A NOTE ON DISAPPEARING

“... but whosoever of them ate the lotus’ honeyed fruit wished to bring tidings back no more and never to leave the place; there with the lotus eaters they desired to stay, to feed on lotus and forget the homeward way.”The Odyssey, Book IX.

The Odyssey, Book IX.

The Lotophagi are gone from the Libyan strand and the Sirens from their Campanian isle, but still the sons of men go forth to strangeness and forgetfulness. What fruit or song it is that calls them out and binds them in absence, we must try to read from their history, their psyche and the chemistry of their wandering souls. Some urgent whip of that divine vice, our curiosity, drives us to the exploration and will not relent until we discover whether they have been devoured by the Polyphemus of crime, bestialized by some profane Circe or simply made drunk with the Lethe of change and remoteness.

The unreturning adventurer—the man whose destiny is hid in doubt—has tormented the imagination in every century. In life the lost comrade wakes a more poignant curiosity than the returning Odysseus. What of the true Smerdis and the false? Was it the great Aeneas the Etruscans slew, and where does Merlin lie? Did Attila die of apoplexy in the arms of Hilda or shall we believe the elder Eddas, the Nibelungen and Volsunga sagas or the Teutonic legends of later times? Was it the genuine Dmitri who was murdered in the Kremlin, and what of the two other pseudo-Dmitris? What became of Dandhu Panth after he fled into Nepal in 1859; did he perish soon or is there truth in the tale of the finger burial of Nana Sahib? And was it Quantrill who died at Louisville of his wounds after Captain Terrill’s siege of the barn at Bloomfield?

These enigmas are more lasting and irritating than any other minor facet of history, and the patient searching of scholars seems but to add to the popular confusion and to the charm of our doubts. Even where research seems to arrive at positive results, the general will cling to their puzzlement, for a romantic mystery is always sweeter than a sordid fact.

Even in the modern world, so closely organized, so completely explored and so prodigiously policed, those enigmas continue to pile up. In our day it is an axiom that nothing is harder to lose sight of than a ship at sea or a man on land. This sounds, at first blush, like a paradox. It ought, surely, to be easy to scrape the name from a vessel, change her gear and peculiarities a little, paint a fresh word upon her side and so conceal her. Simpler still, why can’t any man, not too conspicuous or individual, step out of the crowd, alter the cut of his hair and clothes, assume another name and immediately be draped in a fresh ego? Does it not take a huge annual expenditure for ship registry and all sorts of marine policing on the one side, and an even greater sum for the land police, on the other, to prevent such things? Truly enough, and it is the police power of the earth, backed by certain plain or obscure motivations in mankind, that makes it next to impossible for a ship or a man to drop out of sight, as the phrase goes.

Leaving aside the ships, which are a small part of our argument, we may note that, for all the difficulty, thousands of human beings try to vanish every year. Plainly there are many circumstances, many crises in the lives of men, women and children, that make a complete detachment and forgottenness desirable, nay, imperative. Yet, of the twenty-five thousand persons reported missing to the police of the City of New York every year, to take an instance, only a few remain permanently undiscovered. Most are mere stayouts or young runaways and are returned to their inquiring relatives within a few hours or days. Others are deserting spouses—husbands who have wearied or wives who have found new loves. These sometimes lead long chases before they are reported and identified, at which time the police have no more to do with the matter unless there is action from the domestic courts. A number are suicides, whose bodies soon or late rise from the city-engirdling waters and are, almost without fail, identified by the marvelously efficient police detectives in charge of the morgues. Some are pretended amnesics and a few are true ones. But in the end the police of the cities clear up nearly all these cases. For instance, in the year 1924, the New York police department had on its books only one male and one female uncleared case originating in the year of 1918, or six years earlier. At the same time there were four male and six female cases dating from 1919, three male and one female cases that had originated in 1920, no male and three female cases that originated in 1921, three male and two female cases of the date of 1922, but in 1924 there were still pending, as the police say, twenty-eight male and sixty-three female cases of the year preceding, 1923.

The point here is that only one man and one woman could stay hid from the searching eyes of the law as long as six years. Evidently the business of vanishing presents some formidable difficulties.

However, it is not even these solitary absentees that engage our interest most sharply, for usually we know why they went and have some indication that they are alive and merely skulking. There is another and far rarer genus of the family of the missing, however, that does strike hard upon that explosive chemical of human curiosity. Here we have those few and detached inexplicable affairs that neither astuteness nor diligence, time nor patience, frenzy nor faith can penetrate—the true romances, the genuine mysteries of vanishment. A man goes forth to his habitual labor and between hours he is gone from all that knew him, all that was familiar. There is a gap in the environment and many lives are affected, nearly or remotely. No one knows the why or where or how of his going and all the power of men and materials is hopelessly expended. Years pass and these tales of puzzlement become legends. They are then things to brood about before the fire, when the moving mind is touched by the inner mysteriousness of life.

Again, there are those strange instances of the theft of human beings by human beings—kidnappings, in the usual term. Nothing except a natural cataclysm is so excitant of mass terror as the first suggestion that there are child-stealers abroad. What fevers and rages of the public temper may result from such crimes will be seen from some of what follows. The most celebrated instance is, of course, the affair of Charlie Ross of Philadelphia, which carries us back more than half a century. We have here the classic American kidnapping case, already a tradition, rich in all the elements that make the perfect abduction tale.

This terror of the thief of children is, to be sure, as old as the races. From the Phoenicians who stole babes to feed to their bloody divinities, the Minoans who raped the youth of Greece for their bull-fights, and the priests of many lands who demanded maidens to satisfy the wrath of their gods and the lust of their flesh, down to the European Gypsies, who sometimes steal, or are said to steal, children for bridal gifts, we have this dread vein running through the body of our history. We need, accordingly, no going back into our phylogeny or biology, to understand the frenzy of the mother when the shadow of the kidnapper passes over her cote. The women of Normandy are said still to whisper with trembling the name of Gilles de Rais (or Retz), that bold marshal of France and comrade in arms of Jeanne d’Arc, who seems to have been a stealer and killer of children, instead of the original of Perrault’s Bluebeard, as many believe. What terror other kidnappers have sent into the hearts of parents will be seen from the text.

This volume is not intended as a handbook of mysteries, for such works exist in numbers. The author has limited himself to problems of disappearance and cases of kidnapping, thereby excluding many twice-told wonders—the wandering Ahasuerus, the Flying Dutchman, Prince Charles Edward, the Dauphin, Gosselin’sFemme sans nom, the changeling of Louis Philippe and the Crown Prince Rudolf and the affair at Mayerling.

Neither have I attempted any technical exploration of the conduct and motives of vanishers and kidnappers. It must be sufficiently clear that a man unpursued who flees and hides is out of tune with his environment, ill adjusted, nervously unwell. Nor need we accent again the fact that all criminals, kidnappers included, are creatures of disease or defect.

A general bibliography will be found at the end of the book. The information to be had from these volumes has been liberally supported and amplified from the files of contemporary newspapers in the countries and cities where these dramas of doubt were played. The records of legal trials have been consulted in instances where trials took place and I have talked with the accessible officials having knowledge of the cases or persons here treated.

E. H. S.

New York, August, 1927.

Back to Index Next