Terrifying & True | The Funhouse Mummy: Elmer McCurdy's Horrifying Tale This Halloween - Weekly Spooky: Scary Halloween Stories | Terrifying Tales to Creep Your Night

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
A carnival dummy wasn't a dummy at all. In nineteen
seventy six, a stunt arm snapped and a real bone
hit the floor. Arsenic in the tissues, a copper bullet jacket,
and a nineteen twenty four penny all pointed to a
dead outlaw, Elmer McCurdy, who toured America for sixty six years.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
What you were about to beat you is burd to
be you based on witness accounts, testamties, and public record.
This is terrifying and treat.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Tonight, Long Beach, California, nineteen seventy six, neon wash dark Ride,
a routine shoot until a dead body prop reveals human bone.
Investigators trace arsenic in balmy, a bullet's metal jacket, and

(01:15):
carnival tickets across six decades of exhibitions. Who was this man?
How did an outlaw's body become a sideshow attraction? Our
search leads from a botched Oklahoma train robbery in nineteen
eleven to a concrete sealed grape in nineteen seventy seven.

(01:38):
Join us as we untangle the forensics and the cons
of the funhouse mummy. It sounds like an urban legend,

(01:59):
A cree be Carnival Mannikin turns out to be a
real human corpse. In nineteen seventy six, this myth proved
horrifyingly true. A prop hanging in a Long Beach amusement
park funhouse was discovered to be an actual mummified body,

(02:24):
one that had toured the country for decades. The truth
behind this fun house skeleton is more bizarre and disturbing
than just about any ghost story, made all the more
chilling by the fact that every word is true. In

(02:45):
December of nineteen seventy six, a camera crew for the
television program The Six Million Dollar Man set up at
the Pike, a Seaside amusement park in Long Beach, California.
They were filming inside an old dark ride called Laugh
in the Dark, one of the Pike's vintage haunted house attractions,

(03:09):
filled with glow painted skeletons and spooky props. For decades,
the Pike had been a Coney Island style funfare by
the sea, known for rickety roller coasters, side shows, and
arcades lit by a thousand lights, though by the nineteen

(03:31):
seventies its glory days had faded into seediness. As the
crew arranged their shots amid the cobwebbed scenery, one member
noticed a garish, emaciated dummy dangling from a gallows in
a corner, a figure long assumed to be just another

(03:53):
cheesy prop. While adjusting the set, an art director grabbed
the Mannikin's arm to move it, and the arm snapped
off in his hand. To his horror, the detached limb
wasn't made of plaster or paper mache, but of real

(04:15):
bone and desiccated human tissue. In that chilling moment, the
crew realized this was no Mannikin at all. It was
a mummified human corpse hanging from the noose. The funhouse
prank had become a real life nightmare. Production, of course,

(04:40):
ground to a halt as police and firefighters rushed to
the scene. Paramedics arriving on the set initially thought it
was some morbid prank about severe dehydration, but they quickly
saw the joke was on them. The Los Angeles County

(05:02):
Coroner's Office took custody of the body to determine its identity.
Under the glare of real forensics, the flaking corpse began
giving up its secrets. Medical examiners noted the body was
petrified and shrunken. Once a man of perhaps average build,

(05:26):
now a fifty pound five foot three inch mummy, nearly
skeletal in places. The remains had endured significant wear. The
ears and some fingers and toes were missing, likely broken
off over time, and a gruesome hole had been drilled

(05:48):
through the neck, presumably to hang it on the rope
that still oozed an ugly yellow puss like goo. Inside
the cadet chest, coroners found the apparent cause of death,
a copper jacketed bullet lodged in the tissue, the kind

(06:11):
of ammunition used in the early nineteen hundreds. Clearly this
person had been dead for a very very long time.
The most telling clues, however, were discovered stuffed in the
corpse's mouth. Wedged in the jaw were some old ticket

