In 1976, an episode of the popular TV show was filmed at Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach. To create the right atmosphere, a gallows with a hanged man's mannequin was placed near one of the pavilions.
In the hustle and bustle, one of the crew members damaged the mannequin, and his arm fell off. To everyone's horror, human bones appeared under the layer of wax.
It turned out that the body, which for more than 60 years was mistaken for a dummy and used in various shows and carnivals, belonged to the former loser mobster Elmer McCurdy.
In the underworld, McCready (1880-1911) was known as an explosives expert. But he was the worst specialist. Once, for example, he tried to blow up a safe with nitroglycerin, and valuable silver coins were fused into one large lump of silver. And during his last robbery, he mixed up the dates and instead of a train carrying $ 400,000, they robbed an ordinary passenger train. The loot for McCready and his gang was $ 46 and several bottles of whiskey. But the loser-robber could not take advantage of those either, since he was shot during the chase.
Nobody asked for the body of the unfortunate McCready, so the owner of the funeral home embalmed it and put it on display in his pavilion. People gladly forked out to look at the embalmed bandit, so during his posthumous career he made much more money than during his lifetime.
Then the owner sold it profitably, and poor McCready began to change hands until everyone forgot that this was not a wax doll, but the body of a real person. The owner of the "Haunted House" in the vicinity of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota even refused to buy the mummy, considering it not similar enough to a real human body.
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For half a century, McCready starred in films and television shows, participated in carnivals and even visited the wax museum.
A long earthly journey ended for McCurdy in one of the cemeteries in Oklahoma on April 22, 1977. To avoid further adventures, the coffin was filled with two cubic yards of concrete.
Sveta Gogol
