The Mummy Outlaw Who Fooled Hollywood
From train robber to sideshow corpse: The Strange Journey of Elmer McCurdy.
Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and others evoke a sense of the Wild West era, long before chatGPT or Googling became common verbs. Their names belong to a time when America’s frontier was still unsettled, where outlaws robbed trains, lawmen faced down desperadoes, and legends were forged in dusty saloons under flickering lantern light. These figures weren’t just men — they became myths, carried forward by dime novels, traveling shows, and Hollywood reels. Yet the line between history and performance has always been blurry. The Wild West was never just about gunsmoke and gold; it was about the stories we told, the myths we kept alive, and the characters who refused to die — sometimes quite literally, as in the strange case of Elmer McCurdy, the outlaw who lived on as a carnival prop decades after his final shootout.
Elmer J. McCurdy was born in 1880 to Sadie McCurdy, a teenage mother, before the show "Teen Mom" was on MTV. McCurdy drifted through jobs and found himself in a life of crime, though he wasn’t successful. His most infamous heist, a bungled train robbery in Oklahoma back in October 1911, netted $46 and a jug of whisky. Days later, he was gunned down by a sheriff’s posse.
And, usually, this would have been where the tale ended. Turns out, McCurdy had more adventures to live after death than he ever could have imagined. Let’s delve into this interesting turn of events that led McCurdy to spend the next several years touring the US.
Because no one came forward to claim his body, the undertaker in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, decided to take matters into his own hands. Instead of a quick burial, he embalmed McCurdy with an arsenic-based preservative that left the outlaw stiff, leathery, and disturbingly lifelike — a detail noted in the Library of Congress’s account of his afterlife (Thomas, 2018). Weeks turned into months, and when no relatives appeared, the undertaker began to see an opportunity. He dressed McCurdy in his best clothes, propped him in the corner of the funeral home, and for a nickel, curious locals could step inside and gawk at “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up.” Children whispered that he looked ready to open his eyes; adults marveled at how real he appeared, never realizing they were staring at the embalmed remains of a man whose last crime had yielded only forty-six dollars and a jug of whiskey (History.com, Ponti, 2025).
“McCurdy was a classic two‑bit loser, but after his death, he was suddenly glorified as a hard‑riding outlaw, and his embalmed body was turned into a sideshow attraction.”
— The New Yorker (Svenvold, December 9, 2002)
The sideshow didn’t end there, as journalist Nick Spacek described in KANSAS! Magazine (2024), carnival promoters and traveling showmen soon came calling. Each wanted the outlaw corpse for their own morbid attractions. McCurdy’s body was shuffled from one sideshow tent to another, displayed in wax museums, and even cast as a grisly prop in exploitation films. His name faded, his identity forgotten, and by the 1930s, he was no longer remembered as a failed outlaw but treated as just another grotesque curiosity —a body turned into a spectacle for crowds who thought he was nothing more than a papier-mâché dummy. To most who paid their ticket, he was just another grotesque curiosity — a body turned into spectacle (Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, 2020).
Decades rolled by, and McCurdy’s wanderings carried him farther from Oklahoma than he had ever gone alive. By the mid-1970s, his remains ended up in a Long Beach, California, amusement park funhouse, painted in garish colors under flickering neon. It was there, in 1976, that a crew filming The Six Million Dollar Man tried to move what they thought was a mannequin. As they repositioned the figure, the arm snapped off — and inside was not sawdust or stuffing, but bone (The New Yorker, Svenvold, 2002).
The discovery stunned investigators, who slowly traced the corpse’s bizarre history through old sideshow records and newspaper clippings. The “dummy” wasn’t a mannequin at all, but the long-lost remains of Elmer McCurdy, outlaw turned carnival attraction (Medium, Reynolds, 2024). In 1977, after more than sixty years of wandering, McCurdy was finally laid to rest in Guthrie, Oklahoma. To ensure his traveling days were truly over, workers poured two feet of concrete over his casket — a detail confirmed by local accounts in Native Oklahoma (2024).
For the first time since 1911, Elmer McCurdy stayed put.
Elmer McCurdy never reached the fame of Jesse James or Wyatt Earp in life, but in death, he became something else entirely: a macabre roadside attraction, a legend not of heroism or crime, but of how spectacle can outlast memory. His story reminds us that myth and reality in the Wild West were never separate—they were stitched together in the dime novels, carnival tents, and television sets that carried them forward. McCurdy may have been a failed outlaw, but in the strangest way, he achieved the immortality he always sought.
📚 Further Reading & Sources
Heather Thomas, Elmer McCurdy: Traveling Corpse, Library of Congress Blog (2018) – Read here
Crystal Ponti, The Dead Outlaw Whose Mummy Became a Traveling Show Prop, History.com (2025) – Read here
Nick Spacek, The True Story of the Mummified Outlaw, KANSAS! Magazine (2024) – Read here
The Sideshow Corpse Hidden in a Fun House, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (2020) – Read here
Svenvold, Elmer McCurdy, The New Yorker (2002) – Read here
Tim Reynolds, The Strange Saga of Elmer McCurdy, Medium (2024) – Read here
The Strange Life of Elmer McCurdy, Native Oklahoma (2024) – Read here
Elmer McCurdy, Wikipedia – Read here
🎥 An American Mummy: The Tale of Outlaw Elmer McCurdy, YouTube – Watch here
🎥 TIMEWATCH: The Oklahoma Outlaw [Elmer McCurdy], BBC Documentary on YouTube – Watch here