kabbos
By : Ayad Attar
It is known that the bond of human with the world of the living is cut off by his death, everything ends for him, physically at least… But this intuitive information does not fully apply to the hero of our story, as this man continued to live among the living even after his death. He traveled between many cities, experienced many events, met new people, earned money, and even participated in some films and TV series!! .
Nonsense.. How could Dead do all this?! ..
Trust me, our hero did all of that…
ELMER MCCURDY was a miserable man from his birth in 1880. He was known throughout his life for his addiction to alcohol and for failing miserably in every profession he engaged in.. failed as a student.. failed as a soldier.. failed as a craftsman.. and failed as a husband.
Finally, after he got fed up, our friend decided to try a new profession, a profession that does not require capital, experience and intelligence.. He decided to become a thief and a bandit, gathering around him a group of drunks like him and established a small gang to steal trains.
The McCurdy gang combined two features… stupidity and jinx… so that whoever reads about the thefts of this funny gang may think at first glance that he is reading about the events of a comic movie..
In 1910, after several failed attempts, the gang finally succeeded in robbing a commercial train, but it was not a complete success, as the gang failed to find the key to the large iron safe that occupied the space of an entire locomotive, so they decided to blow up the safe with fingers of dynamite, and indeed they succeeded blew it up, and they flew with joy when they found four thousand dollars in it, which is a very huge amount on those days.
But unfortunately the whole amount was in small coins, and to add to the bad luck, half of those coins had melted due to the large amount of dynamite that McCurdy had put when he blew up the safe, and the other half weighed several tons, and required a large truck, which is What was not available to McCurdy and his “clever” companions, so they took only a small amount of those coins and left the rest behind.
The first gang robbery became a joke for the people and the press, so the gang quickly broke up and McCurdy was left alone, of course no one was willing to accompany such a stupid and unlucky mob boss
But the hero of our story did not despair and did not give up his dream of becoming a famous bandit. In 1911, he finally found a new partner, no less foolish then him. The two succeeded in robbing a passenger train, but the euphoria of victory quickly evaporated after they discovered that the train carried only $ 47.
Once again, McCurdy became a joke. Some newspapers even described his recent robbery as the most trivial armed robbery on a train in the history of the United States.
But despite the insignificance of McCurdy’s thefts, the Oklahoma state government allocated $2,000 for his arrest.
One day in the winter of 1911, four men managed to surround him inside the stable of a farm. The four men did not intend to kill McCurdy, they wanted to capture him alive and put him in prison in order to receive the full reward, but McCudry, who was drunk as usual, was determined to resist and not surrender, so he rained the men with bullets from his pistol, but he failed to hit anyone. On the other hand, the men fired several bullets to frighten him, but McCurdy’s jinx led one of those bullets to land in his chest, killing him instantly.
The irony is that the story did not end with McCurdy’s death..No, it just started! ..
The four men took McCurdy’s body to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and after receiving their prize they gave the body to the undertaker in the city.
Because none of McCurdy’s relatives or acquaintances appeared to claim the body and pay the funeral and burial fees, the owner of the undertaker kept the body for himself, elaborately embalmed it with arsenic, then displayed it to the public and placed under it a sign saying: “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up!”
McCurdy’s body quickly gained fame, and people lined up to see it for one nickel. They would go in to see the body and then put a nickel in McCurdy’s mouth before they came out! The undertaker used to extract nickels whenever McCurdy’s mouth was filled with money, and it is said that he made a huge fortune in this way.
The fame of the mummy and the money that it bestowed on the undertaker aroused the greed of many, so suddenly a person appeared in 1917 demanding the body, claiming that he was McCurdy’s brother and that he had come to take his brother’s body to his hometown for the purpose of burial in the family cemetery.
All of this was a lie, of course, for the man was in fact nothing but a circus owner who defrauded the undertaker, so he took the body from him and began displaying it in his circus in exchange for money after placing a large sign under it claiming that it belonged to the most famous and bravest outlaw in Oklahoma history.
Then the years passed quickly, and the director of the circus died, and with his death the corpse began a long journey during which it moved between many circus shows and festivals, and was shown for a period in a crime museum, and was repeatedly used to frighten people inside the Dark funhouse in amusement parks, and was also displayed in a wax museum in the 1940s.
And that long journey was not without its strangeness, as we said, people paid the price of seeing the corpse by putting money in its mouth, and for a period of time they used the corpse’s mouth to cut the tickets to one of the museums. The corpse appeared in the background of a movie in 1933, and was once used as a guarantee for a $500 loan! .
The funniest thing is that McCurdy’s corpse made more money during his many years of touring the United States than what McCurdy earned while he was alive.
Of course, the corpse turned into a mummy due to time, and in the 1960s, and as a result of the continuous movement of the corpse from one place to another and from the hands of one person to another, everyone forgot that it was a real corpse! It was sold in 1971 to a wax fair as a mannequin, and on this basis the staff of a famous television series called (The Six Million Dollar Man) rented it to appear in one of its episodes in 1976.
During the filming of the series, one of the workers inadvertently broke the doll’s arm while it was lowered from the gallows that was tied to it during filming, and to everyone’s surprise, a long bone dangled from inside the doll’s arm, and everyone was astonished when they discovered that what they thought was a wax doll is in The truth is a real human mummy.
The mummy was transferred to a medical center, and there, while examining the mummy, the doctors found five silver cents dating back to 1926 and a museum ticket card stuck inside the mummy’s mouth! They also found the bullet that killed McCurdy in 1911, and it remained in his chest for decades.
Finally, after a long journey that took 65 years, the body of Elmer McCurdy ended up in the Oklahoma City cemetery to be buried there at the expense of the state government, and in order to ensure that no one tampered with the body again, it was buried under two cubic meters of reinforced concrete.
Finally.. I think you should remember the story of Almer McCurdy as you enter tunnel of horror and haunted house in the amusement parks.. who knows.. maybe some of those scary dolls that appear to you suddenly to terrify you.. maybe they are really a forgotten human corpse!.
