Belated Burials: Expired, Unidentified, and Famous!

October 4, 2023

Fans of bizarre tourist attractions saw their travel plans disrupted recently when it was announced that Stoneman Willie, a preserved corpse on display since 1895 in Reading, Pennsylvania, had finally been identified and would be buried under his real name. His imminent interment was teased to Reading when his casket appeared in a motorcycle hearse at the town’s 275th anniversary parade last weekend, and his funeral home stewards kept him available for public farewell viewing this week in all his empty eye socket snaggly-toothed charm.

Stoneman Willie is the latest body entering the “proper burial” stage of Dead Guy Fame. He’s one of a dying breed of already-dead people. The posthumous population peaked roughly a century ago. Usually what would happen is that an unidentified stranger would expire in a town, then the local undertaker would embalm the corpse, prop it up in a chair or a corner of the casket showroom, and hope someone would recognize it (and pay the aftercare bill).

There’s no way to know how many times this was done and resolved fairly quickly, but a few display corpses went unclaimed — lighting up the nightmares of local children — for decades, long enough to become unofficial local attractions. The lonely corpses with no apparent next-of-kin were viewed with affection by owners, usually descendants of the original embalmer — a family heirloom equivalent to grandpa Ezekiel’s taxidermy weasel lamp, or Aunt Ethel’s wig.

In that respectful spirit, we offer this brief guide to America’s Belated Burials:

• Speedy – Paducah, KY
Real name: Charles Atkins. Died 1928, buried 1994.
Named Speedy because he never moved.

• Spaghetti – Laurinburg, North Carolina
Real name: Cancetto Farmica. Died 1910, buried 1972.
Named Spaghetti because he was Italian. He was a traveling carnival worker who got hit by a tent stake during a fight.

• Eugene – Sabina, Ohio
Real name: unknown. Died 1929, buried 1964.
Named Eugene because a paper in his pocket had the address of a vacant lot, and the living neighbor next door was named Eugene.

• David Elihu George – Enid, Oklahoma
Real name: John Wilkes Booth. Died 1903, buried ?
This stranger, who some believe was really Lincoln’s assassin in disguise, was embalmed and displayed in Enid for 40 years before being sold to a circus. In the early 2000s we were told he was in the hands of a private collector in Virginia.

• The Dummy – Guthrie, Oklahoma
Real name: Elmer McCurdy. Died 1911, buried 1977.
Luckless Old West criminal spent his last post-life years covered in day-glo paint in a spook house before he was rediscovered (during a “Six Million Dollar Man” TV series location shoot) to be a corpse and buried.

• The Mummy – Middlebury, Vermont
Real name: Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef. Died 1883 BC, buried 1950 AD.
Son of an Egyptian Pharaoh. His postmortem fame has cratered; even his gravestone has been removed.

And there are at least two places in America where embalmed bodies are still cheerfully exhibited:

• Sylvia & Sylvester – Seattle, Washington
Official ambassadors of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Sylvia’s origins remain murky, but Sylvester had the corpse name “McGinty” in the 1890s. He was embalmed after being shot in Arizona.

• Mummies of the Insane – Philippi, West Virginia
Long-time residents of the Barbour County Historical Museum. Previously living residents of the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Not mummies. They were embalmed in 1888.

May they outlive us all.

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Giant Twine Ball Rolls To A New Home

September 27, 2023

The giant twine ball of the late James Frank Kotera (a.k.a. JFK), all 12 tons of it, was safely trucked to its new home in Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin, on September 21, 2023. The move was organized by one of JFK’s neighbors, Terri Nelson, who suggested the idea at his January funeral. According to Terri, JFK’s sister was surprised by the idea, because she had planned to bury the twine ball, thinking that no one would care about it.

JFK called himself “World Famous Dump Man” because he had spent years working at a nearby transfer station sorting the dropped-off trash and recyclables. The transfer station has been named in his memory, and it became the final destination of the twine ball — not to be recycled, but to be permanently displayed on a new concrete pad. It’s also next to the town hall: a place of honor.

Special equipment had to be brought in to handle the massive orb — all of the labor was donated — and Terri told us that she feared that the ball would fall apart when it was lifted from the spot where it had sat outdoors for the past 40+ years. But JFK had always boasted of his tight winding technique, and the ball held together to make the move with all of its twine in place.

For now, the twine ball is covered by a tarp. Terri said that the town plans to build a permanent canopy over the ball, similar to the one that had sheltered it in JFK’s back yard, before the winter snows arrive.

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Weed Museum For Atlantic City

April 29, 2023

In the 1970s Atlantic City, the original home of Miss America, believed that casinos would bring glamor (and cash) to an aging resort that had once been called America’s Playground.

Now, 50 years later, it’s placed its revitalization bets on legal weed, gambling that its former commercial strip — a blighted stretch of 99-cent stores and pawn shops — will become “the East Coast hub for cannabis” according to Kashawn “Kash” McKinley, the city’s new czar of pot.