(06:33):
stubs and a corroded nineteen twenty four penny. One ticket
bore the name Lewis Sonny's Museum of Crime, and another
was a ticket for the Pike Amusement Park. These bizarre
artifacts confirmed that the body had been exhibited as a

(06:55):
side show attraction in the past. Investigations were baffled. Who
was this mystery mummy and how had he ended up
painted neon red and strung up in a carnival funhouse.
With these clues on hand, police put out a press

(07:16):
release seeking the public's help in identifying the body. The
news flashed across the country. A real human body had
been found masquerading as a haunted house prop. As macabre
as it sounded, it was all too real. Soon a

(07:39):
group of history buffs over a thousand miles away would
crack the case and finally give this soul a name.
When the truth emerged, the funhouse corpse was identified as
Elmer J. McCurdy, and Oklahoma outlaw, who died in nineteen eleven,

(08:03):
sixty five years earlier. His life was as troubled as
his after life was bizarre. Born on January first, eighteen
eighty in Maine, McCurdy had an unstable upbringing and drifted
west in early adulthood. He worked odd jobs as a

(08:26):
miner and plumber, but chronic alcoholism and misfortune dogged him.
In nineteen ten, Elmer fell in with a loose gang
of train and bank robbers on the frontiers of Oklahoma
and Kansas. He fancied himself a demolitions expert, having learned

(08:48):
to use nitroglycerin during a brief stint in the army,
but in practice he was utterly inept. McCurdy's short career
as an outlaw turned into a comedy of errors. In
one attempted safe cracking, he used too much nitroglycerin and

(09:08):
obliterated the safe as well as the money inside, fusing
silver coins to the safe's metal floor. In another incident,
he used too little explosive, failing to blow the safe
open at all. His most famous blunder, however, came in

(09:36):
October of nineteen eleven, when McCurdy and some accomplices tried
to rob a train supposedly carrying four hundred thousand dollars
in cash. They stopped the wrong train and instead escaped
with only forty six dollars, two jugs of whiskey, and

(09:59):
a few person items, including the train conductor's comb. It
was a pitiful haul that would soon become McCurdy's final crime.
Elmer McCurdy went on a whiskey bender after that botched heist,
Hiding out in a hay barn in Oklahoma with his

(10:21):
meager lute. At dawn on October seventh, nineteen eleven, he
awoke to the barking of bloodhounds and the realization that
a sheriff's posse had tracked him down. You'll never take
me alive, McCurdy supposedly yelled, a vow that earned him

(10:43):
the posthumous moniker of the Bandit who Wouldn't give Up.
A gunfight erupted and lasted an hour. McCurdy managed to
wound a deputy, but in the end he was killed
by a posseman's bullet in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma.

(11:04):
With no known family or friends to claim his remains,
the Bandit's body was turned over to a local undertaker.
At this point, McCurdy was just another anonymous outlaw who
met a violent end, but his story was about to
take an even more bizarre turn. After his death, no

(11:31):
next of kin came forward for Elmer McCurdy, so his
corpse ended up at Johnson's funeral home in paw Huska, Oklahoma. There,
an industrious undertaker named Joseph Johnson decided to make the
most of McCurdy's notorious corpse using an arsenic based preservation fluid,

(11:55):
a potent embalming method common in that era. Ilmmafied the
body to prevent decay. Mccurty's embalmed features were reportedly so
well preserved that he almost looked alive aside from the
leathery tanned skin. Sensing morbid curiosity from locals, the undertaker

(12:21):
propped the cadaver up in a back room and put
it on display for visitors five cents a look, the
equivalent to one dollar and seventy cents in twoenty twenty five.
Curious spectators would drop a nickel into the dead man's

(12:41):
mouth in exchange for a gander at the embalmed bandit.
As he was advertised. For five years, mccurty's body stood
in the funeral parlor, wearing street clothes and holding a rifle,
drawing gaping crowds and steadily pocketing coins for the undertaker.

