For me, this is a bit of forgotten trivia that I wanted to preserve.
In 1976, the waxed corpse of forgotten Old West gunfighter Elmer McCurdy was discovered by the film crew of the Six Million Dollar Man while they were producing an episode at a working carnival. They were moving what they thought was a mannequin when the arm broke off, exposing old Elmer’s preservedness.
It seems that, after Elmer died in a shootout in 1911, nobody claimed the body, so the undertaker put it on display — charging folks a nickel to see the robber who “wouldn’t be taken alive.”
After a while, it seems that people forgot it was an actual corpse. So, for the next 60 years, his body had been passed around from side show to carnival.
When he was finally buried in Oklahoma, the state medical examiner had workers cover his casket with concrete.
I, of course, was surfing the web looking for a description of Death Probe — the Dalek of my childhood — but was distracted by the Case of the Waxy Corpse.