Boo_ep002

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:00]:
What follows may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:06]:
The world is full of stories. Stories of mysteries, of curiosities, of oddities. Join Cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth for the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected, as they lift the lid and cautiously peer ins the box of Oddities.

Kat [00:00:35]:
Hold on. I gotta take my earrings out.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:37]:
Okay.

Kat [00:00:38]:
They're jabbing in my ears at the back of my head.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:42]:
All right, you ready?

Kat [00:00:43]:
Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:43]:
Okay, then. Welcome to episode two of our podcast.

Kat [00:00:48]:
This is the Box of Oddities. And I'm Cat.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:51]:
I'm Jethro Gilligan Toth. And first of all, we wanna thank everybody for all the positive feedback.

Kat [00:00:57]:
Oh, my gosh. Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:59]:
Fantastic. You can find all the information about how to get ahold of us. Facebook, inst. Twitter, all that stuff on our website, which is the boxofodddities.com.

Kat [00:01:08]:
Like, subscribe. What's the other thing? Rate.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:12]:
Rate.

Kat [00:01:12]:
Rate us Real good. Like, yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:14]:
Would really appreciate it.

Kat [00:01:15]:
We sure would.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:17]:
I think I need to take my earrings out too.

Kat [00:01:18]:
Hang on. Nice.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:21]:
Every week on the Box of Oddities, we explore the strange, the bizarre, the unexplained stuff that we're into.

Kat [00:01:29]:
Yeah. We found that we would find crazy stories and we'd share them with each other. You know, that was our pillow talk. And so why not make it into a thing where we just did that on a regular basis and shared the stories with you?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:46]:
So I've picked out a story for this week. So has Kat. We don't know what each story is. We don't know what each other has chosen as a story, and that way we'll be as surprised as you. So let's choose who's gonna go first. Do you have a. A quarter or a dime or a coin that can flip?

Kat [00:02:03]:
I don't.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:04]:
No, I never have. Change?

Kat [00:02:07]:
Let me check. Nope.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:09]:
All right, well, last week, we flipped the werewolf book. This week, let's decide by spinning the pig fetus in the jar.

Kat [00:02:20]:
Is that disrespectful?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:22]:
I think. Let me make sure that the lid is on tight. Okay.

Kat [00:02:26]:
All right, so if the head or the tail points toward you.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:30]:
Yeah, the snout.

Kat [00:02:32]:
Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:32]:
Okay, here we go. You go first this week.

Kat [00:02:40]:
Oh, my. That's very exciting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:44]:
Pig looks a little dizzy.

Kat [00:02:45]:
Oh, geez. All right, so. And you and I have briefly discussed this, but I thought that there was too much to explore to not do it. So are you ready?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:57]:
I am.

Kat [00:02:58]:
This summer, off the coast of Portugal, researchers were working on a project to minimize unwanted catches in commercial fishing. When they unknowingly brought up one of the rarest and most ancient beings on the planet. Evidence shows that this creature may have lived during the Cretaceous period. These researchers had caught a fringed shark. And this week, we're gonna talk about living fossils.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:24]:
Excellent. Yeah, I love that.

Kat [00:03:26]:
I know. Okay, so this. When I found this story, it blew my mind, and I gathered everything that I could about it, and so it only made sense that I pulled it together. Now, even though I did all of that, I still feel completely unprepared. There's so much.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:42]:
Well, being unprepared is a big part of this podcast.

Kat [00:03:45]:
Okay, so Chlamydos Lycias angenius, more commonly known as the fringed shark, which comes from the frilly or fringed appearance of the six pairs of gill slits, with the first pair meeting across the throat. So they meet. They're kind of like this, and then it's like. It's like if you had a hem on a skirt or a pair of pants and then you pulled the thread, so the hem kind of bunches up.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:15]:
Gotcha.

Kat [00:04:16]:
That's what it looks like. Other common names for this species include frill shark, lizard shark, scaffold shark, and silk shark. The species has been found though few and far between over the outer continental shelf and upper continental slope, generally near the bottom. And it's been caught as deep as 5150ft. Deep?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:40]:
Good Lord. That's. That's almost a mile.

Kat [00:04:42]:
It's crazy. How.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:43]:
How old is this creature?

Kat [00:04:46]:
The one that they caught specifically?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:48]:
Yeah.

Kat [00:04:48]:
I don't know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:49]:
Well, I don't mean his age. I mean, how.

Kat [00:04:51]:
16, 17? He looked like a teenager.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:54]:
No, that's not what I mean. How long ago. How far back in time does this species go?

