Grave of famous horse still attracts visitors 50 years later
He has been off the air for 50 years, and deceased since 1970, but Mister Ed still has a faithful following.
TV’s most famous talking horse didn’t do autographs, but plenty of memorabilia immortalizes Mister Ed and the show that ran during 1961-66. Plenty of fans make the trip to Tahlequah to see a big memento: Mister Ed’s grave marker.
“People call the chamber all the time, asking about the grave site,” said Laura Doss, executive director for the Tahlequah Area Chamber of Commerce.
There is disagreement about whether the actual Mister Ed, whose real name was Bamboo Harvester, is at eternal rest beneath the marker. But fans and locals seem happy the TV star has a memorial, regardless of whether it stands over the wrong palomino.
“There is a lot of oral tradition about it,” local historian Beth Herrington said. “It seems that the horse has no heritage here, but the owner thought this would be a good place for the grave site.”
Kin Thompson, an assistant professor of hospitality and tourism management at Northeastern State University, remembers finding an alternate account about whether Mister Ed was actually in the grave.
“It was when we first had the internet and could really start looking things up,” Thompson said. “I had my students doing a tourism promotion and development assignment, and on the Nickelodeon site, they found a story claiming that Mr. Ed actually died in California, and that he is still there. It also said the horse buried in Tahlequah was actually Pumpkin, who was Mr. Ed’s stunt double, and that Pumpkin and his trainer came to Tahlequah. I was so disappointed at the time. We’d had T-shirts printed reading ‘Dead Ed’s Tahlequah.’”