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Disappearance In A Parisian Hotel: Fact Or Fable?

Zeke Newbold

Carbon based biped.
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I think I first came across this story in a Reader's Digest Bumper book of Mysteries, or such like, and am fairly sure I have since also come across it in a similar coffee table compendium. In both cases the story was related as though it were factual.

Perhaps you know it too. It goes like this: some time between the wars a wealthy mother and her daughter return from a sojourn in the Far East and, en route back to England, take residence in a hotel in Paris for the night. The mother and daughter take seperate single rooms - with the mother's room being just below the daughter's one.

The daughter decides to have a nap and the plan is for them to meet up again later in the evening. Later, after a short rest, the daughter duly goes downstairs to her mother's room only to find it completely empty - and indeed looking as though it had never even been tenanted !Even the furniture seems different. On making increasingly frantic enquiries she is infomed, by the non-plussed hotel staff, that she had arrived alone and that they know nothing of any tenant answering to the description of her mother. They even show her the Guest book - where only the daughter's name has been signed there. The daughter returns to England distraughtand her mother is never seen again.

Then a speculative explanation is given for this strange turn of events. Perhaps the mother had returned from the East with a deadly infection and had fallen ill that evening - and died. The Parisian staff, upon discovering this, initiated a quick cover up operation (with the assistance of government figures
). After all, any talk of a deadly illness in Paris during the tourist season, which so many relied on for their livelihoods, just would not do. So the room was swiftly refurbished and all staff who had dealings with the two British women were coached in how to respond to the young woman's enquiries and what to say....

I assumed that this - now rather topical! - story had some basis in fact, albeit with some added folkloric element, until I came acros, by chance, the following paperback:

Alfred Hitchcock's 14 Suspense Stories To Play Russian Roulette By. (Dell Publishing Co, New York, 1964).

In this compilation there is a story by a writer called Ralph Strauss. It is called `The Room on the Fourth Floor`. This features the same story as above except with more detail given for versimiltude. (For example, the story is told to the author by a politician at the Houses of Parliament). In this case the illness that the mother succumbed to was none other than the Bubonic plague. Also we are told that some important exhibition was going on in Paris that year However the whole tale is packaged and introduced entirely as a work of fiction.

I can't seem to find out when the story was first published - but the author died in 1950. The story seems to be well regarded enough to be the first thing that comes up if you put `Ralph Strauss` into a search engine. The story even seems to have been turned into a TV episode as a part of a show called `The Unforseen` in 1958:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5293508/

So...what happened? Is the whole event purely a work of fiction that somehow ended up as being reported as fact in books devoted to the unexplained? Or was the story an already existing urban myth about the cunning French - that Mr Strauss picked up on and fleshed out into a story and which meanwhile somehow found its way into the annals of non-fiction. Or...!?
 
I vote "fiction", because ...

It's Ralph Straus (not 'Strauss'). More specifically - Ralph Sidney Albert Straus.

He was an English fiction writer who died in 1950. Among other things he wrote science fiction.

(1882-1950) UK author who also published as by Ralph Strode; his only sf novel, The Dust which is God: An Undimensional Adventure (1907 chap), confronts a frustrated scientist (see Mad Scientist) whose mentor from another Dimension serves as his Virgilian guide on a tour of various exemplary planets (see Cosmology; Utopia), where he learns that the goal of Evolution– which is to say "the Evolution of the superman" (see Superman) – is to realize the god within us. That this tale was published by Samurai Press seems relevant, as the Third World visited by the pair has evolved under the guidance of men who, placing "their own discipline, their own destiny, above that to which their reason was petty and mean, had become masters of the world." This eugenical elite (matutinal cold showers are dauntingly normal) is clearly akin to the Samurai elite that rules the world as depicted in H G Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905).

In 5000 A.D.: A Review and an Excursion, Read Before ye Sette of Odd Volumes at Oddenino's Imperial Restaurant on January. 24th, 1911 (coll 1911 chap), the review is of the sf genre and the excursion is a Time-Travel tale. Pengard Awake (1920) is a bibliofantasy. Straus is perhaps best remembered for a Club Story, "The Most Maddening Story in the World" (August 1920 The Sovereign Magazine), in which a quasi-Basilisk – a message on a calling card – causes those who read it to turn savagely upon its unwitting bearer; the tale is a rewrite of "The Mysterious Card" (February 1896 Black Cat) by Cleveland Moffett. Ralph L Finn's sf novel Time Marches Sideways (1950) is dedicated to Straus for having "commended the idea" and perhaps talked it through with Finn.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/straus_ralph

Hitchcock included his "Room on the Fourth Floor" story in anthologies in 1945, 1947 and again in 1964.

