Eerie Disappearances

Eskimo Village
Photo Source: Library Of Congress

The paranormal, what is it? When people hear that term they think of ghosts, or spirits, but it is a lot more than that. It is usually defined as something that seems to be outside the normal sensory channels. It is something that is so unusual that it doesn't fit what we consider to be a normal event, because it is so strange. Every once in awhile we hear about something like this. One case had to do with a missing village. The village was an Eskimo village that contained over 2,000 individuals. A fur trapper had been stopping there for years. One day, when he was headed toward the village, he noticed something strange. The village look deserted. As he entered the village there was no one to be seen anywhere. He began to look into the huts, but they were all empty. He knew that the villagers didn't move, because their provisions were still in the village. As he looked around outside he noticed some high snow drifts. He dug into some of them and to his horror he found frozen sled dogs that had starved to death. That was not the only strange thing that he found. The graves of the ancestors of the village residents had been dug up. The trapper notified the authorities who launched an investigation but nothing was found, not even footprints. The entire population of the village had just disappeared without a trace, never to be found again.

Bus
Photo Source: Library Of Congress

What happened in Bennington, Vermont between 1920 and 1950 was very strange. It seems that during that period in time people have disappeared from this place for years, without a trace. It is one thing for people to disappear from a place like New York City, where there are millions of people coming and going, but a place like Bennington has only a population of a little over 6,000 families today and was much less populated years ago, so it was easy to notice a disappearance. One disappearance that was never accounted for was the one that occurred in December 1949. A man named Tetford was on a bus with other passengers. He was asleep in his seat and traveling to the Soldier's Home in Bennington. He never reached his destination. All the 14 passengers that were one the bus with him testified that he was asleep in his seat and never got off the bus, but just vanished. His belongings were still on the bus.

Mystery Cloud
Photo Source: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version

Sometimes we are are told about disappearances, where there was either just not enough investigation, or some facts were left out to make the tale seem more eerie One of these tales is about the lost battalion in the World War I. The story goes this way. A British battalion was fighting with the Turks when a funny shaped low cloud came down upon a hill that was directly in the direction that the battalion was marching. They were observed marching directly into the cloud and when the cloud rose, the battalion was gone, never to be seen again. Unfortunately this is only half the story, but you will find this story all over the Internet. Here is the rest of the story. An area that contained a cap bridge had been examined by the Reverend Charles Pierrepoint Edwards and he found a mass grave. In the grave were the bodies of at least 144 soldiers and officers from the lost battalion. A few of the rest had survived and been found and the balance were thought to have been put into Turkish prison camps.

In 1923 a very strange thing happened in Hoer-Verde, Brazil. The town had a population of about 600 people. The town's inhabitants completely disappeared without a trace. Police were called in and launched an intensive investigation, but the only things that was found were a gun that had been fired and a sentence that had been scribbled on a blackboard. The sentence said, “There is no salvation.” What could have possibly happened to the population of a town this big? There are records that indicate that this has happened in many different countries in the past.

I know that disappearances in war time seem to be quite normal, but there are times when they can not be explained. A group of Chinese soldiers over 3,000 strong just disappeared over night. They had been surrounded by different guard posts and the sentries saw nothing unusual and no movement among the soldiers. The disappearance took place in 1937, It was discovered that they had disappeared when radio communication broke off.

One Russian editorial that I read, stated that some of the disappearances in that country that involve more than one or two people at a time were caused by a black hole. This is hard to figure out, because if a black hole would have ever touched down on Earth, it wouldn't just be people disappearing, but the entire planet. This is assuming that scientists are right when they say that black holes exist. Another explanation that was given by writer John Keel is that the fabric of reality may have torn and people just passed out of our dimension into the next. Is there a dimension that is now populated by the descendants of all those lost souls from time immemorial?

The most fun explanation is that people are caught in a time slip. They were either brought back or forward in time, but they still exist. Again this is hard to swallow, because we would have met some of these people in our own time. Then there is the explanation that people who have disappeared are out of time sync with the rest of us. We can not see them, but sometimes we can see the results of what they do indirectly. Supposedly if we see an object move across the room it is not because of ghosts, but these people trying to communicate with us.

How do I look at these things? First of all there is no denying that there have been an awful lot of mass disappearances, but most can be accounted for. There are some that can not be. Of the ones that can not be, probably there was some rational reason for most of those that we are not aware of. That leaves only a few that are mysterious. The few that are left can not be explained by any means and those are the ones that interest me.

Let me tell you one more story. Oliver Larch went to his well in 1909. He needed to draw water. It had been snowing and you could see his footprints heading to the well then abruptly stopping. He never made it to the well and his neighbors testified that they could hear him screaming for help over their heads.