What was the most bizarre thing ever found in a TV set?

The story you will know now has some macabre and very bizarre ingredients. First of all, try to imagine what would be, for you, the strangest item to be found in a TV show scenario. Thought? We are not going out of reality and thinking about aliens and the like, but corpses are allowed.

It all started with a recording of the "Six Million Dollar Man" show in 1977 during the filming of the episode "Carnival of Spies" at the museum park called Nu-Pike in California. The problem really was when a fluorescent orange mannequin dressed in cowboy clothes - and hanging on a rope - needed to be removed.

But one of the dummy's arms broke when they tried to lift it, and then the whole team realized that the dummy was actually a corpse - it was the body of a man named Elmer McCurdy, who had died in 1911. On the dead man's mouth were two items: a 1924 penny and a ticket to the Crime Museum in Los Angeles.

Meeting

The dead, it turned out, was a criminal whose greatest ambition was to accumulate money. McCurdy used to commemorate the fact that he was arrested only once - and for being drunk at a time when he killed a man during a fight. After the near miss and perhaps out of fear of being arrested for murder, McCurdy devoted himself “only” to some types of theft. In one of these banditry episodes, he broke into a train in 1911, believing it was money-carrying, but in fact it was a passenger train and McCurdy "made" only $ 46 and two bottles of whiskey.

Our arack thief was killed during a police shootout shortly after the train crash, and his body was sent to Oklahoma, but no one searched for him. It is not clear who came up with the idea of ​​making money from a bad guy's body, but basically that's what happened, as McCurdy was embalmed and presented as the attraction "the bad guy who would never give up" during an exhibition., proving to be a lucrative business.

Exhibition

The problem was that later a man introduced himself as a brother to the embalmed corpse, demanding that the body be able to hold a decent funeral. The alleged brother also performed some shows and, of course, began to display the body of the dead thief. And so, the embalmed version of McCurdy went from exhibition to exhibition to the Nu Pike Museum, where it was stored and forgotten until the day of the 1977 TV show.

It is still unclear how the coins ended up in McCurdy's mouth, but it is believed that this could be a form of payment to see the body or even a lucky ritual, as done to this day by people who shoot pennies in fountains. Someone must have seen the corpse at the Crime Museum and put the ticket in McCurdy's mouth - which was instrumental in investigating the case.

Once the story was resolved, McCurdy was buried in an Oklahoma cemetery. There finally rests the man who made much more dead money than in life.

* Posted on 08/09/2013

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