A Real Stiff

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We do take requests here at True Weird Stuff. Sandra Karen Piggott reached out on Facebook and asked us to tell this story. So here you go, Sandra. We're calling this one, A Real Stiff. In the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in the early 1900s, kids had to make their own fun. No video games, no playgrounds or parks, no movie theaters.

Not that there was a lot of time set aside for play, but kids always managed to find a way. Like the kids of the town undertaker, who came up with a great prank, a prank never before pulled in the town, or probably anywhere. Those kids sneaked into the parlor of the funeral home, a place that was usually off-limits to them, as hushed and elegant as the times and the town would allow.

There, in the corner, the body was propped up against the wall. These kids had grown up surrounded by death. They weren't afraid of a body, and they weren't squeamish either. Giggling and whispering, the kids carefully buckled a pair of roller skates onto the feet of the corpse and slowly, slowly coaxed the body, now on wheels, out of the parlor and onto the street.

Then they chased the younger, smaller kids, pushing the corpse from behind, clattering down the rough sidewalks to screams and tears. Weren't those the days? You know, the days when kids played outside. They didn't need screens or joysticks, not when they had their very own embalmed corpse on wheels. But whose body was it?

And why did it take 66 years to finally have a funeral? And they got a small beam of light. It was the last attraction that Walt Disney himself participated in designing. It's too bad that he died three months before it opened at Disneyland on March 18th, 1967. Walt Disney had been inspired by tales of pirates and buccaneers and treasure, and by folklore, fiction, and the true exploits of notorious sailors like Jean Lafitte and Captain Bluebeard.

We're talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which for the time was so dark and thrilling and realistic. Today, if you say Pirates of the Caribbean, people think you're talking about the movie franchise, which was inspired by the Disney ride, which now seems quaint and low tech in our world of CGI and virtual reality.

The Disney Imagineers who helped bring Walt's pirate vision to life, though, they weren't shooting for quaint or low tech. They wanted to create an experience that would leave park guests not just impressed, but feeling like they'd faced real pirates and somehow survived. The Imagineers threw everything at it. They spared no expense.

The cost of building the Pirates of the Caribbean ride ended up being as much as the rest of the whole Disneyland Anaheim combined. All that effort and all that money. Yet the designers weren't happy. The ride just didn't have the feel they wanted. The bones and skulls and skeletons that were meant to inspire fear ended up looking rubbery and obviously fake.

Even in the dim light, it just all looks silly. That might have been acceptable at some cheap carnival, but never, never at Disney, which is how UCLA came to supply Disney with real human remains for the attraction. And when the ride opened, every single skeleton, every skull was real. Park guests had no idea just how authentic all that Disney magic really was.

Now, over time, Imagineers replaced the real human remains with very convincing fakes and assured the public that the real bones had been given a proper and dignified burial. Not everyone's buying the story, of course. The rumor is that there are at least four sets of human remains still on that ride. One in the jail, another two on a couple of the smaller islands, and a skull nailed to the headboard in the bedchamber scene.

Lots of morbid speculation out there about that skull. A favorite rumor is that the skull had been donated by a former Imagineer. I guess it was his own. There was outrage and disgust, of course, at the idea of using real human remains as part of a theme park attraction, but I don't know. Wouldn't you rather have your skeleton in there with the pirates than six feet under in some cold grave that no one ever visits?

Humans have ancient taboos against the desecration of our dead. And you have to at least, you know, grudgingly admit that putting your great-grandma's bones in a fake pirate tavern for tourists to gawk at could definitely be considered a desecration. But it's a thing that happens more than any of us might like. And in your lifetime.

Which is uncomfortable. We do like to feel superior to our ancestors. Like we're making, you know, progress as a civilization. It's one thing for the people of the olden times to use real human remains as movie and haunted house props. But we're supposed to know better. We're supposed to have laws and stuff that stop us from using real dead bodies.

You know, like they did in the movies Poltergeist, Apocalypse Now, Dawn of the Dead. Just to name the big hits. We don't actually have laws like that though. Not really. Though the Department of the Interior does have strict protections for Native American grave sites. And the TSA does require you to use an approved container for remains.

You know, one that can pass through their x-ray machines. Other than that, only eight states in the U.S. have laws prohibiting the sale of human remains. As a nation, we are weirdly casual. About what can and cannot be done with the dead. Cedric Lodge was fired from his position as morgue manager down at Harvard Medical School last month.

But a federal indictment says Lodge stole human remains from the school and then sold them to people in multiple states. Agents found as many as 40 skulls, rib cages, hip bones, all human remains. They were all over the suspect's apartment on Love Avenue. One of the skulls had a scarf around its neck. Another was on the very bed where Knott slept, agents said.

Agents accused Knott of buying and selling the human bones online. Some of the bones, they said, were stolen from a grocery store. Just to try and find some house plants. And inside of a dresser was the cremated remains of a 20-year-old gentleman. After posting this on social media, a deputy said the bones sat in a cardboard box at the donation store's drop-off center.

Someone noticed it and immediately called police. A human skull was found on sale as decoration at a Florida antiques market. See what I mean? Makes having your bones used to set dressing for a Disney attraction look not so bad. It might even make you famous. The way it made a bumbling wannabe outlaw named Elmer McCurdy famous.

Elmer McCurdy was a crook. A small-time, two-bit sort of crook. The kind of low-level player who might daydream of becoming a legend like Butch Cassidy or Billy the Kid, but instead ends up bleeding out on some dusty street in the middle of godforsaken nowhere. Just one more nameless corpse facedown in the dirt of the American West.

