09/28/2026
⚰️ THIS OUTLAW DIED IN 1911 — BUT WASN’T BURIED UNTIL 1977
The man standing in this photograph is dead.
His name was Elmer McCurdy.
And what happened to his body after he died may be stranger than anything he ever did while alive.
🔫 McCurdy was an Oklahoma train robber.
On October 7, 1911, lawmen tracked him to a barn in the Osage Hills after a train robbery.
McCurdy refused to surrender.
When the gunfight ended, he was dead.
Normally, that would have been the end of the story.
It wasn't.
⚰️ McCurdy's body was embalmed and taken to an undertaker in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Nobody claimed him.
So the undertaker displayed the co**se and reportedly charged visitors a nickel to see the dead outlaw.
Six months passed.
Eventually, men claiming to be McCurdy's relatives took the body away.
They weren't relatives.
They were connected to the carnival business.
🎪 For years afterward, McCurdy's embalmed co**se traveled as a sideshow attraction.
Decades passed.
His identity gradually became lost.
By 1968, the body had reached a Hollywood wax museum.
Eventually it ended up hanging inside an amusement-park funhouse in Long Beach, California — treated as nothing more than an old mannequin.
Then, in December 1976, a television crew working on “The Six Million Dollar Man” discovered the truth.
The mannequin was human.
Investigators eventually identified the body as Elmer McCurdy.
He had been dead for 65 years.
🏜️ Oklahoma finally brought him home.
On April 22, 1977, a horse-drawn hearse carried McCurdy to Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie.
He was placed in a plain pine coffin and buried in Boot Hill.
After more than six decades of traveling farther in death than he ever had in life…
Elmer McCurdy finally stopped moving.
Would you have believed this was a real body?
📸 TAP THE PHOTO FOR THE FULL-BODY IMAGE.
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— Backroads Unearthed
