The ones I'm going to be posting are from http://www.onemagazine.net/legends.htm. I would have just given the link, but there's a disturbing pic there that caught me off guard.. I wasn't prepared for it at all! lol... so I thought I'd just give everyone a warning just in case you do decide to go there.

Anyway here goes:


A "hanging man" prop, displayed in a California fun house for years, turns out to be a long dead corpse.

In December 1976 a Universal Studios camera 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. In preparing the set in
a corner of the fun house, a worker moved the "hanging man," causing one of this prop's arms to come off. Inside it was human bone. This was no mere prop; this was a dead guy!

The body was that of Elmer McCurdy, a young man who in 1911 robbed a train of $46 and two jugs of whiskey in Oklahoma. He announced to the posse in pursuit of him that he would not be taken alive. He was proved right -- they killed him in the ensuing shoot-out.

McCurdy began his career as a sideshow attraction right after his embalming. 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."

In 1915 two guys showed up, claiming McCurdy as their brother. They hauled the dead guy away, supposedly to give him a decent burial in the family plot. In reality, McCurdy's "brothers" were carnival promoters and this was a ruse to get the deceased away from that proprietary 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 Six Million Dollar Man crew discovered this prop to be a corpse, McCurdy had been hanging in that Long Beach fun house for four years.

In April 1977, the much traveled Elmer McCurdy was laid to final rest in Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. To make sure the corpse would not make its way back to the entertainment world, the state medical examiner ordered two cubic yards of cement poured over the coffin before the grave was closed. McCurdy hasn't been seen hanging around amusement parks since.

A prisoner once killed himself using a deck of playing cards.

On 20 October 1930, William Kogut, an inmate on San Quentin's death row, fashioned ordinary decks of pasteboards into a pipe bomb, which he used to take his own life. Kogut was awaiting execution for the throat-slash murder of Mayme Guthrie, who ran a rooming house (which may have doubled as a gaming house and brothel) in Oroville, California.

Kogut removed a hollow steel leg from his cot, tore several packs of playing cards into tiny pieces, and stuffed these bits into the pipe. He plugged one end tightly with a broom handle, and poured water into the other end to soak the torn cards. He then placed this device on top of the kerosene heater next to his bed, laid down, and put his head up against the open end of the pipe.

The heater turned the water into steam, and when the pressure built up to a high enough level, the resulting explosion shot the bits of playing cards out of the pipe with enough force to penetrate Kogut's skull.

Several visitors to Disneyland have lost their lives on various attractions.

Actually, eight guests have been killed on Disneyland attractions since the park's opening in 1955. All the deaths (except the most recent) were the result of guests who apparently ignored safety instructions and/or defeated rides' safety mechanisms.

May 1964: Mark Maples, a 15 year old Long Beach, CA, resident, was killed on the Matterhorn Bobsleds. He unfastened his seat belt and stood up as his bobsled neared the peak of the mountain, lost his balance and was thrown from the sled to the track below, fracturing his skull and ribs and causing internal injuries. He died three days later.

June 1966: Thomas Guy Cleveland, a 19 year old Northridge, CA, resident, was killed when he attempted to sneak into Disneyland along the Monorail track and was struck by the oncoming train, then dragged 30 to 40 feet down the track.

August 1967: Ricky Lee Yama, a 17 year old Hawthorne, CA, resident, was killed when he disregarded safety instructions and exited his People Mover car as the ride was passing through a tunnel, slipped as he was jumping from car to car and was crushed to death beneath the wheels of oncoming cars.

June 1973: Bogden Delaurot, an 18 year old Brooklyn resident, drowned trying to swim across the Rivers of America. His body was not located by searchers until the next morning.

7 June 1980: Gerardo Gonzales, a recent San Diego high school graduate, was killed on the People Mover in an accident much like the one that had befallen Ricky Lee Yama thirteen years earlier.

4 June 1983: Philip Straughan, an 18 year old Albuquerque, New Mexico, resident, who had been drinking quite heavily that evening also drowned in the Rivers of America.

3 January 1984: Dolly Regene Young, a 48 year old Fremont, CA, resident, was killed on the Matterhorn in an incident remarkably similar to the first Disneyland guest death nearly twenty years earlier. About two thirds of the way down the mountain Young was thrown from her seat into the path of an oncoming bobsled, her head and chest becoming pinned beneath its wheels. An examination of Young's sled revealed that her seat belt was not fastened at the time of the accident.