And yet, here we are talking about him. Talking about Elmer McCurdy, a man whose name should have been forgotten about 113 years ago when he died in a gunfight with sheriff's deputies in Oklahoma. The beginning of Elmer McCurdy's story is almost as chaotic as its end. It's like that for some people. Human pinballs launched into life only to ricochet off bad luck and worse timing into poor choices and stupid mistakes.

The kind of guy who couldn't or wouldn't get out of his own way. Not that his prospects were ever all that great, if we're honest. McCurdy was born to an unmarried teenager named Sadie McCurdy. No one knows who his father was. One possible candidate for the job was Sadie's own cousin, a man named Charles Smith. Back in 1880 when Elmer was born, the shame and stigma of being an unwed mother was enough to ruin both Sadie's life and the life of her newborn.

Which probably explains why Elmer was adopted by Sadie's brother George and his wife Helen. This kind of thing happened more than you'd believe. It still happens now. Sometimes the truth never comes out. Or comes out when a 23andMe DNA test uproots an entire family tree. Elmer might never have known the truth about his own origins had his adoptive father not died of tuberculosis when the boy was 10 years old.

His mother Helen and his biological mother Sadie took Elmer and the three moved from Washington, Maine to Bangor. When Elmer hit his teens, Sadie made the decision to tell her son the truth about his parentage. That his mom and dad were actually his aunt and uncle. That she, the woman he'd called Aunt Sadie, was his real mother.

And his real father? Sadie just wasn't sure about who that might be. It's an understatement to say that Elmer didn't take it well. He became sullen and rebellious and he began drinking. The tension and conflict drove Elmer to leave Helen and Sadie. He moved in with his grandfather and apprenticed himself as a plumber.

Elmer learned fast and proved to be a capable plumber. It wasn't long before he was earning a solid living. But this most American of success stories was undone by an economic downturn so severe that even a plumber couldn't find enough work to survive. No sooner had Elmer lost his job than his mother died. His grandfather passed away less than two months later.

Everything Elmer had known was suddenly just gone. With no way to support himself, Elmer left Maine and began drifting. He'd pick up a plumbing job here and there and men were always needed in the lead mines. Elmer's problem wasn't an unwillingness to work. It was his drinking. He could get a job but he couldn't keep one.

And so he continued to drift further and further west. He spent some time in Kansas where he managed to find work again as a plumber and also got arrested for public drunkenness. Eventually in 1907, feeling like he was just about out of options, Elmer McCurdy enlisted in the United States Army where he did okay. Was trained as a machine gunner.

Spent a little time learning how to use nitroglycerin aka dynamite and was honorably discharged on November 7th, 1910. If only he'd stayed in the army. If only he'd been able to get sober and stay that way. But then again, maybe none of that mattered. Destiny had something very specific and very strange in store for Elmer McCurdy.

With his days at Fort Leavenworth behind him, McCurdy made his way to the town of St. Joseph, Kansas. He ran into an army buddy there, a guy named Walter Schoppelrei. This was apparently the moment that Elmer decided to turn to a life of crime. His new career got off to a bad start though, when two officers employed by the Chicago Great Western Railway spotted the pair going into a cave.

Following McCurdy and Schoppelrei, the officers found the cache of what to them seemed like awfully suspicious tools. One of the most damaging pieces of evidence from the standpoint of the state was an instrument used in safe blowing. This, the men declared, was part of a new invention for a machine gun, which Schoppelrei was inventing.

The railway cops didn't buy that story. They arrested McCurdy and Schoppelrei on November 19th, just 10 days after McCurdy's army discharge, and charged the men with possession of burglary tools. Then they tossed them into county jail to await a jury trial. It took a few months, but for once, luck was on McCurdy's side. Two key witnesses for the prosecution, a pair of army officers who were scheduled to testify regarding these so-called machine gun parts, were detained at Fort Leavenworth to oversee a court-martial.

In their place appeared two young privates who testified that both McCurdy and Schoppelrei were men of sterling character. That seemed to satisfy the court. The jury voted to acquit. Schoppelrei returned to duty. And McCurdy? His plan was to take what the army had taught him about nitroglycerin and use it to rob banks and trains.

Now the problem was, the army just hadn't taught him very much. Nitroglycerin is really unstable, as anyone who grew up watching the coyote blow himself to bits chasing the roadrunner has known since they were about eight years old. McCurdy headed to Oklahoma. In March, he and three accomplices came up with a very ambitious plan.

Rob train number 104 of the Iron Mountain, Missouri Pacific Railway. Word was, the train was carrying a safe containing $4,000. That's the equivalent of more than $130,000 today. McCurdy convinced the other men that he could easily blow the safe with dynamite. They'd be out of there with that cash before anyone really knew what was happening.

Except... He used too much dynamite. Way too much dynamite. He succeeded in destroying the door to the safe, the safe itself, and almost all the money inside it. The men got away with a few hundred dollars worth of mostly melted silver coins. They had to drag the safe's frame with them as they fled, since those melted coins were fused to it.

Now McCurdy somehow eluded arrest for this debacle and laid low until September 1911. This time his target was a bank instead of a train. The Citizens Bank in Chautauqua, Kansas. He had two new accomplices for this caper and a plan straight out of a movie. The men would use a hammer to bust through the bank's wall. It took hours, but I'll be damned if it didn't work.

They were in. First obstacle, the outer door of the vault. This time, McCurdy's nitroglycerin charges did the job. Blowing off the door, but not damaging the safe inside. Now McCurdy set the charges to blow the safe door. But no matter what he tried, he couldn't get the charges to ignite. As the seconds ticked past, the man serving as lookout panicked and took off running.

