Early 20th Century author Charles Fort is one of my problematic faves. If you’re not familiar with Fort and his ouvre, he’s basically an anthologist of the paranormal who meticulously catalogued the strange and unusual: rains of frogs, poltergeist activity, out-of-place artifacts, unidentified flying objects, spontaneous human combustions.

As a child I was transfixed by Fort’s books. As an adult, I find they are often more notable for their omissions, misrepresentations, and straight-up lies. Here’s an example from his 1931 book Lo!:

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.

Charles Fort, Lo!

This is a masterful example of storytelling economy. In seventy words Fort vividly establishes the who, what, where, and when; and lets the how and why remain a mystery.  Can a man just vanish into thin air?

You can see why this story inspired some of our greatest science fiction writers. Benjamin Bathurst frequently appears in their stories as someone who has slipped through the cracks of spacetime. One of the best is H. Beam Piper’s “He Walked Around the Horses,” where Bathurst slides into a divergent timeline where the American and French Revolutions never happened.

There’s one problem: Fort’s story is lie.

He has carefully pruned away details to keep things brief and vague. The problem is that many of those details concern the what, where, and when — and when they’re restored, the mystery of how and why is very different.

Benjamin Bathurst did disappear. But there was nothing supernatural about it.

The Story So Far

Benjamin Bathurst was born on March 14, 1774.

The Bathursts were well-to-do. Benjamin’s father, the Right Reverend Henry Bathurst, was the Bishop of Norwich. His late uncle was Allen Bathurst, the 1st Earl Bathurst, a distinguished peer; patron of the arts; and friend of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lionel Sterne.

Benjamin was the third of eight children. Oldest brother Henry followed their father into the clergy. Older brother James enlisted in the army. 

Reverend Bathurst hoped that his third son would study law and stand for Parliament. He was disappointed when Benjamin wanted to become a diplomat. Competition for positions was fierce and required you to have political and social connections. It took years, but eventually Benjamin’s cousin Henry, the 2nd Earl Bathurst, was able to get him hired by the Foreign Service.

In 1803 Bathurst was sent to Vienna, which he later called “the most unwholesome capital in Europe.” He accomplished little of note, at least diplomatically. He did make some progress in affairs of the heart; meeting, wooing, and marrying Miss Phyllida Pratt Call, the daughter of a Cornish baronet and ten years his senior.

Two years later Bathurst was sent to Stockholm. He arrived in the middle of an outbreak of whooping cough, which soured his impressions of the city.

I am surrounded by nothingness, by duplicity, and mean. I have an opportunity of viewing human nature in its most vile and abominable garb, and God grant I may not contract some elements of the epidemic that prevails. I begin now to repent having selected this career.

correspondence of Benjamin Bathurst, 1806

After three years in Stockholm, Bathurst fell victim to another pandemic sweeping through the city. It’s not clear exactly what — given his symptoms, it may have been Hungarian spotted fever or dysentery. He was sent back to the United Kingdom to get some tender loving care from his wife.

In 1809 Bathurst was appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Emperor Francis II of Austria. For the first time he was expected to do more than shake hands, attend state funerals, and parrot pre-written policy statements. This was his entry into the world of high-stakes international diplomacy.

At the time the British and the Austrians were conspiring against the French under Napoleon Bonaparte. Their plan was to weaken Napoleon by making him fight on two separate fronts: the British would redouble their efforts in Spain in the West, while the Austrians would lead a pan-German rising against Bonapartism in the East. With any luck they could topple the Emperor for good.

Bathurst’s job was to make sure the Austrians stuck to the plan. He traveled from London to Vienna on the fastest ships available. Foul weather intervened, though, putting him weeks behind schedule. 

By the time he arrived in Trieste on April 19, 1809 the Austrians had already marched into Bavaria without an official declaration of war.

By the time he arrived in Vienna on April 26, the Austrians were losing.

Surprise was the only advantage the Austrians had. Napoleon’s counterattack had driven them back down the Danube into their own territory. Now the French were on the outskirts of Vienna and the imperial court was hastily relocating to Buda. Once it was clear the Austrians were losing the other German states chose to remain neutral. 

Ministers urged Emperor Francis to dismiss the British envoy without receiving him, lest he provoke the wrath of Napoleon.

Bathurst did not help his cause by being rude and abrasive. He treated Austrians like minions, instead of allies and equals. He also had nothing nice to say about the military leadership of Archduke Charles — who was the Emperor’s brother. Whoops.

