Cimarron City, Oklahoma

For sixty-five years, the corpse of outlaw Elmer McCurdy toured America as a sideshow prop before anyone realized it was real. McCurdy botched nearly every robbery he attempted; his final 1911 heist netted forty-six dollars and a jug of whiskey, and that October he was killed in a shootout in a hayloft near Bartlesville. Embalmed with an arsenic-heavy fluid that left him rigid enough to stand on his own, his unclaimed body was dressed up and displayed for a nickel as 'The Embalmed Bandit.' In 1916 carnival promoters posing as his brothers carried him off, and for decades he drifted through wax museums, haunted houses, and funhouses, mistaken for a dummy. In December 1976 a crew filming The Six Million Dollar Man at a Long Beach amusement park tried to move a glow-painted 'mannequin' hanging from a noose, and an arm snapped off to reveal a real human bone. A 1924 penny and old ticket stubs lodged in the body helped identify him. On April 22, 1977, a horse-drawn hearse carried McCurdy to the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery here in Guthrie, beside fellow outlaw Bill Doolin. Two feet of concrete was reportedly poured over his casket so no one could ever put him back on display. He had, as the saying goes, traveled farther dead than he ever did alive.