Mysterious vanishings come in a variety of flavors, or “species,” if
you will. There are those people who just simply disappear into thin
air, never to be seen again, more rarely those who spontaneously cease
to exist in practically full view of others, those who leave perplexing
clues in their wake, and sometimes those who actually seem to come back,
often with decidedly strange or puzzling stories to tell. Yet there are
others still, which merge facets of all of these into a twisted hybrid
of the weird; those who vanished without a trace, wove a web of mystery
around them, and then suddenly reappeared only to deepen the unexplained
quality to it all. These are the people who walked off the face of the
earth, walked back, but all was not what it seemed, creating a
complicated tapestry of mystery, deceit, strange imposters, and just
plain weirdness.
In April of 1922, little 2-year-old Pauline Picard was playing on her
family’s farm in the rural area of Goas Al Ludu, near Chautelin, in the
Brest district of Brittany, France, when she mysteriously and abruptly
went missing without a trace. When authorities were notified and the
farm and surrounding vicinity thoroughly searched, there was turned up
no sign of the vanished girl or where she could have possibly gone, and
more extensive searches branching further out equally got nowhere.
Frustrated authorities were forced to conclude that she had been
kidnapped, but there was no evidence at all as to what had become of
her. Pauline had just seemingly blinked out of existence.
As the days went by with no trace of Pauline and no leads to go on,
any hope of ever finding her slowly began to fade. Then, a few weeks
after the baffling vanishing, a young girl matching Pauline’s
description was found wandering about out on her own in the village of
Cherbourg, located around 300 miles away. The mysterious mute girl was
placed in the care of a local hospice and considering the uncanny
physical resemblance and lack of any apparent parents, authorities
became convinced that they had found the missing Pauline Picard. Police
contacted the girl’s parents and showed her a picture of the girl they
had found, causing Pauline’s mother to break down in tears and proclaim
that it was indeed her lost daughter.
The area of Goas Al Ludu
The overjoyed parents made the trip out to Cherbourg in order to be
reunited with their vanished daughter, but this meeting would prove to
be rather odd indeed. Although the girl at the hospice looked exactly
like Pauline, she seemed to not recognize her own parents in the
slightest, and seemed somewhat uncomfortable and even scared in their
presence. On top of this, she also allegedly had an entirely different
personality, mannerisms, and remained mute throughout, not saying a word
to anyone. Although it was all rather weird, everyone present
attributed it to mental trauma over whatever had brought her all the way
out there and what had happened since her disappearance, and she was at
this point still assumed to be Pauline. Her parents would bring her
home, upon which neighbors also recognized the girl as Pauline. Numerous
newspapers at the time reported of this fortunate reunion and it was
all considered a success story. However, the girl’s return would only
set off a new series of bizarre events and mysteries.
The girl’s arrival at the home saw her stubborn inability to speak
continue, and this was still at first thought to be merely because of
shock and trauma, but she also still showed many differences in
personality and continued to seem to have no memory at all of the house
she was in or the people she was now amongst. It also almost seemed to
the family as if she did not even understand the Breton dialect they
were speaking to her. Just as Pauline’s parents were beginning to
suspect something was truly off about their daughter, things began to
rocket further into the realm of the strange.
At around this point, a local farmer named Yves Martin allegedly
approached the Picards to ask if they really thought that the girl they
had taken home was their daughter, before apparently lamenting “God help
me, I am guilty,” and shambling off with a crazy look on his face. The
not surprisingly unsettled parents contacted authorities and Martin
would later be admitted to a mental asylum. Even more disturbing was a
gruesome discovery made not long after, when a local came across the
severely decomposed naked body of a little girl with a neatly folded
pile of clothes next to her not far from the Picard farm. The corpse was
in quite a dire state, missing its hands, feet, and head, which coupled
with the advanced state of decomposition made it difficult to identify,
and it would later be found that there were stab wounds present on the
body as well, indicating that the girl had been brutally murdered.
Pauline Picard
Adding to the whole mystery was that the ravaged body was found in a
place that had been searched before, and locals claimed that they had
passed by there frequently without anyone ever noticing anything amiss,
leading to the idea that the body had been placed there rather recently.
Meanwhile, Pauline’s parents were baffled that the clothes folded next
to the body seemed to be those of their daughter, in fact the ones she
had been wearing the day she had gone missing, even though they thought
that she was alive and well in their home, adding a further sheen of
weirdness to everything. There was also purportedly found the skull of
an unidentified man lying nearby the corpse, although it could not be
ascertained who it belonged to or what connection it had to the grisly
find of the girl’s body, if any.
