Apparently with all his moving about, the true nature of McCurdy’s remains got lost. The Long Beach park thought they had a wax dummy that decorated their “house of Horrors”… then one day like in a bad horror movie, they were moving some stuff around, someone grabbed McCurdy and his arm came off - revealling meat and bones instead of 2x4’s and stuffing.
Thus giving some lucky workers a story that can’t be topped, that they’ll tell for the next 80 years.
I like how Wikipedia says the mummy was rediscovered, during filming of an episode for The Six Million Dollar Man:
“During filming of the 1977 episode ‘Carnival of Spies’ for the television show The Six Million Dollar Man, which was shot at the Pike in December 1976, a crew member was moving what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin’s arm broke off, it was discovered that it was in fact the embalmed and mummified remains of a human. Later, when medical examiner Thomas Noguchi opened the mummy’s mouth for other clues, he was surprised to find a 1924 penny and a ticket from Sonney Amusement’s Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. That ticket and archived newspaper accounts helped police and researchers identify the body as that of Elmer McCurdy.”