The smell of popcorn, the sound of laughter, and the screams of people riding a roller coaster. These are the sounds and sensations associated with an amusement park, a place of joy, wonder, and childhood memories. But at the heart of an amusement park in Long Beach, California, a macabre and terrifying secret was hidden, a forgotten piece of American history that would chill the blood of all who discovered the truth.

On a December night in 1976, a television crew was preparing to film an episode of the popular action show The $6 Million Man, inside the haunted funhouse, Laugh-in-the-Dark. The crew was setting up the lights and props. A crew member approached what he thought was a horror dummy, a skeletal figure with a neon-red dummy hanging from a gallows. When the man touched the dummy’s arm, it came off with a dry snap. But what came out was not plastic or plaster. It was a real human bone.

What followed was the kind of scene you don’t see in horror movies. The prop the crews were handling was not a prop at all. It was the perfectly preserved, mummified body of an Old West outlaw, a man who had been dead for over 60 years. The police were called to the scene and the movie set became a real-life crime scene. The discovery was a shock. But the story of how this dead man ended up in a funhouse, hanging from a gallows as a prop, is a strange and tragic odyssey that spans 65 years and stretches across the entire country.

To understand how a dead bandit ended up as a prop, we must start at the beginning, with the story of one of the most unfortunate and pathetic criminals in Old West history, Elmer McCurdy. Born in 1880, McCurdy’s life was marked by failure. His childhood was hard and full of hardship. He joined the U.S. Army, where he received important training as a machine gun operator and, more importantly, learned to use nitroglycerin as an explosive. After his service, he drifted into a life of crime, hoping to make his fortune as a bold and daring outlaw. There was only one problem: Elmer McCurdy was a terrible outlaw.

McCurdy’s criminal career was a tragic comedy of errors. In 1911, he and his gang planned to rob a train in Oklahoma, believing it was carrying a $400,000 payroll for a Native American tribe. They managed to stop the train and locate the safe. With the expertise he had acquired in the army, Elmer carefully prepared his nitroglycerin charge to blow the safe door open. But, in a miscalculation that would become the hallmark of his criminal career, he used too much explosive. The explosion not only blew the safe door off, but it completely destroyed the safe along with most of its contents. The silver coins melted into a giant mass of molten metal that was only worth a fraction of the original prize. They escaped with what little they could salvage.

A few months later, undeterred, Elmer planned his next big score: a bank robbery in the small town of Shiakwa, Kansas. He and his gang spent two hours in the dead of night, using a hammer and drill to break through the thick brick wall of the bank. When they finally got inside, they placed their nitroglycerin charge on the main vault door. Once again, Elmer miscalculated the amount. The explosion was so powerful it demolished the interior of the building and brought the roof down, but it failed to damage the inner safe where the money was. The massive explosion woke up the entire town, and the gang was forced to flee empty-handed, having caused thousands of dollars in damage and stolen nothing.

Elmer’s final robbery attempt was perhaps the most pathetic. He decided to rob another train, this one supposedly carrying a $4,000 payment for the Osage Nation. But he got his train schedules mixed up. Instead of robbing the high-value passenger train, he and his gang mistakenly stopped a local, slow-moving passenger train that had nothing of value on it. They managed to steal a grand total of about $43, a watch, and two jugs of whiskey from the terrified passengers.

Three days later, a sheriff’s posse tracked Elmer down to a hay barn where he was hiding out, drunk on the stolen whiskey. A shootout ensued and, on October 7, 1911, Elmer McCurdy, the failed outlaw, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest. And this is where his strange, unbelievable story truly begins.

His unclaimed body was taken to the Johnson Funeral Home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The undertaker, Joseph Johnson, used a large quantity of an arsenic-based embalming fluid, a common practice at the time, to preserve the body while he waited for someone to claim it and pay for the burial. But no one ever came. No family, no friends. Elmer McCurdy was alone in death, as he had been for much of his life.

As the months passed, the undertaker noticed something remarkable. The arsenic-based preservative had worked so well in the dry Oklahoma air that Elmer’s body had become perfectly mummified. It was hard as leather and incredibly well preserved. Seeing a bizarre business opportunity, the undertaker decided to put his pickled outlaw on display. He dressed Elmer in his old clothes, placed a rifle in his hands, and stood him up in a corner of the funeral home. He began charging local residents a nickel to see the bandit who wouldn’t give up. For the next five years, Elmer McCurdy’s corpse was a popular local tourist attraction.

