Elmer McCurdy's Body Being Used as a Prop in an Amusement Park

Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880, to a single mother, Augusta Sadie McCurdy, in Washington, Maine. Growing up, his father was unknown to him, and he, therefore, lived with his mother and his extended family. After a troubled teenagehood as a drunkard, McCurdy became his mothers protector, and for this reason, he apprenticed himself as a plumber. However, at the age of 20, McCurdy lost his mother leaving him all by himself. To sustain himself, Elmer traveled west to Kansas where he plied his trade as a plumber and also worked as a miner. At the age of 27, he joined the army, where he learned about the use of weapons and nitro-glycerine for about three years. Elmer, however, arrived in Oklahoma, a couple of decades after the golden age of outlaws and here, he attempted to bring back to life, the long lost art of train robbing (Colby).

In the realm of his career as a robber, he particularly targeted banks and trains and in most cases, performed very poorly at it. His first steps toward being an outlaw were in 1910, when he, alongside his gang of friends attempted a robbery on a Pacific Express train. Notably, his mishaps often coincided with his clumsy use of nitro-glycerine which either blew up the money that he intended to steal or melted the coins altogether. After about a year full of his unsuccessful heists, McCurdy targeted to hold up a train that was supposedly carrying gold and property worth more than $400,000. Nonetheless, owing to his usual bad luck, he and his gang of friends targeted the wrong train where there were only able to steal the content from the passengers pockets and some whiskey (Candy guy). Later the following morning, McCurdy woke up only to find officers surrounding his hideout and after an ensuing shootout, his dead body was discovered shot in the chest.

Arguably, according to many scholars, it was only after McCurdys death that his career took off. As strange as this might sound, it evident that one of the primary reasons why McCurdy, despite having been an unsuccessful outlaw, is remembered is the fact that his corpse was mummified. Morton states that, immediately after his death, McCurdys body was taken to a funeral home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. However, time went by, and nobody claimed his corpse. This, in essence, saw the undertaker at that particular funeral home embalming the body with an arsenic-based perspective and charged locals a nickel to see The Bandit Who Wouldnt Give Up. According to historians, McCurdy is believed to have made more money in his death, than what he made his entire life. The fact that his corpse was well dressed up, the locals who went to view his body dropped nickels in the corpses open mouth, from where the undertaker would retrieve them for entrepreneurial purposes.

Many years went by, and still no next of kin showed up to claim McCurdys body and so the corpse continued to mouth nickels for quite some years. At this point, several carnival promoters approached the undertaker with the intentions of buying the stiff, but he turned all of them down since his corpse was indeed earning the funeral parlor, some good money. However, the undertakers lucrative scheme was suddenly cut short when some carnival promoters, who claimed to be McCurdys long-lost relatives showed up at the funeral home and requested to take with them, the corpse so that they could give him a decent burial. Their lies eventually sufficed, and within weeks, McCurdys corpse turned into a star attraction of a traveling carnival.

Similar to the undertaker at the funeral home, these carnival promoters perceived McCurdys corpse as a business opportunity for them. They, therefore, exhibited his body in different freak shows throughout Texas under the same billing used by the undertaker, The Bandit Who Wouldnt Give Up. According to an article by The Line Up Staff, McCurdys mummy began a sixty-year odyssey in different exhibitions where it was passed from one carnival to another and from show to show. The entrepreneurial use of McCurdys body culminated when he was once forfeited as security for a $500 loan and eventually displayed in a theatre lobby during showings of the Narcotic film in 1933. More fundamentally, for the better part of the 1930s and 1940s, McCurdys corpse was displayed in the Museum of Crime that was, then, owned by a former police officer known as Luis Sony. However, by the 1960s McCurdys memory of his original nature was forgotten and this saw his corpse being sold as a mannequin to a wax museum in 1971. Here, the corpse was used as a creepy funhouse prop in the NU-Pike Amusement Park.

The amusement trend continued for years, and thrill seekers crept up to the ghoulish figure without knowing that this was indeed the body of a dead man. The corpses stay at this amusement museum was short lived since in 1976; the secret was accidentally revealed by the Six Million Dollar Man, production crew that had set up their shoot inside this particular fun-house. More specifically, a member of the crew tried to move a dummy that was hung by a noose when an appendage despatched from the dummy, revealing both human tissue and bones. Although historians are not particularly precise about which part of the mannequins body detached from the corpse, there is evidence that this was McCurdys dead body after a coroner and a forensic anthropologist were tasked with examining these remains. The results of this particular forensic investigation confirmed that these were indeed human remains and also identified the mummified corpse to be that of McCurdy (The Line Up Staff).

Finally, in 1977, following an extensive amount of press attention, the McCurdys much-traveled corpse was eventually laid to rest at Summit View Cemetery in Oklahoma where an approximated 300 people attended the burial. Besides, to ensure that the corpse did not make its way back to the entertainment world, the state medical officer ordered that cement is poured over McCurdys coffin before the grave was closed. There, however, seems to be a vast range of agreement between researchers done by various scholars who substantiate that Elmer McCurdy was supposedly buried next to Bill Doolin, who was perceived as the real Oklahoma outlaw (Morton).

Works Cited

Candy guy. "ELMER MCCURDY - The Wandering Dead." Circus Freaks and Human Oddites, 1 Nov. 2008, www.thehumanmarvels.com/elmer-mccurdy-the-wandering-dead/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.

Colby, Christine. "Mummified Corpse Of Old West Outlaw Elmer McCurdy Discovered By "Six Million Dollar Man" Crew In 1976." CrimeFeed, 8 Dec. 2016, crimefeed.com/2016/12/mummified-corpse-old-west-outlaw-elmer-mccurdy-discovered-six-million-dollar-man-crew-1976/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.

The Line Up Staff. "Elmer McCurdy: The Outlaw Mummy of Oklahoma." The Line Up, 24 Dec. 2014, the-line-up.com/elmer-mccurdy-mummy-man.

Morton, Ella. "How a Real Corpse Ended Up in a Fun Park Spookhouse." Slate Magazine, 11 Apr. 2014, www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/04/11/the_corpse_of_elmer_mccurdy_and_how_it_ended_up_in_a_long_beach_fun_park.html. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.