Elmer McCurdy: The Inept Outlaw Who Became a Funhouse Mummy

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In December 1976, a television crew filming inside the Laugh in the Dark funhouse at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach reached out to move a neon-painted prop hanging from a gallows. The arm snapped off, and inside was human bone. The body belonged to Elmer McCurdy, born in 1880 in Washington, Maine, to an unmarried 17-year-old and raised to believe his aunt and uncle were his parents. Learning the truth pushed him toward drink, and a run of family deaths in 1900 left him drifting between plumbing and lead mining jobs before he joined the Army in 1907.

A little nitroglycerin training at Fort Leavenworth convinced him he could crack safes. He could not. This episode follows his short, hapless career as a train and bank robber in Oklahoma and Kansas, his death in a hayloft shootout in October 1911, and the far stranger career that followed: more than six decades as a paid attraction, passed from an undertaker in Pawhuska to carnival promoters, crime museums, film lobbies, and finally a funhouse, until a coroner pieced his identity back together.

• In March 1911 he used so much nitroglycerin on a train safe said to hold $4,000 that the silver coins inside melted into the steel, leaving the gang with a few hundred dollars.
• His final job targeted a train carrying an estimated $400,000 in Osage royalty payments, but he stopped the wrong train and left with $46, whiskey, a revolver, a coat, and the conductor's watch.
• The undertaker embalmed him with arsenic, propped him up with a rifle, and charged a nickel a look, claiming the body was collateral for an unpaid bill.
• In 1916 two carnival promoters posing as his brothers claimed the body, and by 1933 filmmaker Dwain Esper was displaying it in theater lobbies as a supposed drug addict to promote the film Narcotic.
• The autopsy turned up arsenic, tuberculosis scarring, a gas check bullet jacket made only between 1905 and 1940, and a 1924 penny and museum of crime ticket stubs sealed in the mouth. He was buried in Guthrie in April 1977 under two feet of concrete.