Oh, the scares we subject ourselves to. We will walk through a "haunted house" at an amusement park almost hoping that we will be sent into fits of fear or at least get to see a hysterical person run screaming or crying out of the realistically innocent building. Really what we are afraid of are mere facsimiles of the things we dread. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies -- they are all just fakes for our sick amusement. Or are they? Alright, I will spare the theatrics. They typically are, but just once that I know of, the mummy in an amusement park house was real.
In December of 1976, a film crew was at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California when a member of the crew moved one of the pesky spooks out of the way. When he did, the mummy's dry, old arm snapped off and I imagine a puff of skin dust filled the air and only when the epidermal exhalation of death cleared did the man notice that there was a bone in the arm. Not a pig bone. Not a sheep bone. It was not even a really good fake bone. It was a freaking man's freaking arm bone.
It turns out that the sick and twisted carnies of old school Nu-Pike thought it would be cool to rip a dude off and steal the mummy he had been parading around for profit. It was the body of Elmer McCurdy, who was shot and killed in 1911. The funeral home did not find an owner for the body so put it on display and sold views for a nickel. Five years later, the creepy carnies claimed to be related to the deceased and the previous "owner" was forced to give up the corpse. The new "owners" continued to use it for profit until it wound up in the fun house where I presume countless people touched it, not realizing it was a dude who died decades earlier. Bizarre? You might say that.
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