In December 1976, the cast and crew of TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man were hard at work preparing to shoot an episode for the show’s fourth season at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. While setting up a scene in which Steve Austin (played by Lee Majors) was to make his way through a funhouse ride called Laff in the Dark, an employee on set tried to move what he thought was a hanging mannequin out of his way and got a big surprise in the process. You see, when the worker grabbed onto the supposed dummy’s arm, it snapped off in his hand. Upon closer examination, he realized that there was a bone inside.

It turns out this was no spookhouse mannequin, but a real honest-to-goodness dead body . Peculiar as that may sound, the story of how it ended up being part of a carnival ride is even more bizarre. Eventually, it was discovered that the remains belonged to an outlaw by the name of Elmer McCurdy, who’d been killed in a gunfight with police way back in 1911.…