Benjamin Bathurst: How to Become an Enduring Mystery in Just 10 Seconds

Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re going to follow a guy around a corner and see him vanish forever. Sound fun? Let’s get started.

In 1809, Europe was in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. 25-year-old Benjamin Bathurst was a British diplomat sent to Austria to do diplomat things against the French that did not end well, and thus he needed to hurry home. It was thought the safest route from Vienna to London would pass through Prussia. Unfortunately for Bathurst, the route turned out to be terminally unsafe.

So why is the death of a random diplomat in dangerous territory still so famous? Because Bathurst didn’t simply die. He vanished. And according to legend (popularized by writer Charles Fort), he did it in a rather spectacular way.

Let’s join in on the night of Nov 25, 1809: Bathurst and his personal secretary, whose name is Krause, are traveling in Prussia under assumed names. Pretty wise in wartime. They stop at a post house in the town of Perleberg to get fresh horses for their carriage. They dine at the nearby White Swan Inn, and afterward Bathurst goes into a private room and writes a bunch of letters. 

The new horses are ready at 9 p.m. Bathurst comes out of the inn to get into the carriage, and then Krause comes out of the inn to get into the carriage, only Bathurst is not in the carriage. Bathurst is, in fact, nowhere.

The legend’s popularity rests on the amount of time between when Bathurst was last seen and when he was missed. Even a few short minutes is long enough to abduct somebody, but a few seconds—look away, look back—that timeline is shocking. And that’s the story that’s made poor Bathurst famous: with Krause right on his heels, Bathurst stepped out of sight around the carriage and was never seen again.

The only possible evidence of what might have happened to Bathurst was discovered 43 years later, in 1852. The skeleton of someone killed by a blow to the head was found in the basement of a house once owned by a man who had worked at the White Swan Inn in 1809, and who at some point came into a bunch of money. But nobody knows if the bones belonged to Bathurst.

In any missing person case, there are multiple possibilities, including vanishing of one’s own accord, getting lost, dying of natural causes or accident in an undiscovered location, suicide, abduction, and murder. The last two seem most likely in Bathurst’s case, as he was a diplomat in wartime traveling through unsafe territory, and also wore an expensive coat, which could have made him a target for thieves.

Benjamin Bathurst’s disappearance has inspired many speculative stories, and can certainly inspire some more! So here are some vanishing writing prompts.

• History’s mystery. What if the problem is not that you don’t see a missing man, but that you see him too much? A residual haunting is like a recording that plays over and over on the site of an emotional event. So say you’re a traveler stopping for fresh horses at a small inn, and while hanging out in the courtyard, you see a man in an expensive coat that’s a decade out of style. He walks around your carriage and then vanishes. When you run shrieking to the inn, the staff says, Oh, yeah, that’s Bathurst. His ghost shows up once in a while to disappear and we still don’t know what the hell happened to him. How maddening would it be to watch the vanishing over and over, and still not have a clue about where he went?

• No one can talk to a horse, of course. If the bit about Bathurst walking around the carriage is true, then there were actually witnesses to the moment of his disappearance: the horses themselves. You could have a story about a missing man’s family tracking down the horses that were there that night and hiring a person who claims they can talk to animals. What would the horses say? Would they understand what they saw? What would the psychic do if they were actually a fraud and had to make up a credible explanation for a weird disappearance?

• Double or nothing. What if the reason nobody can find a missing man is because he was never there at all? Say Bathurst had been killed before he even left Austria, but the killers wanted to make it look like he’d vanished somewhere far away, to clear themselves from suspicion. For this to work, the man’s traveling companions would have to fool people all along the journey into thinking they’d seen Benjamin Bathurst. They’d probably do it by dressing someone up in Bathurst’s clothes and mimicking his voice and mannerisms. But what would happen if there was no time to plan? If Bathurst’s killing was an accident with no coverup in place? What if the people who had to portray Bathurst had no idea what he looked like, how he dressed, or how he talked? Could they still pull it off?

• It’s dangerous to go alone. So a plausible explanation for Bathurst’s disappearance is political assassination. A less plausible one is abduction by aliens. But what if they were both true? Say you’ve got some assassins on what’s supposed to be an easy job, kidnap some guy at an inn and get rid of him. But just when they’re about to accomplish their mission, aliens fire up their tractor beam and abduct the whole lot of them. Now, everybody immediately notices that Bathurst has vanished, because everybody knew he was there. But nobody knew about the assassins, because sneaking around was part of the job. What would their families think when they never came home? And what would the aliens do when one of their abductees discovers the other guys were trying to kill him?

• Did you see that? What if the only eyewitnesses to the disappearance were the assassins sent to kill Bathurst? What would they do when they saw him vanish? Alert the authorities? Join the search? Probably they would not go home and report that just as they pulled their knives out, Bathurst glitched out of this mortal plane. Which might make it awkward if Bathurst unexpectedly reappeared, very much alive.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! Be careful on your way home, now.

Sources & further reading:

Benjamin Bathurst: Wikipedia

The Disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst: Mike Dash (archived)

Gone Guy: [Benjamin Bathurst]: The Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope podcast