Lo! by Charles Fort

Author:Charles Fort [Fort, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2014-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

16

Here is the shortest story that I know of:

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Nov. 2, 1886—a girl stepped from her home, to go to a spring.

Still, though we shall have details and comments, I know of many occurrences of which, so far as definitely finding out anything is concerned, no more than that can be told.

After all, I can tell a shorter story:

He walked around the horses.

Upon Nov. 25, 1809, Benjamin Bathurst, returning from Vienna, where, at the Court of the Emperor Francis, he had been representing the British Government, was in the small town of Perleberg, Germany. In the presence of his valet and his secretary, he was examining horses, which were to carry his coach over more of his journey back to England. Under observation, he walked around to the other side of the horses. He vanished. For details, see the Cornhill Magazine, 55-279.

I have not told much of the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst, because so many accounts are easily available: but the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, in Historic Oddities, tells of a circumstance that is not findable in all other accounts that I have read. It is that, upon Jan. 23, 1810, in a Hamburg newspaper, appeared a paragraph, telling that Bathurst was safe and well, his friends having received a letter from him. But his friends had received no such letter. Wondering as to the origin of this paragraph, and the reason for it, Baring-Gould asks: “Was it inserted to make the authorities abandon the search?” Was it an inquiry-stopper? is the way I word this. Some writers have thought that, for political reasons, at the instigation of Napoleon Bonaparte, Bathurst was abducted. Bonaparte went to the trouble to deny that this was so.

In the Literary Digest, 46-922, it is said that the police records of London show that 170,472 persons mysteriously disappeared in the years 1907-13, and that nothing had been found out in 3,260 of the cases. Anybody who has an impression of 167,212 cases, all explained ordinarily, may not think much of 3,260 cases left over. But some of us, now educated somewhat, or at least temporarily, by experience with pseudo-endings of mysteries, will question that the 167,212 cases were so satisfactorily explained, except relatively to not very exacting satisfactions. If it’s a matter of remarriage and collection of insurance, half a dozen bereft ones may “identify” a body found in a river, or cast up by the sea. They settle among themselves which shall marry again and collect. Naturally enough, wherever Cupid is, cupidity is not far away, and both haunt morgues. Whether our astronomical and geological and biological knowledge is almost final, or not, we know very little about ourselves. Some of us can’t, or apparently can’t, tell a husband or a wife from someone else’s husband or wife. About the year 1920, in New York City, a woman, whose husband was in an insane asylum, was visited by a man, who greeted her fondly, telling her that he was her husband. She made everything cheerful and home-like for him.

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