Lights, camera…mummy??! In December 1976, when filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man:
The crew was on set on a laff in the dark ride in California. The director on set told a crew member to move one of the dummies in the funhouse scene.
However, when the crew member went to move the dummy out of the scene. One of their body parts broke off while it was being pushed, and you could see human bones from the broken part. The dummy was an actual dead human being named Elmer McCurdy, who died almost 80 years old.
Elmer McCurdy was born on January 1, 1880, and died on October 7, 1911. He was part of a gang of outlaws who robbed. They finally got unlucky when they were planning to rob a train with loads of money but instead robbed the wrong train and got only 45 dollars, a watch, and some alcohol. A couple of days later, another group attacked McCurdy’s gang, and he died in a shootout with them.
McCurdy’s body was taken to an Oklahoma funeral home called Johnson Funeral Home located in Pawhuska. The funeral home embalmed his body, and he was left there for six months, waiting for someone to claim the body, and unfortunately, no one did. The mortician turned this into a money-making opportunity. He decided since Elmer was perfectly embalmed, he nicknamed Elmer the “Embalmed Bandit” and dressed him up in cowboy gear, put a gun in his hand, and charged a nickel for anyone who wanted to see Elmer.
In 1916, a group of carnival promoters passing by Pawhuska pretended to be relatives of Elmer. It took him to the Great Patterson Carnival Show as part of their human curiosities sideshow.
In 1922, the head of an entertainment company from California named Louis Sonney got Elmer only because the Great Patterson Carnival Show put up Elmer as a security deposit and could not pay back a $500 loan they took out. Louis Sonney, in turn, put Elmer as part of his traveling show and also in the Museum of Crime. Elmer was on tour up and down the West Coast of the United States until 1940. He was even part of a movie from 1933 called “Narcotic.”
However, when Louis Sonney died in 1949, the hype about Mummy Elmer died down, and he was stored in a Los Angeles warehouse for about 20 years. In 1968, Elmer was sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum and renamed the “1000-Year-Old Man.” However, the museum closed after only a year, and somehow, Elmer got grouped with the other Wax Museum dummies, all sold to the Nu-Point Amusement Park in Long Beach, California. The people who owned the part naturally assumed that Elmer was a Wax Figure, so he was painted in fluorescent colors and hung in the dark ride Laff in the Dark.
That is how, in December 1976, a crew member from the show The Six Million Dollar Man came to find Elmer. Elmer was then taken to the Los Angeles Corner’s Office, where he was researched and was found to have the bullet that ultimately killed him still in his chest and an embalming fluid that was commonly used in the early 1900s. Elmer even had carnival ticket stubs stuffed into his mouth. With additional aid from Oklahoma historians, the LA Corner matched the remains with Elmer McCurdy.
In February 1977, the City Council in Gurthie, Oklahoma, had a burial plot in Boot Hill, part of Summit View, where other outlaws had been buried, and offered Elmer a chance to be buried alongside them. Finally, after sixty years of Elmer’s illustrious after-life career, he was laid to rest.
Source: Youtube, Library of Congress blogs: Elmer McCurdy: traveling corpse.
ladycultblog 
I remember reading about this in ‘Roadside America’ in the 80s – always a horrifying story!
LikeLiked by 1 person