Shortly after Bathurst made his criticism, Charles soundly trounced Napoleon at the Battle of Aspern-Essling. The Austrians took this as a sign to ignore Bathurst, and hoped it would be a turning point in the war. It wasn’t. Two weeks later Napoleon decisively crushed Charles at the Battle of Wagram.

The Austrians sued for peace.

Bathurst received an official rebuke from Foreign Secretary George Canning. He was upbraided for overstepping his bounds, wasting scarce resources and political capital on a doomed cause, and sending the inadvertent message that an alliance with the British was worthless. Bathurst became despondent and paranoid. The stress also triggered a flare-up of whatever he had contracted in Sweden, which had never cleared up.

While the French and Austrians negotiated the terms of the latter’s submission, Bathurst was effectively a persona non grata — no one wanted to get on Napoleon’s bad side by cozying up to the British. His interactions were limited to expatriates, secret agents, and spies who begged him to carry their letters back to Britain. Most of them were innocent correspondence with friends and family. Some were top secret intelligence. And one of them was a panicked note from British agent Friedrich von Gentz explaining why he had diverted £700 from general accounts for his own personal use.

After the Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed on October 14, all British diplomats were expelled from Austria. Bathurst took forever to plan his departure, like he expected some sort of last-minute reprieve. His departure was also delayed because neither Austria nor French-allied Prussia were inclined to issue him transit papers.

In the end, Bathurst was able to secure a passport and transit papers under the false identity of “Koch,” a humble merchant from Hamburg. On November 10, he set out from Buda in a half-calèche drawn by four horses and accompanied by his Swiss valet, Nikolaus Hilbert, and trusted embassy messenger Joseph Krause.

The plan was to take the main road through Berlin to the port city of Kołobrzeg, ferry across the Baltic to Ystad, make their way to Gothenberg and catch a ship back to Britain. It wasn’t  the safest route. Bathurst would be traveling through territory controlled by Napoleon and his allies, who would consider a British diplomat traveling incognito to be a pretty prize. The party only stopped only to eat, change horses, or rest for the night in the post houses along the way. 

Bathurst’s chronic illness was now causing excruciating stomach cramps. When he reached Berlin on November 20 the Austrian chargé d’affaires, the Count de Bombelles, found him to be weak and sickly, barely able to stand and unable to eat. Even Bathurst had to admit that his nerves were “shattered” and that he was unwell.

There was no time to rest, though, and they set out for Hamburg on November 23. This was the most dangerous stretch of the journey. Prussia had been devastated by the French, and the countryside was riddled with beggars, deserters, and bandits. 

Bathurst’s condition continued to deteriorate. When they stopped at the post house in Kletzke on November 24, Krause suggested that Bathurst should try some medicine Phyllida had him, a mild emetic made from powdered rhubarb and calomel. That worked in the short run, but a few hours later the cramps were back with a vengeance and  Bathurst accused the messenger of poisoning him. Krause could only respond that he and Bathurst had eaten the same things, so if anyone had poisoned the diplomat it was his own wife.

It was a long, sleepless night.

The Disappearance

In the morning of November 25 an exhausted Krause told a maid at the post house that Bathurst might not reach Hamburg alive. While he supervised loading the coach, Bathurst sipped strong coffee — the only thing he could keep down — and dashed off a quick letter to his wife.

That day he was miserable company, feverish, cramped, paranoid, and irritable. He thought every coach on the road was following them. He moaned about being abandoned by the British government, his wife, and his friends. He accused Krause, Hilbert, and the carriage driver of plotting to either murder him or deliver him into the clutches of the odious French.

When they reached the town of Perleberg in early afternoon, Bathurst really lost it. First he was triggered by a broken-down carriage and accused its passengers of being assassins. Then, when they stopped by the local post house, the White Swan Inn, he accused two Jewish merchants staying there of being kidnappers. Finally, while Krause and Hilbert transferred their baggage to the next coach, Bathurst snuck off to call on the town major, a Captain von Klitzing.

The housekeeper made tea and served as translator — Klitzing had a sore throat and spoke in a whisper. Bathurst was trembling so hard he could barely hold his teacup, and drank little. In hushed tones he told the captain that he was a wealthy merchant from Hamburg, and his traveling companions were trying to poison him. He asked for an armed escort back to Berlin, and offered a reward of 1,000 guineas if he was safely returned home.

Klitzing was confused. Bathurst clearly wasn’t from Hamburg — his German was laughably bad. He was also evasive, and he had a suspiciously large amount of money. Ultimately he decided against providing an armed escort, and instead sent two soldiers to the White Swan Inn to keep the peace.

