Four years ago on Labor Day weekend a highly unusual group of individuals gathered in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to celebrate the colorful and freakish world that is Sideshow. The First Annual Sideshow Gathering brought together a most eclectic group of individuals and displays - giants and midgets, body modifiers, performers, artists and even displays of freak animals. Amidst the freakery was a newly born organization - the Sword Swallowers’ Association International - an organization that I co-founded. We proposed something both remarkable and absurd that weekend; to gather together the most sword swallowers ever in one location and to swallow the most swords ever swallowed at one time. We did just that.

With 19 of the world’s 50 odd sword swallowers flying in from around the globe we managed to collectively swallow 50 swords on stage that night. It was such an unusual event that it caught the attention of a wide array of media and allowed us to secure a Guinness World Record for our efforts.

Each year we have repeated the event, but never once did we break the record. With extremely busy schedules, the difficulties of travel and the far flung locations of the few remaining practitioners of this dangerous art, it has been a challenge to even come close to matching the number - until now.

Friday, September 2, 2005 saw nine - count them - nine sword swallowers taking to the stage at midnight with swords in hand. As with our first record breaking event a CPA was on hand to verify the count, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was present to witness the attempt, and the paperwork for Guinness was filled out and ready to go should we break the record. And as wild as it seems, we did just that.

Nine sword swallowers, fifty two swords and one new world record. It may be a while before we top that one, folks.

tags: guinness world records, pa, ripley’s believe it or not, roderick russell, sideshow gathering, sword swallowing, wilkes-barre

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 at Sep 06, 05 | 11:45 am and is filed under Roderick Russell News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.