotation. The effect was not without discomfort—he couldn’t breathe while he was contorted—but it was relatively simple to perform and proved a striking visual.

(Curiously, there are news reports circa 1906 of an “H. Costa” in Vienna who could align his face with his spine; he was examined by the German Medical Society of Prague. It’s not clear whether Costa was Laurello or whether two people with such a peculiar ability were in Europe at the time.)

After touring Germany, Laurello opted to head to the United States, taking the White Star Liner ship Olympic (sister ship to the Titanic) to New York in 1921. He wasn’t the only performer on the ship: “Three Swiss giants” and a “Hungarian … who tips the scales at 500 pounds” were also aboard.

Sideshows were experiencing a resurgence, and a person who could (in the words of one newspaper) “toe east and face directly west” was in demand. In America, Laurello had a job waiting with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus; he traveled with the troupe for a year, swiveling his head to gasps and applause. Sometimes, he’d mime a puff on a cigarette or down a beer—and on at least one occasion, a $1000 reward was offered to anyone who could duplicate his feat.

When news media caught sight of Laurello, the resulting publicity would be good for crowds, though their headlines were callous in the extreme. The phrases Circus Freak and Sideshow Freak were common. Laurello’s appearance at the osteopathic convention was described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “Circus Freak With Revolving Head Interests State Delegates.”

The crass language of the era was not lost on Laurello or other sideshow performers, who once gathered to scold Ringling Brothers and the media alike on the inhumane labels.

“The flock of human oddities who have long, and it was supposed amiably, endured the name of ‘freaks,’ met in rebellious mood in their [room] off the main entrance and did then and there draw up and adopt a set of resolutions having all the crackle of an ultimatum,” wrote The New York Herald in April 1922.

The performers’ mandate also mused, “We wonder if the public, whose attentions we welcome, but whose sympathy is intolerable, ever stops to think who are the freaks from our point of view.”

Neither Ringling nor the press was particularly receptive, and so Laurello and his colleagues continued to tolerate the slurs. (Their preferred label was “strange people.”) Laurello, however, would not do so under the Ringling banner for long. By 1924, he was operating with a traveling show promoted by a T.A. Wolfe. He took on a variety of names, including Bobby, the Boy With the Revolving Head, the Man With the Revolving Head, and the Human Periscope. In the earliest days of motion pictures, he was also captured on film for posterity.

Head of Entertainment

By the time he had arrived in America, Laurello was married for a second time, to Amelia Wittl; when she became pregnant with the first of their two sons, the couple settled in Coney Island, where they would remain for the next 30 years.

There was at least one rough patch in their union. In 1931, Amelia went to police in New York to allege that Laurello was guilty of spousal abandonment, leaving her with two children. She informed them that he was performing in Baltimore, Maryland. Police in New York advised their counterparts there that Laurello was wanted, and that he would be easy to find: He could turn his head halfway around his body.

Sure enough, police found Laurello performing on stage, a vaguely unsettling smile crossing his lips as he stared out at observers from the middle of his back. Laurello was arrested. He told a judge it was a misunderstanding: He was just traveling for work, having recently signed a new 32-week contract with a show. (“Sideshow Freak With Rotating Neck Arrested” was one indelicate headline.) He was released on $500 bond, and the couple soon reconciled.

Come 1933, Laurello was installed as part of a traveling exhibit courtesy of Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! fame. The couple’s two boys were said to be in “training” to replicate their father’s skill, though it’s not clear they ever made a public event out of it. (Instead, son Albert wound up losing his life after enlisting in the U.S. Army in World War II.) In 1940, Laurello was pictured along with several other “oddities” in the Ripley menagerie in Life magazine; six years later, he was said to have worked over 200 weeks for the company, sometimes accompanied by a “trained cat and dog act.”

Martin and Amelia remained married until Martin’s death, which has been pegged to various dates. Reflecting in her old age, Amelia herself believed it was 1958, but the reputable Billboard trade magazine reported Laurello as having passed of a heart attack in February 1954 (they don’t list an exact date, however, and it’s possible his passing came in 1953). There also remains relatively little conclusively known about what sort of physiological advantage he may have had. At the osteopathic conference, Dr. Flack observed Laurello could “displace” the vertebrae in his neck.

There are also curiosities relating to Laurello’s personal life. Census information examined by Look2History revealed that Laurello may have had six or more children, with four remaining in Germany. There’s also the matter of Amelia claiming in a 1976 interview that she and Martin arrived in the U.S. from Switzerland, not Germany.

It’s possible Amelia wanted to distance them from their German heritage in the wake of World War II. One of Laurello’s fellow performers, Percilla Bejano, claimed Laurello was a “Nazi” who “didn’t like the American flag.” No other evidence of such beliefs exist, however, and his son, Albert, fought against Axis forces in the war.

Sideshow acts persist today, albeit without the insensitive language Laurello and others petitioned to have stricken from the public discourse. Coney Island offers performances by fire-eaters, glass walkers, sword swallowers, and more. None, however, possess Martin Laurello’s unique ability to “toe east and face directly west.”

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