People Who Just Disappear (Go Missing)

[escargot]

(By reference to an old thread which itself disappeared ... )

This happened, I'm told, to someone in my street, in the late 60s. She was a young mother of two little children and one morning her elder child, who was 3, was run over in the street, having wandered out through an open front door. Neighbours went to find little Kay's Ma but only the baby was there. Breakfast dishes were in the sink and the woman's coat and handbag were there, washing machine was on, but no Ma. She was never seen or heard of again. Her husband eventually remarried so she must have been declared dead at some point.

Both husband and second wife are now dead but I sometimes work with the second wife's daughter and will ask her some details when I think the time is right.

Haven't time to track down if I ever did reply to myself, but the mystery was indeed resolved; or was it?

The second wife's daughter was from a previous relationship, older than the two apparently abandoned children. I asked her about it and she said the first wife ran off with a soldier.

At the time I accepted that, but now I wonder if that's what SHE was told as a child. So I dunno.
I used to be quite pally with the woman who was the injured 3 year-old girl so I'll ask her if I see her again.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Richard Morris vanishes after going out for a run. Not seen since the 6th of May

https://news.sky.com/story/richard-...-as-foreign-office-extremely-worried-11986613

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-52635741

 

[Comfortably Numb]

I recently came across this article, which I thought might be of interest.

Perhaps can be relocated to another thread, if more appropriate there?

10 People Who May Have Disappeared Into Another Dimension

Katherine Ripley
Updated April 7, 2020

We like to think that if we're always prepared, travel in groups, and walk with both eyes open, we'll be safe from any potential dangers. But then Stranger Things went and made us all terrified of the possibility that we could disappear into the Upside-Down at any moment. No amount of preparation can keep you safe from being snatched into another dimension. So, to make you even more terrified, here's a list of real-life people who disappeared into another dimension - or at least, it seems very likely that they did.

[...]

https://m.ranker.com/list/people-who-disappeared-to-another-dimension/katherine-ripley

 

[littlebrowndragon]

Personally, I think it would be wonderful to have the freedom to just "vanish", to just disappear and go on the wander, rather like Lara disappears into the Russian hinterland at the end of the film Dr Zhivago. Unfortunately, the authorities do tend to notice these things. So much for living in a free country.

 

[GNC]

If you disappear, people are going to wonder what happened to you, it's only natural and not confined to the authorities. They could be your family and friends, or folks reading about your disappearance on the internet. At best it's a human concern for your wellbeing, it's an impulse most of us have, authority figures too, to worry if things go suddenly wrong for you.

 

[Yithian]

Richard Morris vanishes after going out for a run. Not seen since the 6th of May

https://news.sky.com/story/richard-...-as-foreign-office-extremely-worried-11986613

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-52635741

There's nothing obvious in his history that would make him a political target for foreign agents, which leaves his private life or an acute health incident.

Anonymous people online are discussing forms of sudden onset dementia and how it has been the cause of disappearances in the past.

I'm afraid that this doesn't look promising, regardless of what the explanation turns out to be.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

There's nothing obvious in his history that would make him a political target for foreign agents, which leaves his private life or an acute health incident.

Anonymous people online are discussing forms of sudden onset dementia and how it has been the cause of disappearances in the past.

I'm afraid that this doesn't look promising, regardless of what the explanation turns out to be.

That's very sudden onset though.

"I'm just going out for a run darling, I'll be back in 20 minutes" five minutes later "Where the hell am I? That cave/clifftop/volcano looks promising, I'll just wander over there"

He'd just been given a new post so I'm guessing he was still compos. Rapid dementias usually happen over weeks not within a day, so I'd think it unlikely.

I believe many of these cases, Anthony Parsons being one, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-45663082 are by hit and run drivers who then cover up the death and remove the body.

 

[Frideswide]

I believe many of these cases, Anthony Parsons being one, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-45663082 are by hit and run drivers who then cover up the death.

I remember. That was my thought too.

 

[Tempest63]

I remember. That was my thought too.

Good god man, this is a Fortean site, the man has obviously been taken by extra terrestrials and fed to their pet cryptids.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Good god flirty woman, this is a Fortean site, the man has obviously been taken by extra terrestrials and fed to their pet cryptids.

Just corrected that for you.

 

[Yithian]

I think we need a comma unless Tempest meant not only to address Frideswide as the wrong sex, but also to elevate her to divinity.

