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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Spooky Week: Elmer McCurdy’s Nine Lives

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.61.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1976, a television crew filming an episode of the show “The Six Million Dollar Man” descended on a rundown funhouse in Long Beach, California. While filming, they accidentally broke the arm off a wax dummy. Except...it wasn't a wax dummy. It was a real body. The body of a notorious train robber from the early 1900s, named Elmer McCurdy. Check out the Atlas entry for Elmer McCurdy’s grave.  For more information on Elmer, we recommend Mark Svenvold’s book “Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey Dylan.

0:04.0

Hi Amanda, how are you?

0:05.0

Good.

0:06.0

So Halloween's coming up with all, you know, the haunted houses and the corn mazes and

0:10.6

hay rides and whatever, just like so many great opportunities

0:13.4

to be scared in a fun environment

0:15.2

where you know everything is fake and it's totally safe.

0:18.0

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

0:19.0

But today I want to tell you a story where real horror crashes the fake horror party, you know?

0:28.0

So for this story, we're going to go back to the 1970s specifically to

0:36.9

December of 1976. Okay. So we're at this kind of like fun house in Long Beach, California on the

0:46.3

boardwalk. It's called a laugh in the dark, L A F in the dark.

0:50.3

Yes, I'm here. I'm very excited.

0:52.8

So just picture kind of like, you know, a little bit of a rundown fun house and there's like the

0:59.2

creepy organ music playing probably. But there's this television crew that's at this

1:06.3

fun house filming on location an episode of the six million dollar man which is

1:10.7

a popular show at the time. You know what I'm talking about.

1:15.0

Yeah, okay.

1:16.0

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:17.0

So that sound is coming through on top of the Oregon music,

1:19.0

and they're like filming this episode.

1:22.0

And apparently as you walk through the fun house there's this one area where this wax figure

...

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