In ten unbelievable tales we can find out who these people were, before they vanished- without a trace.
Do kids still go through an Unsolved Mysteries of the Unknown phase? Even if it no longer directly involves Unsolved Mysteries or Mysteries of the Unknown?
My childhood local library conveniently gathered everything paranormal, psychic powers, UFO, Big Foot, mysterious disappearances and so on under the “Occult” section, which during the peak Satanic-Panic years was basically an invitation to middle schoolers to scare themselves silly.
I picked up this book at a small charity thrift store in upstate New York, which seems to get a steady supply of some of the most obscure YA and Middle Reader series of the 1980s and 90s. One of the names in the list of “cases” profiled caught my eye and I thought I might have found a relic of the peak of the “you-are-totally-going-to-get-kidnapped-and-murdered” era, which it is not quite.
Still, that non-descript cover is strangely menacing, right? I think I figured out it is because it reminds me of the cover of Alive.
Some Highlights: The book actually retells the stories of 10 historical unsolved missing persons cases, ranging from the most famous to the too-obscure-for-Wikipedia, dating from 1854 to 1982.
Larsen opens the book with a bang, relating the case of Orion Williamson, a farmer in pre-Civil War Alabama who vanished in the middle of a field in front of four witnesses. In the weeks following his disappearance, it is reported that a circle of dead grass has appeared in the spot where he vanished, and even stranger, his wife reports that she can hear his voice calling for help within the circle.
Scientists and reporters converge on the farm, including writer Ambrose Bierce, who concludes that Williamson walked into “a void spot of universal ether” and was sucked into an alternate dimension.
How do people “vanish into thin air”? No one knows. Except perhaps Orion Williamson…
So: unsettling. Also, a good set up for the next story, which is about the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. The Bierce chapter is kind of all over the place, as it details his interest in mysterious happenings (such as Williamson’s disappearance) and includes a lengthy detour on Bierce’s reporting on the case of Charles May, who was murdered by his son… but afterward appeared at the general store in a town eight miles away, according to a number of eyewitnesses.
Spooky!
Way spookier than the rest of Bierce’s story, in which he gets increasingly older and crankier and in 1913, at the age of 71 sets off on an ill-advised journey to fight for Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution…
What really happed to Ambrose Bierce to put an end to his famous journey of death? No one knows. And that’s exactly the Bierce would have wanted it.
In 1910 New York socialite and aspiring writer Dorothy Arnold was spotted out shopping on 5th Avenue by several of her friends and acquaintances, but when she doesn’t return to the family home that night, her parents try to investigate her disappearance without attracting any publicity. Eventually it comes out that Dorothy had been having an affair with a ne’er-do-well, and her family suspects that she either ran away with him or died after having a “secret operation” (which later in the chapter is specified to be an illegal abortion). Playboy George Griscom initially flees to Italy but returns to plead for Dorothy to come home.
It is noted that Agatha Christie (who would later go mysteriously missing for awhile herself) had a keen interest in Dorothy’s story. And my favorite detail is that before she disappeared, she stopped at a local bookstore to pick up some reading material, and then at a candy shop:
There she selected a box of chocolates, charged them to her family’s account, and took it with her.
The NYPD continues to receive tips for the next decade, but:
Dorothy Arnold was lost… and never found.
The chapter on Amelia Earhart covers familiar territory, detailing the pilot’s disappearance in the south Pacific in 1937. It takes the novel approach of telling the story, from the point of view of the Coast Guard captain and radio operator assigned to track her progress in her highly publicized circumnavigation of the globe.
It also touches on a few theories surrounding what happened to her after she disappeared, including an account from “a friend of Amelia’s who was also a pilot and had some psychic ability” that she had been working as a spy for the U.S. government in the years leading up to World War II. Other theories suggest that (the married) Earhart faked her disappearance to live out her life in a tropical paradise with her navigator, Fred Noonan; and reports that she was living disguised as nun in New Jersey.
Officially, no one knows.
Some of the cases Larsen profiles are hyper-local, including the disappearance of University of Colorado professor Thomas Rhia (was he a CIA agent???) and Des Moines housewife and gun enthusiast Alice Van Alstine (murdered by her own militia???)
There is a surprisingly brief chapter on Michael Rockefeller, son of the then-governor of New York State, who was possibly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.
The disappearances of Dr. Charles Brancati and Judge Joseph Force Crater seem to be tied to the New York mafia and Tammany Hall shenanigans.
The final story told in this volume is the one that initially caught my eye. It is also the most contemporary, and one of the few that has remained in flux since the publication of the book: the mysterious kidnapping of West Des Moines, Iowa, paperboy Johnny Gosch.
Like Adam Walsh and Etan Paz, Johnny Gosch’s disappearance was one of the high-profile stranger-danger abductions of the 1980s: he was one of the first missing children to have his photo printed on milk cartons.
12-year-old Gosch disappeared as he was preparing for his early morning paper route, just minutes after picking up his papers and chatting with a number of other local paperboys. Witnesses reported seeing Johnny talk with men in two different cars who were asking for directions, and then disappearing during a brief window of time when there were no other witnesses around.
Larsen details some of the tips that had come in during the three years between Gosch’s disappearance and the publication of the book, before concluding
Is Johnny Gosch still alive? Will he come home?
The Gosch case has stayed in the public eye due to the advocacy of his mother and the strange turns that the case has taken:
Two other the paperboys in the Des Moines area disappeared under similar circumstances in 1984 and 1986.
This was followed by the blackmail of the Gosch family by the member of a “Biker Club” who claimed to have information about their son being trafficked to Mexico; the blackmailer was apprehended by the FBI at the Canadian border and charged with wire fraud.
And most strangely of all, Johnny’s mother claims that she has been in contact with her son, including a visit in the middle of the night in 1997, in which he revealed he was being held prisoner by a cult. Johnny’s disappearance and his mother’s subsequent activities were profiled in the 2014 documentary Who Took Johnny?
Sign It Was Written in 1985 Department:
Every year thousands of people disappear- old people, young people, children. They leave home in the same way they always have- go to school or to work or to run an errand- but sometimes something strange happens. Sometimes- they don’t come back.
Sequel Department: Larsen followed up with Lost… and Never Found II, which the thrift store also conveniently had in stock. Watch this space!
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: 1939-1989 