Elmer McCurdy was a failed outlaw. His life was unremarkable. However, his “afterlife” became one of the most bizarre chapters in American history. For 66 years, his mummified remains traveled across the United States. They appeared in carnivals, wax museums, and even a Hollywood film. No one realized they were handling a real human being.
A Career of Botched Robberies
McCurdy was born in Maine in 1880. He eventually found his way to Oklahoma. There, he attempted to make a name for himself as a train and bank robber. Despite his ambitions, he was notoriously incompetent.
- The Nitro Mistake: In one instance, he used too much nitroglycerin on a safe. It destroyed most of the money he intended to steal.
- The Final Blunder: In October 1911, McCurdy and his gang targeted a train. They believed it carried a $400,000 payment to the Osage Nation. Instead, they stopped the wrong train and made off with only $46 and some jugs of whiskey.
McCurdy retreated to a hayloft to drink his spoils, but a sheriff’s posse tracked him down. On October 7, 1911, he was killed in a shootout, succumbing to a single gunshot wound to the chest.
The Making of a Mummy
McCurdy’s body was taken to the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. No next of kin came to claim it. The undertaker, Joseph Johnson, embalmed the body with a heavy arsenic-based preservative. This was a common practice at the time for bodies that would need to be preserved for long periods.
No one arrived to pay for the funeral. Johnson decided to recoup his costs. He turned McCurdy into an exhibit.
- The Exhibit: He dressed the corpse in street clothes, placed a rifle in its hands, and called it “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up.”
- The Profit: For five years, visitors paid a nickel to see the “Embalmed Bandit.” The funeral director would even have people drop the nickels into McCurdy’s open mouth.
Decades on the Carnival Circuit
In 1916, two carnival promoters posing as McCurdy’s “long-lost brothers” convinced Johnson to release the body for a “proper burial.” Instead, they took the corpse on the road. For the next 60 years, McCurdy’s body was sold and traded across the country:
- Sideshow Attraction: He was billed as “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive.”
- Hollywood Cameo: In the 1930s, his body was used in theater lobbies to promote the exploitation film Narcotic! as a “dead dope fiend.” He even made a brief appearance in the 1967 horror film She Freak.
- Wax Museum Wax-Over: Eventually, his skin became so shriveled and petrified that he was mistaken for a wax dummy. Owners began coating him in wax and painting him with fluorescent orange paint to enhance his “spooky” appearance.
Discovery and Final Rest
By 1976, McCurdy was hanging from a noose in the “Laff in the Dark” funhouse at The Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. On December 8, a crew filming an episode of the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man (“Carnival of Spies”) moved what they thought was a wax mannequin.
When the figure’s arm snapped off, it revealed human bone and muscle tissue.
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office investigated the case. They found a 1924 penny and a ticket stub for the “Museum of Crime” inside the mummy’s mouth. These clues, along with the turn-of-the-century bullet still lodged in his chest, helped historians identify the remains as Elmer McCurdy.
The End of the Journey
In April 1977, Elmer McCurdy was finally returned to Oklahoma. Officials wanted to ensure “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up” would never travel again. They buried him in Guthrie’s Summit View Cemetery under two feet of solid concrete.
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