24 December 1998: In a tragic Christmas Eve accident, one Disneyland cast member and two guests were injured (one fatally) when a rope used o secure the sailing ship Columbia as it docked on the Rivers of America tore loose the metal cleat to which it was attached. The cleat sailed through air and struck the heads of two guests who were waiting to board the ship, Luan Phi Dawson, 33, of Duvall, Washington, and his wife, Lieu Thuy Vuong, 43. Dawson was declared brain dead two days later and died when his life support system was disconnected.

Guests at Walt Disney World alerted the America Sings ride operators after hearing the blood curdling screams of a woman being crushed to death by the ride's rotating wall.

After Disneyland's Carousel of Progress was shut down and shipped to Florida's Walt Disney World in 1973, the attraction was revamped and re-opened on 29 June 1974, as America Sings. Like its predecessor, the attraction featured an outer ring of six seating areas which rotated around a stationary center housing multiple stages.

On the evening of 8 July 1974, a 18 year old woman from Santa Ana named Deborah Gail Stone was working the attraction as a hostess. 11:00 PM that evening, Stone approached too closely to the area between the rotating theater wall and the non-moving stage wall and was crushed to death between them. Ride operators were notified by a guest who heard Stone's screams from an adjacent theater.

Immediately after the accident, America Sings was closed for two days while a safety light that alerted the attraction's operator whenever someone got too close to the danger area was installed. Eventually the solid walls were replaced with breakaway ones to prevent similar accidents from occurring.

An actor pretending to hang himself during a performance, accidentally kills himself as the audience watches, unaware of the problem.

Case #1: (October 23,1990 Chicago Tribune):
A teenager who pretended to hang from a gallows as part of a pre-Halloween hayride died while performing the stunt. Police said Monday that hayride customers on Saturday found the body of Brian Jewell, 17, hanging from the gallows, his feet touching the ground.

The stunt had worked on other nights and there was no indication of foul play, prosecutor James Holzapfel said. The gallows was being checked for flaws, and an autopsy was performed Monday.

During the ride, about 40 people are driven past several Halloween fright exhibits. The stunt went off without problems earlier Saturday. But the tractor driver became concerned later, when Jewell failed to give a speech he normally made as the wagon passed.

Case #2: (October 29, 1990 Los Angeles Times):
A 15 year old staging a gallows scene at a Halloween party accidentally hanged himself when the noose somehow tightened, authorities said today.

William Anthony Odom of Charlotte, N.C., was pronounced dead Friday night amid fake spider webs and plastic bats decorating an aunt's home. Odom and several of his friends had staged a haunted house in the basement.

Case #3: On August 17, 1997 Antony Wheeler, while playing Judas in a Greek production of Jesus Christ Superstar, was supposed to conclude his performance with Judas hanging himself, a stunt he'd successfully negotiated 20 previous times. This time he forgot to fasten the rope to his safety harness.

Case #4: On April 22, 2000 Renato Di Paolo, another actor playing Judas, mistakenly hanged himself in Camerata Nuova, a town 45 miles from Rome. Di Paolo's death was captured on film by someone shooting a video of the outdoor play.

An unusually large number of deaths have occurred among the former cast of the Poltergeist trilogy. This occurrence has given rise to the rumor that the productions were in some way "cursed" due to the nature of the films themselves, as if the evil spirits conjured up in the make-believe world of the cinema have since reached out into the real world to claim what they might see as their rightful victims.

22 year old Dominique Dunne died on 4 November 1982 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, four days after her boyfriend choked her into a coma from which she never awoke. She died about year after Poltergeist was released.

12 year old Heather O'Rourke died of septic shock on 1 February 1988 at the Children's Hospital in San Diego. What had been thought to be a bout of ordinary flu launched her into cardiac arrest during the drive to the local hospital as bacterial toxins set loose by a bowel obstruction made their way into her bloodstream. Her heart was successfully restarted and she was flown by helicopter to the much larger Children's Hospital where she underwent an operation to remove the obstruction. The toxins rampaging through her system proved too much, and she died on the operating table. She died a few months before Poltergeist III was released (but after it the filming was complete).

60 year old Julian Beck died of stomach cancer on 14 September 1985 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Like O'Rourke, he expired during the period between filming and release, but in his case the film in question was Poltergeist II, which was released in May 1986.

53 year old Will Sampson died on 3 June 1987 in a Houston hospital after receiving a heart-lung transplant 6 weeks earlier. The cause of his death was ascribed to severe pre-operative malnutrition and post-operative kidney failure and fungal infection. Like Beck, Sampson appeared in only one film in the series, Poltergeist II, released in May 1986. He was best known for his portrayal of the Indian who feigned being mute in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

Two men each lost an arm in a grisly tug-of-war contest.