Unable to get at the vault's contents, McCurdy and the other guy dove on a tray of coins sitting just outside the safe, crammed their pockets full and fled. They stayed hidden until late that night. And then hopped a train to the Kansas State line. That's where they parted. And McCurdy made his way to the ranch of a man he knew in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

McCurdy hid out in a hay shed on the property and drank himself stupid for the next few weeks. Whoever said, third time's the charm, clearly didn't have Elmo McCurdy in mind. Two weeks hadn't even gone by when McCurdy hatched his next and final plan. It was ambitious and that alone should have made McCurdy pause and reconsider.

But greed is often louder than logic. And McCurdy knew that a train would be coming through Okesa, Oklahoma on October 4th. What that train was carrying had to be the worst kept secret in the West. If a hapless, drunken, failed robber hiding in a hay shed knew about it. The cargo on that train was a royalty payment to the Osage Nation.

$400,000. And that partner is more than $13 million to you and me. If you're plotting to steal that kind of money, you better be paying attention to every single detail. The train schedule, for example. That'd be an important detail to attend to. Because on that day, two trains were scheduled to come through the Okesa station.

One was an express train carrying all that cash. The other was a regular old passenger train. Do you see what's about to happen? Or are you going to make me say it? McCurdy got the schedules mixed up. He robbed the wrong train. Instead of $400,000, he got $46. A watch and two bottles of whiskey. And then he bolted, just as the train he was supposed to rob.

Cheerfully rumbled past him. Of course, he tried to hide. But he was no better at that than he was at robbing trains. Plus, he was already slugging back the stolen whiskey. Plus, he was sick. Tuberculosis had finally caught up to him after his time in the mines. He had pneumonia and a case of trichinosis on top of that.

You know, that ghastly parasitic infection you can get from eating undercooked meat. Elmer was in bad shape. Bloodhounds easily tracked his scent back to the ranch in Bartlesville. Officers in pursuit of the men who held up a Katy passenger train last week engaged in a pitched battle Saturday morning with one of the bandits who had taken refuge in a barn.

The sheriff and his force of deputies surrounded the barn and the refugee opened fire on the officers. That refugee was, of course, Elmer McCurdy. The officers returned fire with deadly effect. Elmer McCurdy put up a fight, a gunfight that lasted more than an hour. But he was doomed. McCurdy died of a single gunshot wound to the chest.

They say he was lying down when the bullet hit. Sick and drunk as he was, that makes sense. Elmer McCurdy was just 31 years old. The law dogs hauled Elmer's body to an undertaker in Pasco, Oklahoma. No one had much optimism about any next of kin showing up to claim the deceased. So the undertaker, Joseph L. Johnson, embalmed the body with a powerful arsenic-based solution.

Then he carefully washed and cleaned Elmer's corpse, shaved his face and dressed the body in a suit. He waited and waited and still no one came for Elmer. Townspeople began hinting and then urging him to give Elmer a decent burial. But the undertaker refused. He'd performed a service and he expected to be paid for it.

If Elmer had neither friends nor family willing to pay, then Elmer would somehow have to earn his own keep. The undertaker swapped Elmer's funeral suit for workman's attire and propped him up in a corner of that funeral home. In a melodramatic flourish, he stood a rifle up, wrapping Elmer's stiff hand around the barrel.

Then he commenced to charging people a nickel to see the bandit who wouldn't give up. When that ran its course, Elmer became the Oklahoma outlaw and the mystery man of many aliases and even the embalmed bandit. Did people line up and pay to see Elmer's corpse? They did. It's hard for us to imagine a big outing to a funeral home to gawk at a body, but those were simpler times and entertainment was scarce on the prairie.

And this is macabre and terrible. But folks thought it was great fun to drop their five cents directly into the corpse's open mouth. Word got around that undertaker Joseph Johnson was raking in the nickels thanks to his unclaimed corpse. It wasn't just the public who lined up for a peek. Carnival promoters had heard tell of the embalmed bandit and tried to buy the body from the undertaker, who would not part with his little cash cowboy for any price he was offered.

Almost five years to the day after that train schedule screw-up ended Elmer McCurdy's half-assed criminal career, a man came calling at the funeral home of Pawhuska. He said he was Elmer's brother. He'd gone to the trouble of contacting both the sheriff's office and a local attorney to make sure he'd have no trouble collecting his poor brother's body so the family could give Elmer a proper Christian burial.

The undertaker, despite his turning Elmer into a spectacle, was a man of honor. Of course he would release Elmer to his brother, to both of his brothers, as it happened because the man wasn't alone when he came to take the body. And so Elmer McCurdy, dead these past five years, was ceremoniously taken to the rail depot and placed on a train.

We're taking our brother home to San Francisco, the two men said in voices thick with emotion. Now hold up there just a second. Brothers? San Francisco? Were these men mistaken about Elmer McCurdy? No, they knew who he was. And while they were brothers, they weren't his brothers. Elmer had no siblings and his home, as you know, was in the state of Maine, about as far as a person can get from San Francisco.

The real names of those two men were James and Charles Patterson, and they weren't shipping Elmer to California. His body was instead rattling along the rails on its way to Arkansas City, Kansas. James was the owner of a traveling carnival called the Great Patterson Carnival Shows. His brother Charles had heard the tales of the embalmed bandit and convinced James that Elmer's corpse would be a real draw.

And it was for six years. People in small towns and big towns lined up with their coins to see the outlaw who would never be captured alive. Elmer's corpse saw more of the country than he ever did while he was alive. He was a headline attraction for the Great Patterson Carnival. And even better than that, he was as big or bigger an attraction than the wax effigies of real legendary Western outlaws like Jesse James and the Dalton Brothers.

