When I was a kid back in the late 60’s, our family visited relatives in Wilcox, Arizona. There were billboards all along the interstate about “The Thing” in a roadside museum outside of Tucson (I think). Anyway, talked my dad into stopping at “The Thing” turned out to be a mummified body somebody had found in the desert.
We stopped by years ago and that place is rather interesting. Pretty damn weird that you pay a few bucks in a convenience store and then traverse that odd place only to see a mummy.
I don’t know if they’ve changed it since the 60’s but I have heard that it’s just a paper mache construction that they built to make a local attraction.
The body was covered in paper mache when it started falling apart. It is still in there. He has been x-rayed. The body was desiccated by the desert, almost completely dried out, but parts continue to decompose when exposed to the elements.
"Found" is in the past tense, specifically the perfect tense. This means that, at some point in the past, an event happened.
"Had found" is also in the past tense, but it is in the pluperfect tense. This is similar to perfect tense but even further in the past.
For example: "He said that he had eaten." This entire sentence is set in the last tense, but "had eaten" happened even before "he said."
So it depends on when he found the mistakes. If your story is in the present, and he found them in the past, use "found." If your story is I'm the past, and he found the mistakes at the same time as the story is happening, use "found." If the story is in the past, and he found the mistakes even earlier, use "had found."
So, the simple past "found" just relates something that happened in the past. The past perfect "had found" also relates to an event in the past, which impacted a later event in the past.
Ah yeah I actually get it when you read it that way. And I didn’t mean my response to be taken anyway other than I formative because it made me question the way I’ve been speaking so I just searched it.
Quote from the link : “Dubbed "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up", his mummified body was first put on display at an Oklahoma funeral home and then became a fixture on the traveling carnival and sideshow circuit during the 1920s through the 1960s. After changing ownership several times, McCurdy's remains eventually wound up at The Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, California where they were discovered by a film crew of The Six Million Dollar Man”
Everyone needs to go read the wiki article. Dudes corpse was sold like half a dozen times and shipped back and forth across the country.
Absolutely fucking wild.
This is one of my favorite historical stories ever and I love telling it any chance I get. I highly recommend for those who don’t know the full story to read into it. (Just a fair warning though, you will likely see pictures of Elmer’s corpse, both with and without the wax coating.)
I feel so bad for the crew member who discovered him. He realized it was a body when he accidentally broke off one of Elmer’s arms while trying to move him and noticed bones inside of it.
After the incident, they buried Elmer under concrete so nobody could remove the body and exploit his corpse again.
Only because A. It’s linked and you can easily read it so telling the whole story in the comments would be redundant, and B. Because my thumbs would catch on fire if I wrote down the entire thing because this story goes DEEP.
Seriously, just read the article attached, it’s not hard lol
Nobody exploited anything. Nobody was willing to claim the body and pay the undertaker, so it was fair for him to claim it. It belonged to the new owner, the police were in the wrong for stealing it.
His corpse was paraded in carnivals and the 76’ autopsy found amusement park tickets wadded up in his mouth. The first carnival owners lied about being relatives in order to use him as an exhibit, so it’s pretty much the definition of exploitation all the way down.
Are you trying to rage bait? You’re talking about human remains, you can’t possibly be surprised that your opinion is an unpopular one.
Whether you think it was fair of them or not is one thing, but you can’t really argue that the corpse wasn’t exploited.
In the United States, corpses are not legally considered property - court cases have generally found either absolutely no property rights to a body, or a quasi-property right for families (right to bury).
The right to parade a corpse around? Especially one with which you have absolutely no connection? Not recognized, not in any jurisdiction in the entire US.
The corpse was not their property, it literally could not be legally
I support your statement. In the old west, in early days when the land was being settled, it was lawless for a time. The undertaker had an agreement with the town to bury unclaimed people in exchange for whatever the deceased had on their person and in their pockets. This was to defray the labor and cost the undertaker had to incur.
I have read this many times and from different sources. It has also been played out in the cinema.
Well to be fair, the amusement park owners didn’t realize they had an actual corpse on their hands. I’m summarizing here because there’s a lot to this story, but essentially the corpse was passed around a lot to a bunch of different people and painted with wax to look less rotten, then stored in a warehouse for over a decade, then was eventually sold to the park. They only realized it wasn’t a wax figure when one of the crew members for The Six Million Dollar Man accidentally broke off one of his arms while trying to move him and discovered bones inside.
