True Ghost Tales

There are many strange stories of mysterious disappearances. Everybody knows about Amelia Earhart, the Mary Celeste, Jimmy Hoffa and maybe even Ambrose Bierce, and hot zones of strange activity like the Bermuda Triangle and similar locations like the Bass Strait Triangle, The Michigan Triangle and the Devil’s Sea but I wanted to investigate the more mysterious and strange disappearances. All of these stories are true and can be found on the internet for further investigation.

In 1815, a prisoner in a Prussian gulag, named Diderici was in a chain gang walking in the prison yard for the day’s exercise. As Diderici walked with his prison inmates, he slowly began to fade in and out of view. His body became more and more transparent until Diderici disappeared altogether, and his manacles and leg irons fell empty to the ground.

On September 23, 1880, David Lang was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck, and Lang’s brother-in-law, who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy. His wife and two children were watching their father walk across the field. When suddenly Lang vanished in mid-step and in full view of the judge and his family. The ground around where Lang had been walking was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no trace was found. The story further states that Lang’s children later called out to him, and heard a disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance.

On December 1, 1949, a Mr. Tetford was on his way home to Bennington Vermont from a trip to St. Albans. Tetford was sitting on the bus with 14 other passengers. They all testified to seeing him there, sleeping in his seat. When the bus reached its destination, however, Tetford was gone, although his belongings were still on the luggage rack and a bus timetable lay open on his empty seat.

In 1975, Jackson Wright and his wife Martha was driving from New Jersey to New York City. According to Wright, he pulled the car over to wipe the windshield of condensation. Martha went to clean off the back window. When he was finished, Wright turned around to discover his wife was missing.

In 1873, James Worson of Leamington Spa, England, was a simple shoemaker who was known to brag about his running abilities. One day, James made a bet with a few of his friends that he could run non-stop from Leamington Spa to Coventry. James began to jog with his friends following in a horse-drawn cart. James did well for the first few miles. Then his friends saw him trip on something and fall forward – but never hit the ground. Instead, James completely vanished. A thorough search was conducted in the area, with hopes he had fallen into a concealed hole but he was never found.

On November 25, 1809 Benjamin Bathurst, a British diplomat, was in the town of Perleberg Germany, while traveling to Hamburg from Berlin. Initially, Bathurst considered staying the night in Perleberg, but eventually decided to continue on to Hamburg. After ordering horses for their coach at a post house, he and his German courier, Herr Krause, had dinner at the White Swan Inn. Several hours later when the coach and fresh horses were ready, Bathurst left the inn, followed seconds after by Herr Krause. When Krause reached the coach he was surprised to find Bathurst was not in the coach and was nowhere to be found. It was thought that he had returned to the inn for some reason before entering the coach, but no trace of him was ever found, despite a thorough search of the area and the town and an extensive investigation and he was never found.

In November 1878, 16 year old Charles Ashmore left his house to fetch water from the well for his family in Quincy, Illinois. After many minutes of waiting, his father and sister went in search, fearing he had slipped in the snow or fallen down the well but he was nowhere to be found. The only sign of him was his footprints in the snow that led halfway to the well, then abruptly stopped. Then his voice pierced the night screaming “Help, help, they have me!” from overhead.

Multiple Disappearances

In November 1930, a fur trapper named Joe Labelle made his way on snow shoes to an Eskimo village, with over 2,000 residents, on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in northern Canada. When he arrived he discovered the village was deserted. All he found a pot of charred stew on a fireplace of cinders. An investigation was initiated. No footprints of any of the residents were found, all of the Eskimos’ sled dogs were found buried under a 12-foot-high snow drift starved to death, all of the food and provisions were found undisturbed in their huts. And the Eskimos’ ancestral graves had been emptied.

On February 5, 1923, six hundred inhabitants of the settlement Hoer-Verde in Brazil disappeared. The police thoroughly examined the small town. At the town school, they found a gun, which was apparently used the day before, lying on the floor and the words “there is no salvation” written on a blackboard.

In 1945, a train carrying hundreds of passengers traveling from Guandun, China, to Shanghai was lost halfway to its destination. The track was examined from Guandun to Shanghai with nothing found. There were no survivors or witnesses to explain it’s disappearance.

Almost disappeared

On December 8th Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B Cumpston arrived at the Victoria hotel in Bristol England for a short trip. Early in the evening they began to hear strange, loud sounds in their room. The sounds soon stopped so they returned to bed for the night but were awoken at approx. 3.00am by the same loud noises. The walls and floor appeared to start melting around them. They shouted out for help and could not help but notice how strange their shouts sounded, echoing weirdly and being repeated by unseen presences. Mr. Cumpston then told of how the floor suddenly opened up and how it felt as if he were being pulled into it. Mrs. Cumpston managed to pull him out and the two of them fled out a nearby window. They were panicked beyond belief and were under the impression that criminals had somehow attempted to kidnap them. They were arrested at a nearby railroad station by police for disorderly conduct.

In the past these disappearances might be explained by mermaids, fairies, werewolves and sea creatures, while today more stranger explanations are given like momentary black holes, alien abduction, tears in the fabric of reality, teleportation and being pulled into the fourth dimension. A more recent, and widely accepted, explanation is Reality Shifts. A reality shift is the sudden manifestation of objects appearing, disappearing, transforming and transporting. They supposedly happen all the time around us unnoticed, until one of the few shifts that happen that makes something noticeable disappear like a person or a train. But this is only the newest hypothesis, what do you think?

Written by Brackette, Copyright 2009 True Ghost Tales