Kat [00:05:00]:
About 80 million years.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:02]:
80 million years. And they're basically unchanged?

Kat [00:05:04]:
Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:05]:
That's amazing.

Kat [00:05:07]:
It is amazing. That's why we're talking about it. So the head of this shark is broad, it's flattened with a short round. It's. Now, I posted a picture of it on our Instagram page this morning. So you haven't seen it, right?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:23]:
No, I have not.

Kat [00:05:24]:
They have big eyes and very long jaws that are positioned at the end of the snout, as opposed to the underslung jaws that most sharks have. And then the corners of the mouth are devoid of furrows or folds, which I guess that kind of makes the sharks look like they're smiling.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:42]:
Usually that's my worst nightmare.

Kat [00:05:45]:
Wait for this. The teeth rows are rather widely spread, numbering in about 300 teeth. In all, each tooth is small, but it has three slender needle like cusps alternating with two cusplates. So their teeth have teeth now?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:06]:
It's my worst nightmare, right? Yeah.

Kat [00:06:07]:
It's absolutely amazing. It's incredible. The inside of their mouth looks like someone just threw a bag of needles at you.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:14]:
So how long has it been since they've caught one of these?

Kat [00:06:18]:
I don't know. I'm telling a story. Let's move along.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:21]:
I'm just interested. Go.

Kat [00:06:23]:
It's one of only two still surviving species in that shark family. Scientists believe the frilled shark is nearly the same inside and out as it was 80 million years ago. That's when Tyrannosaur and the Titanosaur roamed the earth. The fossils are the only reason that we know about these guys. And of course, Jeff Goldblum is the reason we know so much.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:46]:
Well, of course, Jeff Goldblum is our source all knowledge.

Kat [00:06:50]:
Wink. Love you, Jeff. So that's why Frilly is referred to as a living fossil. Living fossils are really an interesting thing because not all scientists believe that that phrase should exist. We will get to that. So a living fossil is an extant taxon, which is something I had to look up. Extant is just the opposite of extinct. It just means it still exists and it closely resembles organisms otherwise known only from the fossil. So like you said before, they're almost the same, or so close to the same as they were that many years ago. So many creatures are referred to as living fossils. The aardvark is the only living species in the order Tubulodentata, which is genetically the animal can be considered a living fossil.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:46]:
Now you're just making words.

Kat [00:07:48]:
They have just. Yeah, I mean, I'm just shitting my way through most of these words. I don't. Yeah. So then there's a type of fish, which is colon saath fish, which has been around for about 400 million years, which that number doesn't even make any sense to me. Living fossils have two main characteristics, although some have a third. The first two are required for recognition as a living fossil. They must be living members of the taxa that are notably long living in their species. And they show little morphological difference. So like you said, don't change much.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:30]:
No evolution.

Kat [00:08:31]:
Right. Though some living fossils were known from fossils before we knew that these things still existed. So we only knew them by way of fossils. And then all of a sudden someone discovered that these animals are still here, which is mind blowing. And you think, holy crap, there are none. And then you realize there are some and that must be for a scientist or, you know, anyone.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:56]:
That's going to be pretty exciting.

Kat [00:08:57]:
Just mind blowing.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:58]:
It is mind blowing. I read an article just recently about a similar species of fish in the New guinea area, Papua New Guinea. And these fish have feet and they actually will.

Kat [00:09:11]:
Like a little Darwin fish.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:13]:
Yeah, kind of like a Darwin fish. Yeah. You often see these things on the back of people's cars and. No, seriously, they move from water body to water body and they have actually found them in trees. They can climb trees and they go back forever.

Kat [00:09:31]:
That's unbelievable.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:33]:
What's interesting too, in this room, Papua New guinea, you have ancestors there.

Kat [00:09:39]:
I do, I do.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:41]:
Speaking of Papua New guinea, we did an ancestry.com DNA thing. And your ancestors come from Papua New.

Kat [00:09:50]:
Guinea, near those islands.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:53]:
In those islands. And it's the only dark skinned race with blonde hair.

Kat [00:09:59]:
Correct.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:00]:
Known in the world.

Kat [00:10:01]:
Right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:02]:
I also just found out not long ago, and this is probably a topic for a different show, that many of them were cannibalistic. So you, you have cannibal DNA, which is ironic.

Kat [00:10:15]:
I'm so jealous considering I've been a vegetarian since I was 12.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:18]:
Yeah, it's crazy.