That seemed to satisfy Bathurst, who left. The housekeeper thought it strange that he did not head towards the post house but instead ducked down a side street, towards a hall where local aristocrats would be holding a ball later that evening. Shortly after Bathurst’s departure Augustus Schmidt, the postmaster’s son, knocked on the door looking for him. The housekeeper helpfully pointed Schmidt in the right direction.

Bathurst returned to the White Swan and announced they would be resting for a few hours, then traveling at night to avoid detection by French soldiers in the area. When Krause objected, Bathurst produced a brace of pistols from underneath his fur coat and fired a shot out of the window to prove that they were loaded. Krause backed down and Hilbert started unloading the carriage.

For the next two hours, Bathurst held Krause at gunpoint while he scribbled out letters in a trembling hand to Metternich, the Count de Bombelles, and his wife Phyllida. When darkness fell he called for the carriage, then immediately changed his mind and countermanded the order.

Eventually, Krause suggested that if they were being pursued, they should burn all of the dispatches they were carrying. It would be no great loss — duplicates of the official dispatches had been sent to London along other routes, and this way if they were stopped by the French there would be no reason to detain them. Bathurst’s demeanor changed immediately. He smiled, told Krause he had misjudged him, and they burned the letters together.

Krause dismissed the soldiers, paying them a ducat for their faithful service and continued discretion, while Bathurst washed down a few slices of boiled turkey with a bottle of cheap claret. Then he crawled on top of the table and took a nap.

At 9:00 PM, Bathurst woke in a start and declared it was time to leave. While Krause and Hilbert loaded the carriage, Bathurst stood to the side, nervously checking his watch and his purse. Then he loudly announced he was taking a walk. He rounded the carriage, strode past a coachman who was pumping water for the horses, wandered down the main street for a bit, and ducked into an alley.

At 9:15 PM, the carriage was ready but Bathurst was nowhere to be found. Krause waited for an hour, and then panicked. He sent Hilbert to go fetch Captain von Klitzing, and then frantically started tossing dispatches he’d hidden from Bathurst into the fire.

At 11:00 PM Hilbert finally tracked down Klitzing at the ball and told him that his master had gone missing. Klitzing was at first unconcerned, but when he realized that Bathurst was the man who had spoken to him that afternoon he sprung into action. His soldiers locked down the post house and placed Krause and Hilbert in protective custody.

The Official Investigation

A door-to-door search of the entire town turned up only one trace of the missing diplomat. Bathurst’s velvet-lined sable overcoat and Krause’s more modest coat had gone missing at some point during the night. They were found hidden in the woodshed behind the White Swan Inn.

Augustus Schmidt, the postmaster’s son, confessed to taking the coats but insisted that they had been left behind by the Jewish merchants, and that he was just holding on to them until their owners returned later. Klitzing didn’t believe him — Schmidt was a ne’er-do-well with a history of petty theft, with no alibi for time of the disappearance. He had Schmidt arrested for theft and thrown into jail. Frau Schmidt, too, after Augustus revealed that his mother had sold Bathurst gunpowder for his pistols.

The departure of those two merchants, though, that was suspicious. They were chased down on the road and interrogated and turned out to be exactly what they claimed to be — Jewish merchants from Lenzen. The authorities reluctantly let them resume their journey.

There was still no sign of Bathurst anywhere. Klitzing combed the countryside with gangs of bloodhounds who were  given a good sniff of Bathurst’s coat. Nothing.

He even had the River Stepenitz dammed so it could be dredged. Nothing.

Klitzing eventually ran out of reasons to hold on to his prisoners. On December 10 Krause and Hilbert were released, given new passports, and sent back to Berlin.

A week later two women gathering firewood in nearby Quitzow Wood found a pair of trousers with bullet holes in them. Authorities assumed they were Bathurst’s because a letter he’d written to to his wife was stuffed into a pocket. It was a rambling rant where Bathurst claimed to be surrounded by enemies and blamed his situation on a plot between the Russians and a French diplomat named the Comte d’Antraigues. He ended by demanding that Phyllida should never remarry. 

There was something weird about those trousers. Somehow the they had been missed by the search parties who had been combing the woods for weeks. The area had been wet and rainy for days, but the trousers were bone dry when found. And though there were bullet holes, there were no bloodstains. It was all very suspicious.

After the trousers, nothing.

It was as if Benjamin Bathurst had vanished off the face of the earth.

The Unofficial Investigation

As far as the Bathursts knew, their son was still on his way back to Britain. They had been worried in early November when the French newspaper Le Moniteur ran an article claiming the British envoy to Austria had gone mad and committed suicide, but were reassured when the Foreign Service told them that it was a lie and Benjamin was still in Vienna. When he failed to show up by the end of they month they just assumed he was taking the long way to avoid falling into the hands of the French. 

