In December 1976, the cast and crew of TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man were hard at work preparing to shoot an episode for the show’s fourth season at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. While setting up a scene in which Steve Austin (played by Lee Majors) was to make his way through a funhouse ride called Laff in the Dark, an employee on set tried to move what he thought was a hanging mannequin out of his way and got a big surprise in the process.
You see, when the worker grabbed onto the supposed dummy’s arm, it snapped off in his hand. Upon closer examination, he realized that there was a bone inside.
It turns out this was no spookhouse mannequin, but a real honest-to-goodness dead body. Peculiar as that may sound, the story of how it ended up being part of a carnival ride is even more bizarre. Eventually, it was discovered that the remains belonged to an outlaw by the name of Elmer McCurdy, who’d been killed in a gunfight with police way back in 1911. McCurdy had reportedly just robbed a train in Oklahoma prior to his death, and hid out in a barnyard where he was later shot.
A TV Crew Found a Real Dead Body Inside an Amusement Park Funhouse in 1976
McCurdy’s body was then taken to a funeral home in nearby Pawhuska, but no one ever claimed it. For whatever reason, the undertaker decided to embalm McCurdy and prop his preserved corpse up to entertain his customers—for five cents a pop. After a while, two men purporting to be McCurdy’s long-lost brothers requested the body so that they could give it a decent burial. In reality, they were carnival proprietors looking to make McCurdy their new star attraction.
For the next 60 years, McCurdy’s mummified corpse was displayed at carnivals, haunted houses and wax museums before landing at the Pike. By then, everyone apparently just assumed it was fake. Once the police were able to identify McCurdy, his remains were finally laid to rest at a cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. And to make sure he didn’t go on any future tours, two feet of concrete was poured over his coffin.
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