"Good God, Man,..."

"Good God, flighty woman,..."

 

[EnolaGaia]

Good god man, this is a Fortean site, the man has obviously been taken by extra terrestrials and fed to their pet cryptids.

Good god flirty woman ...

I think we need a comma unless Tempest meant not only to address Frideswide as the wrong sex, but also to elevate her to divinity.
"Good God, Man,..."
"Good God, flighty woman,..."

Depends on how you parse it ... Maybe Fridesy does flirt with gods ...


P.S.: Yith, where did you get the "flighty" bit?

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Depends on how you parse it ... Maybe Fridesy does flirt with gods ...


P.S.: Yith, where did you get the "flighty" bit?

This would not surprise me.

 

[Kondoru]

A face like that isnt going to just dissapear in a hurry.

(But I am with littlebrowndragon; I think we should have the right to vanish if we feel like it).

 

[Naughty_Felid]

A face like that isnt going to just dissapear in a hurry.

(But I am with littlebrowndragon; I think we should have the right to vanish if we feel like it).

It depends on what we've done. Lord Lucan springs to mind...

edit: not the excellent poster btw...or is it???

 

[littlebrowndragon]

If you disappear, people are going to wonder what happened to you, it's only natural and not confined to the authorities. They could be your family and friends, or folks reading about your disappearance on the internet. At best it's a human concern for your wellbeing, it's an impulse most of us have, authority figures too, to worry if things go suddenly wrong for you.

Hmmm.... so my freedom should be curtailed just because people might worry about me? Just because others might wonder what happened to me? That sure is a big price for someone to pay so that others can have peace of mind. What about my peace of mind? What about my need for freedom? Of course, these expressions of concern about others disrespects them , disrespects their freedom of choice. Perhaps those who claim to be concerned should examine the effect of their concern on me instead of selfishly demanding that I am denied my freedom.

To give an example, after a stay in hospital a while back, I was out on my bike, rather shakily, at the front of my house. My neighbour shouted across to me to be careful in case I fell off my bike. Unfortunately, her words had a very deleterious effect on me. What happened was that her words planted the idea in my head that I might indeed fall off my bike. I therefore totally lost confidence such that I had to get off my bike and go indoors. Ironically, her words were more likely to cause me to fall off my bike than if she had said and done nothing. So, her expressions of concern, while well intentioned, were actually damaging to me.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Hmmm.... so my freedom should be curtailed just because people might worry about me? Just because others might wonder what happened to me? That sure is a big price for someone to pay so that others can have peace of mind. What about my peace of mind? What about my need for freedom? Of course, these expressions of concern about others disrespects them , disrespects their freedom of choice. Perhaps those who claim to be concerned should examine the effect of their concern on me instead of selfishly demanding that I am denied my freedom.

To give an example, after a stay in hospital a while back, I was out on my bike, rather shakily, at the front of my house. My neighbour shouted across to me to be careful in case I fell off my bike. Unfortunately, her words had a very deleterious effect on me. What happened was that her words planted the idea in my head that I might indeed fall off my bike. I therefore totally lost confidence such that I had to get off my bike and go indoors. Ironically, her words were more likely to cause me to fall off my bike than if she had said and done nothing. So, her expressions of concern, while well intentioned, were actually damaging to me.

The art of cycling is to wave at people who yell out to you. It doesn't mean you have to listen to them.

 

[hunck]

Tony Parsons, the 63 year old man who set out to cycle from Fort William to his home in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, for charity, on 29th Sept 2017 has never been found.

He set out to cycle the 170km after 4pm with darkness not far off, which doesn't seem a good plan, & by all accounts wasn't particularly fit.

You'd think that he or his bike would've been found in the past 2½ years by walkers/hikers/police but no..

There's a long thread on websleuths which has this theory as the last post:

After 2 years of going through every likely scenario and visiting the area i have now come to a conclusion. I am very confident of this and got help from some people.

Tony left the bridge of orchy hotel and he did indeed set of on the main road heading towards Tyndrum. He was seen by a lorry driver and just after this he stopped at the bridge that spanned the Allt Kinglass river. He stopped to relieve himself and walked down the steps to the river. There he had an accident and slipped on the wet rocks. He was quickly swept away towards the river orchy to his death. I believe his body still lies somewhere in the river orchy waiting to be found. The police have overlooked this likely scenario

I believe his bike didn't go down the steps with him. he leaned it against a post or whatever. his bike was stolen and the thieves remained silent.

