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

Some of Ray Bradbury's best-known works were inspired by a man named Mr. Electrico who told him to "live forever," and said he recognized him from a past

Curator's Note

A 12-year-old Ray Bradbury sat in the front row while a carnival performer called Mr. Electrico tapped him with an electrified sword and told him to “Live forever!” Bradbury said he started writing within days, and the encounter went on to shape The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Mental Floss looks at the story and at why scholars still can’t prove Mr. Electrico existed. It’s a great reminder that one moment with a performer can change the course of someone’s life.

Eden Gordon October 1, 2026 12:00 am Comment

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?’”

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