Quote:Mysterious disappearances aren’t new. For whatever reasons, some people just seem to vanish without a trace, never to be seen again.
Yet, as bizarre as these cases may be, there seems to be an even stranger type of disappearance out there; people who vanish in full view of others, under circumstances where it seems impossible that they could have even gone far, let alone totally disappeared.

These are the cases in which people were there one moment and gone the next, seeming to have just literally faded from existence, leaving us baffled and perhaps even questioning what we think we know about this mysterious world of ours.

Let’s take a look at the history of some of the more curious accounts of these spontaneous vanishings of people who by all indications seemed to have just ceased to exist.

One of the earliest well-known accounts of people spontaneously vanishing comes from back in the 1700s. Sometime in the 1760s, in the English town of Shepton Mallet, there lived an elderly man in his 70s by the name of Owen Parfitt.
Crippled with disease, Parfitt was said to be unable to get around on his own, instead spending his days either bedridden or sitting outside by the doorway to his home, where he lived with his sister.

According to the story, one day old Owen was sitting in his usual spot by the door, where his sister, also his primary caretaker, had been keeping an eye on him as usual.
On this day the weather was rather chilly, and Owen had covered himself with a coat, but there were no indications that anything was amiss, or that this day was any different from the many other times Owen had sat outside.

When his sister went to move him, she found that only the coat remained where Owen had been sitting just moments before. Since he was unable to walk on his own, she at first thought that perhaps a neighbor had moved him inside for her, as was sometimes the case, but the old man was nowhere to be found and the neighbors denied having moved him, although they had seen him sitting there all day.

In fact, there were many witnesses about on that day, yet no one had seen anything unusual at all. Owen’s sister searched the area but Owen was nowhere to be found, and it was baffling that he could have gotten far so soon, in front of so many people, and with the inability to walk.
A search was launched by authorities, but no trace of Owen Parfitt was ever found, leading to the popular legend at the time that the Devil had come for him as payment for a pact they had made. His disappearance remains a mystery to this day.

Quote:Sometimes, not only did the person disappear, but they did so right before the eyes of witnesses, literally fading away in plain sight.

Just a few years after Bathurst’s odd case, another even more bizarre disappearance was to occur.
In 1815, at a Prussian prison at Weichselmunde, a prisoner by the name of Diderici was doing a 10-year sentence for assuming the identity of his dead employer by dressing up in his clothes and a wig and trying to withdraw a large amount of money after the man had died of a stroke.
Allegedly, one day Diderici was being led through the exercise yard in chains in a line of other prisoners, when something very odd began to happen.
According to other prisoners, Diderici began to literally fade away, his body gradually becoming transparent and immaterial until finally his empty manacles and chains clattered to the ground as baffled prisoners and prison guards looked on.
An inquiry into the case would turn up nearly 30 eyewitness accounts from both convicts and guards that reported the exact same thing; that Diderici had become slowly invisible until he was simply not there anymore.

Puzzled by the case, the authorities would end up brushing the whole affair under the carpet, closing the case and proclaiming it an “Act of God.” Diderici would never be seen again.

A similarly bizarre vanishing supposedly happened in 1873 in Leamington Spa, England.
A shoemaker by the name of James Worson was out with his friends when he suddenly made a bet with them that he could run without stopping all the way to Coventry, which was a full 16 miles away.
The friends did not have faith in Worson’s ability to do this, and readily took him up on the bet. In order to make sure he followed through, the friends allegedly followed Worson in a horse drawn cart.

Worson ran for a few miles without any problems, and his friends were starting to think they might actually lose the bet when he suddenly tripped on something in the road.

The story goes that Worson pitched forward, but never hit the ground, instead completely blinking out of existence right before his terrified friends’ eyes.
A police search turned up nothing and this seems to be another case of someone who just spontaneously ceased to exist in full view of witnesses.