The Funhouse Dummy Was a Real Outlaw. He’d Been Dead for 65 Years.

In December 1976, a crew working on The Six Million Dollar Man needed to move a dummy at the Nu-Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. It was a painted figure hanging from a gallows in the dark, the sort of thing that was supposed to make teenagers scream as their ride rounded a corner. A crew member tried to move it. The arm came off. And inside the break, there was bone.

There’s a particular irony in a crew from a show about a man with a bionic arm discovering that the dummy’s arm was real. But the better question was how an actual dead man had ended up hanging in a California funhouse. The answer began in Oklahoma, back when people still robbed trains.

Elmer McCurdy was a small-time outlaw who, in October 1911, reportedly held up the wrong train. He’d been after a fortune. What he got was $46 and a jug of whiskey. Three days later, lawmen cornered him in a barn near Bartlesville. McCurdy fired from the hayloft and died in the shootout. His body went to a funeral home in Pawhuska, where nobody came to claim it.

That’s where the paying customers came in. The undertaker had preserved McCurdy with an arsenic-based embalming solution. With no relatives coming for him, he dressed the dead man in street clothes, propped him up with a rifle and displayed him as “The Embalmed Bandit.” Admission was a nickel. According to accounts of the display, visitors could deposit it right between Elmer’s lips. The man who’d walked off a train with $46 was finally drawing steady money, five cents at a time.

In 1916, two men showed up claiming to be McCurdy’s brothers. They said they wanted to give him a proper burial. They were actually carnival promoters, and what they wanted was a real dead outlaw for their traveling show. They got him. Over the years, McCurdy passed through carnivals and crime exhibits, billed under names including “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive” and, eventually, “The Thousand-Year-Old Man.” He even did a stint in movie theater lobbies promoting the 1933 anti-drug exploitation picture Narcotic. Apparently, if you owned a mummy, you could make him illustrate whatever point you were trying to sell that week.

The strangest turn came when the showmen stopped selling him as a real corpse because the people who had him no longer realized he was one. By the time he was painted a bright color and hung in the Long Beach funhouse, riders were screaming at a real dead man and laughing afterward because, of course, it was only a dummy. It took the TV crew to find out otherwise. Investigators found old tickets in his mouth that helped trace him back to a former exhibitor. Evidence of a bullet wound helped connect him to the outlaw who’d died in that Oklahoma barn.

On April 22, 1977, a black, glass-sided hearse pulled by two white horses carried McCurdy to the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. This time, the burial was real. Concrete was reportedly poured over the casket to discourage anyone from taking him on the road again. After 66 years of other people deciding where Elmer McCurdy ought to go next, somebody finally made sure he stayed put.