9 Mysterious Disappearances of People Other Than Amelia Earhart

Al-Hakim was a 10th–11th-century ruler of the Fatimid dynasty who was known for his erratic and contradictory leadership. He led for 25 years (996–1021) of his known 36 years of life, during which time he, for instance, established a generous policy to support the poor only to follow it with some astonishingly harsh or strange edict such as forbidding women to leave their homes and then forbidding cobblers to make or sell women’s footwear. One night in February 1021 al-Hakim rode out of Cairo. He was never heard from again, nor was his body ever found.

The eldest son of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was born while his father was abroad in Holland. When Edward IV returned to his royal position, he named his son the prince of Wales. But upon the king’s death, a dispute erupted between the child’s maternal and paternal uncles concerning the legitimacy of the king’s marriage to Elizabeth. Ultimately, Edward V and his brother Richard, duke of York, were locked away in the Tower of London. It is presumed that they were murdered and that skeletons found in the tower in 1647 were those of the boys.

The disappearance of some 100 settlers from their colony on Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina) in the late 1580s remains an unsolved—and still compelling—mystery embedded in American history. The colony was established by Gov. John White, who promptly returned to England to fetch supplies. By the time he returned in 1590, the settlement and all its people were gone. The only trace was the word “CROATOAN” carved on a fencepost and “CRO” on a tree. Croatoan was the name of the Native American tribe that lived on Roanoke as well as the name of present-day Hatteras Island. Several theories arose and archaeological exploration continues, but nothing definitive has surfaced about the settlers’ disappearance.

Solomon Northup’s is a story of tremendous misfortune and resilience. Though he was born a free person in New York about 1808, Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. He was owned by a series of sadistic masters until he was able to find a way to send letters to his family in 1852. His freedom was legally reinstated in 1853, and Northup went on to cowrite a memoir—Twelve Years a Slave—that sold like hotcakes. He became a national celebrity and lectured throughout the country. His kidnappers were eventually indicted, but the charges were dismissed in 1857. Northup then promptly retreated from the public eye. It is likely that he joined the Underground Railroad, but the date and circumstances of his death are unknown.

Ambrose Bierce, a newspaper and short-story writer, was well known for his satirical column “Prattler,” which ran in a number of West Coast papers such as the San Francisco Examiner. He served in and survived the American Civil War (his experiences in which he detailed in his best-known stories) and eventually married and had three children. While he continued as a newspaper columnist, he also wrote many novels and short stories as well as The Devil’s Dictionary, a book of social commentary disguised as a collection of dark and witty definitions for well-known terms. He left the U.S. for Mexico about 1913, during the Mexican Revolution. After December of that year there remains no record of him, though numerous theories have been put forth over the past century.

George Mallory was a schoolmaster in England and a seasoned mountain climber. He had trained on the most-difficult routes up the Alps before being recruited for the first major climbing expedition up Mount Everest in 1921. That first attempt was thwarted by high winds, and a second attempt in 1922—which also failed—involved an avalanche and the death of seven porters. Finally in 1924 he set out on a third expedition. Mallory and another climber, Andrew Irvine, went off to attempt the summit on June 8 and were never seen again. They left the world to wonder what had taken place on that fateful day, including whether before disappearing they had become the first climbers ever to reach the summit. Irvine’s axe was found in 1933 at about 27,750 feet (8,460 meters), which seemed to indicate that they did not make it to the top and likely fell to their deaths. Seventy-five years later, in 1999, an expedition discovered Mallory’s body at 26,760 feet (8,160 meters). As of 2015, Irvine’s remains had not been found, and the exact circumstances of their deaths are as yet undetermined.

Wallace D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam (NOI), rose from being a silk peddler on the streets of Detroit to become a preacher and self-identified savior of the African American people. He had a short but influential stint as the outspoken NOI leader in Detroit from 1930 to 1934, with a number of run-ins with the law during that time. Very little documented biographical information about him exists, though several stories about his origins circulate. He claimed to have been born in Mecca, though the FBI’s findings suggest that he was born in New Zealand and led the life of a minor scofflaw once he arrived in the United States. He disappeared in 1934. Often referred to as “the Prophet” and thought to be the incarnation of Allah by followers of the Nation of Islam, he is celebrated each year on February 26, Saviors’ Day.

Raoul Wallenberg was from a well-connected and upstanding Swedish family. He’d been a star student of architecture and became a successful businessman. Because of his family and business connections throughout Europe, he was recruited as a special envoy for a major rescue operation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Between March and June of that year, the Nazis had deported about 400,000 Jews, most of them to the Auschwitz death camp. Wallenberg distributed documents to the Jews of Budapest and convinced Hungarian authorities to let the documentation (called a Schutz-Pass) function as passports. Those passports saved some 15,000 Jews from certain death. In January of 1945 Wallenberg was arrested for unknown reasons by Soviet troops, who later claimed he died of a heart attack in 1947, but no one knows for sure if he died then or what happened to him after his arrest.

Savvy, smart, and no-nonsense, Jimmy Hoffa started out as a union organizer and by 1958 had climbed the ranks to become the president of the Teamsters, the largest labor union in the United States. It was widely known that many of the Teamsters’ dealings were deeply corrupt. He was avidly pursued by federal authorities, whom he managed to evade until 1964, when he was sent to federal prison for jury tampering and a host of other crimes. Even from behind bars, it seemed that Hoffa succeeded in controlling Teamster activities. He was released in 1971 under the condition that he would steer clear of union activities. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to a restaurant in suburban Detroit for what is thought to have been a meeting with Teamster officials. He was never seen again and was legally declared “presumed dead” in 1982. His remains one of the most-compelling mysterious disappearances of the 20th century.