#the last episode was 140 fucking minutes long and we got a two days later time skip right in the middle of everything

[maddy-ferguson]

byler tumblr is a crazy crazy place because why do people get booed for disliking some stuff in canon. isn't that idk normal in fandoms

[joozhik-blog]

This dude had more life after he died than I have right now

Person of the day -  Elmer J. McCurdy (January 1, 1880 – October 7, 1911). 

Elmer was born in Washington, Maine, on January 1, 1880. He was the son of 17-year-old Sadie McCurdy who was unmarried at the time of his birth. The father’s identity is unknown, one possibility is Sadie’s cousin, Charles Smith. In any case, to save Sadie from embarrassment of raising an illegitimate child, the kid was adopted by her brother George, who died from tuberculosis in 1890. After George’s death Sadie moved in with Elmer again and eventually told him she was his real mother. As you can imagine, this made quite an impression on the young man, who became quite disturbed and began drinking heavily as a teenager. 

For some time he lived with his grandfather while working as a apprentice plumber, until 1898 when he lost his job due to the economic downturn.  In 1900 his mother died and his grandfather soon followed after. Elmer drifted between cities  working as a lead miner and plumber, but he was unable to hold any job because of his alcoholism. So he took the only logical way out of this and turned to the life of crime. 

In 1907 he joined the United States Army. Assigned to Fort Leavenworth, he was a machine gun operator and was trained to use nitroglycerin for demolition purposes. Now, after being dispatched, he decided to use this (very minimal) knowledge for other purposes. Long story short, he wasn’t a very successful robber either: blowing up the safe together with the money it contained, getting caught and arrested when attempting robberies etc. His final robbery happened in 1911. The plan was to rob a train carrying $400,000 in cash, but Elmer and his guys accidentally stopped a passenger train instead. So, after what newspapers later called “one of the smallest [robberies] in the history of train robbery” (having stolen $46 from the mail clerk, some whiskey, an automatic revolver, a coat and the train conductor’s watch), he, understandably, spent his days getting drunk. At the time he was also ill with tuberculosis (which he developed after working in mines), a mild case of pneumonia and trichinosis (that doesn’t sound fun at all). This beautiful bouquet didn’t have enough time to kill him though, because soon after he got (by mistake) caught up in some other robbery which resulted in a shootout with the police and… well, he was shot. 

And that was a rather boring story of rather unimpressive life of a man by the name of Elmer J. McCurdy. 

Now, scratch all that. 

Imagine a nice December day of 1976. We’re in Long Beach, California. The production crew of the television show The Six Million Dollar Man are filming scenes for the “Carnival of Spies” episode at the amusement park, called The Pike. During the shoot, a prop man suddenly decides to pull at the hand of what he thought was a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. The hand came off (ups..), revealing human bone and muscle tissue underneath what was previously considered by the crew to be papier-machet, because of how light it was (way to ruin a perfectly good prop.. I mean, man, come on… who does that, wtf…). Anyways, this was kinda weird, so police were called and the mummified corpse was taken to the Los Angeles coroner’s office. After the autopsy it was determined that the body was that of a human male who had died of a gunshot wound to the chest. The body was completely petrified, covered in wax and had been covered with layers of phosphorus paint. Tests conducted on the tissue showed the presence of arsenic which was a component of embalming fluid until the late 1920s. Inside the mouth was a 1924 penny and ticket stubs to the 140 W. Pike, Side Show and Louis Sonney’s Museum of Crime. 

Now go back to Elmer for a minute. Remember how he was dead when we last saw him? You thought that was it, didn’t you? Of course you didn’t - I put the spoiler in the title! So, let’s finally get to what you were waiting for - let’s explore what Elmer was up to after we left him laying face down with a bullet in his chest. 

Well, his body was  taken to the Johnson Funeral Home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma where it went unclaimed. Joseph L. Johnson, the owner and undertaker, embalmed the body with an arsenic-based preservative which was typically used in embalming in that era to preserve a body for a long period when no next of kin were known. Johnson then decided to exhibit McCurdy to make money. He dressed the corpse in street clothes, placed a rifle in the hands and stood it up in the corner of the funeral home. For a nickel, Johnson allowed visitors to see “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up” (at various times, McCurdy was also called “The Mystery Man of Many Aliases”, “The Oklahoma Outlaw”, and “The Embalmed Bandit”). “The Bandit” became a popular attraction at the funeral home and attracted the attention of carnival promoters. Johnson received numerous offers to sell McCurdy’s mummified body but he refused. 

On October 6, 1916, a man calling himself Aver contacted Johnson claiming to be Elmer’s long lost brother from California. He arrived at the funeral home with another man calling himself Wayne, who also claimed to be Elmer’s brother. Johnson released the body to the men who then put it on a train, ostensibly to San Francisco. It was instead shipped to Arkansas City, Kansas. The men who claimed to be long lost brothers of poor Elmer were in fact James and Charles Patterson. James Patterson was the owner of the Great Patterson Carnival Shows, a traveling carnival. The corpse then would be featured in Patterson’s traveling carnival as “The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive”, until 1922 when Patterson sold his operation to Louis Sonney.

In 1933, it was acquired for a time by director Dwain Esper to promote his exploitation film Narcotic! The corpse was placed in the lobby of theaters as a “dead dope fiend” whom Esper claimed had killed himself while surrounded by police after he had robbed a drug store to support his habit. By this time Elmer was fully mummified; the skin had become hard and shriveled causing the body to shrink - Esper claimed that these were the effects of drug abuse. After Louis Sonney died in 1949, the corpse was placed in storage in a Los Angeles warehouse. In 1964, Sonney’s son. Dan lent the corpse to filmmaker David F. Friedman. It eventually made a brief appearance in Friedman’s 1967 film She Freak (our Elemer was quite a film star). In 1968, Dan Sonney sold the body along with other wax figures for $10,000 to Spoony Singh the owner of the Hollywood Wax Museum. Singh had bought the figures for two Canadian men who exhibited them at a show at Mount Rushmore. While being exhibited there, Elmer lost some fingers and toes along with the tips of his ears after surviving a windstorm. So he was sent back to Singh who decided that the corpse looked “too gruesome” and not lifelike enough to exhibit (fuck you, you asshole, our Elemer is fabulous). Singh sold the body Ed Liersch, part owner of The Pike, an amusement zone in Long Beach, California. And then full circle we return back (or forward?) in time to December 8, 1976. 

What’s the point of this story? Well, Elmer was an alcoholic fuck up born possibly from a shameful incest. But look at him! He became a star - people coming from all over to see him, acting in movies, costing thousands of dollars. He overcame his problems (by simultaneously overcoming his life, but that’s besides the point)! If he can do it, so can you! Let little, shriveled up, arsenic-laden Elmer inspire you on your way to greatness! 

More on Elmer: 

A video by Caitlin Doughty and inspiration for this post

“The Long, Strange, 60-Year Trip of Elmer McCurdy” 

“Elmer McCurdy – The Wandering Dead” 

“The Mummy Everyone Forgot Was Real”  

The Straight Dope: Was a dead body found inside an amusement park “mummy”?

Elmer at Find a grave