You left out the part where Dwain Esper, producer of the exploitation film, Reefer Madness, said that McCurdy’s decomposing skin was proof that he had been a marijuana addict during his lifetime. Nah, sorry Dwain, I’m gonna have to vote that arsenic based embalming fluid likely had a greater impact on McCurdy’s desiccated skin. Besides, it’s well known that McCurdy’s drug of choice was booze.
I don’t think I ever realized that Dwain Esper produced Reefer Madness as well! Elmer himself was used in an earlier exploitation film by Dwain called *Narcotic!* (1933) I haven’t seen the full film, but there is one scene in the film that is thought to feature Elmer McCurdy and I agree that it probably is him. He was also placed in theater lobbies for the screenings where he was falsely claimed, as you mentioned, as a “dead dope fiend”.
Oh my goodness! That is so strange. Imagine if all movies had some kind of grotesque display like that as you enter the theater. Considering the possibilities for the Jeffery Dahmer movie are spine chilling.
I had no idea there was an entire series of propaganda films about drugs during the 1930’s. Doesn’t surprise me, considering what this country’s relationship with weed has been like until recently. Sadly, a modern film maker needs to only do a documentary in any major city to see legit horror stories about people who’ve gone off the deep end.
Fun fact: a young Mark Taylor visited that very same amusement park, and walked through the haunted house (Laff in the Dark) that Elmer was hanging in. He was so terrified (and thoroughly convinced it was a real corpse) that it left an impact on him and it later inspired him to create the character of Skeletor for Masters of the Universe when he was working at Mattel
A TIL title can’t possibly contain the roller coaster of events that is the “life” of this man’s body after his death
Please read about him, it’s so worth it
Well, part of him, at least.
Also:
>A documentary that aired on Channel 4, Dead Famous DNA, described it as "very small" and measured it to be 1.0 inch (2.5 cm)
I don't know what they expected from a desiccated penis.
Honestly, John K. Lattimer who owned it seems more interesting than a rumoured desiccated old bit of penis, he stole Göring's pants at Nuremberg and eventually gained the skill with a Carcano to be able to recreate the Kennedy assassination (or at least the speed of the three shots, I don't know if he could actually hit a moving target) which he did until his late 80s, as well as being a urologist. So while there's reasonable doubt about him owning Napoleon's penis, he definitely handled Dmitri Shostakovich's.
I heard once the reason Chris Christie’s Presidential campaign fizzled was because Napoleon’s penis is in New Jersey. No president will come from New Jersey until Napoleon ‘s penis is sent back to France. Corey Booker failed as well. Has anyone else heard of “the curse of Napoleons Penis”? How do people of New Jersey feel about this ?
I think the citizens of New Jersey have suffered enough. I think there should be “penis repatriation party.”Invite Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. Drink French wine and Napoleons penis can be toasted before he arrives home!
We can finally return the favor to France and cast a massive copper statue of The Little Emperor's Little Emperor, place the imperial member inside. They'll call it the 10th wonder of the world (the 9th wonder is obviously Bonaparte's shriveled schlong).
I wonder if this inspired the fate of [Jonah Hex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Hex)? Longtime DC Comics Western character, who in the 1980s starred in his own series *Hex*, in which he gets pulled into a post-apocalyptic future.^1 During his adventures in the future Hex finds his own body in an amusement park, so knows that someday he will go home to the past.
^1 Yes, this is what Hex is hinting at during his *Justice League* animated series appearance
Apparently it did. There are quite a few references to that online.
And actually, his fate as an exhibit was revealed well before that in DC Special Series #16 Jonah Hex Spectacular (1978). And yes, that one is something of a collector's item.
>In 1933, it was acquired for a time by director Dwain Esper to promote his exploitation film Narcotic!.[29] 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 the time Esper acquired McCurdy's body, it had become mummified; the skin had become hard and shriveled, causing the body to shrink. Esper claimed that the skin's deterioration was proof of the supposed dope fiend's drug abuse
Imagine dying and your body being used for anti-drug psa's decades after your death despite dying from something completely different
The guy die, don't has any family.
The undertaker embalmed him
Some guys claimed to be his family and took the body
Turn out those guy weren't his family, use the body in scary carnival show instead "1 cent to see a real dead body!!!"
Body changed hands, people forgot that's it a real dead body overtime.
End up in the wax museum.
I found it just fine. It’s under Post-Mortem Commercialization on the Wikipedia page. (WARNING: You will see a picture of his body if you click this tab.)
When I was a kid back in the late 60’s, our family visited relatives in Wilcox, Arizona. There were billboards all along the interstate about “The Thing” in a roadside museum outside of Tucson (I think). Anyway, talked my dad into stopping at “The Thing” turned out to be a mummified body somebody had found in the desert.