Elmer's after-death show business career didn't end when Patterson sold his operation. The new owner, Louis Sonny, knew a moneymaker when he saw one. Now Elmer McCurdy's body was the star of the Traveling Museum of Crime. In the early 1930s, Elmer even had a side hustle promoting a movie called Narcotic. The director, Dwain Esper, posed McCurdy in the lobby of a movie theater.

The story was that the body belonged to a dope fiend who took his own life when police caught him robbing a drugstore. Look at that leathery skin, Esper said. Those sunken eyes. This is what happens when you do drugs. That leathery skin, those sunken eyes. McCurdy had been dead at this point for 22 years and for sure was a bit worse for wear, but still very much in demand.

After his brief stint playing a dead dope fiend, Elmer McCurdy's body was returned to Louis Sonny and sent back out on the road. 16 more years of moving from place to place, sideshow to sideshow. People were still happily paying for a peek at the outlaw who would never be captured alive. Louis Sonny's death in 1949 happened to coincide with a big drop in public interest in sideshow spectacles like Elmer.

Public taste was moving on, leaving Elmer behind. What to do with him now? Enough time had passed since McCurdy's death in 1911 that it's possible that carnies and customers alike either didn't know or didn't believe that this famous sideshow attraction was actually a real corpse. You have to remember that the sideshow gaffe was a staple of the circus and carnival world.

Gaffes were fake. It's easy to see how Sonny's carnival workers assumed that Elmer was a gaffe too. Carnies were an itinerant labor force, people coming and going, a few questions asked. So when Sonny died, it didn't seem strange at all to pack up the outlaw who would never be captured alive to a warehouse in Los Angeles.

Just another carnival prop to be stored away. Almost 20 years passed. That's how long Elmer McCurdy's body sat in that warehouse until the now sadly defunct Hollywood Wax Museum showed up and bought him. Elmer barely enjoyed a year of being called the 1,000 year old man before the museum went under. His body was stacked up with a pile of other wax figure attractions and sent back to storage.

Of course, he alone among his silent wax and co-workers was real. But by 1969, there didn't seem to be anyone left who knew it. Which is how Elmer McCurdy found himself sold to an amusement park in Long Beach, California. They dusted him off, covered his naked mummified body in fluorescent paint and dangled him from a fake gallows in the spooky laugh-in-the-dark funhouse ride where he proceeded to give park visitors a far more legit scare than they paid for for 13 years.

13 years of a real human corpse swinging at the end of a rope in a haunted funhouse at the beach. You will never believe who we have to thank for helping to finally lay the inept outlaw Elmer McCurdy to rest. The six million dollar man. Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Better. It was December 1976. The episode featured Steve Austin tracking a group of bad guys to a carnival that turned out to be a traveling missile base. The body was hanging by a noose from a makeshift gallows in the funhouse.

The body was painted with a reddish fluorescent paint so a black light would make it shine in the dark. The discovery that it was a human corpse came during the filming of a scene in the funhouse for the television series. Okay, so this next bit might be the creepiest part of this whole story. And that's saying something.

A technician moved the body and an arm fell off. He was about to glue it back on when he noticed a bone sticking out. A bone. A human bone sticking out. A preliminary examination by the coroner's office shows the body was that of an elderly man, five foot three, 150 pounds, but much younger than 1,000 years. Well, they got that one detail right.

The body appears to be that of a foreigner, possibly from South America. You know, even coroners in Southern California don't get much practice handling a mummified body, so it's not surprising that they mistook Elmer's darkened skin for his ethnicity. Because the skin is hard as rock, the body was apparently embalmed with a fluid with a heavy metal base, such as arsenic.

The use of arsenic in embalming fluid is prohibited in the United States. But it wasn't always prohibited, was it? Not that anyone in 1976 Los Angeles would look at Elmer's now wizened remains and think, but this body's been kicking around for about 65 years. The simpler explanation was that the body had come into the country from somewhere else.

They took x-rays and tissue samples and got a forensic dentist to see if the body might be identified by its teeth. Elmer's fingerprints were gone. That was no use. All they knew for certain was that the body had once been professionally embalmed. The two distinctive incisions gave it away. The lungs showed the distinctive scarring of tuberculosis.

Plus, the body cavity contained an embalming hardening solution that was no longer in use and hadn't been since the early 1900s. They also found the copper jacket from a bullet in the cavity, a type of bullet that hadn't been manufactured since well before World War II. All clues. Another clue was a strange one. The ears, fingers, and big toes were missing.

Sidebar? They were missing because at one point, Elmer's body had been hauled to Mount Rushmore where they dressed him up as a Canadian, whatever that meant, for a special show. Then an unexpected windstorm howled through the South Dakota mountains, blowing Elmer's fingers, toes, and ears right off, just in case you were worried that not enough awful things had happened to Elmer McCurdy's body.

There's actually even one more awful thing, though it did help to finally solve the mystery of the Funhouse corpse. Stuffed inside McCurdy's mouth, were carnival ticket stubs and wax museum stubs, a very corroded 1924 penny, and jackpot, a ticket for Lewis Sonny's Traveling Museum of Crime. The Los Angeles coroner's office got busy.

You have to hand it to them. Elmer McCurdy wasn't much of an outlaw and he was gunned down after just his third comically bad attempt at robbing a train. It's not like he was famous or even infamous, but the investigators at least had something to work with from the bullet jacket to the ticket stubs. They narrowed the search and finally contacted Lewis Sonny's son, Dan.

Dan knew the truth. The Funhouse corpse was that of a man named Elmer McCurdy. The story got a lot of attention in the press, as you can imagine, and funeral homes all over the country reached out to the LA coroner's office volunteering to bury McCurdy's body at no cost. Generous as that was, officials were holding out and hoped that some living relative would appear and claim the body, which never happened, and you know why.