In late December the government finally received news of Bathurst’s disappearance from Krause, and it fell to new foreign secretary Lord Richard Wellesley to break the bad news to his family. They found little comfort in Wellesley’s assurance that there was no scandal and the disappearance seemed to be a freak occurrence.

In actuality the Foreign Office was in the dark like everyone else, so they hired agents to go to Perleberg and dig around. They found nothing.

The Bathursts hired their own agent. He found nothing.

The British press had a field day — this was the 19th Century equivalent of the 24-hour news networks reporting on a missing white woman. The disappearance was front page news and speculation was rampant. As the word spread curious expatriates began to investigate on their own time. They found nothing.

Now, the sensible assumption was that Bathurst had been robbed and killed — after all, the area was swarming with bandits, Bathurst was wearing expensive clothes and jewelry and kept flashing cash.  But who wanted to believe that? 

Certainly not the Bathursts, who clung to the hope that Benjamin was still alive. They chose to believe that he had been kidnapped the French and thrown into to some dank prison. When the British government offered a £1,000 reward for information about Bathurst’s final fate, the Bathursts doubled it. King Frederick III of Prussia even added 100 Friedrich’s d’or to the pot.

The French government, of course, vigorously denied any involvement. When Phyllida wrote to the Emperor himself demanding her husband’s release, the “official” reply came from Le Moniteur:

From information we have received from Berlin, we believe that Mr. Bathurst had gone off his head. It is the manner of the British cabinet to commit diplomatic commissions to persons whom the whole nation knows are half fools. It is only the English diplomatic service which contains crazy people.

The French version of events seemed to match the reports coming in from British agents and allies like Krause, the Count de Bombelles, and Friedrich von Gentz. Gentz was still furiously trying to explain away his apparent embezzlement, but included this tidbit in his apology:

Mr. Bathurst’s trouble was not a sudden matter; those who like myself, saw him frequently last summer, were able to forsee it; everything indicated in this unfortunate young man an impending physical and intellectual dislocation; and it needed only an unusual situation to reveal these tendencies fully.

correspondence of Friederich von Gentz, 1810

At this point Phyllida decided to appeal directly to the humanity of the Emperor himself. Astoundingly, she had an in — her younger sister’s mother-in-law had been Napoleon’s dorm mother while he was in military academy. Napoleon wasn’t a complete monster, and couldn’t say no to his mom-away-from home. He issued special passports allowing Phyllida to visit the Continent and investigate her husband’s disappearance. He even instructed every official in the empire to assist her to the best of their ability.

On June 8 Phyllida departed from Harwich with a retinue that included her brother George Call, a Mr. Boner (a German teacher who posed as their father), and her Swedish nursemaid Grotti (who spoke German). They reached in Perleberg in early July and began asking hard questions.

In the intervening months the proffered rewards had lured informants out of the woodwork.

One of them reported that the alley where Bathurst had disappeared was where the Schmidts lived. Augustus Schmidt was promptly re-arrested but continued to insist on his innocence. Phyllida visited Augustus in jail and concluded that though the young man “look[ed] like an assassin” he was too handsome to be a murderer. (This is how we get Scott Petersons, people.)

One Frau Hacker claimed that a cobbler named Goldberger had made a fortune by fencing Bathurst’s jewelry and diplomatic seals. George Call and the authorities tracked down the cobbler, who had an ironclad alibi. In the end they concluded Hacker had invented the tale to get out of jail — did I mention she was awaiting trial for fraud?

Rumors in France claimed that an English ambassador was locked away in the dungeons of Magdeberg Castle. Phyllida interviewed its governor, who sheepishly admitted that the “ambassador” was a lowly courier, whose importance he had exaggerated to impress a girl at a party.

In Vienna they interviewed Krause and Hilbert, whose stories remained consistent. In Paris they interviewed the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Police, who could only repeat the official line that the Empire was not involved.

Phyllida spent three months on the Continent, learned nothing, and departed on September 18. The trip wasn’t entirely unprofitable, though. Their bags were packed full of contraband, which customs authorities on both sides of the border pointedly overlooked. 

The Theories

That was it for contemporary investigations.

They didn’t turn up very much in the way of evidence. Frankly, it would be surprising if they had — at the time, the police were basically useless if they didn’t catch a crook red-handed or stumble into a confession. It didn’t help that many investigators were reluctant to probe too deeply, lest they discover something that might embarrass their country.