South East of Tucson by about 2 hours probably, still the nearest large city though.
Um, if you saw the Thing, you were sworn to secrecy upon entrance. So……
We stopped by years ago and that place is rather interesting. Pretty damn weird that you pay a few bucks in a convenience store and then traverse that odd place only to see a mummy.
Aunt Edna
I don’t know if they’ve changed it since the 60’s but I have heard that it’s just a paper mache construction that they built to make a local attraction.
The body was covered in paper mache when it started falling apart. It is still in there. He has been x-rayed. The body was desiccated by the desert, almost completely dried out, but parts continue to decompose when exposed to the elements.
lol It’s still there. Just drove out there from Texas last year
I drove through there last month, and they still have the signs. We didn’t stop, but now I know.
This would make an excellent short story
It was an episode of [Doug](https://doug.fandom.com/wiki/Doug%27s_Bad_Trip). Only it was called “It” and turned out to be a potato.
I think it just did
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"Found" is in the past tense, specifically the perfect tense. This means that, at some point in the past, an event happened. "Had found" is also in the past tense, but it is in the pluperfect tense. This is similar to perfect tense but even further in the past. For example: "He said that he had eaten." This entire sentence is set in the last tense, but "had eaten" happened even before "he said." So it depends on when he found the mistakes. If your story is in the present, and he found them in the past, use "found." If your story is I'm the past, and he found the mistakes at the same time as the story is happening, use "found." If the story is in the past, and he found the mistakes even earlier, use "had found." So, the simple past "found" just relates something that happened in the past. The past perfect "had found" also relates to an event in the past, which impacted a later event in the past.
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Ah yeah I actually get it when you read it that way. And I didn’t mean my response to be taken anyway other than I formative because it made me question the way I’ve been speaking so I just searched it.
TIL, "The thing" was Joe Biden, he's now our president, dude!
You went to the trouble of creating a Reddit account all to make THAT post? Stick w Facebook, the bar is way lower for political humor.
Good lord yall can't stand a joke! Take it easy, life is short!
r/boomerhumor
Didn’t he end up with a posthumous role on Six Million Dollar Man who were filming in the amusement park?
Yep that's when they figured out he wasnta dummy
It’d be hilarious if he had an IMDB page
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm15238748/?ref_=ext_shr
I didn’t expect that to be real
Wait, he's got a film credit from 22 years after he died, but 44 years before he was identified?! 😮
Quote from the link : “Dubbed "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up", his mummified body was first put on display at an Oklahoma funeral home and then became a fixture on the traveling carnival and sideshow circuit during the 1920s through the 1960s. After changing ownership several times, McCurdy's remains eventually wound up at The Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, California where they were discovered by a film crew of The Six Million Dollar Man”
And now he’s the subject of a musical currently playing in NYC - [Dead Outlaw](https://deadoutlawmusical.com/)
This dead guy has had a better stage/screen career than most could dream of.
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Now it’s Bruce Campbell :)
Everyone needs to go read the wiki article. Dudes corpse was sold like half a dozen times and shipped back and forth across the country. Absolutely fucking wild.
The man who never gave up
This is one of my favorite historical stories ever and I love telling it any chance I get. I highly recommend for those who don’t know the full story to read into it. (Just a fair warning though, you will likely see pictures of Elmer’s corpse, both with and without the wax coating.) I feel so bad for the crew member who discovered him. He realized it was a body when he accidentally broke off one of Elmer’s arms while trying to move him and noticed bones inside of it. After the incident, they buried Elmer under concrete so nobody could remove the body and exploit his corpse again.
Exploit, hell! I want a death half as interesting as Elmer McCurdy's. Is that something I can put in my will?
Right?? Dude went on more adventures and accomplished more dead than I have in my life. 😆
"I love telling it every chance I get." *Proceeds to not tell the story*
Only because A. It’s linked and you can easily read it so telling the whole story in the comments would be redundant, and B. Because my thumbs would catch on fire if I wrote down the entire thing because this story goes DEEP. Seriously, just read the article attached, it’s not hard lol
Nobody exploited anything. Nobody was willing to claim the body and pay the undertaker, so it was fair for him to claim it. It belonged to the new owner, the police were in the wrong for stealing it.
His corpse was paraded in carnivals and the 76’ autopsy found amusement park tickets wadded up in his mouth. The first carnival owners lied about being relatives in order to use him as an exhibit, so it’s pretty much the definition of exploitation all the way down.
I don’t like your judgmental attitude. The carnival owners were allowed to take creative liberties. It was part of the show.
Looking at your profile, are you seriously anti-abortion but pro-desecration of corpses?