(13:04):
As gruesome as it sounds, displaying corpses of outlaws was
not unheard of at the time, but Elmer's extended post
mortem career was just getting started. In nineteen sixteen, two
men arrived from California, claiming to be Elmer McCurdy's long

(13:25):
lost brothers, wanting to give poor Elmer a proper burial.
In truth, however, they were con men, James and Charles Patterson,
owners of a traveling carnival called the Great Patterson Shows.
The undertaker, likely tired of babysitting a corpse, released McCurdy's

(13:49):
body to these supposed relatives. Within weeks, visitors to a
carnival in West Texas were paying admission to see the
mummified Oklahoma outlaw on display. McCurdy had been effectively kidnapped
by carnees and turned into a money making sideshow attraction.

(14:14):
For several years, Elmer McCurdy's embalmed remains toward the carnival
and County fair circuit. The Bandit who Wouldn't Give Up
was exhibited alongside sword swallowers, so called freaks and curiosities,
a genuine mummy for profit. By the early nineteen twenties,

(14:39):
McCurdy's corpse had changed hands again. A failing carnival pawned
the well traveled cadaver in order to cover a debt,
leaving it as collateral for a loan of five hundred
dollars that went unpaid. The new owner was Lewis Sonny,

(15:02):
a California showman who ran a traveling museum of crime
featuring wax effigies of famous Outlaws. Elmer McCurdy, an actual
preserved outlaw, became Sonny's star exhibit in Lewis Sonny's Traveling
Museum of Crime. Around nineteen twenty two, Sonny dressed the

(15:26):
body in cowboy garb and gave it top billing as
a real Wild West bandit, dubbing it the Outlaw who
would Never be captured alive, and then the Embalmed Bandit,
among other colorful names. Patrons paid to gaze at McCurdy's

(15:46):
remains in an ornate coffin while Sonny spun thrilling tales
of gunslinging and mayhem for the crowds. Demand was strong.
People in the nineteen twenties flocked to see morbid curiosities,
and McCurdy's corpse Chris crossed the country, raking in profits
at carnivals, state fairs, and amusement shows. For years, mccurty's

(16:13):
corpse logged more miles dead than he ever had alive.
In nineteen twenty four, it even rode along with the
Great Trans American Foot Race side show, a grueling cross
country race event, and over that decade it popped up
at venues from Los Angeles all the way to Mount Rushmore. Notably,

(16:35):
during a tour through the Midwest, the Outlaw's body returned
to Oklahoma the very state of his demise, as part
of a traveling show. According to one account, the very
lawman who had killed McCurdy in nineteen eleven, Sheriff Bob Fenton,
showed up to quietly view the corpse. He simply stared

(16:58):
at the embalmed body for a moment and walked away
in silence. As the corpse's fame grew, its true identity
sometimes blurred into legend. Carnival promoters were not shy about

(17:21):
fabricating wild stories around the mummy in order to entice audiences.
One sideshow talker claimed the mummy was an ancient bandit
who had drank a magical poison that preserved his body.
Another one promoted it as the remains of a dope

(17:42):
fiend killed by narcotics, whatever sensational tale might fit the
venue's theme. Despite all the hype, those who had known
of McCurdy's history occasionally stumbled upon the exhibit and recognized
it for what it was, correcting the record when they could.

(18:04):
In one amusing incident, the original Undertaker's own son, Luke Johnson,
attended a carnival side show in the late nineteen twenties
and heard the showman pitching a tale about a mummified
outlaw preserved by poison. Luke realized it was McCurdy on
display and set the barker straight. By the nineteen thirties,

(18:29):
old fashioned side shows were waning in popularity, but Elmer
McCurdy still found an audience in new forms of entertainment.
Lewis Sonny moved into filmmaking, producing lurid exploitation films to
cater to the public's continued appetite for the macabre. In

(18:52):
nineteen thirty three, Sonny even lent McCurdy's body to promote
a drugs and crime expose film called Narcotic nineteen thirty three.
Theater goers in Los Angeles that year were greeted by
the sight of McCurdy's withered corpse propped up in lobby displays,

