Elmer McCurdy – The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up
Many of us have been to local fairs or carnivals over the years, and some of us decided to show how brave we were by riding the Haunted House attraction with our friends. The creepiest parts of those rides were the mannequins that were propped up in corners, painted to make our skin crawl, and keep us up at night. If you are anything like me, I would lay in bed, wide eyed, wondering if they were all actually dummies, or if my rickety car had passed something not so fake in the darkness. This brings me to Elmer McCurdy.
Elmer McCurdy was born on New Years day 1880 in Washington, Maine. He was adopted by his uncle and his uncle’s wife to save the family’s reputation as his biological mother was only 17 and unwed. Elmer spent most of his younger years in Bangor, Maine. You might know Bangor because the town is the home of horror master Steven King and the basis for many of the locations in his novels. Bangor is also the home to Box of Oddities podcasters Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth. Anyways, he developed a drinking problem at a very young age, and this would be a problem for him for the rest of his life.
Elmer was briefly in the military at Fort Leavenworth where he learned how to use nitroglycerin, poorly. After being discharged, he eventually made his way to Lenapah, Oklahoma. It was in Lenapah were he joined up with a group of men who decided to rob the Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific train. They did manage to stop the train but that was about as far as the good luck lasted. McCurdy blew the door off the train’s safe with nitroglycerin and with it most of the $4,000 contained within. They scrounged some coins but even those were melted together from the blast.
A few months later, Elmer attempted and failed to rob a bank, but again made off with very little money. He blew the vault’s door clean though the lobby but did not breach the inner safe. So back to train robbing it was. Train robbery 2, went almost as well as the first. The crew stopped the wrong train, failed to get into the safe, and only made off with a few jugs of whiskey and about $50. Little did he know, this robbery was to be his last.
The sheriffs near Okesa, Oklahoma placed a $2,000 bounty on old Elmer’s head and discovered that he was hiding out in a local barn. On the morning of October 7, 1911, the barn was surrounded, and a very drunk McCurdy began shooting at the police outside. Eventually the officers landed a round in McCurdy’s chest and he died.
Strangely, this is when the story really gets interesting. Elmer’s body was taken to a local mortician where he was embalmed with an arsenic-based fluid for extra long preservation. After nobody showed up to claim his body, the mortician decided to recoup the money spent on embalming him by displaying him in the window of the mortuary, and charging money to get a closer look at “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up.” Coins were inserted into the corpse’s mouth leaving it to the imagination to figure out how the coins were retrieved.
Five years later, two men claiming to be Elmer’s brothers showed up to claim the body. These men were in fact owners of the Great Patterson Carnival Show. They had heard the story and thought that the body would make a great addition to the traveling carnival. He traveled the country from 1916 until 1922 as “The Outlaw That Would Never Be Captured Alive.” Thousands of people flocked to see his famous outlaw’s preserved body over the years. Gaining him more fame in death than he ever had as a train robber.
Louis Sonney purchased Elmer in 1922 to display him in this traveling “Museum of Crime.” McCurdy was lent to movie director Dwain Esper for a while in 1933 and was displayed as an example of what would happen if you were a dope fiend and was sometimes displayed in movie theaters to promote his film Narcotic!. After the promotion for the film ended, Elmer was placed in storage in Los Angeles for the next 30 years. Elmer had become fully mummified and was seen as simply a creepy prop for use in movies and not an actual human body.
He made one more film appearance in the movie She Freak in 1967 before being sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum along with a group of wax figurines. Eventually Ed Liersch, who owned an amusement company, bought the body and placed it in the “Laff in the Dark” funhouse. He had a hole drilled in his neck for a support to be inserted before being hung from the gallows in one of the funhouse’s scenes. Here he hung until 1976.
While shooting an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, a prop assistant tried moving Elmer’s body out of a shot only to have his arm break clean off. This was not thought strange until they discovered that the wax body contained human bone and muscle tissue! Medical examiners confirmed that it was a human body that had become mummified and they were able to trace him back to the traveling museum of crime because of a ticket stub found in his mouth and a coin dating back to 1924.
On April 22, 1977 Elmer was finally put to rest in the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. His casket is covered in a layer of concrete so he may finally rest without fear of being exhumed and put back on display. You can still find his headstone in the Guthrie cemetery and pay respects to a very bad train robber that traveled and gained more fame in death than many people during their lives.
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