The Strange Encounter With a Carnival Magician That Inspired Ray Bradbury to Write

It began with a man bathed in electricity, reaching out towards a young child and commanding him to become eternal.

As Ray Bradbury told it, he was twelve years old when he met the carnival magician who gave him that lofty order. “I was in love with circuses and their mystery: I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico,” Bradbury said in an interview with biographer Sam Weller published in Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews.

Bradbury met this Mr. Electrico at a carnival called the Dill Brothers Combined Shows in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois in 1932. “He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity,” Bradbury continued. “Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, ‘Live, forever!’ And I thought, ‘God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?’” 

An electric encounter

That moment was only the beginning of an experience that would follow Bradbury for the rest of his days. The next day, according to the author, he was driving back from his uncle’s funeral with his family when he spotted the carnival spread out on the shores of Lake Michigan. He demanded that his father stop the car, and raced towards the tents and lights in the distance. “It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn’t I?” he recalled. “I was running toward life.”

There, he found Mr. Electrico and enlisted his help with a magic trick. The magician obliged, and then offered to introduce Bradbury to a group of carnival performers.

“He took me in, and the first person I met was the Illustrated Man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man!” Bradbury said. “I didn’t call him that, he was the Tattooed Man. I changed his name later for my book. But I met the Strong Man, I met the Fat Lady, I met the trapeze people, I met the dwarf and the skeleton. They all became characters later in my life.”

The strangest part of the encounter was still yet to come. The magician and the boy went and sat by the edge of the lake and talked, and suddenly, the older man turned to him and said, “I’m glad you’re back in my life.” 

“What do you mean? I don’t know you,” Bradbury replied. But the magician was undeterred. “Yes. You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the battle of the Argonne Forest and you died in my arms outside there, twenty-two years ago,” he told the child. “I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.”

The young Bradbury left the encounter both deeply moved and charged with inspiration. In his own words, this peculiar meeting marked the moment he became a writer. “Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed,” he said. “He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.”

He recounted the event similarly in his book Zen in the Art of Writing. “A few days later I began to write, full-time,” he wrote in his conclusion to the anecdote. “I have written every single day of my life since that day.”

The author often repeated variants of this story over the years. He also threaded it into much of his writing, working the carnival performers that he met there into many of his most famous stories. The encounter also directly inspired his novel named Something Wicked This Way Comes, which, of course, involves a carnival and two boys confronting mortality in the autumn of their childhoods. That novel also features a character named Mr. Electrico, who is hooked up to an electric chair as part of a terrifying carnival act. 

A magician lost to time

Scholars have never been able to find any substantial evidence of Mr. Electrico’s existence, and have also identified several discrepancies in Bradbury's narrative. The writer claimed to have met the man on Labor Day Weekend, the day before his uncle’s funeral. However, his uncle, Lester Moberg, was murdered during a botched robbery on October 17 and died on October 24, nearly a month later. Additionally, no evidence of a carnival or circus near Bradbury’s hometown in the weeks surrounding his uncle’s death has been unearthed. 

Because of this, Mr. Electrico has taken on something of a mythic position among Bradbury scholars. Some have wondered if the entire story was a fabrication. But other Bradbury scholars, such as Jason Aukerman, the director of the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis, believe the writer was telling the truth. “Knowing what I know of Bradbury, it seems very unlikely that he would make up this myth,” Aukerman said.

It is known that during Bradbury’s childhood, traveling magicians and circus performers sometimes performed wondrous feats with electricity, and occasionally also promised to work healings and wonders at the same time. It is also certain that the awesome power and wickedness of technology were on full display as Bradbury came of age. The author would spend the rest of his life writing about variations on this theme, creating an oeuvre of work in the process that has eternally cemented his legacy.

As for what made Mr. Electrico take such an interest in him, Bradbury himself theorized that it may have had something to do with his youthful attentiveness and energy. “Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live,” Bradbury said. “Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.”

Clearly, what happened that day changed Bradbury permanently. “When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, ‘Live forever,’” Bradbury recalled of that initial encounter with Mr. Electrico. “And I decided to.”