A circus that displays people with abnormal or unusual oddities. Examples of such people include bearded women, Siamese twins, or in the case of The Saga of Darren Shan, a woman who can bite through steel, a man with two bellies, a
vampire and his
spider, a snake
boy, a man who is afraid of the ground, a monkey girl, et al. Legal back before television was invented.
A freak show back in those times had evil
con men rounding up people who had physical deformities, putting them in cages, paying the public to stare at them and forcing them to perform insane tricks that could
hurt or kill normal people who imitated them. The people who saw these freak shows were just as
disturbed as the people who ran them. These shows are now illegal because of the abusive nature, and the discrimination these performers faced because the public were conned into thinking that they were freaks, which meant that they were misunderstood by those who realized that they were entirely normal and that the real freaks were the people who ran these
human circuses. Although there are exceptions like American Horror
Story: Freak Show, and Cirque du Freak where there would be actual freaks running the shows, these were in the minority. Today, there might be shows like this which we call reality television, which displays people like
Abby and Brittany, who would have qualified to be in a freak show if they were around when those things were
legal. They are
scary depending on the acts that are performing.