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Ralph_Straus

Here's the Project Gutenberg transcription of the story:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0609261h.html
 
According to the ISFDB the short story was first published sometime in 1930, and it was first anthologized in 1937.
Title: The Room on the Fourth Floor Title Record # 1332795
Author: Ralph Straus
Date: 1930-00-00
Type: SHORTFICTION [non-genre]
Length: short story
Language: English
Note: Contains no speculative elements.
Synopsis: Miss Farringham checks into at a Paris hotel with her mother. A few hours later, her mother is missing and everyone, from the hotel manager to the cab driver who brought them there, is telling her that she arrived unaccompanied.

SOURCE: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1332795
 
I believe it was an urban myth that was made into the Jean Simmons/Dirk Bogarde variant film So Long at the Fair. David Tomlinson plays her brother and he disappears, so Dirk helps her find out what happened. The film seems to have cemented it as a piece of possible history, because audiences thought it was based on a true story, and that impression has lasted to this day.
 
I believe it was an urban myth that was made into the Jean Simmons/Dirk Bogarde variant film So Long at the Fair. David Tomlinson plays her brother and he disappears, so Dirk helps her find out what happened. The film seems to have cemented it as a piece of possible history, because audiences thought it was based on a true story, and that impression has lasted to this day.
came here to say the same.
 
As a footnote, the notion of the tourist trade playing down a plague-risk repeats itself in Dirk's Venetian romance.

Was Ibsen the first at this theme in Enemy of the People? Probably not.

Now that we are in a real plague scenario, where are all the Adonises? Where is my mascara? Above all, where are my contaminated strawberries? Are we to be robbed, even of theatre, in the end? :doh:
 
Oh, I'm having the proper shivers, now. I read your post this morning, Zeke, and enjoyed it- I hadn't been aware of this story before. But now I'm sitting and preparing for my private student's lesson this afternoon. I knew the focus was going to be on how to express degrees of certainty about past events. You'll never guess what story is used to contextualise the target language... I'm running late, but I'll upload the relevant page later on. See attached:
NCE - Upper Intermediate - Student Book p100.jpg

It's page 100 of New Cutting Edge Upper-Intermediate Student Book, if anyone has a copy lying around and they wish to verify the coincidence.
 
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I vote "fiction", because ...

It's Ralph Straus (not 'Strauss'). More specifically - Ralph Sidney Albert Straus.

He was an English fiction writer who died in 1950. Among other things he wrote science fiction.

Well thanks for the sourcing - but my question wasn't whether Ralph Staus's tale was fictional or not (it clearly is and is overtly packaged as such) but how and why its senario came to be taken as fact by some publications. And did this `fact` - or at least popular myth - precede his story?

Then I looked up the film So Long At The Fair (which was a new one on me) and a quick glance at Wikipedia (if you can trust it)seems to answer my question in spades.It transpires that the story is indeed a Nineteenth Century (!) Urban Myth which has `inspired` `several` tribute stories - Straus's and this film just being two of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long_at_the_Fair

So it look likes what we have here is a British equivalent of Australia's Pic Nic at Hanging Rock or the USA's The Amythiville Horror - a national bit of folklore widely believed by many to be true or at least `factional`.

You can clearly see the Urban Myth elements in this story: there's the Cautionary Tale element (`If you go galivanting off to the Far East, you may well return with a fatal disease`), the hint of British Francophobia (`Trust those sly and artful French to hatch such a sheme!`) and with -perhaps - a side-dish of shaudenfraude (`Ha! Those wealthy jetsetter sure got their come-uppance, didn't they!`)

It is interesting to nore that the sad case of Elisa Lam also encompasses an updated version of this myth: there had been an outbreak of T.B earler in th area where her death occured. The testing kits used were called Lam Elisa. So, in this Conspiracy Theory, Miss Lamb was `disappeared` by hotel staff and/or local officials owing to the uncomfortable similarity of her name to something assocated with a disease afoot in the environs...or something.
 
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Oh, I'm having the proper shivers, now. I read your post this morning, Zeke, and enjoyed it- I hadn't been aware of this story before. But now I'm sitting and preparing for my private student's lesson this afternoon. I knew the focus was going to be on how to express degrees of certainty about past events. You'll never guess what story is used to contextualise the target language... I'm running late, but I'll upload the relevant page later on. See attached:
View attachment 30049

It's page 100 of New Cutting Edge Upper-Intermediate Student Book, if anyone has a copy lying around and they wish to verify the coincidence.
Lovely coincidence!