 

[Yithian]

P.S.: Yith, where did you get the "flighty" bit?

I'm not sure!

 

[EnolaGaia]

Tony Parsons, the 63 year old man who set out to cycle from Fort William to his home in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, for charity, on 29th Sept 2017 has never been found. ...

Discussion of the Tony Parsons case was one of the "casualties" incurred when the old "People Who Just Disappear" thread just disappeared in June 2019.

If you'd like to browse the archived November 2018 copy of that thread (at the Wayback Machine), the first mention of the Parsons case was posted on 7 October 2017 on page 36 of the thread (as it stood at the time of archiving):

https://web.archive.org/web/2018110...hreads/people-who-just-disappear.1575/page-36

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Tony Parsons, the 63 year old man who set out to cycle from Fort William to his home in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, for charity, on 29th Sept 2017 has never been found.

He set out to cycle the 170km after 4pm with darkness not far off, which doesn't seem a good plan, & by all accounts wasn't particularly fit.

You'd think that he or his bike would've been found in the past 2½ years by walkers/hikers/police but no..

There's a long thread on websleuths which has this theory as the last post:

They came up with a lot of the observations we made in the early days of the disappearance.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Richard Morris vanishes after going out for a run. Not seen since the 6th of May

https://news.sky.com/story/richard-...-as-foreign-office-extremely-worried-11986613

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-52635741

I'm very surprised that they haven't managed to find anything via his fitness app - Police asked other runners to check his profile on Strava.

He recently did an interview with Runners World and is a highly experienced runner and regularly ran in Nepal.

 

[Spookdaddy]

...This happened, I'm told, to someone in my street, in the late 60s. She was a young mother of two little children and one morning her elder child, who was 3, was run over in the street, having wandered out through an open front door. Neighbours went to find little Kay's Ma but only the baby was there. Breakfast dishes were in the sink and the woman's coat and handbag were there, washing machine was on, but no Ma. She was never seen or heard of again. Her husband eventually remarried so she must have been declared dead at some point...

A tantalising story.

Although this particular incident wasn't so long ago, I suspect that such mysteries were once more common - in the days when options, especially for women, were so much more limited than they have become in recent years. (And it’s worth remembering that even as recently as this event, the 60’s were not The 60’s for everyone). The opportunities and vast geography of Empire provided some opportunity for men to simply up sticks and disappear (as happened with one of my grandfather’s brothers), but less so for lone females. There were no social workers or services to fall back on, no advice organisations, no anonymous phone numbers - the shame and social judgmentalism associated with anything seen as domestic failure was a formidable and sometimes life destroying force, which, unless the individual had a remarkable sturdy and understanding family, more often than not had to be borne by the individual alone.

After my first working trip to Dublin I went to visit my my maternal grandparents. My grandmother – then very ill and displaying symptoms of dementia - began to speak of her childhood there. I will never forget the look on my grandad’s face. She had never spoken of her past – not one iota of information had ever passed her lips – and I recall my granddad and I sitting very still and silent, as if a rare bird had entered the room, hoping to extend the flow of hitherto unspoken memory for as long as we possibly could. I have no doubt that her flight from Dublin, and consequent silence, was rooted in some sort of social shame – very possibly, something which no-one would blink an eye at these days.

By coincidence, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming is on my current reading list. Cumming is an art historian; I’ve read her excellent art history books, The Vanishing Man and A Face to the World - but On Chapel Sands is a book about a mystery deep within her mother’s childhood: her kidnapping from a Lincolnshire beach in 1929 and the five day disappearance and fifty year void of information that followed her reappearance.

 

[PeteS]

A face like that isnt going to just dissapear in a hurry.

(But I am with littlebrowndragon; I think we should have the right to vanish if we feel like it).

You do have the right to vanish of course. It's just that in the modern world it is very difficult to do so with cctv, ability to track phones, bank accounts, obtaining housing etc. An awful lot of planning would have to go into it, if you wish to be untraceable.