Kat [00:10:19]:
Yeah. So some of the species that were only known by way of fossils until just recently, where some of those fish that we were talking about earlier, not the feet fish, the other ones, the dawn redwood, which was discovered in a remote Chinese valley. Glypheoid lobsters, which I looked up and are amazing looking. It looks like you took a regular lobster, but you just like bound it up real tight in the back for a couple years and then unbound it. And so it's real, real small on the. And then like a normal lobster size in the front. It's ridiculous. Lobster binding, it looks ridiculous.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:06]:
It's popular in Papua New Guinea.

Kat [00:11:08]:
Yeah. Certain types of wasps, certain types of beetles. Again, you know, it's just one of those things that I think it must be fascinating to, to only know something by way of fossils and then.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:17]:
Yeah, it's incredible.

Kat [00:11:19]:
Other examples of living fossils are those that have no close relatives but are survivors of large and widespread groups in that fossil record. So like Ginkgo biloba, which is a plant that helps you, helps your brain remember things. I, I think though there is a lively debate about. Do you think it's funny that I couldn't remember?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:43]:
Yeah, I could. Yeah.

Kat [00:11:44]:
Yeah. So living fossil, there's no solid definition for it. So some scientists protest that because there is no real definition and because the term is so widely misused and Misunderstood. We should dump it all together. Language that we could use rather than living fossils that they believe that we should consider and use instead is long enduring. Which would be, you know, the taxon that lived through a large portion of geological time. Or the term resembles ancient species, which may mean that they're not even technically related, but have certain physical characteristics. Like the elephant shrew, which is so cute.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:27]:
What is the elephant shrew?

Kat [00:12:28]:
It's like picture a mouse, but with an elephant trunk.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:33]:
Can I have one?

Kat [00:12:34]:
Yeah, I know I'd like one of those, please. Retains many ancient traits. So that's a living taxon with characteristics believed to be primitive, which is a more neutral definition. It doesn't make it clear whether or not the taxon is truly old or simply has those traits.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:52]:
I love the idea that there's an unbroken chain between things that are here present in our lives that goes all the way back to, in some cases, the Cretaceous period.

Kat [00:13:04]:
Right? Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:05]:
Or before.

Kat [00:13:06]:
And. Yes. Or before. And there is another shark that I was looking at that I think that you and I should take some time and explore together, because it's called the goblin shark and it's very aptly named. It has this kind of like, you know, the death masks from back in the day?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:27]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Like from during the Black Plague. And they would stuff it with flowers and incense so that they didn't have to smell the rotting corpses.

Kat [00:13:36]:
Right. It looks like it's wearing a death mask.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:38]:
Good Lord.

Kat [00:13:38]:
And they are. Some of their lineage is from over 125 million years old. Absolutely incredible.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:45]:
That is amazing.

Kat [00:13:46]:
It really is. And this is one of those topics that I kept finding more and more things. And there are way more living fossils than I thought that there were. It seemed to me that living fossils meant something really rare and really unusual. And in this case, there are way more living fossils than I had any idea of, which I found fascinating.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:10]:
What about Sasquatch?

Kat [00:14:12]:
Sasquatch, interestingly enough, not listed on any reputable website as a existing tax on ever.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:21]:
For some reason, you just hate the idea of there being a Bigfoot or.

Kat [00:14:26]:
I do not hate the idea.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:27]:
You roll your eyes. Every time I'm watching a documentary on Sasquatch, you roll your eyes like, why can't Sasquatch be a living fossil?

Kat [00:14:37]:
Because there's no proof of him existing now or ever. And once you show me that, I will gladly get on your Sasquatch train.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:48]:
They have found Sasquatch stool. They have found Sasquatch poop.

Kat [00:14:57]:
Who is they? Can I see it? Some guys tell me Some guys, some.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:00]:
Guys, they found Sasquatch poop. And apparently what they determined was that Sasquatch really enjoys paydays.

Kat [00:15:09]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're peanutty and delicious.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:12]:
Delicious.

Kat [00:15:14]:
There you go. So that's what I have for you about living fossils.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:16]:
That is so great. You know, it reminds me of, you know, we're talking about this unbroken chain thing. It reminds me of the trait that's inside of us that has evolved and stayed with us since our earliest, earliest mammalian ancestors. Tree shrew. During that time, there were still giant lizards and tree shrews, of course, lived underground or in trees. And they were very small and had to avoid the lizards in order to survive. And so they learned early on to keep their youth, their young safe by impersonating the sound of a reptile. They would impersonate the sound of a reptile. And instinctively, the baby tree shrews knew to be quiet. And that trait has been passed on to every single mammal right down to us to this day.