But one day, two men arrived at the funeral home, claiming to be Elmer’s long-lost brothers from California, who had finally tracked him down and had come to give him a proper burial. The undertaker, though sad to see his star attraction go, reluctantly handed the mummy over to the men. But the men were not his brothers. They were carnival promoters. Elmer McCurdy’s body had just been stolen from a funeral home. His long, bizarre, and anonymous journey as a sideshow attraction, a movie prop, and a forgotten piece of macabre American history was just beginning.

Elmer McCurdy’s strange journey had begun. The two men who claimed to be his brothers were in fact the owners of a traveling carnival called the Great Patterson Shows. For the next several years, Elmer’s mummified body became a star attraction in their sideshow. He was exhibited alongside the bearded lady and the world’s smallest horse. He was billed as the famous Oklahoma Outlaw or the embalmed bandit. He was a popular and profitable exhibit.

From there, his journey becomes a tangled and often difficult to trace path through the strange underbelly of American entertainment. His body was sold from one carnival to another, from one sideshow owner to the next. He was displayed at amusement parks across Texas and was even, according to some reports, briefly acquired by a wax museum. And as the decades passed, a crucial and bizarre transformation took place. The original true story of who he was began to fade. The oral history that accompanied the exhibit was lost or forgotten as he was sold and resold. New owners no longer knew or cared that he was the real mummified body of an Oklahoma outlaw. To them, he was just a prop, a very realistic and creepy-looking dummy made of wax or papier-mâché. He was loaned out for promotional purposes. And it’s even believed that he made a brief, uncredited appearance in the background of a 1933 horror film. By the 1960s and 70s, his true identity was completely lost. He eventually ended up at the New Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California, where he was simply part of the scenery, a spooky figure hanging in the gallows of the Laugh-in-the-Dark funhouse ride.

And that is where he remained, a forgotten corpse hiding in plain sight, until December 1976. A television crew was filming an episode of the popular action show The $6 Million Man, and they were using the funhouse as a location. As a crew member went to move the neon-red Hanging Man prop, he grabbed its arm. The dry, brittle limb snapped off at the shoulder with an audible crack, and the crew member stared in absolute horror. Sticking out of the dummy’s shoulder was not wire or plaster. It was a real white human arm bone.

The film set was instantly transformed into a real-life crime scene. The Long Beach Police Department and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office were called in. The initial assumption was that this was the body of a recent murder victim. The body was carefully transported to the coroner’s office for an autopsy. But as the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Naguchi, began his work, he realized he was dealing with something far older and far stranger. The body was perfectly mummified, preserved by an old arsenic-based embalming method. As he examined the mouth, he made another bizarre discovery. Lodged inside was a 1924 penny and a ticket stub from the crime museum in Los Angeles. It was clear this body had been a sideshow attraction.

A careful examination of the torso revealed a single old gunshot wound. Using advanced forensic techniques, the team was able to determine that the bullet had been fired from a pre-1922 era weapon. The police now knew they were not looking for a modern killer, but for the identity of a man who had died over half a century ago.

The incredible story of the discovery of the dummy that turned out to be a real body became a national news sensation. And it was this news coverage that finally gave Elmer back his name. Historians and old-time carnival enthusiasts in Oklahoma recognized the story of the embalmed bandit who had been stolen from the Pawhuska funeral home so many years ago. They contacted the L.A. coroner’s office. With this new lead, investigators were able to trace the records and through a painstaking process of historical detective work, they were able to officially and conclusively identify the funhouse mummy. It was Elmer McCurdy.

After a life of failure and a bizarre 65-year career as a sideshow prop after his death, Elmer McCurdy was finally going to get a proper burial. In April 1977, his body was transported back to Oklahoma. He was laid to rest in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, a place reserved for other famous Old West outlaws. His funeral was attended by over 300 people, a far larger crowd than he had ever drawn in his life as a criminal. The residents of Guthrie, who had adopted his strange story as their own, wanted to give him a final, respectful farewell. But they also wanted to ensure that his long, strange journey was finally over. To make absolutely certain that Elmer McCurdy’s body would never be stolen again after his coffin was lowered into the grave, the funeral director ordered a final, definitive measure. They poured 2 feet of solid concrete on top of the casket, sealing him in the earth forever. The bandit who wouldn’t give up had finally been put to rest.