Imagine going to a doctor’s home in the 1930s for a purely social visit, and he asks you to look under the cushion of the sofa you’re sitting on. So you stand up, lift off the cushion, and see that right beneath a plate of glass, resting in the sofa well, is a dead man. Completely mummified. Talk about an ice breaker.
The mummy is known as Sylvester, and he was purchased for a mere $25 during the Great Depression after spending a few decades on the sideshow circuit. As the story goes, his body was found in 1895 by two cowboys making their way through the desert west of Gila Bend, Arizona. He appeared to have suffered a gunshot wound on his left side. Medical examiners believed he was around 45 years old and tall and heavy. Having been killed in the desert, dehydration sucked out nearly a hundred pounds and left him fully preserved—from his blue eyes to his mustache, teeth, and nails.
By 1909 he showed up at Seattle’s Alaska Yukon Exposition and then at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915. He was even said to have appeared as an attraction at a barber shop in Yuma, Arizona, in 1912. Horrified crowds everywhere loved him.
After the doctor who later kept him in his couch for fun passed away, his heirs hired him out to sideshow showmen, allowing him to resume his earlier posthumous career. The promoters created various stories to add hype, including the claim that he was John Wilkes Booth.
By 1955, he found his way to Seattle’s Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, where his afterlife has continued as a remarkable exhibit inside a glass case. Since then, other theories have popped up. One claimed that he was slain in a saloon brawl and his body was then experimented on by a doctor exploring new embalming techniques. After the doctor passed away, he was buried, but Sylvester moved on.
MRIs and CT scans in the early 2000s showed that his organs were all present, including his brain. The preservation may have been due to the fact that his body was also filled with arsenic—perhaps by the experimental doctor.
Another theory states Sylvester was mummified before 1895, and was exhibited by con man Soapy Smith, who called him McGinty. Smith earned his nickname by selling bars of soaps with money hidden inside. As he’d gather a crowd to buy the prize-money soap, he’d use sleight of hand to make sure his shills always got the prize—while he took everyone else’s money in sales.
McGinty, Sylvester, or whoever he was, one can only hope his short life was a fraction as interesting as his long afterlife.