Elmer really didn't have any family. He was about as alone in the world as a person can be. Eventually, a man named Fred Olds contacted the coroner's office. Olds was a representative of a really interesting organization called the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerners. The group is devoted to studying the culture of the American West, specifically the state of Oklahoma.

Let us take final care of Elmer McCurdy, he said. Then coroner Thomas Noguchi, the coroner to the stars, the inspiration for the TV show Quincy, the man who autopsied everyone from Janis Joplin to John Belushi to Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe. Noguchi agreed to release the body to Fred Olds, pending just a few more tests to be absolutely certain that this really and truly was the body of Elmer McCurdy.

Some of you cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, offered a free grave site in their Boothill section, right next to the eternal resting place of Bill Doolin, a real wild West outlaw legend and founder of the Wild Bunch. It was there on April 22nd, 1977, that Elmer McCurdy was finally laid to rest. Cemetery workers poured two feet of concrete on McCurdy's casket, just to make sure that no one could ever again profit from putting his body on display.

More than 300 people joined the funeral procession, walking alongside a horse-drawn hearse carrying the body of a man whose corpse had spent more years among the living than he did. Elmer McCurdy, now after so long, we can say dust to dust and ashes to ashes and lay you down to rest with those whose company you sought in life.

Elmer McCurdy's life was short and unhappy, built on a lie that broke his heart. He was absolutely terrible at being an outlaw. He couldn't stay away from the bottle. He was the definition of hapless. But Elmer didn't need to die on that day in 1911. Maybe as he sat in that hayshed, sick, feverish, drunk, scared, maybe he just couldn't see any other path.

A person can get tired, even a person who's only 31 like Elmer. There are a lot of Elmer McCurdy's out there, human pinballs careening from one misery to the next. People who have lost their way or their place. People who decide in a single instant that they're done searching. It's heartbreaking. It could have and should have been different for Elmer.

Could have, should have. Ain't that always the way? One last thing before we leave this poor man in peace. One final piece of evidence showing that Elmer McCurdy had one hell of a date with destiny. Back in 2017, a designer named Mark Taylor was featured on the Netflix show, The Toys That Made Us. Taylor created the prototypes for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toy line.

Taylor told a story from his childhood. He was about nine years old and his dad took him to an amusement park in Long Beach, California. Taylor didn't want to go into the laugh in the dark fun house. Something about it raised the boy's hackles, but he didn't want to be a baby. So he bucked up and headed into the stifling darkness.

The smell, he said, was so bad, like something in there had died. All he wanted to do was move as fast as he could, get to the end, get to the exit in the waiting sunshine. And then, there it was right in front of him. The gallows, the body of a man glowing with sickly light, swaying ever so slightly at the end of the rope.

I knew right then, Taylor said. All of a sudden, I knew this was a real person, no question. This absolutely was a real person. It's the kind of experience that leaves a mark. It was a memory that stayed with him all those years, following him from childhood into his adult life, where he found himself tasked with creating the He-Man universe.

Moving to his drawing table, he picked up his pen, and once again, he was back in the fun house. Once again, frozen in place in the dark, realizing with complete horror that the specter in front of him was actually a cadaver. It was, he said, one of the scariest things he'd ever seen. Mark Taylor began to draw, and what he drew came straight from his memory of that day in the Laugh-in-the-Dark fun house.

The day he saw the long dead body of Elmer McCurdy hanging from the gallows, what Mark Taylor drew became an iconic cartoon villain, the Lord of Destruction, the Overlord of Evil, and the star of a 2017 Geico insurance commercial, that blue-skinned sorcerer with a skull for a face, Skeletor. I can't remember when I've had a more pleasant day.

Until we meet again! Next time on True Weird Stuff, an all-out nuclear war would kill 5 billion people in about an hour, but not you. You followed directions and built a bunker in your backyard. Now you're emerging from that smoking hole in the earth into an irradiated wasteland to face the complete and utter collapse of human civilization.

But not to worry, the government has a bunker too. Bigger than yours, and hiding right there in plain sight. And what a silly idea it all was. That's the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan. You know, each of these episodes we do are like children, and you say, well, you don't want to love more, one more than the other, but I love this one more than any of the others.

I... I... Dark. I loved this episode so much. I loved everything about it. It's so unbelievable that it has to be true. It's one of those kind of things. Yes. It has everything we like. Roller skating corpses, creepy amusement parks, the six million dollar man. We love a hapless outlaw here at True Weird Stuff. Who doesn't love Skeletor?

The fact that all of these are Elmer McCurdy's story. I told my husband Kevin when I finished writing it, I'm like, I think after this we're just going to shut True Weird Stuff down. Max and I will never be this happy again. So I... So when you were talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean ride when that opened in Disneyland, one summer we drove cross country and went and visited my uncle in Los Angeles, and we went to Disneyland, and I went on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

So I saw those corpses on that ride as a kid because they were still there then. Because they weren't taken out for a long time after that. According to some people, they haven't all been removed. So two things about the use of real human remains at Disneyland in California. Because we're not talking about Orlando here.

Right. It was a different time, okay? It was a completely different time. And it's not that people had less respect for the dead back then. But, you know, the Imagineers went to UCLA's medical school. People donate their bodies to science. And, you know, we need some bones. And the school gave them the bones. So it's very easy to get outraged and outraged and pissy when you don't have context.

But at the time, it wasn't in good taste necessarily. And they weren't. It wasn't something they were bragging about. But it also wasn't illegal. And they didn't think they had done anything immoral. And, you know, honestly, let me just, I don't want to bum anybody out. But come here. Come close. Sit next to me right here.