(19:12):
falsely touted as a cautionary example of a criminal dope
addict who met a bad end. By now, the once
intact corpse had visibly mummified and shrunk, and it was
likely coated in wax or paint to appear more lifelike

(19:33):
Under lights. World War II brought an end to the
golden age of freak exhibits, and after Lewis Sunny died
in nineteen forty nine, the Mummy spent long years packed
away in Los Angeles warehouses collecting dust, while ownership passed

(19:53):
to Sunny's Sun in the nineteen sixties. Mccurty's corpse emerged
from the mothballs for a brief comeback in nineteen sixty
seven with a cameo in a low budget carnival horror movie,
She Freak nineteen sixty seven. Some would call the film
forgettable schlock, but if you look carefully, you can spot

(20:18):
the gaunt, shriveled face of Elmer McCurdy in a quick
montage a disturbing little Hollywood footnote to his post mortem journey.
By nineteen sixty eight, Sonny's heirs were finally ready to
unload the aging corpse. They sold it, along with a

(20:39):
bunch of old wax figures, to a new owner, reportedly
Spoony Singh, founder of the Hollywood Wax Museum. Though Singh
was buying on behalf of two other entrepreneurs, the wax
museum crew may not have realized one of their wax

(21:01):
dummies was an actual human mummy. McCurdy was by then
covered in layers of wax and bright paint. In any case,
the body was deemed too grotesque and decomposed for the
main Hollywood Museum, and was quickly resold to a lesser attraction.

(21:25):
It ended up with a pair of men who ran
a haunted house exhibit at Long Beaches New Pike Amusement Park,
better known simply as The Pike. By nineteen seventy one,
McCurdy's unlucky corpse had been incorporated into the Pike's Laugh
in the Dark ride, literally becoming part of the scenery.

(21:49):
The proprietors painted the mummified body a fluorescent orange red
so that it would glow under black light, mounted it
to a fake coffin with a rig to make it twitch,
and hung it from the rafters as a grizzly gallows prop.
One worker later recalled that when he drilled a hole

(22:11):
in the corpse's foot to secure it, quote, some yellow,
almost gooey stuff came out, likely old bodily fluids or
embalming seepage from the decades old cadaver. For about four
or five years, amusement park visitors in Long Beach unknowingly

(22:34):
rode past the real body of Elmer McCurdy, assuming it
was just another cheap scare prop. Little kids on the
ride even brushed against it in the dark, never realizing
the dummy swinging above them was once a living man.

(22:55):
It wasn't until that TV crew's accidental discovery in late
nineteen seventy six that McCurdy's body finally left the carnival
circuit for good. Elmer McCurdy's post mortem odyssey might be
the most infamous, but it's not entirely unique. In the

(23:17):
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America had a lurid
fascination with the display of outlaws, corpses, and mummified curiosities.
The heyday of the Dime Museum saw showmen like P. T.
Barnum and others drawing crowds to see sensational oddities for

(23:40):
a mere ten cent ticket. These low cost museums and
traveling carnivals eagerly catered to the public's morbid curiosity. By
the early nineteen hundreds, it wasn't just freak animals or
faux mermaids on display, crime exhibits and side shows increasingly

(24:02):
featured the actual remains of infamous criminals or convincing fakes,
blurring the line between education spectacle and desecration. Carnivals, side
shows and museum of crime exhibits often touted human remains

(24:23):
or mummies as star attractions to boost ticket sales. As
one contemporary newspaper noted in nineteen fifteen, all sorts of
mummies were popular side show attractions at the time. It
wasn't always possible for audiences to tell a real body

(24:43):
from a clever fake. For example, displaying the corpse of
a notorious bandit for paying crowds might sound ghoulish today,
but in the Old West era it wasn't unheard of.
Lawmen and carnival men alike sometimes treated dead outlaws as