What little evidence they did turn up, though, was enough to support dozens of largely unfounded theories.

Robbery-Murder

British and Prussian authorities favored the idea that Bathurst had fallen afoul of bandits intending to rob him and was killed, either deliberately or accidentally. Once the killers realized who their victim was, they panicked and got rid of the body.

One issue with this theory is that the murderers had only a few hours to act before the search for Bathurst began. If the authorities were competent they should have discovered his body either during the door-to-door search of the town, or while combing the woods with bloodhounds.

In 1852, a skeleton with a nasty hatchet wound on the skull was unearthed beneath the floorboards of a house not too far from the White Swan Inn. It had been owned by a former employee of the post house, one who had been able to give suspiciously substantial dowries to his daughters, possibly raised by pawning Bathurst’s jewels. Benjamin’s sister Tryphena made a special trip to Perleberg to examine the skull but did not think it was her brother’s, for what it’s worth. (I’m not sure I could identify my own brothers’ de-fleshed skulls, but I’m willing to give it a try if they are.)

This feels entirely plausible, but there are just enough pieces that don’t fit to make you want to explore other possibilities.

Kidnapped by the French

Benjamin’s parents and wife favored the version of events put forth by Louis-Alexandre de Launay, the Comte d’Antraigues. 

d’Antraigues is a true enigma — an aristocrat who initially supported the French Revolution, but switched factions so frequently his true allegiance remained a mystery. After Napoleon’s rise to power d’Antraigues was exiled to London and became a secret agent working against the French for the British and Russians. 

Bathurst’s final letter explicitly blamed d’Antraigues for his situation When the letter became public knowledge d’Antriagues went into damage control mode, assuring Phyllida that he was innocent. He instead suggested that her husband was seized by French soldiers in a round-up of deserters, and then transferred to Magdeberg where he was executed. There was no evidence to back up this claim but d’Antraigues swore he would find it.

In July 1812 the Comte and his wife were killed by a servant in what was either a political assassination or a heated domestic argument about food service. (The servant was Italian, so either explanation is equally plausible.) Whatever d’Antraigues had discovered died with him. 

Official documents strongly suggest that there were no French soldiers in the area, either openly or covertly, which strongly suggests this is another dead end.

Kidnapped by the Russians

Pierre Desmarest, the chief of Napoleon’s secret police, also believed that Bathurst had been kidnapped — but not by him. In his version of the story Krause was a double agent who delivered the missing diplomat to the Russians. After a brief interrogation Bathurst was shipped off to Siberia and then worked to death in the salt mines.

Desmarest’s only evidence was circumstantial, the fact that Krause was able to live out the remainder of his days in relative comfort. In the end the lack of hard evidence makes this another dead end.

Lost at Sea

Phyllida’s brother George W. Call had yet another theory. In December 1809 a unknown English traveler tried to arrange an audience with the British consul in Königsberg but refused to give his name. He then boarded a ship for Stockholm, which sank in a storm. Call thought the unknown traveler might have been Bathurst.

The idea that the sickly, paranoid Bathurst could stealth his way through 500 miles of enemy territory seems fantastic, but stranger things have happened. After all, Geoffrey Pyke covered the same distance during his escape from Ruhleben — though of course he was terribly clever and fluent in German. Bathurst was neither.

If there is any evidence for this one, it’s at the bottom of the Baltic. Looks like another dead end.

Assassinated

When Sir John Hall researched his book Four Famous Mysteries, he was given access to formerly classified Foreign Office records. He realized that Bathurst was in contact with the Tugendbund, or “League of Virtue,” a Prussian secret society trying free the country from Napoleon and the French. 

During his travels Bathurst met with several members at an opera house in Berlin, and may have tactlessly started openly discussing their secret plans. Thankfully, no one else at the opera could speak English, but that was enough to convince the society that Bathurst needed to be silenced. Their agent Captain von Klitzing had the diplomat killed and then used his position to cover up the crime.

It’s a good theory. Unfortunately most secret societies don’t leave detailed records of their murder plots lying around to be found by future historians. (This podcast is an exception, of course). Also the Tugendbund had been almost entirely wiped out by the end of 1809.

Which leaves us with yet another dead end.

Conclusions

That’s it. Dead end after dead end after dead end. Frankly, given the botched investigation, the inadequacy of contemporary forensic techniques, the lack of any sort of reliable documentary evidence, and the passage of time it seems unlikely that we’ll ever know what really happened to Benjamin Bathurst.

Unless, of course, he finally falls out of a crack in space-time and can tell us for himself.