Prop body used in popular TV show turned out to be real human corpse, but the story of how it got there is so much stranger

In 1976, film crew were preparing to shoot an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man at the Laff-in-the-Dark funhouse when a crew member went to move a prop body only for the arm to fall off and expose what appeared to be real human bones inside.

That’s because they were real human bones and this was a real human corpse belonging to a man named Elmer McCurdy and as strange as this discovery was, the story of the man these remains belonged to and the journey his deceased body took afterwards are much stranger.

The body is examined

After the grim discovery was made by the film crew the body was transported to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office according to the Library of Congress blog. Upon close examination a copper-jacketed bullet was discovered in the chest meaning the person was more than likely murdered. 

Slowly the clues were put together to figure out who this person was. Embalming fluid commonly used in the early 1900’s was also found within the body suggesting the remains were pretty old. The corpse’s mouth was also stuffed with carnival ticket stubs which proved to be a big help in identifying the body.

Who did the remains belong to?

The coroner was eventually able to identify the remains as belonging to a man by the name of Elmer McCurdy and he had been shot to death way back in 1911! McCurdy was a drinker, a drifter, and a bandit who ran with a gang of train robbers. He was an outlaw through and through, although not exactly the kind you’d see in a Western.

One day the gang picked the wrong train, making off with $45 and some whiskey. The men likely thought they’d gotten away with their crime, however, they were tracked down a couple of days later and found themselves facing frontier justice. McCurdy swore he would never be taken alive and ultimately died after an hour long shoot out.

After his death, McCurdy’s body was taken to a funeral home where it was embalmed and then it sat there for six months as nobody came to claim it. After noticing the perfectly preserved cadaver, one business-savvy individual decided to cash-in on a growing interest in the “embalmed bandit” as he was known locally. He dressed Elmer up, put a rifle in his hand and put the corpse on display for five cents per view.

McCurdy’s journey after his death

In 1916, two men from a carnival posed as brothers of Elmer and claimed the body, only to make the corpse a sideshow attraction as they travelled across the country with the Great Patterson Carnival Show.

The body then passed into the possession of Louis Sonney in 1922 after a carnival worker used Elmer as a security deposit only to default on a $500 loan. McCurdy’s corpse then travelled up and down the West Coast with Sonney as part of his Museum of Crime show which ran until the 1940s.

Elmer ended up in a warehouse after Sonney’s death in 1949 and remained there until 1968 where he was sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum which closed a year later. It’s here that the body became mixed with the wax dolls and mistaken for a prop rather than a real body. He was then sold to the Nu-Point Amusement Park in Long Beach, CA, where he was painted in fluorescent red paint and put to work as a creepy prop on a spooky ride at the park.

In 1976 an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man was filmed at the park which is where the prop was revealed to be a real body. The following year McCurdy was given a proper burial in the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery. He had been travelling the country as a corpse for over 65 years by that point.