Quite a lot of ESL textbooks, and teachers, use Unexplained Mysteries as a springboard for the teaching of language:

https://ihworld.com/ih-journal/issues/issue-38/unexplained-mysteries-as-a-teaching-aid/
 
Hitchcock himself alluded to the story representing an example of a widely known meme or plot device when he wrote:
Straus's "The Room on the Fourth Floor" has been included here as an excellent treatment of another theme of near-folklore familiarity.

The Quality of Suspense (originally the introduction to Suspense Stories Collected by Alfred Hitchcock. Dell, 1945 / 1947). Reprinted as an essay in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Volume 2, p. 38.

It's also worth pointing out that the earliest known version of the story claims the room as well as the lady was "erased" and denied to have ever existed.

Snopes noted the disappearing room meme as a known UL a long time ago, but couldn't trace the source farther back than a newspaper story Alexander Woollcott cited but no one could find (yet another disappearance! ...).

The Wikipedia entry for the movie cites the newspaper stories from which the UL was believed to have originated, and it provides a link to the source that finally located them:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/14/vanishing-lady/

This discovery occurred in 2010 - three years after the Snopes review was last updated.
 
Well thanks for the sourcing - but my question wasn't whether Ralph Staus's tale was fictional or not (it clearly is and is overtly packaged as such) but how and why its senario came to be taken as fact by some publications. And did this `fact` - or at least popular myth - precede his story? ...

It was necessary to trace backward to see whether the story could be determined to have originated as fact versus fiction. In this case it seems most likely to have been fiction.

The second part of your question is - given the apparently fictional origin - how and when the story mutated into something believed to have actually occurred. This requires tracing things forward in time from the origin, and it's a much trickier exercise because the connections are by definition less likely to have been documented.

Fortunately, in this / your case the final steps in that path of connections leading to your earlier encounter with the story can be specified.

You mentioned having first read the story in a Reader's Digest Association (RDA) book of mysteries.

SIDE NOTE: RDA has anthologized materials concerning 'mysteries' in two distinct senses - mysterious occurrences in the 'real world' (i.e., paranormal stuff) and fictional mystery stories.

Assuming it was the former rather than the latter, I can specify at least two stepping stones in the path of mutation from fiction / UL to alleged historical factuality as they pertain to your own encounter with the tale.

The text of the fifth edition of RDA's Mysteries of the Unexplained (1985) is available online at:

https://archive.org/stream/MysteriesOfTheUnexplained/Mysteries of the Unexplained_djvu.txt

It contains the following ...

A distraught young Englishwoman came to the British Embassy in Paris one day in May 1889. She and her mother, on their way home from India, had checked into a hotel not long before, taking two single rooms, and the mother had fallen ill. The hotel doctor had examined her and sent the daughter out for medicine. When she returned, the hotel staff denied ever having seen her mother! Only the younger womans name was in the hotel register. When she insisted on seeing the room her mother had occupied, she found it was not the one she remembered. Even the hotel doctor denied having met her before.

Unable to make her story believed, the young woman ended up in an asylum in England. Some have speculated that the mother had contracted plague in the Far East and that the hotel staff had conspired to suppress the news-even going so far as to redecorate the mother s hotel room and to dispose of her corpse— rather than lose business. But the only evidence to support the case of the vanished matron was the young womans own testimony: a sign of madness, possibly, but if true, surely enough to drive her mad.
(Readers Digest, eds., Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, p. 361)
(labeled as p. 122 in this text transcription)

The cited source would therefore be:

The Reader's Digest Book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories that are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, Incredible ... But True
(1975; sometimes listed as 1976, with multiple printings thereafter)

... or possibly the later (... version of the 1975 book?):

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, and Often Incredible (1981).

It's unclear whether the RDA crew were the first to relate this story as if it were a true event, but they certainly seem to have been the last ones in the bucket brigade line leading to you.
 
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You mentioned having first read the story in a Reader's Digest Association (RDA) book of mysteries.

The cited source would therefore be:

The Reader's Digest Book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories that are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, Incredible ... But True
(1975; sometimes listed as 1976, with multiple printings thereafter)

... or possibly the later (... version of the 1975 book?):

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, and Often Incredible (1981).

I have the 1976 edition described as "first revise". The story is indeed on page 361. It's titled "Long at the Fair" which gives a strong hint as to where Reader's Digest got the idea from.

oxo
 
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