Elmer McCurdy

Today we're gonna meet a man with nine lives.

[laughs] Elmer McCurdy is his name.

His first life was fascinating enough.

He was an outlaw of the Old West, but then his later lives, uh, take this to a whole other level.

I'm talking about sketchy carnival sideshow acts, scheming undertakers, and a human mummy.

We're gonna meet Elmer McCurdy after this.

This fall, L.L.Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year: the first school drop-off, the first sweater weather day, the first chilly evening around the fire pit.

For over 100 years, L.L.Bean has been part of these traditions, crunching leaves in bean boots made in Maine, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat.

Now, friends, there's an old saying out in the wind-scoured plains of Oklahoma that a man's troubles are supposed to end when they lay him in the dirt.

But if your name happened to be Elmer McCurdy, dying wasn't the end of your story.

Oh, no.

It was barely the opening act.

Tucked inside his desiccated throat were pennies minted in 1924 and ticket stubs from the 1913 Museum of Crime.

Extensive X-rays, tissue tests, and historical matching with old Pawhuska police archives confirmed the impossible.

The funhouse prop was none other than Elmer McCurdy, the inept bandit of the Osage Hills.

So on October 22, 1977, poor Elmer finally made his way home.

saying out in the wind-scoured plains of Oklahoma that a man's troubles are supposed to end when they lay him in the dirt.

But if your name happened to be Elmer McCurdy, dying wasn't the end of your story.

Oh no, it was barely the opening act.

In life, Elmer was just about the most pitiful hard luck outlaw who ever tried to hold up a train.

But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, nobody showed up to claim the dead outlaw.

Undertaker Johnson had spent his own time whisking chemicals on the dead man, and he wasn't about to swallow the cost.

So, he dressed Homer in an ordinary pair of trousers, slung an unloaded rifle across his chest, and propped him upright in the corner of the funeral parlor.

He hung a hand-painted cardboard sign around his neck, saying, The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up.

Morbid History with Thomas Gloom.

The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up Elmer McCurdy was, by nearly every account, a terrible criminal.

He was born in Washington, Maine on January 1, 1880.

His childhood was hard and his family history complicated.

It worked.

People actually paid.

For five years, Elmer McCurdy, dead, embalmed, unclaimed, and completely unaware of any of it, was one of Pawhuska's more reliable tourist attractions.

In 1916, two men arrived at Johnson's funeral home claiming to be McCurdy's long-lost brothers, come to finally take him home for a proper burial.

And, uh, today actually, we are gonna be going over a strange prob or an outlaw or whatever you wanna call him, you know.

But today we are gonna be talking about Elmer McCurdy, or Elmer J. McCurdy.

He was born in January 1st of 1880, and he, he was an American outlaw, you know, who was... end- ended up getting killed in a shootout with police after robbing a train in Oklahoma in October of 1911.

So Elmer McCurdy, he was born in Washington, uh, Maine on, uh, January 1st of 1880.

And he was the son of a 17-year-old Sadie McCurdy, so who was unmarried at the time of his birth and the, the identity of the McCurdy's father is unknown.

So one possibility of Sadie's...

Yeah, he ended up...

Uh, he began drinking heavily, and he had a habit, you know, that would continue throughout his life.

Dang.

It's not like, it's not like Elmer McCurdy that had goo inside of him, remember?

Yeah.

[laughs]