34 BLASTS FROM THE PAST
Vanished from the face of the Earth
A single newspaper article published in 1888 launched one of the most persistent myths in forteana: that there are instances in which persons literally vanished from the face of the Earth. A quarter of a century later, its author, American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce, mysteriously disappeared.
One day in July 1854 Orion Williamson went missing while crossing a field near Selma, Alabama. A similar fate met James Burne Worson, a shoemaker from Leamington, Warwickshire, running along a road: “He did not fall to the earth – he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever afterward discovered.” On the evening of 9 November at about 9pm, young Charles Ashmore, living near Quincy, Illinois, vanished. He left the farmhouse to get water from a well at some distance, but did not return. His worried family found a trail in the snow that stopped abruptly. For months his mother and other family members heard his voice near the well. “The intervals of silence grew longer and longer, the voice fainter and farther, and by midsummer was heard no more.” Bierce included these three cases in his article. We know that he is pulling our
“He did not fall to the earth –he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever afterward discovered.”
legs as none of the persons existed, but the anecdotes were convincingly written, and the novel vanishings struck a nerve. Bierce had started a meme.
As early as the following year, Ashmore’s disappearance was being presented as fact.2 In 1890, a newspaper from Quincy, Illinois, the town near which Ashmore had allegedly lived, asked its readers if anyone remembered the case.3 Between 1901 and 1904 several American and Canadian newspapers relocated Ashmore’s disappearance to England, somewhere between Bramber and Steyning, for reasons unknown.4
Bierce’s stories were so evocative that they became templates for other equally famous vanishing tales. The best known is the mysterious disappearance of Oliver Lerch. The story is modelled after that of Charles Ashmore, having all the familiar ingredients: a house, a distant well, night, snowfall and a trail that ends suddenly. Written by journalist and newspaper editor Irving Lewis, it was published in 1904 in a New York newspaper.5 Lewis’s hoax was so successful that it began to lead a life of its own in countless papers and magazines, even a few Austrian ones in the 1930s,6 and continues to appear in books and websites to this day. The Lerch story also spawned a variation: a letter to a 1967 South Bend newspaper claimed that the story had been around “a long time”: “as a small child my mother told me a similar story, the difference being that the victim was a little girl instead of Oliver Lerch. Who told my mother the story, it never occurred to question. As she told it, the little girl went for water at the well on a moonlit night. When her cries of distress were heard, her tracks were followed until they ended in the snow. The wooden water bucket was found there, but the little girl was never seen again; the supposition being that a giant bird had carried her away.”
David Lang, a farmer who disappeared at Gallatin, Tennessee, is another famous variation on Bierce’s Williamson vanishing story. Lang also disappeared while crossing a field, and his voice too was heard in the following months. The story was penned by mystery writer Stuart Palmer. It gained some credence because it was published in 1953 in Fate,8 but Palmer had sold the same story twice. The original source was a 1930 edition of Ghost Stories,9 a pulp magazine that offered a mix of ghostly fiction and ‘true’ supernatural experiences. Palmer had been its one-time editor (see FT18:67, 334:32). 10
The vanishings of Martin Spangler and Charlotte Ashton are further variations on Bierce’s stories. Spangler was an English schoolmaster from Lancashire, said to have mysteriously vanished in 1911, in plain sight of his wife and daughter, while crossing a field. His voice was somehow heard in the field, but a hole dug to a depth of over 15ft (4.6m) revealed nothing.11 Charlotte Ashton mysteriously disappeared from her farm near London on 17 October 1876. The elements of her story are recognisable. It is night; a bucket of water is needed from the well outside; 16-yearold Charlotte volunteers to fetch it. She doesn’t return. The search party finds her footprints in the snow, where they abruptly stop, but no trace of the girl. Around noon, her voice is suddenly heard: “Father! I can see you! Can’t you see me? The voice seemed to echo from the interior of the well, but in the next moment it was coming from the branch of a nearby tree. Seconds later it was coming from a cracked boulder. “Please help me!” Charlotte begged. “I can’t find my way back! The opening – it’s disappeared!” The next four days the voice moved about
NOTES
1 ‘Whither? Some Strange Instances of Mysterious Disappearance’ , San Francisco Examiner ,14 Oct 1888.
