Roadside Grave of Solid Muldoon
Beulah Valley, Colorado
Solid Muldoon was created by George Hull, the same prankster/con man who had concocted the Cardiff Giant eight years earlier. Hull was more sophisticated with this new "petrified giant," encasing a real human skeleton inside mortar that contained ground bones and meat. He also gave it a small tail, hoping to pass it off as evolution's long-sought missing link. It was buried in secret outside of Pueblo, Colorado, then "discovered" by a flunky on September 16, 1877.
The 7.5-foot-tall giant was dubbed "Solid Muldoon" after an Irish ditty (There goes Muldoon, He's a solid man), and enjoyed a brief span of profitable popularity. But once it was exposed as a fraud, interest in the giant ended.
No one knows what happened to the original Solid Muldoon, but in 1976 a replica was made as part of the Colorado Centennial and U.S. Bicentennial celebration. The new petrified giant was displayed for a few years in the El Pueblo History Museum. Then on July 22, 1984, Solid Muldoon II was hauled to an existing highway point-of-interest pull-off near the original's discovery site, buried, and given his own tombstone.