Yesterday we witnessed ‘The Thing?’ just ouside of Pheonix, we can’t tell you exactly what it is, because that would make it a something rather than a thing. We met up with a guy called Jerry Bone who runs the place wearing a white cowboy hat (which is rock solid and apparently how “decent sixty dollar” hats are supposed to be, unlike my $2.99 floppy straw version I got from a gas station) and loves to entertain people with all the curiosities and mysteries that lay behnd the ominous door in the back of the gift shop. Jerry took us on a tour past giant dead spiders, old tractors, Hitler’s car, model Indians and then finally to the chest that contains the final resting place of… dun dun DUN… The Thing? (the question mark is very important).
When I was a kid, we lived in Yuma and what is now known as ‘the thing’ was in the Yuma Terriortial Prison Museum. It was billed as a real mummy. Yuma was a small town and not a was going on, so every year one of our field trips was to the museum to see the ‘mummy’. In the 90’s I went back to Yuma for the first time in 30 years. Found out from the museum people that the ‘mummy’ was found out to be made of plaster, and is now being billed as ‘the thing.’