Kat [00:16:13]:
I don't think that I know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:16]:
When we try to non verbally quiet an infant, what sound do we make?

Kat [00:16:23]:
I don't know. Clanging pots?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:25]:
No, no, there were no clanging pots in those days. No, no, we go, shh, shh is.

Kat [00:16:33]:
The sound of a lizard.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:34]:
It's a hissing reptile.

Kat [00:16:36]:
That's really cool.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:38]:
Yeah, I thought that was amazing.

Kat [00:16:40]:
So we've done that ever since.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:41]:
Ever since, yeah.

Kat [00:16:42]:
That's amazing.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:43]:
I learned that in the book by Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eaten.

Kat [00:16:48]:
Ah, fascinating.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:49]:
That's a great book, by the way. Check it out.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:51]:
You're listening to the box of oddities. The question is why?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:57]:
Here are five weird facts really quick.

Kat [00:16:59]:
Number five. In 2008, scientists discovered a new species of bacteria that lives in hairspray.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:06]:
Number four. The first American film to show a toilet flushing was Alfred Hitchcock Psycho.

Kat [00:17:11]:
Number three, the Romans used to clean and whiten their teeth with urine.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:15]:
I'm sensing a trend here. Urine number two. In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over whether a police officer called Bob Geary would be allowed to patrol while carrying his ventriloquist dummy called Brendan Osmarti. And the referendum passed. He got to carry his ventriloquist dummy.

Kat [00:17:35]:
Good for him. And number one, experiments show that the rhesus monkey will pay to look at pictures of female Reese's monkeys bottoms.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:43]:
It's just really hard for them to get credit.

Kat [00:17:45]:
No plus, no pockets.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:46]:
The box of Oddities with Cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:55]:
All right, on this episode, I'M going to talk about the strange but true afterlife journey of Elmer McCurdy.

Kat [00:18:04]:
I love that. That rhymes. It sounds like a children's book.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:07]:
Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880. He was shot dead in 1911. And he was buried in 1977. 66 years between when he died and when he was buried.

Kat [00:18:23]:
That doesn't make any sense.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:25]:
And during that period, he went on to an illustrious showbiz career. Let me explain. Here's how the story really kind of unfolded. On December 8th of 1976, the production crew for the TV show the Six Million Dollar Man. Remember that TV show?

Kat [00:18:41]:
Barely.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:41]:
They were filming scenes for an episode called Carnival of Spies at a place called the pike, which was an amusement park in Long Beach. It was kind of a rundown carnival. But they had leased the Laugh in the Dark fun House to film some episodes of or a episode of the Six Million Dollar Man. They were moving props around, and there was a wax mannequin that was hanging from gallows inside the funhouse. And so when they tried to move this mannequin, the arm broke off and they could see it had a human bone inside.

Kat [00:19:17]:
Well, that's a very well put together mannequin.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:21]:
Yeah. And muscle.

Kat [00:19:22]:
Attention to detail.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:23]:
Muscle tissue. Yeah. Was still visible. They immediately recognized it as a human corpse. Oh, gosh. It was mummified. So they called the police, who took the remains to the coroner's office. Los Angeles coroner's office, where they determined that this male human had died of a gunshot wound to the chest. But he was completely petrified.

Kat [00:19:48]:
Oh, my goodness.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:49]:
And they had no idea who he was. They didn't know he was Elmer McCurdy at the time. But he was covered in wax and layers of phosphorus paint. So that when the black lights hit him in the funhouse, he would glow in the dark. He weighed about 50 pounds. He was 63 inches in height. Some hair was still visible on the sides and back of his head. Other than that, he just looked like a mummy from, like, Egypt or something. And had no idea how old this guy was or whether or not he was a modern cadaver in the last couple hundred years, or whether it went all the way back to whenever. So they took him to the coroner's office and performed a second autopsy on him. Because one was done in 1911. They found out he died from a unique type of bullet called a gas check, which they were able to trace to the time that this guy died, 1911.

Kat [00:20:47]:
I don't know even what that means. A gas check.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:20:51]:
Some kind of an exploding bullet.

Kat [00:20:52]:
Gotcha. Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:20:53]:
That was designed to really create a lot of. A lot of damage when it hit. So after a lot of research, they figured out what happened and who this guy was, and here's his story. McCurdy was born in our hometown, Bangor, Maine. Oh, we do our show in Bangor, Maine, just so you know. The hometown of Stephen King.

