Strung up in the corner of a roadside amusement park fun house was the figure of a man,

coated so many times with phosphorus paint that it glowed in the dimly lit space, intended to frighten any carnival goers who dared enter.

It was alarmingly lifelike, and yet in the several years the figure was on display,

no one dared question if the man was anything more than a manne

this story begins in Washington, Maine, but spans the entire country.

It's a different kind of true crime story

about the life and death of a man named Elmer McCurdy.

Elmer McCurdy was shot and killed, but his death was not investigated or prosecuted as a murder.

Elmer McCurdy was a criminal himself in the final decade of his life. A lousy one by most accounts but that wasn't

what made Elmer the center of national attention and intrigue in the late 1970s, 66 years after he died.

What happened to Elmer McCurdy in his death,

and during the nearly seven decades

before he was finally interred, that's the story here.

I'm Kylie Lowe and this is the bizarre story of Maynor Elmer McCurdy's Life After Death on Dark Down East. I'm going to Born in Washington, Maine in 1880, Elmer McCurdy seemed to land in the midst of unfortunate circumstances from the very start.

According to the New England Historical Society, his mother was Sadie McCurdy, just 17 years old and living at home when she had Elmer.

Though unconfirmed, many sources report that Elmer McCurdy's father was a cousin of

Sadie's who had lived with her family for a short

stint. Having a baby out of wedlock during this time left women and their

families with permanently tarnished images.

To protect the McCurdy family from the expected societal judgment, Sadie's brother George

and sister-in-law Helen adopted Elmer and raised him as their own alongside their biological son.

Until he was 15 years old, Elmer was a happy boy and teenager.

...