(25:04):
public attractions. In fact, when McCurdy was laid to rest
finally in nineteen seventy seven, he was buried near the
grave of Bill Doolin, a famous Oklahoma outlaw shot dead
in eighteen ninety six, whose body had been preserved and

(25:26):
briefly exhibited for public viewing. This practice of exploiting the
dead had precedent, even if McCurdy's sixty six year tour
was an extreme case, to say the least. Perhaps the
closest rival to McCurdy's Traveling Corpse in American lore was

(25:47):
the purported John Wilkes Booth Mummy. Decades after President Lincoln's
assassin was killed in eighteen sixty five, a mummified cadaver
surfaced that carnival promoters boldly claimed was Booth's body. Starting
around the nineteen twenties and into the nineteen thirties, this

(26:10):
supposed Booth Mummy toured with carnivals and side shows, drawing
the morbidly curious, even though its true identity as Booth
was highly dubious. In reality, the mummy was widely believed
to be the embalmed remains of an Oklahoma drifter named

(26:30):
David E. George, who had committed suicide in nineteen oh
three after allegedly confessing to being Booth under an alias.
The legend of the Booth Mummy grew so popular that

(26:50):
Life magazine ran a feature on it in nineteen thirty eight,
noting that it had changed hands many times and that
nearly every every proprietor had suffered financial ruin or worse,
giving rise to the rumors that the Booth Corpse carried
with it a curse. Sideshow customers in the thirties paid

(27:14):
twenty five cents each to gaze upon the shriveled figure
of Quote John Wilkes's booth. While skeptics pointed out there
was no solid evidence of its authenticity, Carney promoter's even
invited examinations. One photo spread showed a sheriff taking the

(27:35):
mummy's fingerprints, but as Life dryly observed, this proved nothing,
since no verified prince of Booth existed for a comparison.
In another instance, the showman's wife displayed X rays of
the mummy's broken leg, hoping to match it to Booth's

(27:56):
known injury, while a surgeon and an optomical tryst publicly
dueled in the press over whether the mummy's facial features
matched Booths. In the end, the Booth Mummy was never
conclusively proven to be the assassin's body, and its trail
eventually disappeared into carnival legend. That sensational tale illustrates how

(28:22):
far showmen would go, even concocting elaborate historical hoaxes in
order to profit from a well preserved corpse. Mccurty's case, however,
stands out. It's one of the few times such a
sideshow mummy was indisputably identified and reclaimed after decades as

(28:46):
a curiosity. Elmer mccurty's body was removed from the circuit
and treated for once, not as an artifact, but as
a human being who deserved to rest in peace. This long,
strange chapter of carnival culture highlights a once common subculture

(29:08):
of exploitation. For early twentieth century side shows, nothing seemed
off limits. Even human bodies could become carnival commodities. The
corpses of outlaws were seen as marketable curios. They satisfied
public fascination with the macabre and offered a tangible, albeit

(29:30):
grotesque connection to the Wild West's lurid legends. Sideshow promoters
frequently concocted new legends in order to rebrand these remains,
as seen when McCurdy's handlers fabricated those wild stories about
the poised outlaw, the drug addicted bandit, and the one

(29:52):
thousand year old mummy, etc. To keep crowds coming and paying.
Ethical boundaries were scant. By the time McCurdy was hanging
in that Long Beach funhouse, people had literally forgotten that
the gaudy, abused object was once a man. The revelation

(30:15):
of the funhouse corpse in nineteen seventy six forced a
modern public to reckon with the ghoulish legacy of these practices,
and it arrived just as attitudes towards such displays were
dramatically changing. Once the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office had

(30:36):
Elmer McCurdy's remains and the clues from his body, investigators
and forensic experts began piecing together his identity. Doctor Joseph Choy,
the Department Medical Examiner, conducted an autopsy and confirmed the
body was mail and had died of a gunshot wound