2 ‘Stories of the Missing. A Brief Chapter of Mysterious Disappearances’, Philadelphia Times ,17 Nov 1889; Wood County Reporter, Grand Rapids, WI, 5 Dec 1889; Portage Daily Democrat, Portage, WI, 9 Dec 1889.
3 ‘Who remembers the Case?’, The Quincy Whig, Quincy, IL, 28 May 1890. 4 ‘Vanished And Left No Trace’, Chicago Tribune, 10 Feb 1901. The article was published dozens of times between 1901 and 1904, the last being ‘Many Lost in London’, Tri-city Star, Davenport, IA, 19 Sept 1904. 5 Irving Lewis, ‘The Man Who Disappeared’, New York Morning Telegraph, 25 Dec 1904, also Theo Paijmans & Chris Aubeck, “Nightmare Before Christmas: The Strange Disappearance of Oliver Lerch”, FT335:42-47.
For more vanishings see FT18:6-7, 24:39, 29:55, 36:51-53, 44:40-44, 49:52-53, 194:40-44, 262:30.
6 ‘Ein Mensch Verschwindet’, Der Abend, 21 June 1932; ‘Menschen Verschwinden Spurlos’, Die Stunde, Vienna, 27 Sept 1932; ‘Ein Mensch Verschwindet’, Mocca, Vienna, Mar 1933, pp16-18; ‘Ein Mensch Verschwindet’, Die Muskete, 24 Mar 1938.
7 ‘What Got Oliver?’, The South Bend Tribune, South Bend, IN, 14 June 1967.
8 Stuart Palmer, ‘How Lost was my father?’, Fate, July 1953, pp75-85.
9 Stuart Palmer, ‘Between Two Worlds’, Ghost Stories, April 1930, pp2531.
10 Mentioned in Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, WI, 6 May 1934. 11 The Twilight Zone , May 1967, No. 21.
12 W Wilson Weir, ‘Strange Disappearances into the 4th Dimenson’, Occult, vol.1, no.2, 1970, p53 (also mentions Lang’s disappearance); ‘Door to Oblivion’, The Twilight Zone, Nov 1971, No. 40, p10.
13 ‘Mysterious Disappearance. Has the Devil Got Them, or Were They Swallowed Up by the Earth?’, Sandusky Register, Sandusky, OH, 25 Feb 1901.
14 ‘Whither? Some
Strange Instances of Mysterious Disappearance’ , San Francisco Examiner , San Francisco, 14 Oct 1888. 15 Mysterious Disappearances’ Boston Weekly Globe , 15 June 1881. Also published in a number of American newspapers and one Australian newspaper in June 1881.
16 ‘Persons that turn to Air’, St Louis Republic,
St Louis, MO. It was republished in newspapers in Wisconsin, Kansas and California between May and July 1890.
17 ‘Where Cars go To. Sometimes They seem to vanish From the Earth’, Boston Weekly Globe, Boston, 10 Mar 1891. The article was republished in newspapers in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Tennessee, Maryland and
New York between April and May 1891. See note 24.
18 Hazel I Diaz Pumara, Williamsport Sunday Grit National Edition, Williamsport, PA, 26 Jan 1969. Pumara doesn’t mention any source for the Brooklyn account. She also wrote for Occult and the Journal of Borderland Research.
19 ‘Zeb Todd. Passes off Stolen Stories on the Editor’, Chillicothe Gazette, Chillicothe, OH, 2 Mar 1901.
20 ‘Extraordinary Hallucination’, Times ,11 Dec 1873. See FT380:11. 21 ‘Cosmic Holes’, New York Times, 30 Nov 1884. The article was reprinted in 1886 in various American newspapers.