Kat [00:21:16]:
Right. And Paul Bunyan.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:19]:
And Paul Bunyan. There are those that would argue that. But, yeah. He was the son of Sadie McCurdy, and at a very early age, he moved to Oklahoma. He was a hobo and an alcoholic who did not do very well in business or providing for himself or his family, mostly because of the alcoholism. So he took up train robbery, and he was probably the world's worst train robber.

Kat [00:21:46]:
Oh.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:47]:
In September of 1911, McCurdy, along with a couple other guys, robbed the Citizens bank in Kansas. And after spending two hours breaking through the bank with a hammer, breaking through the wall, he placed some nitroglycerin inside and blew it open. And he only got away with, like, 150 bucks. After all that work that didn't work out very well. Then he decided to rob a train. And this. This train was supposed to have $400,000 on it.

Kat [00:22:18]:
Wow.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:18]:
Like a. Like a payroll train. But he robbed the wrong train. He robbed a passenger train. And he got away with $46 and two jugs of whiskey. So he was clearly disappointed by. By the haul and returned to a friend's ranch on October 6th and just drank the whiskey.

Kat [00:22:40]:
If you fail at robbing a train, then you're gonna. You're gonna resort to whiskey, I think.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:45]:
Now, unknown to him, they had put a $2,000 reward on his head. And so a posse shows up. He's up in, like, a hayloft, drunk, And a posse shows up and orders him to come out, and he refuses. So he starts shooting at him. They return fire, and they shoot him and kill him. And that was that. So he's taken to a funeral home and he's embalmed. Nobody comes to claim him. And so he stays in the funeral home for, like, a year. And then they start using him as a display to show how great their embalming services work. And at that time, he had become petrified. So they just stood him up in the corner.

Kat [00:23:26]:
Oh, gosh.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:27]:
Of the funeral home.

Kat [00:23:28]:
That was awful.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:30]:
Ultimately, people started to become very curious about this. They heard about this guy who had died but was just standing in the corner at the funeral home. So the funeral director started charging a nickel for everybody to come in and. And take a look at this guy standing in the corner. Several years go by, and in 1916, a man calling himself Aver contacted the funeral director, claiming to be Elmer McCurdy's long lost brother from California. Aver had already contacted the county of Oklahoma, where the body was, and with the idea of taking McCurdy for burial in San Francisco. But what happened was he took him out on the carnival circuit and displayed him as the last Oklahoma train robber. And so Elmer McCurdy made the rounds for years and years and years under several different names. The embalmed bandit, the last train robber of Oklahoma, the outlaw who would never be captured alive until about 1922, when the guy sold his operation to another person called Louis Sony. Sony used McCurdy's corpse in what he called his museum of traveling crime. That was for a number of years. And then it was acquired by a guy named Duane Esper to promote an exploitation film in the 30s called Narcotic. And he said that this guy was a dope fiend that had died of a heroin overdose. And they displayed him in the lobbies of theaters around the country. And this, you know. So McCurdy had traveled all over the US in a carnival. And ironically, during this particular tour, they set him up on display in the movie theater of his hometown. And nobody knew it was him.

Kat [00:25:14]:
Oh, well, it had been a while. Plus, he probably looked a little different.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:18]:
He certainly did. After Louis Sony died in 1949, the corpse was placed in storage in a Los Angeles warehouse until 1964. And at that point, Sony's son Dan lent the corpse to filmmakers, and he made brief appearances in some pretty bad movies like she Freak and Blood Fest and some things like that.

Kat [00:25:40]:
Classics.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:41]:
Ultimately, Dan Sony sold the body, along with a lot of Wax figures for $10,000 to Spoonie Singh, who was the owner of the Hollywood Wax Museum. From there, the body went on tour to places like Mount Rushmore. This was going on for years and years and years. Finally, Singh sold it to a guy named Ed Liersh, who was part owner of the pike the amusement zone in Long Beach, California. And by 1976, McCurdy's corpse had been hanging in the Laugh in the Dark funhouse exhibit for about eight years, and nobody knew it was a real person.

Kat [00:26:17]:
Oh, I feel so bad for Ed.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:26:20]:
Apparently you don't feel too bad because his name's Elmer.

Kat [00:26:23]:
Elmer. I can't keep track of all this stuff.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:26:26]:
So once they discovered who he was and they were able to determine what happened, you Know, the stories, the newspaper articles, the investigative work, the autopsy, the gunshot, everything lined up. And they were they, without a shadow of it out. They said, yeah, this is Elmer McCurdy who was shot and killed in 1911. 66 years, jeez Louise, before he was buried. And so the town fathers of his hometown in Oklahoma came out and claimed his body and took him back to his hometown and gave him a dignified funeral and buried him. And now he is still in show business because he's one of the biggest tourist attractions in the hometown. People come to see his grave.