Although the body could ultimately not be identified, with the
location being so close to where Pauline had gone missing, the presence
of her clothes at the site, and the strange behavior of the girl from
Cherbourg, there was the rumor that the corpse was actually that of the
missing girl, and that the one now in the Picard household was someone
else. Indeed, even Pauline’s parents began to believe this, and the girl
who had been staying with them was relocated to an orphanage, with
uncertainty still hanging over who she really was.
The case leaves many questions in its wake, such as who was the girl
with such a strong resemblance to Pauline found wandering about in
Cherbourg and why had she been alone? Why had she never been reported
missing? Was she really Pauline all along, perhaps suffering from some
sort of amnesia, and if so how had she ended up in a town so far away?
Who did the body of the girl that was found belong to and was it really
that of Pauline or someone else? If she was someone else, then who was
she and where did she come from? What connection did the skull have to
the case and who did it belong to? What did Martin’s cryptic admission
mean, if anything? These are questions which remain unanswered, and the
girl who had reappeared to the family has never been identified one way
or the other.
Another case which occurred even earlier than that of Pauline Picard
is also weird in many respects. On August 23, 1912, a family named the
Dunbars, consisting of Father Percy, mother Lessie, and two children
Bobby and Alonzo, went on a fishing trip to Louisiana’s Swayze Lake,
around 25 miles from their home in Opelousas, Louisiana. At some point
4-year-old Bobby Dunbar wandered away from his family, who were having
lunch at their cabin, after which he proceeded to vanish off the face of
the earth. Police immediately launched a large scale search for the
missing boy, but all that was found was a set of footprints leading
towards a railway, after which they stopped. It was largely assumed at
the time that Bobby had been abducted, but it was never found just who
had done it or where he had been taken.
Bobby Dunbar
Months later, in April of 1913, a man named William Walters was found
in Mississippi with a boy matching the description of the missing Bobby
Dunbar, and when apprehended he maintained that the name of the boy who
he was with was actually Charles Bruce Anderson, and that he was on his
way to meet the boy’s mother, Julia Anderson. Police were nevertheless
suspicious, and when Bobby’s parents arrived to take a look at the boy
they were immediately convinced it was their missing son, even though he
seemed to have no idea who they were. Amazingly, the boy was released
to them anyway, and the mother would later claim that as she bathed him
she recognized his distinctive moles and a scar that he had had, further
cementing the certainty that he was indeed her thought to be lost son.
In the meantime, Julia Anderson showed up to dispute this, insisting
that the boy was her own son, but she was shown to demonstrate a
profound lack of sense of what her own boy even looked like, unable to
pick him out of a line-up of 5 other boys, and this was seen to be
rather suspicious. Not to mention, Anderson had apparently had 3
children out of wedlock, which was quite the taboo in those days, making
her look all the worse. Adding to the whole mess even more was that she
had let her son go off with Walters for so long. The court eventually
ruled that the boy was Bobby Dunbar and he was sent to live his parents,
who were ecstatic that their lost son was home, while Walters was
charged with kidnapping.
The whole thing became quite the sensational court case at the time,
and many witnesses actually came out of the woodwork to support Walters.
Many of these were citizens of the town of Poplarville, Mississippi,
where Walters had spent a lot of time, and they claimed that the boy had
been around since before Bobby Dunbar had even gone missing. Of course
Anderson was there as well, still fiercely adamant that it was her own
son. In the end, after a highly publicized courtroom drama unfolded, the
court ruled that custody was to be given to the Dunbars, and Walter was
convicted of kidnapping and slapped with a life sentence, which would
be appealed 2 years later by the efforts of his lawyer but would not go
to trial again. Walters would spend the rest of his life telling anyone
who would listen of his innocence. Anderson would move to Poplarville
and become a nurse there, all the while insisting that her son had been
stolen away from her by the Dunbars.
The real Bobby Dunbar on the left, and the potential imposter on the right
The boy in question went on to be raised to adulthood as Bobby
Dunbar, eventually getting married, having four kids of his own, and
dying in 1966 having lived a full life. In later years it was claimed
that throughout his life “Bobby Dunbar” had on occasion reached out to
and met with the Anderson family, although it is uncertain if this is
true or what his reasons might have been. Then, in 2004, the whole
debate would be put to rest by a DNA test requested by Bobby’s own
granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, who was sure that he had been a
true Dunbar and wanted to prove it once and for all. The DNA from Bobby
Dunbar was compared to that of his cousin, and the results shocked
everyone. The boy who they had raised as their own was shown to have had
no blood relation to them at all.