The most ambitious of several dozen planned marijuana businesses in this designated “Green Zone” is a complex described as a “museum” by its parent company, Agri-Kind. Covering several city blocks, it will supposedly include an indoor grow farm, guided tours similar to those at breweries and wineries, video displays, exhibits of cannabis-processing machinery, and some historical artifacts (Grateful Dead posters? Petrified hash brownies? Bongs?).

While specifics have been as hazy as the air inside a 1970s head shop, company founder Jon Cohn has said that the museum will do for weed what Chocolate World has done for chocolate (also, stoned people love chocolate). His vision, he has said, is that the museum will be comparable to the Johnny Cash Museum or Graceland, and that it will be “really educational.”

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Wedding Bells For Cocaine Bear

March 30, 2023

Despite being dead for nearly 40 years, Cocaine Bear has officiated a wedding in Lexington, Kentucky. Hollywood heartthrob, Oscar-ceremony crasher — is there nothing this bear can’t do?

The revelation that a bear could officiate a wedding in Kentucky was first floated by local expert Griffin VanMeter, one of Cocaine Bear’s caretakers at the KY Fun Mall, in Roadside America’s feature story about the coke-obliterated bruin. We have long chronicled odd places that host marriage ceremonies — caves, presidential temples, drive-thru chapels, even the SPAM Museum — but this was the first in which the officiating presence was a deceased bear carcass.

According to Griffin, the Roadside America story prompted multiple couples to inquire about Cocaine Bear’s availability. Armando Elizondo and Alexandra Venturino were first on the list, and were married in the presence of Cocaine Bear — with Griffin as a human backup — on March 27, 2023.

Cocaine Bear, known for frequent costume changes at the Fun Mall, wore a dignified top hat for the happy occasion. It was attended by a small crowd of family, friends, well-wishers, and the press, as well as “Cokey,” the Fun Mall’s huggable Cocaine Bear mascot, who entertained the children in attendance and reminded everyone not to do drugs.

Photographs: Cassie Lopez

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New Ice Pad For The Frozen Dead Guy

March 29, 2023

Convergence. At Roadside America, we relish the moments when the capricious ley lines of tourism intersect, creating something strange and new. And involving three disparate oddball roadside attractions.

So it was recently when John Cullen, owner of the eerie Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado —- where Steven King was inspired to write The Shining —- announced that he was partnering with Alcor Cryonics — which gives tours of its deep-freeze facility of “corpsical” humans in Scottsdale, Arizona — to relocate famous Frozen Dead Guy “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel from his long-time storage shed in Nederland, Colorado, to the Stanley Hotel’s ice house – and then open it as tourist attraction.

Well, well, and well.

Cullen has said that at some point in 2023 he hopes to have a hearse parade to escort Grandpa Bredo, who’s been dead since 1989, from Nederland to Estes Park. He’s also said that Bredo’s new ice house home will be “experiential” for tourists — a pledge that has us shivering with its possibilities — as well as a place to keep Grandpa frozen in liquid nitrogen at 200 degrees below zero.

Cullen flew to Oslo, Norway to get the approval of Trygve Bauge, Grandpa’s grandson. Bauge reportedly approved, and said that the goal of keeping Grandpa frozen was not to bring him back from the dead, but to keep him viable until future science can resurrect Bredo as a younger version of himself.

That may take awhile, so a long-term future for the Frozen Dead Guy as an attraction seems promising.

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Bronze Fonz: All-Natural

March 16, 2022

The movement to rid our home products and snacks of additives and dyes now has a similar statuesque champion: The Bronz Fonz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When the statue of Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli, star of TV’s “Happy Days” (set in Milwaukee) was first cast in 2008, it was given a golden sheen, mimicking an Oscar. But the city didn’t like that, so Fonzie’s clothes were tinted in various shades: blue jeans, white t-shirt, black leather jacket. Unfortunately his skin was left gold, and when the blue oxide in his jeans abruptly faded they were coated in bright blue auto paint. It made the bronze statue a colorful mess regardless of one’s opinion of the merits of a permanent Fonzie tribute, which was already low among Milwaukee’s upper crust. Splattering it with protest paint would not have made much difference.

So in early 2022 Fonzie was given yet another makeover. This time, all of the added colors were stripped off. Instead of paint or coatings, the bronze itself was tinted in darker shades to give him his blackish jacket, boots, and hair — a more subtle, dignified look for a mature pop culture icon. Bolted along the city’s Riverwalk, he’s a photo op that’s hard to pass up.

When this latest version of Fonzie was unveiled on March 11, the statue was described as “truly bronze” by a spokesperson for the city’s visitor bureau — although of course Fonzie had been truly bronze all along.

Now, however, he’s an all-natural greaser: a statue appropriate for the 21st century.

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