Charles Fort called it the shortest story he knew. That Benjamin Bathurst, a British envoy to the Austrian court at Vienna, stopped for a meal at an inn in the Prussian town of Perleberg. That after finishing his supper, he went outside to look over his coach, that he ‘walked around the horses’ — and vanished.
Bathurst’s disappearance, on 25 November 1809, has become one of the classics of the Fortean genre. Almost every author who has cited the case, including Fort, stresses both the suddenness with which the young diplomat vanished, and the presence of witnesses who looked on as he stepped into the unknown. But, unfortunately, none has checked the story against the original sources. ...