One of the attractions that basically took circuses, fairs, and parks by storm in the early part of the last century was Olga, the Headless Woman. Over time she received names like Tina or Madame Yvette, but her essence remained intact: a woman, apparently headless, who could follow basic instructions and move far better than any robot.
Getting money out of people was not easy for the entertainment market in the early decades of the 20th century. In some cases, extremes were reached that the modern world outright rejects (animal abuse being at the top of the list, and we cannot forget the the "phenomena" of P.T. Barnum), but one of its main resources was illusion.
Olga, the Headless Woman
The story tells us that Olga's act came to the United States in 1937, brought from Hamburg by a man who called himself Doctor Heineman, also known as Egon Heineman, who had moved to England (where he had originally presented Olga) escaping from the "new" Nazi Germany.
What the audience first saw was Doctor Heineman accompanied by a nurse, but before that they learned Olga's "origin": a girl from Hamburg who ended up partially decapitated in a terrible accident while traveling on the Orient Express. One of the passengers on the train was "Doctor Landau" (a kind of analog of Doctor Frankenstein), who had carried out experiments with life-support systems. Landau managed to save Olga... but in the process he had to remove her head completely. The result was available to visitors for the modest sum of ten cents.
The appearance of Olga was disturbing: a series of tubes came out of her neck, connected to different jars with "liquid food and supplements" to keep her alive. People were particularly impressed to see that Olga could obey orders and move almost like a normal person. The most common action (after a brief indication from the nurse) was to remove one of her gloves, which managed to break the idea that she was a robot or a wax doll.
The explosion of popularity of the act (thanks to its appearance at the 1939 World's Fair) caused other events to copy it at full speed. In different places, Olga became known as Tina, Robin, and the sophisticated "Madame Yvette", of whom we have a video:
The act was convincing, and the public didn't feel cheated. So... how did they do it? What was the mechanism behind Olga, the Headless Woman? I imagine that the trained eyes of our readers have already detected a detail or two, but the official explanation is that the trick depends on two mirrors, placed in such a way that they form a "V".
The horizontal rods provide additional support, and the joining point of the mirrors is hidden in the central column with the tubes. All the actress has to do is place her head behind the "V", move her arms, and let the mirrors complete the illusion.
Other versions of Olga gave her a fake torso (so only the arms were real), as well as using dark backgrounds and hiding the horizontal rods by raising the chair or placing it slightly at an angle backwards.
Another very striking fact about this trick is its longevity. The available information suggests that Olga and her headless twins appeared for the last time in Canada around the year 1983, and even a version was present at the 2002 edition of Ozzfest... which frankly sounds very appropriate.
To finish, I would like to mention an act based on a similar but inverted concept. It is Spidora, the Spider-Woman, which presented the face of a beautiful woman "connected" to the horrible body of a giant spider. Personally, I'll stick with Olga, not because I have anything against spiders, but because her illusion was much more elaborate.