 

[PeteS]

I recently watched one of those US "missing" episodes on the telly. Happened mid 2000's. A married couple who worked different shifts, so sometimes a couple of days went by before they saw each other. Husband gets a call to say wife hasn't turned up for work. No trace of her for 24 hours so he tries to report her as missing, but Police won't accept the report since too soon. He tries several times, searches the roads, badgers the Police, who get a call to say husband is suspicious. He is brought in for questioning when Police find wife upside down in her car in a dense wooded area adjacent to the road she used to get to work. She had gone off the road but amazingly with serious injuries and a week after she had crashed, she was still alive and survived. The husband had travelled that road several times without finding her and if it hadn't been for his badgering the Police the conclusion was that it would be unlikely that she would have been found.
Does make you wonder how many disappeared are lying in a crashed car somewhere not yet found. A few have been found at the bottom of lakes in the past as well.

 

[EnolaGaia]

... Does make you wonder how many disappeared are lying in a crashed car somewhere not yet found. A few have been found at the bottom of lakes in the past as well.

Yep ... A number of such cases are mentioned in:

People Who are Discovered Or Re-Surface After Long Disappearances
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...long-disappearances.65925/page-4#post-1894539

... and the creepiest lake-related story is probably:

The Foss Lake Mystery
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-foss-lake-mystery.54109/

 

[Yithian]

That's very sudden onset though.

[...]

He'd just been given a new post so I'm guessing he was still compos. Rapid dementias usually happen over weeks not within a day, so I'd think it unlikely.

I largely agree, but two points: many people seem to miss ( and sometimes misattribute) or ignore the early warning signs.

My single point of reference is an old friend's father who suddenly became disoriented in his home (while in his 50s) and couldn't recall where he was, or indeed who he was and why he was there.

It turned out to be a brain tumour.

If there were warning signs, he didn't spot them.

 

[escargot]

Hmmm.... so my freedom should be curtailed just because people might worry about me? Just because others might wonder what happened to me? That sure is a big price for someone to pay so that others can have peace of mind. What about my peace of mind? What about my need for freedom? Of course, these expressions of concern about others disrespects them , disrespects their freedom of choice. Perhaps those who claim to be concerned should examine the effect of their concern on me instead of selfishly demanding that I am denied my freedom.

The police are duty-bound to investigate if someone, let's call them X, is reported missing.
If they find X safe and well but X doesn't want to go home, the police will report this back to the family and close the case. X is free to walk away from their old life if they're not vulnerable or escaping justice.

This happens now and then.

 

[littlebrowndragon]

The police are duty-bound to investigate if someone, let's call them X, is reported missing.
If they find X safe and well but X doesn't want to go home, the police will report this back to the family and close the case. X is free to walk away from their old life if they're not vulnerable or escaping justice.

Thank you. That's interesting. However, this police involvement, this keeping tabs on people, no matter the justification, is still an infringement of one's freedom. Every year, for example, it gets harder and harder to travel since one has less and less freedom. I did a lot of travelling abroad during the 70s and into the 90s and I remember how easy it was in the 70s compared to the 90s and early 00s. In fact, I am often surprised at how recently it was that passports were introduced. They are an infringement of one's freedom. One reason I don't want Brexit, for example, is that travel will become more difficult. At least within Europe one can go anywhere without a passport. That feeling of lack of restriction is indescribable.

As to freedom, I quote the Declaration of Arbroath (700 years old last month): "It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."

That people are justifying restrictions to freedom e.g. police surveillance, border controls between countries, that people no longer value freedom, demonstrates just how bad things have become.

 

[Yithian]

Another well-known case that stuck in my mind: Nick Gill, talented chef and brother of the late A. A. Gill

After soaring to the very top of his trade by his early 20s, and being tipped for a life of fame and fortune, Nick Gill suffered a personal crisis that saw his career implode, his finances collapse, and his mental health disintegrate.

He was jailed in the mid-Nineties, for violently attacking his ex-wife, lost contact with his two young children, and became a heavy drinker and drug user.

In 1998, to the dismay of friends and family, he decided to vanish.

The last person to see Nick alive was Adrian, 59, who is four years his senior. ‘He’d had a bad time and he was unhappy,’ Adrian later recalled. ‘He came and told me, “I’m going to go and disappear”.’

His last words are reputed to have been: ‘Please don’t look for me.’

Fifteen years have passed since Nick has been seen or heard from by friends or family members. His extraordinary career and once soaring success have been — quite unfairly — forgotten.

Longer account here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-abandoned-famous-family-disappeared-air.html