On 25 October 1997, a mass tug-of-war contest was held at a park along the Keelung River in Taipei in celebration of Retrocession Day (the 52nd anniversary of the end of the Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan). Over 1,600 participants joined in the contest, exerting over 80,000 kg of force on a 5 cm nylon rope that could bear a force of about 26,000 kg at most.

Within seconds the rope snapped, severing the left arms of two men (Yang Chiung-ming and Chen Ming-kuo) below the shoulder. (The severing of the limbs was believed to have been caused by sheer rebounding force of the broken rope rather than the men's having wrapped the rope around their arms, as was sometimes reported.) The victims were taken to Mackay Memorial Hospital and underwent seven hours of microsurgery to reattach their arms.

Oops.. double post! Anyone have any true stories?

When a mausoleum is opened to admit a freshly deceased family member, evidence is found of the last dearly departed's frantic quest for escape.

Case #1: In the 1850s, a young girl visiting Edisto Island, South Carolina, died of diphtheria. She was quickly interred in a local family's mausoleum because it was feared the disease might otherwise spread. When one of the family's sons died in the Civil War, the tomb was opened to admit him. A tiny skeleton was found on the floor just behind the door.

Case #2 : [British Medical Journal, 1877]
A correspondent at Naples states that the Appeals Court has had before it a case not likely to inspire confidence in the minds of those who look forward with horror to the possibility of being buried alive. It appeared from the evidence that some time ago, a woman was interred with all the usual formalities, it being believed that she was dead, while she was only in a trance. Some days afterwards, when the grave in which she had been placed was opened for the reception of another body, it was found that the clothes which covered the unfortunate woman were torn to pieces, and that she had even broken her limbs in attempting to extricate herself from the living tomb. The Court, after hearing the case, sentenced the doctor who had signed the certificate of decease, and the Major who had authorized the interment each to three month's imprisonment for involuntary manslaughter.

After repeatedly complaining about the smell in their room, a couple (usually said to be German tourists) staying in a hotel (usually said to be in Las Vegas) discovers the body of a murdered girl (usually a prostitute) under their bed.

This legend began to circulate around 1991, but occurrences of dead bodies under the hotel bed happen all the time. Some investigated and reported events include:

On June 10, 1999 the rapidly decomposing remains of 64 year old Saul Hernandez were discovered inside the bed in Room 112 at the Burgundy Motor Inn in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A German couple had spent the night sleeping over Hernandez's remains, and it was their complaint to the manager about the smell in their room which led to the discovery of the corpse.

In July 1996 a woman's body was found under a mattress in the Colorado Boulevard Travelodge in Pasadena, CA. The motel's staff discovered her ten days after her demise and only after guests had complained for several days of a foul odor coming from that room.

In Virginia in 1989, Jerry Lee Dunbar disposed of the remains of two victims this way: 27 year old Deirdre Smith, who was discovered in May under the floor of a motel room on Route 1, and 29 year old Marilyn Graham, who turned up in June under a bed in the Alexandria Econo Lodge. In Smith's case, the killer first kept her body partially hidden under his bed for two days, then subsequently placed it in the crawl space under the carpeted floor. Her presence seemingly didn't bother him, because he didn't move out of that room until three or four weeks later. Both girls' bodies were eventually found after other guests complained about the stink.

While being hospitalized for complications of her pregnancy, a woman confesses to her husband that baby is another man's. The husband demands to know the other man's identity and then storms out. While the woman speaks with her lover on the telephone, the line goes dead. Later the husband returns with a gym bag containing the lover's dripping head, which he shoves in his wife's face.

The news story:
Fulda, Germany, Dec 8, 1993 - An American soldier cut off the head of his pregnant wife's lover and put it on her bedside table in the hospital here where she was about to give birth, a spokesman at the German public prosecutor's office said on Wednesday.

The angry husband struck on Tuesday when his rival, a fellow GI in the American 11th cavalry regiment, was phoning the woman from nearby Sickels military airfield.

The first soldier cut off the second one's head with a knife, then drove to the hospital and showed it to his wife and left it there. The victim just had time to call down the telephone, "Your husband is coming," the German sources said.

An American army spokesman confirmed a decapitated body had been found in a telephone box at the military airfield. U.S. military police held the first man for questioning. He was not immediately named.


Stephan Schap was court-martialed for the murder of Gregory Glover in April 1994. He was found guilty and given a mandatory life sentence.