Episode 681: Elmer McCurdy: The Outlaw Mummy

Morbid

Morbid Network | Wondery

True Crime, Comedy, Exhibit C

4.5 • 95.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In early December 1976, a film crew was shooting an episode of a popular television show at The Pike, a boardwalk amusement park in Long Beach, California. In order to prepare for the scene, the prop master moved what he believed to be a wax mannequin hanging from funhouse gallows; however, when he grabbed the mannequin by the arm, the limb broke off, revealing human bone and muscle tissue.

After removing the body to the coroner’s office to be autopsied, it was revealed that what had long thought to have been a wax museum dummy was in fact the body of a man who’d died from a gunshot wound more than six decades before his body was discovered in Long Beach. After some basic detective work, investigators learned that the mummified corpse was that of Elmer McCurdy, an early twentieth-century bank robber who was shot and killed by a sheriff’s posse in Oklahoma in 1911.

Removing the body from the funhouse and identifying the body allowed authorities to arrange for a proper burial, but it did little to answer the question on the minds of so many: How did the mummified body of a long-dead outlaw end up on display in a wax museum funhouse?

Thank you to the Incredible Dave White of Bring Me the Axe Podcast for research and Writing support!

References

Cohen, Jerry. 1976. "Mummy identified as bandit slain in 1911." Los Angeles Times, December 11: 1.

Harvey, Steve. 1979. "Bungler Elmer McCurdy... RIP... gets more attention in death than in life." Los Angeles Times, December 31: 21.

Himmel, Nieson. 1976. "'Dummy' found to be a corpse." Los Angeles Times, December 9: 3.

Los Angeles Times. 1976. "Mummy was Oklahoma bandit killed in 1912." Los Angeles Times, December 10: 8.

Reuters. 1977. "'Wax model' identified as Oklahoma bandit." New York Times, April 15: 14.

Smith, Robert Barr. 1999. "Western Lore." Wild West.

Svenvold, Mark. 2002. Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw. New York, NY: Harper.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey weirdos, before we unleashed today's macab mystery, we were wondering, have you ever heard of Wondery Plus?
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0:09.9	You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or an Apple podcast or Spotify.
0:14.7	You're listening to a Morbid Network podcast.
0:20.7	I'm John Robbins, and joining me on How Do You Coke this week is the comedian,
0:25.1	writer and broadcaster Pierre Novelli. The real way you learn to cope is you just have to eat
0:29.5	it and suffer. You just have to go, I hate this, but I'll just deal with it. And that is a thing a lot
0:34.3	of autistic people learn to do because they don't know that anyone else is not having this experience. So they think, well, we're all here gritting our teeth
0:41.2	because of how much we hate this environment. And they don't realize no one else is. So that's
0:45.0	How Do You Cope with me, John Robbins. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, weirdos. I'm Elena. And I'm Ash. And this is M-O-R-B-I-D.
1:05.2	M to the O, to the R-M... on we need to keep that
1:25.2	we need to keep that
1:26.6	the r bide m we need to clip that shit right out M to the O to the R-B-I-D.
1:29.1	Mormid.
1:29.7	We need to clip that shit right out.
1:32.1	Hold that up.
1:33.7	M to the O.
1:35.0	To the M-O.
1:36.8	It's like, whoa, we had another M-B-N-B-N.
1:38.5	I said mormbid.
1:39.6	Mormid.
1:40.6	It's Morm B.
	...

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