Elmer McCurdy??????? Who the Hell is that?

I recently found a story that kinda interested me in a few aspects. First it was a story of a mummy and second is was a mummy that no one knew was a mummy..Awesome.
 
(image credit: http://getglue.com/feed)

 Elmer McCurdy was an outlaw and not a very good one at that.While enlisted in the military the only thing he gained from the experience was a penchant for nitroglycerine explosives.  He was kicked out of a gang of thieves after a botched train robbery when he blew up a safe and melted all the loot inside to the floor of the box car it was in. So he joined another band of scurvy madmen and they successfully robbed a passenger train in October 1911 but after an hour long shoot out at the gangs hide out McCurdy was shot dead. Now this really should have been the end of the story for this crazy bastard but alas it is not for I am now writing about it over one hundred years later.

As no one claimed his body the funeral director in Pawhuska, Oklahoma  embalmed him and in doing so did it so successfully that McCurdy actually became mummified. The director then decided to use McCurdy as a window display as this practice was not unheard of at the time.

(image credit: http://terrysplace2000.tripod.com/mccurdy.html)

Over the next five years McCurdy was the window display of this funeral home until a dodgy fellow claiming to be his kin came in to claim his corpse and take him away. This is where things get a bit weird. The dodgy guy was a associate from the Great Patterson Show and wanted to have the body of McCurdy for the "freak" show part of the carnival and called him "The Oklahoma Outlaw". This was the beginning of a sixty year long odyssey. From 1916 onward McCurdy was passed from show to and at one time he was displayed in the lobby of a theater during the 1933 film Narcotic. As his adventures continued McCurdy was even used as collateral for a $500 loan. During the 1930's and much of the 1940's the "Museum of Crime" had the privilege of his presence. As the 1960's came and went the real identity and origin of McCurdy was pretty much lost. He was eventually sold to a wax museum in 1971 as a mannequin.

Poor old McCurdy ended up in a scary funny house painted with orange spray paint used to scare children and teens. During the filming of "The Six Million Dollar Man" in 1976 the director did not like the look of the orange painted "mannequin" in the fun house scene. So as one of the crew members grabbed hold of old McCurdy's arm to move him his arm fell off in the horrified crew members hand.
An investigation was done to find out who and how this mummy ended up in a fun house by a forensic team. Contained in his mouth was a 1924 penny and a ticket for the Sonney Amusement’s Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. 









(image credit: http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Death/Elmer.html)


Through a thorough investigation and following the trail that McCurdy took to get to be in fun house McCurdy's identity was reviled and there was a lot of press surrounding his identification. It was also decided that he should now be inhumed under a lot of cement so that he could finally get some well needed rest. In 1977 Elmer McCurdy was laid to rest at the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma where he still rests today.

Awesome story...... Ma halo for reading this and I'm outta here.