(30:59):
to the chest. While the original bullet had presumably been
removed back in nineteen eleven, Choi found the copper bullet
jacket still lodged in the tissue. Crucially, the jacket had
a gas check, a small metal disc on the bullet's

(31:19):
base designed to prevent barrel corrosion, which was a type
of ammunition used only from about nineteen oh five until
nineteen forty. Tests on the tissue, meanwhile revealed high levels
of arsenic, indicating the corpse had been embalmed with an
arsenic based fluid, a practice common before the late nineteen

(31:43):
twenties but discontinued soon after. These clues immediately suggested a
death decades earlier in the early twentieth century, aligning with
the era hinted at by the nineteen twenty four penny
and old ticket stubs found in the body. The penny

(32:05):
and ticket stubs proved to be invaluable in cracking the mystery.
Investigators gently removed the fragile ephemera from the mummy's mouth
and examined them closely. One ticket bore the name Lewis
Sonny's Museum of Crime, which of course rang a bell.

(32:26):
Sonny's Traveling Crime Museum had been fairly well known in
the nineteen twenties and thirties, the other ticket being for
the Pike Amusement Park itself. The presence of those stubs
was a strong hint that the body had once been
exhibited in Sonny's side show. Detectives contacted Dan Sonny, Lewis

(32:55):
Sonny's son, who confirmed that years ago his father's show
had indeed featured a mummified outlaw corpse named Elmer McCurdy.
This was the first time the name Elmer McCurdy had
surfaced as a serious candidate for the anonymous mummy, but

(33:17):
still the authorities needed solid proof. Meanwhile, news of the
Funhouse Mummy made headlines nationwide. Over a thousand miles away
in Oklahoma, a group of amateur historians in Guthrie read
the story with astonishment. Among them were Bill Lehman, a

(33:40):
local history buff, and Fred Old's, curator of the Oklahoma
Territorial Museum. They were well versed in the old outlaw
tales of their region, and as soon as they heard
about an unidentified, embalmed corpse found in California, had a
strong hunch it was McCurdy, the outlaw whose unburied body

(34:06):
had disappeared from paw Huska in nineteen eleven. Olds contacted
the La County Coroner's office and explained the Oklahoma connection.
Eager to help, he and his colleagues offered to assist
in confirming the identity and even ensure the outlaw would

(34:27):
receive a proper burial back in Oklahoma if indeed it
was McCurdy. Before the coroner could release the body, however,
they would need to conclusively verify that the mummy and
Elmer McCurdy were one in the same In early nineteen

(34:48):
seventy seven. A team of forensic specialists from California and Oklahoma,
including renowned forensic anthropologist doctor Clyde Snow, collaborated on the identification.
This was pre DNA era, so they relied on old
fashioned detective work and anatomical analysis. The corpses mandible or

(35:14):
lower jaw, was removed for closer study. The team carefully
compared the remains to any record of McCurdy's appearance. Remarkably,
McCurdy's nineteen eleven post mortem photograph taken by the undertaker
before embalming, still existed in archives, as did some of

(35:36):
the descriptions of distinguishing marks on his body. Doctor Snow
took radiographs or X rays of the mummy's skull and
employed a technique called photographic super imposition, essentially projecting and
scaling the old photo over the X ray to see

(35:58):
if the features aligned. They did. The skulls, contours and
dentitian matched mccurty's portrait perfectly. Beyond that, the medical exam
had noted certain scars and even bunians on the corpse
that corresponded to injuries. McCurdy was known to have had

(36:20):
in life. After cross checking every clue, the bullets era,
the embalming chemicals, the tickets and penny, the physical match
of skull and scars, the investigators were finally satisfied. In
late March nineteen seventy seven, the Los Angeles County Coroner

(36:42):
officially identified the body as Elmer J. McCurdy. The lost
outlaw had finally been found. Mccurty's remains were released to
the Oklahoma group, but the question remained what to do
with him now. This bizarre story had garnered national attention,

