Thursday, February 11, 2016

A Creepy Discovery


It seemed like a normal location shoot at Long Beach's famed Pike Amusement Center. The crew of The Six Million Dollar Man readied the center's haunted house attraction for the upcoming shoot when they happened upon a too realistic ghostly mannequin. Certain that they had stumbled upon a dead body inside the attraction, the crew summoned the police.



Though initially skeptical, the coroner quickly verified the crew's suspicions. This was indeed a real, mummified body. But whose body was it? And how did it get there? It was a Columbo episode come to life.



It turned out that the "mummy" was Elmer McCurdy, a notorious train robber who was gunned down in 1911 in Oklahoma. How did he get to Long Beach? It turned out that his famed crimes inspired another one- an enterprising carnival operator claimed to be a relative and stole the body, exhibiting it around the country. His fame soon faded and somehow the body was mistaken for a fake mummy and sold to the Pike, where it was discovered by the television crew. After the gruesome discovery, the body was returned to Oklahoma and properly laid to rest.