It seems that James Wong’s reminiscence of the Charlie Chaplin anecdote wasn’t totally correct. The story truly stems from the silent comic’s personal autobiography, written in 1964 and appropriately titled “My Autobiography.” Plainly Chaplin was spending a number of days within the Welsh city of Ebbw Vale, and on the second night time his host launched him to a person named Gilbert, who did have limbs, and who was residing beneath a dresser, not a cot.

“A half a person with no legs, an over sized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sickening white face, a sunken nostril, a big mouth and highly effective muscular shoulders and arms, crawled from beneath the dresser,” Chaplin wrote (through WalesOnline). “He wore flannel underwear with the legs of the garment reduce off to the thighs, from which ten thick, stubby toes caught out.”

This was Gilbert, and Chaplin’s landlord wished the entertainer’s recommendation about whether or not Gilbert might be in a circus. Chaplin mentioned he was “horrified,” and wasn’t capable of reply.

There’s an apparent streak of ableism in each Chaplin’s story and the “X-Recordsdata” episode that got here out of it, implying that the sheer picture of somebody whose physique defies typical norms is inherently terrifying. However the true horror is not within the bodily look of Gilbert or the Peacock household, it is within the conditions that surrounded them. The fictional Peacock brothers are violent murderers — that was the scary half. And poor Gilbert was clearly being mistreated, pressured to reside out of sight beneath a dresser, and is now finest remembered because the inspiration for a gory episode of tv.

So all people take a second to pay your respects to Gilbert, and keep in mind that on the coronary heart of each scary story, there’s a minimum of some actual humanity.