This in some sense exonerated Anderson and Walters of any wrongdoing,
but it still did not prove that it was Anderson’s own son, as she had
long claimed. Indeed, the whole thing only deepened the mystery.
Although we now know that the man who died in 1966, who everyone had
thought to be Bobby Dunbar, was actually not him at all, it has left us
with multiple questions, such as if he was not Bobby, then who was he?
Was he Anderson’s son as she had claimed all along? Also, if he was not
who he was thought to be, then what became of the real Bobby Dunbar, who
vanished back in 1912? Did he die or was he kidnapped and still alive
somewhere? How did the courts and authorities get everything so mixed
up, and how had no one in Dunbar’s family ever caught on to the fact
that he was not really their son? These are questions with answers we
may never know.
Another creepy and rather unsettling case of vanishings and imposters
is that of 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay, who on June 13, 1994, went
missing after going off to play basketball with some friends in San
Antonio, Texas, in the United States. Shortly before this vanishing, he
had called his brother Jason from a payphone to ask him to come pick him
up, but had hung up when his brother refused. That would be the last
anyone heard from him, and despite intensive searches it seemed as if
Nicholas Barclay had simply stepped off the face of the earth.
Nicholas Barclay
At the time it was first thought that he had simply run away from
home. Nicholas was well known for being an aggressive and troubled boy,
often accused of shoplifting, frequently violent towards his own mother,
and always making general drama around town, which had landed him in
trouble with the law on more than one occasion. Indeed, right before his
disappearance he had been scheduled to appear before a juvenile court
on charges that he had not only broken into a convenience store, but had
physically menaced one of his teachers. One private investigator on the
case named Charlie Parker sums up Nicholas’ bad behavior nicely,
saying:
The teachers were having a great deal of trouble with
him. He was erratic, he wasn’t going to school he was fighting back he
had hit one of the teachers. The neighbors told us that they wouldn’t
allow their children to play with him. He cursed his mother, he struck
out at his mother.
He had also frequently run away from home before for short stints,
and it was thought that he would drift back eventually, especially with
no money and not having packed anything to bring with him, but this was
not meant to be. Barclay would remain missing, and various ideas swirled
at the time, including that he had run away for good or even been
attacked and possibly killed by his own brother, but there was no
evidence of any of this. Then, in October of 1997, a full 3 years after
the mysterious vanishing, Barclay’s mother, Beverly Dollarhide, was
contacted by authorities notifying her that her missing son had possibly
been found in Linares, Spain, of all places, after a young man matching
her son’s description had been found huddled in a phone booth. He had
then managed to convince authorities that he was the missing Nicholas
Barclay and they had been holding him ever since.
The boy was identified by his sister, Carol Gibson, also called
Carey, who had flown out to Spain to see him, despite some glaring
oddities. For instance, he now spoke with a thick French accent, which
he attributed to the years he had spent around Europe. He was
nevertheless moved back to his family, proceeding to apparently
assimilate back into his old life, and although he acted quite
differently from before and had missing memories, this was just blamed
on his traumatic experience. Indeed, he had quite the dramatic story to
tell regarding his long disappearance and reappearance in Spain,
claiming that he had been kidnapped and forced into a child pornography
ring where he had been abused and imprisoned before managing to escape.
Some physical anomalies that he displayed since being found was that his
eye and hair color were different than before, which he explained as
chemicals that had been poured into his hair and eyes by his captors to
torture him and render him unrecognizable.
Despite the physical and personality differences, he was accepted as
the family’s lost son, and over the next few months Nicholas continued
to assimilate and even seemed to be regaining some of his lost memories.
However, there were those who sensed that something was not quite as it
seemed, including Nicholas’ brother, Jason, and private investigator
named Charlie Parker, who first heard of the case after being called in
to check it out by the producer of a documentary program looking into
the family. It would be Parker who would eventually start to peel back
the layers to get to the whole creepy truth about what was going on when
he looked at pictures of Nicholas Barclay and the boy found in Spain
and realized that they did not have the same ears. This was seen as
quite a profound discovery, as the ears are said to be a good indicator
of a person’s true identity. Parker would say of this find:
I had not heard about this story. It had not been in the
paper. This producer just told me they wanted me to check it out. Well, I
went right on over to the house.It just so happened there was an old
picture of Nicholas Barclay on the wall. I looked at the picture and saw
blue eyes, but this boy’s eyes were brown. Then I went over and asked
the cameraman to zoom in on his ears. You see, I remembered Scotland
Yard had used that method to trace the man who killed Martin Luther
King.
