Elmer McCurdy – urban legend becomes reality

One of the most famous urban legends concerns an amusement park. According to the legend, a group of kids goes into a funfair ghost house and realises that one of the dummies in the ride is actually a real corpse.

It’s a rather far-fetched story, similar to many other urban legends. But in the 1970s it really happened! A “dummy” turned out to be the body of Elmer McCurdy.

Elmer McCurdy

Elmer was an American outlaw born on 1 January 1880 in Washington, Maine. His mother, Sadie, was 17 and unmarried when she gave birth. To avoid a scandal, her brother George and his wife Helen adopted the boy and raised him as their own.

After George died in 1890, Helen and Sadie moved to Bangor and told little Elmer the truth: Sadie was his real mother, and they did not know who his real father was.

Elmer was traumatised by the news and grew up rebellious. He then went to live with his grandfather, where he learned the plumber’s trade. When his mother and grandfather died, just two months apart, in 1900, Elmer began drifting and drinking.

He worked as a plumber but, with a friend, also took to stealing. In 1907 he joined the army, where he learned to use nitroglycerin for demolition. After his discharge he was arrested with burglary tools, but claimed they were for a foot-operated machine gun he was inventing, and the jury acquitted him.

In 1911 he decided to rob a train with other bandits, with whom he also took part in other hold-ups and bank robberies. His problem was nitroglycerin: in the first raid he used so much that he blew up both the safe and almost all the money, and the bandits fled with a few hundred dollars in melted silver coins.

On 4 October that year he and his gang decided to rob a train carrying about $400,000 meant for the Osage Nation. By mistake, however, they held up the wrong train, a passenger train, getting away with just $46, two jugs of whiskey, a revolver, a coat and the conductor’s watch. As the press wrote, it was “one of the smallest in the history of train robbery”.

He was identified as the robber and tracked down. On 7 October 1911 three deputies found him, drunk, in the hay shed of a ranch near Bartlesville, Oklahoma. A gunfight lasting about an hour followed, in which Elmer was killed by a shot to the chest.

After his death

The body was taken to the morgue, where nobody came to claim it. The Pawhuska undertaker, Joseph L. Johnson, embalmed it with an arsenic-based preservative, dressed it and kept it in the back room. He refused to bury it until someone paid for his services.

He then had the idea of displaying it for money. He dressed it in street clothes, put a rifle in its hands and exhibited it in his funeral home, charging a nickel to see “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up”. Elmer soon became a famous attraction, and many travelling carnivals, very common at the time, asked to buy him.

The undertaker always refused until, in October 1916, two men claiming to be Elmer’s brothers came to claim the body, saying it would be buried in San Francisco.

But those two men were not Elmer’s brothers: they were James and Charles Patterson, owners of a travelling carnival, who shipped him to Arkansas City, Kansas, to show him as “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive”.

Over the years Elmer changed hands many times, displayed in various attractions, including Louis Sonney’s Museum of Crime, alongside wax figures of outlaws such as Jesse James. In the 1930s he was even used to promote an anti-drug film, “Narcotic!”, passed off as an addict who had died after robbing a pharmacy. In 1967 he also appeared in the film “She Freak”, then went to the Hollywood Wax Museum and finally to The Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, where he was hung from a gallows in the “Laff in the Dark” funhouse.

Rediscovery and burial

On 8 December 1976 the crew of the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” was filming an episode at The Pike. A prop man was moving what he thought was a wax dummy and, with a sudden movement, broke off its arm.

Bones and muscle tissue were now visible, and the crew realised it was a real corpse!

They called the police, who had the body examined immediately. It was completely mummified, weighed just 23 kg and had been covered in wax and fluorescent paint, but the marks of the first autopsy and embalming could still be seen. Doctors found it had been embalmed with arsenic, used in embalming fluids only until the late 1920s. They also found the man had had tuberculosis, scars, and the jacket of the bullet that killed him. Thanks to these clues they worked out the period in which he had lived.

When the jaw was removed for dental examination they found a 1924 penny and ticket stubs from “Louis Sonney’s Museum of Crime” in his mouth. They called Sonney’s son, Dan, who confirmed the body was Elmer McCurdy.

After all the tests, on 22 April 1977 he was buried in Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, next to the outlaw Bill Doolin, in front of about 300 people. To stop anyone stealing him again, two feet of concrete were poured over the coffin.

His story also inspired Skeletor, the villain of Masters of the Universe: his creator, Mark Taylor, saw him as a child at The Pike. And in 2024 it became a musical, “Dead Outlaw”. An urban legend come true, or an incredible story that inspired one?

Sources

• Wikipedia, Elmer McCurdy