A group of kids spent a night inside a funhouse, so after the fair closes and everybody leaves, they break inside. It's full of the usual thrills and chills and things designed to terrify the children and adults who venture inside. The macabre maze makes it difficult for the group of kids to get around, and eventually among the startling surprises they come across a hanging corpse.
Suddenly, a prankster in the group shoves one of his friends to scare him and they accidentally bump into the dead hanging man, knocking his hand off. The kids pick the hand up off the floor and shake it at each other jokingly, but soon realize the hand is very old and very real. The hanging man isn't a prop at all, but a real dead body. All the kids run in terror out of the house of horrors.
Afterward, they notified the police, and when detectives came upon the corpse; they knew then that it was real. The skin was stretched tight across its face as though the person had starved to death. The corpse was taken to a morgue for an autopsy. The autopsy results aided the investigation and it was soon discovered that the cadaver was an early nineteenth-century train robber who was caught in the act and killed in a shoot-out with the local town sheriff. Since no one claimed the body, it was taken to a mortician who then used it to advertise his business. He embalmed and preserved the corpse and stood it as a statue in a corner of his workplace for public display.
When people started coming by just to see the dead man, he began to charge admission. Some showmen from a freak show attraction got word of the mummy and convinced the mortician that they were relatives of the dead man. He reluctantly released the corpse to them, who then began to display the corpse in their own show. It traveled the country as the REAL DEAD OUTLAW, but after the freak show disbanded, it was traded to a pawn shop dealer who then sold it to a prop collector. The props collector offered it to an associate who used it to decorate the funhouse.
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100 Urban Legends
Horrorurban legend [ˈərbən ˈlejənd] NOUN urban legends (plural noun) a humorous or horrific story or piece of information circulated as though true, especially one purporting to involve someone vaguely related or known to the teller.
