"You still think it's a hoax?" asked Crew. "What do you want me to do, slice it open like a pumpkin for you?"

Actually, yes, but since Crew says the body was embalmed in mercury, arsenic or a combination (something mortuaries did long ago, one medical examiner told me), the pumpkin slice would likely prove lethal. I contacted Christine Quigley, author of several tomes on death, including "Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century" (McFarland & Company). What she had to say might make old Chatouilleu sit up and throw confetti.

"More likely than not it's a preserved body," says Quigley. "Because it would be harder to fake something like that than it would be for it to be real. What's most unlikely are the stories in these kinds of cases. Now, I've never heard of this particular mummy, but generally I've found that the stories tend to be fabrications because they're in the carnival circuit. Sometimes carnies bought these mummies from the local funeral home director, who kept them for years hoping the family will claim them. It doesn't happen anymore, but they used to over-embalm these bodies. That's why they've lasted so long."

Quigley says that often the bodies became local attractions which people would visit on Halloween, for instance. A carnival operator would come through town, hear of the body and make the funeral director an offer. The corpse then became part of the traveling road show, with an outlandish legend concocted to draw in a paying crowd.

"Sometimes the mortuaries held on to them. There's one case of a funeral home out in the Midwest which still has the body of this guy George Stein, who died in the '20s. In fact, they moved recently and took the body with them instead of interring him," says Quigley.

Indeed, Quigley explains that though the retail sale of corpses no longer occurs legally, there's nothing necessarily illegal about having one in your possession. Though funeral homes have guidelines to follow, the law regarding what you can and can't do with human remains can be a gray area, according to the author.

Quigley cited several cases where human remains were used as sideshow attractions. In 1976, during the filming of an episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" in Long Beach, Calif., the TV crew discovered the mummified body of Old West outlaw Elmer McCurdy in a decrepit fun house where he had been used as part of an attraction. There's also Marie O'Day, whose body was supposedly preserved naturally in Utah's Great Salt Lake. A murderess named Hazel Farris is on display in Alabama, and somewhere out there is a corpse with one gold tooth -- "Gold Tooth Jimmy." For Quigley, Crew's dead clown was one in a long line that includes Mao Tse-tung and Lenin.

But the clincher was my conversation with veteran sideshow operator Jeff Murray, who along with his wife, Sue, has operated sideshows for the past 20 years throughout the United States. His company, Harmur Shows, is based in Ahwahnee, Calif. -- also in the Yosemite area, not too far from the circus family that owns Chatouilleu's body. Murray claims that while on the sideshow circuit he ran across a member of this family who tried to interest him in an odd exhibit.

"They're basically a gypsy family," Murray says of the clown's caretakers. "I don't even know their last name, but they've been around for years. I used to see their son Danny down at Leg Lake when I opened for the spring. His wife was a midcamp, which is the carny term for a palm reader. She always had a booth there. I found out they live not too far from here. He mentioned this stiff they had, but I wasn't that interested. See, we used to have a show of two-headed babies. Real ones, preserved in formaldehyde. But a lot of showmen started to get busted for transporting them across state lines, so we sold them all to collectors. So when he started talking about this dead body, I had no interest at all because I'd just gotten rid of the ones we had."

Murray's never seen the body, but he'd encountered "stiffs" during his travels and had no reason to doubt him. Back in the day, he saw Gold Tooth Jimmy, shrunken heads and pickled babies. He knows the whole history of Marie O'Day and can relate in minute detail other cases of sideshow mummies.

"I thought it was a little strange that they had a dead body, but they said it was a family member, and of course you never know with gypsies. It could be one of those situations where they ended up with this body somehow and made up a story to go along with it," Murray says.

Taking into account what Murray and Quigley have to say, as well as the condition of the body itself -- the way it's dressed and the documents Crew has for it -- I lean toward accepting the artifact as authentic clown carrion, even if part of the clown tale turns out to be myth. Fortunately, Crew says, forensic science may be the final judge. He's been approached by producers for National Geographic TV's popular "Mummy Road Show," who want to X-ray the corpse. Right now it's up to the family to decide. As for Crew, he's already on to his next acquisition.

"It's the body of Alligator Boy, and in mint condition," he squeals. "Now don't tell me you want a death certificate for this, too!"

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