Right here. Hold your hand. You're going to die. You're going to be forgotten. And nothing matters, right? None of it matters. Wouldn't it be awesome if a whole bunch of little kids came cruising by your bones, yelling and screaming and clapping in delight? Wouldn't that be better than just, you know, disappearing? Come on.

I'm with you there. Yeah, come on. There's green. There's burial, cremation, green burial. I want I want the option where can you use my remains as a prop? Because I think that's kind of awesome. But that's, you know, that's us. I don't know what the laws are about what happens with human remains. I do know that desecration of a corpse is a law somewhere in some places.

So there is that. And I can remember. Do you remember there was a TV show called Oddities that was on about these people that dealt in odd artifacts in New York City? And I remember from that, they said, yeah, we won't take anything that human remains because the law gets involved in that. So I don't know when those laws came around.

But I do know this much, that when they handle corpses, when they embalm them, they usually sew their mouths shut or staple their mouths shut. Well, that's now. So, all right. OK, thank you. Modern embalming. The goal with modern embalming is just to get you from the moment of death into the ground, just to give the family, the surviving remaining next of kin, something to have a funeral for.

Modern embalming is not the same as what happened to Elmer McCurdy. So pre-Civil War and there are Civil War cemeteries in the southeast that are leaching so much arsenic into the ground because that was how bodies were embalmed. And if you used a strong enough arsenic solution, what you got was a mummy, which is what Elmer McCurdy turned into.

And the arsenic, the chemical play of the arsenic on human tissues, that's why his skin darkened and was so rock hard. All of that. We don't use that anymore. It's illegal. Like all of the things that were used to embalm Elmer McCurdy are either out of practice or completely illegal. Chances are good that like your embalmed uncle, we can't put roller skates on him and push him around town.

The body wouldn't be mummified the way Elmer McCurdy's was. So there's that. I mean, we're talking in this particular case, this is the literal wild freaking West. I just recently rewatched the all three seasons of Deadwood. This is Deadwood kind of stuff here. There are no rules. There are no regulations. There are really no laws.

There are just people attempting in these sort of violent fits and starts and half-assed ways to create a society in these wild places. It was common practice back then to embalm a body and hold it because no phones, no internet, no airplanes, no Greyhound. There's rail service, but it's not high speed rail and it's not everywhere.

And it was really dangerous too, even at that point. And really dangerous. So you can give the undertaker grief for making a buck off of Elmer McCurdy, but his initial motivations were pretty pure. He was determined that whosever son or husband or brother this was, they were going to be able to give this man a funeral.

And who had any way of knowing that you couldn't be more alone in the world than Elmer McCurdy was. You couldn't have less holding you here than Elmer McCurdy did. It's one of the saddest damn stories. As you were telling it, the one thing that I had going through my mind until they hit the jackpot in his mouth. And that was how on earth were they able to get enough detective work to track what all had happened to him.

So that's pretty amazing that those items were in his mouth. A ticket had survived all those years in his mouth. In his mouth. Because if you think about it, the Museum of Crime predates the Hollywood Wax Museum. And then all decades in storage. And then the amusement park. And there it is. Tucked, you know, between the cheek and the gum, so to speak.

It was a very different world. Let me remind you of the little detail that when people will go to see Elmer's body at the funeral, at the undertaker place, they put their nickel in his mouth. The people of the past, I know that some of y'all, well, not y'all, but some of y'all's parents and neighbors are like, you know, once upon a time, Americans were decent, hardworking people, blah, blah, blah.

No, we weren't. No, we weren't. We packed picnics, went to public executions and put nickels in the mouths of dead bodies for a kick. We were no better then than we are now. We were just different because we had different challenges, different technologies and different realities. But give me a frigging break. The people of the past are not noble, y'all.

They're just people. Uh, yeah, but they should have sewn his mouth shut. That's really undignified. Now, they wouldn't have been able to find all that stuff I know, but I love what you talked about the human pinball. I love the writing of that, where you talk about the pinball because, yeah, and you know people like that.

You know why they didn't show, they don't, now they sew your mouth shut or they adhesive it shut because they don't want people panicking at the open casket viewing, right? This was a different time. This was a different time. First of all, you got shot, you laid down dead in the street, you got put into a pine box, you got buried, boom, you're gone.

It all happened very quickly, unless it was a situation like this, where you're embalmed and waiting for next of kin. But even then, the focus wasn't on the delicate sensibilities of the living. The attitude was like, there's your son, he's dead, deal. Do you see what I mean? They weren't as focused as the modern mortuary businesses on providing comfort care.

I mean, the mortuary business is not for the dead, it's for the living. They are there to usher you through the process of loss and grief and closure and all of that. And so, if you think about the focus of the mortuary business being on the living, suddenly a lot of the stuff that happens makes sense. Because they're not there to scare you or freak you out or make you repulsed.

They're there to make you go, oh gosh, grandma looks like she's sleeping. Right? But in the early days of the American West, the early days of America, full stop, death was something you lived with very intimately. Death was a frequent guest in your home. And even, and you see this a lot in the Puritans and the first wave of colonial settlers right through the Civil War.

Where did the dead body go before it was laid to rest in the ground? In the home. Right. In the living room of the home. Family members, washed and prepared the body for burial. The mortuary industry is super modern and it has, we are so distanced from the phenomenon of death, which is completely natural and you ain't escaping it and neither am I, as creepy and horrible as it sounds.