Parker became quite obsessed with the whole affair after this odd
discovery, and he doggedly pursued the theory that the boy the family
had taken in was not their son, although they steadfastly insisted it
was. Eventually, Parker managed to get a court order out to take DNA and
fingerprints tests on the boy after he admitted he was not Nicholas
when confronted, and these tests turned out just about as he expected.
This was indeed not Nicholas Barclay, and even more bizarre, it turned
out to be a notorious serial impersonator named Frédéric Bourdin, who
had a career of having taken the identities of over 500 children all
over the world and was known by his criminal nickname “The Chameleon.”
Bourdin had heard of the Barclay case, read up on it, and made his move,
managing to trick everyone in the process.
The findings led to a 6 year prison stint for Bourdin on charges of
passport fraud and perjury, but he would go back to his old ways soon
after being released, including taking the identities of at least two
more missing boys, before finally dropping out of the game to settle
down and have kids of his own. Oddly, throughout it all the Barclay
family chose to hang on to the idea that Bourdin had really been their
son, even when faced with incontrovertible evidence that he wasn’t,
going so far as to try and keep Bourdin with them even as he was tried
for being a proven imposter. This has actually led to one of the most
persistent theories as to what became of the real Nicholas Barclay; that
he was killed by his brother Jason and his death covered up by the
family.
Frédéric Bourdin
Nicholas and Jason had purportedly always been at odds with each
other, not getting along and often arguing or fighting, and it has been
speculated that one such fight had ended with Jason killing his brother
in a rage. Since Jason was a known drug user and his family feared
losing both of their sons, it is surmised that they had kept the death
secret. When they had the amazing stroke of luck of some con man trying
to impersonate their dead son, they had then jumped on it as a chance to
weave a charade that Nicholas was still alive and further cover the
death up. This would explain why they were so willing to wholeheartedly
accept Bourdin’s story hook, line and sinker, despite all of the
anomalies and inconsistencies, as well as why they would so strongly
stick to the fraud even in the face of such overwhelming evidence
against it. In fact, Bourdin himself has further fueled this theory by
offering insights into the way the family had treated him during his
life as Nicholas Barclay, saying:
They knew I was not Nicholas. They didn’t believe a word
that I said. But they were good at not showing it. I remember in Spain,
Carey did everything for me. When I didn’t know something, she told me.
That’s the house we used to live in. That’s my daughter, your niece. Do
you remember that? Remember that, remember that, remember that, over and
over again. She wanted to put it in my head so I would never forget.
She couldn’t say that I wasn’t her brother. Did she believe it or not?
If you ask me, no. She did not believe for a second that I was her
brother. She decided that I was going to be her brother. They killed
him. Some of them did it, some of them knew about it, and some of them
choose to ignore it. I wasn’t worried about Nicholas coming back no
more.
Jason was considered a suspect in the disappearance of Nicholas for a
time, but his death by cocaine overdose put an end to this line of
questioning and obliterated that lead. The family always denied any of
this, of course, saying that they had fallen for Bourdin’s story simply
because they were so overjoyed by getting their son back that they had
blindly accepted him as their own. What happened to Nicholas Barclay and
why did his family take in a boy as their own despite the fact that he
was 6 years older than their son and didn’t look or act like him? In the
end there have been no further leads or evidence as to what became of
Nicholas Barclay, and the true reasons behind his vanishing or what
happened to him have remained an impenetrable mystery. The whole bizarre
and riveting story has been made into a 2010 film called The Chameleon, by French director and screenwriter Jean-Paul Salomé, and a 2012 documentary on Bourdin’s involvement in the case titled The Imposter, directed by Bart Layton.
What are we to make of these cases? While it may seem in some of
these accounts the imposter is clear, in others not so much. In all of
them it remains unknown what happened to the real vanished people or
what became of them. These cases serve to bring up just another facet of
the bizarre world of unexplainable vanishings. These are the people who
seemingly evaporated from existence and may or may not have come back
from their mysterious journey, only to leave further enigmas in their
wake. These accounts are sure to remain cloaked in mystery and
creepiness.
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