FATAL ATTRACTION (A TRUE STORY)

How strange it is that some people seek out fear. They hunger for the adrenaline rush associated with terror but want to enjoy it in a safe, controlled environment. There is a delicious, masochistic joy to be had when you allow your imagination to conjure up ideas that can scare you.
Of course, there are times when the truth is even more grotesque than you can imagine.

In the winter of 1976 a Universal Studios production crew arrived at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California, to film an episode of the television action show, the Six Million Dollar Man.

The theme park had been chosen as the perfect setting for an episode of the show. It was a run down and faded attraction, with peeling paint and rusting rides and although still an on-going concern, the park was looking tired and old.

The team began preparing for the shoot, installing lighting rigs and building new facades. A key scene for the show was to feature the 'House of Horrors' ride, which took visitors on a rickety train ride through a series of battered ghosts and ghouls. The ride had seen better days and so the director asked for new props to be built that were more convincing. The set manager got to work with his team, dismantling the lifeless dummies and pulling down the implausible string cobwebs. Last on the list of props to replace was the 'Hanging man' suspended from a thick rope at the end of the ride. As the train passed by, a series of wires would cause the man to sway, so that he would brush against the passengers in order to get one final scream. It was a sorry figure with a tanned leathery face staring open-mouthed, and eyeless.

With the help of an assistant, the set manager climbed up a stepladder to cut the prop from the gallows. As the two men lowered the Hanging Man to the floor, one of the arms broke off.   Closer inspection revealed a human bone protruding from the tattered sleeve. This was not a prop. It was really a dead man.

The body was that of Elmer McCurdy, a young man who in 1911 robbed a train of $50 and some whiskey in Oklahoma. He shouted to the posse in pursuit of him that he would not be taken alive. He was right - when they caught him he received four fatal gunshot wounds to the chest during a frenzied shoot-out.

McCurdy began his posthumous career as a sideshow attraction soon after his embalming. He looked so good dressed up in his fancy clothes that the undertaker propped him up in a corner of the funeral home's back room and charged locals a nickel to see "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up." The nickels were dropped into the corpse's open mouth and the unscrupulous undertaker later retrieved them.
In the absence of any family to claim the body, McCurdy kept gathering nickels for a few years.

In 1915, two men showed up claiming that McCurdy was their brother. They hauled the body away, supposedly to give him a decent burial in the family plot. In reality, McCurdy's kinsfolk were carnival promoters and this was a ruse to get the deceased away from that undertaker. The promoters exhibited McCurdy throughout Texas under the same billing as the undertaker had given him "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up."
After that tour, McCurdy popped up everywhere, including an amusement park near Mount Rushmore, lying in an open casket in a Los Angeles wax museum, and in a few low-budget films. 

Before the TV crew discovered the prop to be a corpse, McCurdy had been hanging in that Long Beach funhouse for four years. For four years, people on the train ride had been brushing past a real corpse as it swung to and fro.

Matthew J Woods

London