That is a very modern thing. In Elmer McCurdy's time, the funeral director that gets so much grief for being truly horrific with how he exploited Elmer's body. The beginning of that funeral director's story in this story was one of compassion. But then again, you know, he didn't want to get paid. He would not release the body until he got paid first.

It's his business, you know. It is a business. Yeah, yeah. So poor Elmer. Elmer never had a chance. This is why, people have written about Elmer and you can find other podcasts who've done episodes about Elmer. The difference for me is, and why true crime is problematic for me, is because I'm a social worker and I'm looking at all the people and all the circumstances, right?

And it's hard for me to go, Elmer McCurdy, oh, he's a dead body in a funhouse. Elmer McCurdy never had a chance. He never had a chance in life. At every turn, he got punched in the face by life. And, you know, he carried that, he carried that capacity for alcoholism. And it was his first drink that was his undoing. Yeah.

But it was the bottle that was his comfort. He was a lonely man. And the thing about Elmer, where I think he deserves so much compassion, even though as bank robbers go, it's hard to be worse than he was. You know, when he realized that he just was in so much trouble, he joined the army. He tried. He worked, he became a plumber.

He worked in the mines. He joined the army. The guy tried. And at every turn, it just didn't work out. Then he turned to crime and that really didn't work out. My favorite was the story of him blowing up the train and the safe. And taking the frame of the safe with the silver coins that were melted to the frame. It's so sad.

It's so sad. Max, if you'd have the only way this works in a movie is if it's like a Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler movie. He's robbing the wrong train as the right train rumbles past him. He robbed the wrong freaking train. It really is a Cone Brothers movie. We've got 13 million on this train and some whiskey and a watch on this train.

And guess which one he got on? Like everything, everything, everything he did. And how would he know that they would use bloodhounds to track him to the hayloft? And by that point, you know, he had tuberculosis. He was so sick and he was so drunk and he was so freaking tired. He was just so tired. He packed a lot in 31 years, but he packed even more.

In the years after that. His is one of those stories where just when you think, oh, there's the twist, right? You have no idea. The first twist is the roller skates on the corpse. Oh, there's the twist. Then the next twist is the traveling carnival, the bandit that wouldn't be captured alive. Oh, there's the twist. And then the Hollywood Wax Museum.

OK, this is the end of the story. No, then the amusement fun park. And you go, OK, this is the end of the story. This is the twist. And then here comes the friggin six million dollar man. And you go, OK, now we're truly done. There's nothing more you can do to this. This story is complete. Wrap it up. Put a bow on it.

Put it on a shelf. It's done. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. Because the six million dollar man was the appetizer for the main course of that body being the inspiration for Skeletor. And now we're done, ladies and gentlemen, with the story. Um, you know, what I thought about was a guy who was so lonely in life, had so many people attend his funeral when it finally happened.

I thought of that, too. So so you see the worst of people. But don't you think that brings out the best of people? Yes, it's an oddity, but they felt like he should have some tribute paid to himself. You know, there's something inside the people that attended that. I loved that. I loved every bit of Elmer's story, even though it broke my heart.

I loved every bit of it. But that really I mean, that gives you so much to think about. So you have to know that all Elmer wanted to be was a badass Wild West outlaw. And of course, he failed miserably. But as a sideshow attraction, he outsold Billy the Kid, right? And then, you know, he had an outlaw's funeral. So he's buried the Boothill section of that cemetery.

That's where the Wild West folks are. There's a Boothill cemetery in Tombstone, for example, Tombstone, Arizona, which same name as the movie and OK Corral and all that. So he's he's actually he's buried in the outlaw section, the Wild West section. He had an outlaw's Wild West funeral, a traditional horse drawn hearse.

The the townspeople walking alongside. He was buried next to Bill Doolin, the founder of the Wild Bunch. So even though Elmer McCurdy never knew one successful day in life, all of his dreams came true in death. And those Wild West funerals, the real ones are unbelievable. So Max, we took we were in Tombstone, Arizona with our with our family.

We took the kids to to Tombstone, Arizona, and we did all the touristy things. We went to the gunfight at the Battle of the OK Corral, which is it's, you know, reenactors. And it's exactly what you think it is, right? Then we went and had lunch at, you know, the saloon and the reenactors. You know, the Earp brothers were in this saloon and they stayed in character.

My little my littlest daughter went over and told them that she really loved watching them in the gunfight and they never broke character. Well, little lady, now you have to understand the West can be a dangerous place. They were wonderful. And as luck would have it, it was one of the coolest things that's ever happened because it was just sheer, blind, random luck.

Tombstone is laid out like a real Wild West town. Wooden sidewalks. I mean, you just feel like you're in a movie. And one of the residents of the town because it's filled with it's populated by real people with real jobs. Not everybody in Tombstone, Arizona is playing Wyatt Earp and one of the long term residents of Tombstone had died and the entire town gathered that day to give him a traditional Old West.

So as we're as we're walking along the wooden sidewalks, we see there's something coming in the distance at the end of the far end of the main street. So we stopped and watched. Here comes the horse drawn hearse and all of the townspeople were dressed in traditional Western clothing. The women had long black dresses and shawls and bonnets.

The men had, you know, there were cowboy hats and boots and frock coats, the longer frock coats. Every single person in that funeral procession was dressed like they were in a cowboy movie and the entire thing, it was completely silent as the procession grew closer, all the tourists, everyone fell silent and we all just stood there and watched this procession go past us on its way to the Boot Hill Cemetery where he would be buried with the other legends of the West.

It was really, really cool. And that, when I was thinking about Elmer McCurdy's funeral, that's what he got, Max, in Oklahoma. That is what happened for him and it's kind of awesome, isn't it? And he was the only one buried there who had actually had roller skates on and rolled around. I knew you would love that detail.