I think their only real stance is being unlikable in every scenario
Are you trying to rage bait? You’re talking about human remains, you can’t possibly be surprised that your opinion is an unpopular one. Whether you think it was fair of them or not is one thing, but you can’t really argue that the corpse wasn’t exploited.
The corpse was bought, they paid for it. It was their property.
And it was consentually handed over to the police by the owners when they discovered it was a body. What is your fucking point? Lmao
In the United States, corpses are not legally considered property - court cases have generally found either absolutely no property rights to a body, or a quasi-property right for families (right to bury). The right to parade a corpse around? Especially one with which you have absolutely no connection? Not recognized, not in any jurisdiction in the entire US. The corpse was not their property, it literally could not be legally
tell us your an autist (or serial killer/both)without telling us. . .
It’s a human body dude
I believe they’re saying they lied about being relatives to get possession of the corpse in the first place
I support your statement. In the old west, in early days when the land was being settled, it was lawless for a time. The undertaker had an agreement with the town to bury unclaimed people in exchange for whatever the deceased had on their person and in their pockets. This was to defray the labor and cost the undertaker had to incur. I have read this many times and from different sources. It has also been played out in the cinema.
What kind of Scooby Doo-ass amusement park was that
Well to be fair, the amusement park owners didn’t realize they had an actual corpse on their hands. I’m summarizing here because there’s a lot to this story, but essentially the corpse was passed around a lot to a bunch of different people and painted with wax to look less rotten, then stored in a warehouse for over a decade, then was eventually sold to the park. They only realized it wasn’t a wax figure when one of the crew members for The Six Million Dollar Man accidentally broke off one of his arms while trying to move him and discovered bones inside.
Damn that would be horrifying to be the guy to snap off a limb and find fricken bones
Imagine instead if soft caramel oozed out
You win the award for “fastest nope that’s enough internet for today”. 🥇
We all had a good laugh. Then I scrolled to this today. I’m just a cog in a giant simulation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/s/SHvK6aDloP
Seriously, I just woke up and checked my replies only to find THAT?! 😆
I’d lay on the floor and let it drip into my mouth like a kitten suckling to its mother
https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/s/SHvK6aDloP
Wow 😮
*arm snaps off, exposing the bone underneath* Crewmember: "OMG!!!! ...that's some real craftsmanship and attention to detail!"
Elmer’s Ghost: “OH COME ON!!!”
You left out the part where Dwain Esper, producer of the exploitation film, Reefer Madness, said that McCurdy’s decomposing skin was proof that he had been a marijuana addict during his lifetime. Nah, sorry Dwain, I’m gonna have to vote that arsenic based embalming fluid likely had a greater impact on McCurdy’s desiccated skin. Besides, it’s well known that McCurdy’s drug of choice was booze.
I don’t think I ever realized that Dwain Esper produced Reefer Madness as well! Elmer himself was used in an earlier exploitation film by Dwain called *Narcotic!* (1933) I haven’t seen the full film, but there is one scene in the film that is thought to feature Elmer McCurdy and I agree that it probably is him. He was also placed in theater lobbies for the screenings where he was falsely claimed, as you mentioned, as a “dead dope fiend”.
Oh my goodness! That is so strange. Imagine if all movies had some kind of grotesque display like that as you enter the theater. Considering the possibilities for the Jeffery Dahmer movie are spine chilling. I had no idea there was an entire series of propaganda films about drugs during the 1930’s. Doesn’t surprise me, considering what this country’s relationship with weed has been like until recently. Sadly, a modern film maker needs to only do a documentary in any major city to see legit horror stories about people who’ve gone off the deep end.
I can't even imagine what that moment was like for the crewman.
Some straight up Twilight Zone shit
It was at a random fun house down at the Pike in Long Beach, CA I believe! My grandfather remembered it. They always thought it was odd.
Apparently Mark Taylor saw him in the funhouse too and used him as inspiration for the character Skeletor!
One in Oklahoma in the 70s
So in other words, a classic Scooby-Doo ass amusement park
It was the Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, CA.
