Did ‘Pine Bluff Historical Museum’ wax figure turn out to be mummified missing man?

Claim:

A small-town Missouri museum’s wax figure turned out to be a real, mummified human body that had been missing for decades.

Rating:

In November 2025, a story began circulating online claiming that a small-town museum in Missouri had, for 50 years, unknowingly displayed the mummified body of a missing man, believing it to be a wax figure. Social media posts described how a new curator supposedly made the discovery while preparing the exhibit for renovation.

One Facebook post (archived) with the story read:

A museum displayed what it thought was a wax figure for 50 years — until a new curator in 2025 discovered it was actually a missing man…The smell was the first thing that struck Clara Whitman. Faint but wrong — like old varnish mixed with something she couldn’t name. It came from the back room of the Pine Bluff Historical Museum, a small-town institution in rural Missouri where she’d recently been hired as curator.

For fifty years, the museum’s prized “wax figure” — a man in a brown suit and bowler hat, seated with a newspaper in his lap — had been the centerpiece of the “Everyday Life in 1920” exhibit. Children posed beside him. Tourists joked about how lifelike he looked. The staff affectionately called him Sam the Silent Man.

But on that humid morning in June 2025, as Clara prepared the exhibit for renovation, she noticed something strange: the figure’s hands weren’t waxy — they were leathery. The fingernails had half-moon ridges. And beneath a small tear at the collar, she saw something that made her stomach twist — the faint pattern of human skin.

She called maintenance to move the mannequin, pretending calm. When they lifted it, a brittle sound cracked through the air — bone.

Within hours, the museum was sealed off with yellow tape. Police swarmed the scene, their radios buzzing. The “wax figure,” it turned out, wasn’t wax at all. It was a mummified man, preserved by decades of dry air and layers of shellac applied by well-meaning curators.

Detective Ryan Mercer from the Pine Bluff Police Department arrived by evening. The autopsy later revealed the man had died around the early 1970s. No signs of struggle, but no ID either. For half a century, the museum had displayed a missing person — seated quietly under glass.

Hundreds of people reacted to, commented on and shared the post. The story spread via multiple posts on Facebook, X, Instagram and blog entires. Readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true.

However, despite many people believing the story and sharing it as factual, no evidence supports any of its claims.

Searches on DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing for “Pine Bluff Historical Museum,” “Clara Whitman,” “Ryan Mercer,” “Sam the Silent Man,” and the “Pine Bluff Police Department” yielded no credible results. If such a discovery had truly occurred, with a human body being displayed for half a century, it would have made national and international headlines. Yet, there were no credible reports from local or national news media in Missouri, and no official statements from any police department or museum confirming such an event. Therefore, we have rated this claim as false.

How we know this story is made up 

There was no evidence of any such discovery taking place in Missouri in June 2025. One of the clearest indicators of fabrication was the use of fictional proper names, such as the supposed curator “Clara Whitman,” the detective “Ryan Mercer,” and institutions like the nonexistent “Pine Bluff Historical Museum” and “Pine Bluff Police Department.”

The story’s reference to a “Pine Bluff Police Department” appears to stem from confusion with the real city of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which does have a police department of that name.

Moreover, AI-detection tools suggested the story was not written by a human. Both GPT Zero and Copyleaks flagged the text as highly likely to be AI-generated, with GPTZero estimating a 100% probability that the passage originated from an AI model. Similarly, ZeroGPT tool flagged the majority of the text “most likely generated by AI.” (Research shows AI-detection software is imperfect. Readers should consider the tools’ results with skepticism.)

(copyleaks.com)
 

The article’s tone, structure and emotional language also indicated that AI software helped create it.

The image being shared alongside the  story appeared to show a person in a hazmat suit examining what looks like an old, human-shaped figure, possibly meant to resemble a preserved body. The inset in the lower corner showed a portrait of a young man in a suit, seemingly intended to imply an identification photo of the “missing man.”

The origin of the image circulating alongside the story was also unclear. AI-detection tools produced mixed results regarding whether it had been created using artificial intelligence. The platform Hive classified the image as “likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content,” giving it a 50.5% probability score, while Sightengine reported it was “uncertain” whether the image was “AI-generated or not.”

(sightengine.com)

Even so, several visual clues suggested the image may have been entirely or partially AI-generated. The portrait of the man in the corner appeared overly smooth and lacked small imperfections typical of real vintage photographs. In addition, the portrait bore no resemblance to the alleged “corpse” shown in the main image. The background scene, depicting a person in protective gear examining what looked like a preserved body, appeared to have been edited with a vintage-style filter. Such filters, whether applied automatically by AI tools or added manually, can make generated images look more authentic and harder to detect.

Finally, the image was shared exclusively through social media posts, with no credible news outlets publishing it — further indicating that it did not depict a real-life situation.

As some commenters on social media suggested, the story may have been loosely inspired by a real historical incident involving Elmer McCurdy, an American outlaw killed in 1911. Five years later, two carnival promoters posing as McCurdy’s brothers claimed the corpse and began exhibiting it in traveling sideshows across the United States. Over the following decades, the embalmed remains were passed from one promoter to another and displayed in a wax museum and an amusement park.

LeadStories also investigated this rumor, discovering that another version of the story existed, mentioning “late summer of 2025” instead of “June morning in 2025,” “Anne Sinclair” instead of “Clara Whitman” and the museum “on the outskirts of a small European town” instead of “Pine Bluff, Missouri.”

Sources

“AI Content & Text Authenticity Detection.” Copyleaks, https://copyleaks.com/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

AI Detector – Trusted AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT5 & Gemini. https://www.zerogpt.com/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

“AI Image Detector. Detect AI-Generated Media at Scale.” Sightengine, https://sightengine.com/detect-ai-generated-images. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Fact Check: Contradictions In “Pine Bluff Historical Museum Wax Figure” Story — No Real Man Mummified | Lead Stories. 10 Nov. 2025, https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/11/fact-check-pine-bluff-historical-museum-wax-figure.html.

“GPTZero Dashboard.” GPTZero Dashboard, https://app.gptzero.me/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Hive Moderation. https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Kar, Sujita Kumar, et al. “How Sensitive Are the Free AI-Detector Tools in Detecting AI-Generated Texts? A Comparison of Popular AI-Detector Tools.” Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, vol. 47, no. 3, May 2025, pp. 275–78. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1177/02537176241247934.

“Pine Bluff · Arkansas.” Pine Bluff · Arkansas, https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pine+Bluff,+AR,+USA/@34.210877,-92.0896256,28476m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x862d3c781ed41ad3:0x61dc9383eac72a98!8m2!3d34.224908!4d-92.0033977!16zL20vMHF0ejk?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTEwNC4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Pine Bluff Arkansas Police Department. https://www.pbpd.org/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Thomas, Heather. “Elmer McCurdy: Traveling Corpse | Headlines & Heroes.” Webpage. The Library of Congress, 24 July 2018, https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2018/07/elmer-mccurdy-traveling-corpse.