(37:06):
and many felt McCurdy deserved a proper burial and that
his grave site should be protected from any future profiteering.
The city of Guthrie, Oklahoma, stepped up. In February nineteen
seventy seven, Guthrie's City council agreed to provide a burial

(37:27):
plot in the local boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery,
an area where other famed outlaws from the territorial days,
like Bill Doolan, are interred. It was partly a gesture
of respect to finally lay the wanderer to rest, and
partly Guthrie embracing a strange bit of wild West history. However,

(37:52):
belated as its own. On April twenty second, nineteen seventy seven,
Elmer McCurdy was finally buried with full funeral rites in Oklahoma,
sixty six years after his death. The Outlaws send off

(38:12):
was as theatrical as anything in his life. A horse
drawn nineteenth century hearse carried his pale blue coffin to
the cemetery, followed by a procession of local lawmen and
Western history enthusiasts in period costume. It was a rainy morning,

(38:34):
and some three hundred people attended McCurdy's belated funeral, far
more mourners than he ever had in life. Perhaps they
came out of curiosity, or to pay respects, or simply
to witness the final chapter of this incredible saga. As

(38:56):
one commentator Riley noted, it was likely the most love
Elmer McCurdy ever got in life or death. After the
graveside eulogy, McCurdy's coffin was lowered into the earth next
to the outlaw Bill Doolin and two other Old West bandits,

(39:18):
as if reuniting him with the rogue's gallery of his
own era, to ensure McCurdy's body would never go wandering again,
officials took an unusual precaution. They in teared him under
two feet of concrete, effectively cementing his grave closed. This

(39:41):
concrete cap was intended to deter any would be grave
robbers or enterprising carnies from digging up the embalmed bandit
for display. By the late nineteen seventies, such an extreme
step might not have been necessary. Times had changed, and

(40:02):
so at attitudes toward human remains, But after all McCurdy
had been through, no chances were taken. In truth, the
era that allowed McCurdy's corpse to be trafficked had already
come to an end. By the mid twentieth century, laws

(40:28):
and ethical standards had evolved significantly. The idea of buying
or exhibiting a human cadaver as entertainment had become not
only abhorrent to the public, but largely illegal. Carnival side
shows as a whole were a dying breed, and legitimate

(40:49):
museums were re examining how they handled human specimens. For example,
the Denver Museum of Nature and Science took its last
Native American skeleton off display in nineteen seventy out of respect,
and ceased exhibiting human remains in that way entirely. The

(41:10):
McCurdy affair in nineteen seventy six and seventy seven served
as a grotesque cautionary tale that underscored the need for oversight.
Many were rightfully astounded that a human body could have
been bought and sold like a prop for six decades
without anyone intervening. In the aftermath, museum curators and amusement

(41:36):
park operators indeed became far more vigilant. They instituted policies
to verify that any dummies or medical specimens on display
were not actual people unless properly authorized for educational purposes.
The abuse of unclaimed bodies, which had waned by the

(41:59):
nineteen seventies, was now firmly condemned. Most states strengthened or
enforced regulation requiring that unclaimed corpses be buried or donated
for scientific and medical use, not kept as sideshow collectibles.

(42:20):
While no specific Elmer McCurdy law was passed, the public
conversation around his case reinforced a modern consensus human remains
deserve dignity, and what happened to McCurdy should never happen again.

(42:40):
Elmer McCurdy's post mortem misadventures had secured him a peculiar
kind of immortality in American pop culture. His story, often
dubbed the Corpse that Wouldn't Quit or the fun house Mummy,
has been retold so many times that its entered the

(43:00):
realm of modern folklore. For years, people swapping spooky stories
around campfires or at slumber parties would insist one time
a real dead body was found in a carnival haunted house.
It's exactly the sort of eerie tale that would be

(43:21):
an urban legend, except in this case it's true. The
tale of McCurdy's wandering corpse has since inspired books, songs,
and screen adaptations. In fact, the strange saga directly influenced
the creation of at least one fictional character in comic books,