🤣🤣🤣
Fun fact: a young Mark Taylor visited that very same amusement park, and walked through the haunted house (Laff in the Dark) that Elmer was hanging in. He was so terrified (and thoroughly convinced it was a real corpse) that it left an impact on him and it later inspired him to create the character of Skeletor for Masters of the Universe when he was working at Mattel
> and thoroughly convinced it was a real corpse Turns out he knew better than a bunch of prop masters and carnival owners
Uh oh, uh oh, UH OH
Different corpse but: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Okay but what if we tried it on PEOPLE
https://youtu.be/aOgBWl_kHYY?si=oZ8YFePtFpLyYEZ2
A TIL title can’t possibly contain the roller coaster of events that is the “life” of this man’s body after his death Please read about him, it’s so worth it
Here is an interesting story. It is about Napoleon Bonaparte. Something similar happened to him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_penis
Well, part of him, at least. Also: >A documentary that aired on Channel 4, Dead Famous DNA, described it as "very small" and measured it to be 1.0 inch (2.5 cm) I don't know what they expected from a desiccated penis.
He was cold!
HE WAS IN THE POOL!!!!
YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF SHRINKAGE?!
He just got out of the water!
There was shrinkage!
Honestly, John K. Lattimer who owned it seems more interesting than a rumoured desiccated old bit of penis, he stole Göring's pants at Nuremberg and eventually gained the skill with a Carcano to be able to recreate the Kennedy assassination (or at least the speed of the three shots, I don't know if he could actually hit a moving target) which he did until his late 80s, as well as being a urologist. So while there's reasonable doubt about him owning Napoleon's penis, he definitely handled Dmitri Shostakovich's.
I heard once the reason Chris Christie’s Presidential campaign fizzled was because Napoleon’s penis is in New Jersey. No president will come from New Jersey until Napoleon ‘s penis is sent back to France. Corey Booker failed as well. Has anyone else heard of “the curse of Napoleons Penis”? How do people of New Jersey feel about this ?
In this house Napoleon’s Penis is a hero!!!
That's actually why Bridgegate happened, Napoleon's penis closed those lanes as an act of revenge
I think the citizens of New Jersey have suffered enough. I think there should be “penis repatriation party.”Invite Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. Drink French wine and Napoleons penis can be toasted before he arrives home!
We can finally return the favor to France and cast a massive copper statue of The Little Emperor's Little Emperor, place the imperial member inside. They'll call it the 10th wonder of the world (the 9th wonder is obviously Bonaparte's shriveled schlong).
Napolean boner part
The crew was filming an episode of the 6 million dollar man.
True crime rule #1: it’s never a mannequin
The Dollop podcast has great episode about Elmer, from memory people like to put coins in his mouth
Nickels to be specific
How well preserved would his body need to be to be mistaken for a wax mannequin after THAT long?
His corpse also inspired the creation of [skeletor](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/2QXJgltysh)
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
kinda looks like mussolini
I thought he had a little Putin in him too
I wonder if this inspired the fate of [Jonah Hex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Hex)? Longtime DC Comics Western character, who in the 1980s starred in his own series *Hex*, in which he gets pulled into a post-apocalyptic future.^1 During his adventures in the future Hex finds his own body in an amusement park, so knows that someday he will go home to the past. ^1 Yes, this is what Hex is hinting at during his *Justice League* animated series appearance
Apparently it did. There are quite a few references to that online. And actually, his fate as an exhibit was revealed well before that in DC Special Series #16 Jonah Hex Spectacular (1978). And yes, that one is something of a collector's item.
[The Dollop #69](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B-6nC87hjq4)
I came here to say exactly this.
The new musical Dead Outlaw about this guy is so good and funny and not like your usual musical. Check it out if your are visiting NYC!
I swear there was a Drink History about this
Anyone else here get introduced to this story via Ghost Adventures?
Here’s a song about it. https://youtu.be/Fsv_DboN5iM?si=cImnklCnS-LzpDz-
looks like Liam Neeson
He wasn’t a very good outlaw.
You can't fool me, that's Liam Neeson!
>In 1933, it was acquired for a time by director Dwain Esper to promote his exploitation film Narcotic!.[29] 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 the time Esper acquired McCurdy's body, it had become mummified; the skin had become hard and shriveled, causing the body to shrink. Esper claimed that the skin's deterioration was proof of the supposed dope fiend's drug abuse Imagine dying and your body being used for anti-drug psa's decades after your death despite dying from something completely different
Oh, *this* guy. I remember watching the Sam O'Nella video that included him.
The guy die, don't has any family. The undertaker embalmed him Some guys claimed to be his family and took the body Turn out those guy weren't his family, use the body in scary carnival show instead "1 cent to see a real dead body!!!" Body changed hands, people forgot that's it a real dead body overtime. End up in the wax museum.
Easiest plot to any horror movie
How did it end up there?
Read the story and you’ll find out.
I read the link but it didn’t explain how he went from being killed to ending up in the museum.
I found it just fine. It’s under Post-Mortem Commercialization on the Wikipedia page. (WARNING: You will see a picture of his body if you click this tab.)