The image of that, of gleeful kids laughing and having a good time with the corpse, I mean. Well, you know, let me just say for any of you clutching your pearls, well, they weren't looking at screens, OK? There you go. There's no pleasing you people. So the skeletor part of this probably was one of the most fascinating turns because you just didn't expect that to happen.

So we have the Skeletor Geico commercial. Oh, let's play it. Here it is. Give up, Skeletor. You're finished. Curse you, He-Man, you interfering imbecile. Give us one good reason we shouldn't vanquish you to another dimension. OK, guys, hear me out. Switching to Geico could save you hundreds on car insurance. He does make a point.

Yes. I do like to save money. Catch you on the flip, suckers. Geico, because saving 15% or more on car insurance is always a great answer. And now, you know. And now, you know. And what's so cool about that, a lot of people listening to this right now grew up playing with those toys. Oh, yeah. So the creator, this is how it is for artists.

It's so fascinating. You don't always get to know what that core inspiration was. But as a nine-year-old kid, he was so scared by Elmer McCurdy that it never left his imagination. And remember that they had painted. So by the time Elmer made it to the Laugh in the Dark funhouse, he wasn't wearing cowboy clothes anymore.

They had stripped his body naked. He was just this leathery, wizened, mummified-looking thing. And they dipped him in fluorescent paint. So, so when that little boy came upon the gallows where Elmer McCurdy's body was hanging, you know the blue light that lights up fluorescent paint? Right, right, black light. Can you see why Skeletor looks like Skeletor?

And how the face of that corpse painted and glowing in the dark inspired that? Can you see it? You can, absolutely. Elmer McCurdy. I love it. I want to thank Sandra for reaching out and suggesting that we tell this story. It just, I loved every bit of it. And there wasn't one, if I could find any little tidbit about Elmer McCurdy, I shared it in the story, just because he should, we've got to put some dignity back on those old bones, you know?

Yeah, we do. We've got to give him his humanity. Oh, so yeah, there you go. Next week, is there anything else we need to cover on Elmer McCurdy? I think we've beaten these bones to death. I just, it's so hard for me to, you're right, like, you love all your children differently, but equally. This one is really hard for me to let go.

I just wanted to do, basically, I wanted to spend the rest of my life telling Elmer McCurdy's story, because I love the show. Sherry said, you're going to love this one. This is going to be your fear. You're going to love this. And then she explained what it was. It was like, oh my God, yeah. I don't know what's wrong with us, Max, because I do know people.

Now, I'm not really close to these people, because we are different animals, but I do know people who are like, well, that is just terrible. That is terrible that that happened to that man. That is a disgrace, and I'm going to pray. Okay, well, thank you for praying, but can we talk about it some more first? Because it's freaking amazing.

It's amazing. And you know what? This is the last thing I'm going to say about Elmer McCurdy, and then I'm going to tell you what we're doing next week. This is the last thing I'm going to say about Elmer McCurdy. He was a wretched, broken, hapless failure in life who never knew love, who never felt himself capable, truly, of making it in the world.

His friends were not his friends. His parents weren't his parents. He was rootless and lost and drifting, and then he died. He bled out in a dirty hayshed, choking on his own fluids because of pneumonia. But in death, he became a freaking icon and an inspiration. And yes, you may go, I just don't think it's right to dip dead bodies and glow in the dark paint and hang them in funhouses.

Well, who does, really? I mean, nobody's advocating for this. We're just saying, let's make some lemonade out of these lemons, okay? I think we did. Because here's a guy, whose life was pure shit, and in death, he's like iconic. Let's be happy. Hey, Sherry, for the people listening to this podcast, it's true weird stuff.

You know that going in. I'm so used to the radio show where, well, if we told this story on the radio show, 99.9% of our listeners would love it. And here comes 0.1%. Well, I just can't listen to a show that takes such delight in the desecration of a human being who's one of God's children. Okay. All right, well. It's true.

And I would like your boss's name and address so that I can file a complaint about you. All right, well, get a pen. It's, let me spell it for you. It's S-H-E-E as in Elmer. Elmer. R-I. S as in Skeletor. Oh my gosh. So here's what we're going to do next week on true weird stuff. And I'm going to dedicate that episode to my big brother who was so traumatized by duck and cover when he was little, little, little.

So my brother was old enough to be the last wave of the duck and cover kids. Duck and cover was a drill where schoolchildren would be instructed to hide under their desks to protect them from an incoming nuclear blast launched by the Soviets. And of course, a school desk is not going to protect you from a nuclear blast, but it is what it is.

So my brother was so traumatized by that that when we were kids out West, he would come in and be like, Sherry, you want to hear a story? Okay. All right, we're going to talk about nuclear winter. And he would fill my head. I mean, I was so paralyzed at like nine years old by fear of the coming nuclear holocaust. It was crazy.

So I've always had a little bit of a fascination with that era in American history, that part of the Cold War where Americans were building nuclear bomb shelters in their basements and backyards. And I don't even know how to tell you how utterly pointless that would be as an exercise. So next week, we're going to look at some nuclear bunkers and we're going to go to where the US government was going to hide in the event of a nuclear strike.

Oh, I love this stuff. I love this stuff. And this particular bunker, thank goodness we never needed it because if we had needed it, it wouldn't have gotten the job done. This nuclear bunker was built in plain sight and disguised with wallpaper and fake walls as a conference center of a resort hotel. It's called the Greenbrier in West Virginia.

And maybe you knew there was a secret nuclear bunker at the Greenbrier, but I bet you don't know the rest of the story. And that's next week on True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

Original artworks by Olivia Axelman. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.