Vanishing Without A Trace...

Everyone has seen keys, glasses, even money disappear without a trace before.  But a person? Or how about a whole village?

When I was a senior in high school, I had gym class the first thing in the morning.   High school was not necessarily the best time of my life and gym was at the bottom of my list so I always made sure I went straight there to get it over with.  My high school was connected to a separate building housing the gymnasium by a covered walk way.  There was basically only one way TO the gym from the high school and only one way BACK which is the route I took that day.  Even now no one can explain to me what happened but I managed to lose my entire gym class one fall day.  No one in the locker room, no one in the showers, no one wandering the school grounds between the buildings.  My entire class had simply VANISHED before my eyes and it shook me so profoundly I had to leave school for the rest of the day.

Mysterious disappearances happen all the time but for your reading enjoyment and to make up for my emergency of last week preventing my posting a Wild Wednesday blog, I have included two instances where someone or something has vanished without a trace...

On one chilly December morning in 1910, prominent socialite, Dorothy Arnold, decided to take a stroll through Central Park.  She was the daughter of a wealthy perfume importer and was hoping to purchase a new party dress.  She was last seen at a bookstore where she made a purchase and ran into a female friend.  That was the last person to probably see Dorothy Arnold alive as she never returned home that night and a private investigation performed by the Pinkertons could find no trace of her.  Dorothy's father, Francis Arnold, would end up spending over $100,000 over the years  in a sad attempt to locate his daughter and by the time Francis died in 1922, he had given up all hope of ever seeing Dorothy alive.

There is much controversy about what happened to the 30 Inuit men, women, and children living in an isolated village on Lake Anjikuni one cold November night in 1930.  Canadian fur trapper, Joe Labelle, came across the village and instead of being greeted by the inhabitants, Joe found deserted huts and the people gone.  What was so bewildering was all the things left behind like food, clothing, tools and there was even some talk that the ceremonial graves of the Inuit ancestors had been dug up and the bodies removed.  Even an extensive search by the Canadian Mounties failed to turn up any clue as to what happened to the villagers.  To this day, the debate goes on as to what really happened.