Kat [00:27:08]:
Aw.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:09]:
So he still doesn't get any peace, really, you know. So there you go. The very unusual and long, strange post life journey of Elmer McCurdy. Born 1880, died 1911, buried 1977.

Kat [00:27:24]:
Poor Elmer. But, you know, he's done more traveling than most people I know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:31]:
Yeah, that's true.

Kat [00:27:32]:
So there's, of course he was covered.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:33]:
In phosphorus paint, but that's true.

Kat [00:27:35]:
But I mean, so are half the kids at Burning man and they're dehydrated as well.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:43]:
You know what's funny is how we react to old corpses as opposed to new corpses. Because when they found this guy, the rumor is that the police called paramedics and said that there was a case of severe dehydration. When they showed up, it was this guy, it was mummified. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a little gallows humor there.

Kat [00:28:07]:
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, when you and I went to the Musee de Civilacion the first time, the muse of human civilization in Quebec for the first time, there were mummies there. And there was a. Separately in another case, a mummy penis. And we referenced that mummy's penis regularly.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:34]:
We were thrilled that we got to see a 4,000 year old mummified penis.

Kat [00:28:38]:
But if we just saw a dude's wiener in a case, probably we'd react differently.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:43]:
Yeah, I think so. Take a minute to think about it. But yeah. Yeah, I think I would be certainly against that. What's weird is when they were doing the autopsy on Elmer, the Los Angeles coroner's office, they noticed that the tops of his ears were gone and one of his fingers and a toe. They weren't sure how that happened, of course, but they determined by tracing the history back to the point where he was being shown at Mount Rushmore. The story is that a breeze came up and blew his ears off. Just the tips, though. Just the tip.

Kat [00:29:17]:
I thought probably people had just taken bits, you know? Yeah, I got part of Elmer.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:22]:
Yeah, Make a keychain. That's so disrespectful.

Kat [00:29:25]:
Awful.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:26]:
Yeah. Elmer McCurdy.

Kat [00:29:28]:
Good story.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:28]:
Rest in peace or pieces. I wish I had an Elmer McCurdy just to like, you know, have hanging out at the house.

Kat [00:29:36]:
Hanging. Cause that's how he was found. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:40]:
Yeah. No, I think it'd be fun. Wouldn't it be fun?

Kat [00:29:43]:
I mean, I guess.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:46]:
I had a friend years ago who worked in a funeral home, and he was out at a party and he borrowed the hearse to go to a party, and he got a call to do a body pickup on the other side of the county. And so he didn't want to drive all the way back, so he picked up the body and went to the party with the body.

Kat [00:30:08]:
Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:09]:
But he just set. He was in a hurry, so he sat the body in the front seat in the passenger seat next to him.

Kat [00:30:16]:
I already don't believe the story.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:18]:
No, it's true.

Kat [00:30:19]:
It's true.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:19]:
And put a hat on him because he was going through a toll booth and he didn't want to attract attention. Sure, maybe he stuck a cigarette in his mouth. I don't know. Anyway, he goes to the party and he's there way longer than he thought. And so by the time he got back to the funeral home, rigor mortis had set in and he couldn't get the guy out of the front seat.

Kat [00:30:40]:
Yeah, like trying to get an awkwardly shaped couch up a stairwell.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:45]:
Only the difference. You can't take the legs off. So I guess that's the end of this show. How are we gonna wrap this up?

Kat [00:30:58]:
Let's, you know, just stop. We'll just stop talking and then.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:03]:
And then the voice guy will say, okay, all right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:08]:
And so let it be known that the Box of Oddities belongs to you and its fate is in your hands. Therefore, it's been requested by those of whom I report to to beseech you for assistance. The Box of Oddities is free. We ask but one thing of you to provide a five star rating and a positive review. True, that is two things. However, tis merely a five star rating and a positive review also. Subscribe to us ok, so three things is all we ask. Three things and three things only. Henceforth, the Box of Oddities commits to the telling of stories. Stories of the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected. We wish to offer our deeply felt gratitude and appreciation for your patronage. The boxofodities.com on Facebook at facebook.com boxofodditiespodcast on Twitter boxofodities and Instagram @boxofodities podcast Copyright 2018All rights reserved.