THE SAGA OF ELMER MCCURDY

This story comes with a warning. The true tale of Oklahoma outlaw Elmer McCurdy is a bizarre and macabre one, and at least one or two of the facts revealed within the next several hundred words may strike some as hilarious and others as appalling; it all depends on the reader’s individual sensibilities and tolerance for the underbelly of show business.
With that in mind, here’s the old lawbreaker’s saga, based on plenty of research as well as personal correspondence with a pivotal figure in McCurdy’s post-death perambulations. We’ll meet him shortly.
Elmer McCurdy was a minor Oklahoma outlaw; by most accounts, he wasn’t a very good one. In October 1911, McCurdy and his gang held up a passenger train, getting away with not quite 50 bucks and a couple of jugs of whiskey. The posse caught up with the gang in northeastern Oklahoma’s Osage Hills, and the major casualty of the resultant shootout was McCurdy himself.
The deceased outlaw was then hauled to Pawhuska, where the local mortician embalmed him with an arsenic-based solution, which essentially mummified McCurdy, making his body as hard as plaster. When no one claimed the remains, the undertaker dressed the corpse in cowboy duds and propped him up in the office as a conversation piece.
“McCurdy became a local curiosity, and people came from miles around just to look at him,” noted Crocker Stephenson in the Dec. 5, 1992, issue of the Milwaukee Sentinel.
“An enterprising member of the (Pawhuska) Chamber of Commerce placed a little sign at his feet that said: ‘The Only “Dead One” in Pawhuska.’”
The mortician apparently earned a tidy second income for a while by charging the curious a nickel to see McCurdy’s remains up close and personal.
How close and personal? According to the Weird California website, “Rumor has it that the nickels were placed in Elmer’s mouth and later collected by the undertaker.”
This went on for some five years, undoubtedly with diminishing returns for the funeral director, until a couple of guys showed up at his establishment, one of whom claimed to be McCurdy’s brother, desiring to give his sibling a proper burial next to their dear mother in their home state of California. With both the entertainment and commercial value of McCurdy’s corpse having played out after half a decade in the Pawhuska parlor, the undertaker handed it off to the alleged relative. But instead of signaling an end to McCurdy’s time above ground, the shift in ownership led to a new career for the long-dead outlaw, as his bogus sibling turned out to be a carney who’d seen the potential in taking Elmer on the road.
In those days, mummified corpses of wrongdoers were big draws on the carnival circuit. Displayed as sideshow attractions – insiders dubbed them “stiff shows” – an outlaw’s petrified remains could be counted on to attract a paying crowd.
So, McCurdy’s body traveled the country, from carnival to carnival, occasionally getting gussied up with a lacquer job or a fresh set of clothes, for the next several decades, gawked at by hundreds of thousands of souls willing to pay a coin or two for the privilege. Eventually, a man named Louis Sonney, a former law officer who had toured with a crime-does-not-pay show before becoming an early exploitation-film pioneer, bought the corpse.
Which brings us to David F. Friedman, a friend and hero of mine, who, like Sonney (and a few others) is a great example of the close relationship between the carnival and exploitation-film businesses. In the ‘60s, Friedman and Dan Sonney, Louis’ son, became business partners, and Friedman moved into the Sonney Amusement Enterprises offices on Cordova Street in Hollywood.
In addition to functioning as the distribution center for such titillating epics as The Lustful Turk (1968) and Trader Hornee (1970), the Cordova Street compound was also a resting place for the mannequins that had once comprised Louis Sonney’s “wax show,” along with McCurdy himself. Friedman even pulled the old outlaw’s remains out of storage for use in a carnival-set exploitation film, 1967’s She-Freak.
According to Friedman, McCurdy’s presence in the back room gave Dan Sonney’s long-suffering secretary, Beatrice Hurwitz, a near-perpetual case of the heebie-jeebies. Not that it took much.
“The Dan and Bea Show,” as Friedman called it, pitted the vulgar, bombastic, practical-joke-loving Sonney against the prim, efficient and easily needled Bea, leading to regular eruptions from the latter, And when Sonney realized just how much the thought of McCurdy’s corpse rattled his squeamish secretary, he strolled into the warehouse, sawed off one of McCurdy’s mummified arms, and began regularly sneaking up and poking an unsuspecting Bea with it, who would reliably explode in horror and rage.
In 1966, according to a letter from Friedmen written 27 years later, Dan Sonney sold his dad’s wax show to a man named Spooney Singh, who owned the Hollywood Wax Museum, “and threw in Elmer as a part of the deal.”
“Spooney thought Elmer too gruesome for his family trade and sold Elmer to a side-show operator on The Pike in Long Beach,” wrote Friedman. “This guy went belly-up and sold the mummy to his neighbor on the midway, who had a dark ride (that is, a “house of horrors” attraction that patrons ride through in the dark). The dark ride guy didn’t know it was a real body and painted it with luminous paint and hung it in the ride as a spook.”
Elmer was still there when a crew from the popular Six Million Dollar Man TV series came to the amusement park in December ’76 to shoot some footage. During preparation for filming, a crewmember accidentally broke the arm off one of the mannequins in the dark ride – and saw a bone inside.
Of course, it turned out not to be a mannequin at all, but the earthly remains of Elmer McCurdy. After its identity was established, the orange-painted, much-traveled human mummy was ultimately turned over to the Oklahoma Historical Society, which interred it in a Guthrie cemetery in 1977.
For a while, a mild case of Elmer mania gripped America, with newspaper and magazine articles, television shows, t-shirts and even a few songs coming along to commemorate his long, strange trip as a petrified attraction. A quarter-century later, in 2002, Basic Books brought out Elmer McCurdy: The Life and Afterlife of An American Outlaw, by Mark Svenvold.
Although Los Angeles County chief medical examiner Thomas Noguchi, then known as “Coroner to the Stars,” took a good part of the credit for properly identifying the long-embalmed corpse as that of McCurdy, it was Dave Friedman who actually made the ID.
“After three or four days about the mystery mummy on the front pages of all the L.A. dailies,” he wrote in his 1993 letter, “I revealed Elmer’s identity, proving my story with Louis’ old bally boards (promotional posters), which I’d kept, and his old scrapbooks, and made Elmer the most famous mummy since King Tut.”
But how could Friedman be so sure? In a telephone conversation I had with him at about the same time he wrote those words, he explained. “Sure, I knew who it was when I read that the arm had come off,” he said with a chuckle. “That was the arm Dan had glued back on, after cutting it off so he could goose Bea with it!”