(43:45):
Jonah Hex, a DC comic's Western anti hero. In a
nineteen eighties Jonah Hex's storyline, the title character's body is
stolen after his death and carded around as a traveling attraction,
a narrative almost identical to McCurdy's true story. This was

(44:06):
no coincidence. The writers have cited McCurdy's history as inspiration
for Jonah Hex's post mortem exploits. McCurdy's story has also
seeped into Hollywood and theater in other ways. The very
circumstances of his discovery read like a horror movie plot,

(44:29):
and indeed, just a year before the real event, an
episode of Charlie's Angels had featured a nearly identical scenario
of a corpse found in a carnival funhouse at the Pike.
Life imitated art in the creepiest way when McCurdy was
found hanging in the exact same attraction that Charlie's Angels

(44:53):
had used for fiction. In recent years, McCurdy's bizarre tale
was adapted into a stage musical titled Dead Outlaw, which
premiered off Broadway in twenty twenty four, turning his life
and after life into a darkly comic piece of theater.

(45:16):
Numerous podcasts, documentaries, and TV segments have recounted the story
as the ultimate truth is Stranger than Fiction caper. Even
Disney's Haunted Mansion Ride famously incorporated real human skeletal remains
in its early days, but that bit of trivia pales

(45:39):
next to McCurdy's odyssey. His saga blurs the line between
horror fiction and historical fact in a way few others do.
Beyond these adaptations, the legacy of Elmer mccurty raises enduring
questions and fascinates the public precisely because it forces us

(46:03):
to confront how we deal with death and remembrance. He's
been called America's most famous corpse, a gruesome title he
earned through his long, unwilling tour of carnivals and roadside attractions.
Every Halloween, lists of scary true stories inevitably include the

(46:25):
fun house mummy who turned out to be real. His
story has become a cautionary legend in the haunted attraction industry,
a macabre reminder to propmakers and haunted house operators that
sometimes the dummy in the corner might just be a

(46:46):
real dead body. It also serves as a stark reflection
on how much our society's view of death and human
dignity has evolved. Elmer McCurdy was a man whose difficult
life ended in obscurity, only for his corpse to achieve

(47:07):
an infamy he never knew. In death, he became a spectacle,
and only upon discovery was he finally seen as a
person again in the eyes of the world. In the end,
Elmer McCurdy saga truly feels like a ghost story you'd

(47:29):
hear whispered on a dark night, a restless soul doomed
to wander, his body never at peace until benevolent strangers
finally laid him to rest. The difference here is that
every detail, from the nickel in his mouth to the
neon paint on his skin to the bullet in his

(47:51):
chest really happened. The fun House Skeleton's journey from outlaw
to carnival mummy to TV set decoration remains one of
the most surreal and unsettling true tales in American history.
It stands as a macabre testament to the saying sometimes

(48:14):
truth is not only stranger than fiction, but also far
more horrifying. Terrifying and True is narrated by Enrique Kuto.
It's executive produced by Rob Fields and bobble Topia dot com,
and produced by Dan Wilder, with original theme music by
Ray Mattis. If you have a story you think we

(48:36):
should cover on Terrifying and True, send us an email
at Weekly Spooky at gmail dot com, and if you
want to support us for as little as one dollar
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an extra special thank you to our Patreon podcast boosters,
folks who pay a little bit more to hear their

(48:58):
name at the end of the show. And they are
Johnny Nicks, Kate and Lulu, Jessica Fuller, Mike Escuey, Jenny Green,
Amber Hansford, Karen we Met, Jack Ker and Craig Cohen.
Thank you all so much and thank you for listening.
We'll see you all right here next time on Terrifying
and True

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Terrifying & True | The Funhouse Mummy: Elmer McCurdy's Horrifying Tale This Halloween

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Terrifying & True | The Funhouse Mummy: Elmer McCurdy's Horrifying Tale This Halloween