In April 1909, thirteen-year-old Adele Boas vanished from the streets of Manhattan. She came from a prosperous Jewish American family with roots in Central Europe, and her disappearance briefly made her one of the most talked-about young women in the United States. Her father, Arthur Boas, was a successful figure in the New York textile industry, and her cousin Emil had risen to become general manager of the Hamburg America steamship company, one of the largest transport firms in the world. The family name commanded respect in New York high society, even if it did not carry the weight of the Astors or Vanderbilts.
Despite her privileged upbringing, Adele chafed under her parents’ strict oversight. She was escorted to and from school every day and felt smothered by their attention. That resentment came to a head on Friday, April 23, 1909, when she went shopping with her mother. Midway through the errands, Adele complained of tiredness and asked to return home.
Her mother agreed and sent her off with precise directions, even though the house was only a few streets away. When Blanche Boas returned home at six that evening, her daughter was nowhere to be found. Adele did not come back that night. The next morning, the family reported her missing.
Arthur Boas immediately offered a one-thousand-dollar reward for information, a sum he soon raised to five thousand. The Pinkerton detective agency was hired to investigate. Major New York and East Coast newspapers carried the story, and speculation ran wild. Some theories blamed the new automobile traffic, suggesting Adele had been struck by a car.
Others assumed she had been kidnapped or killed. One rumor claimed she was mentally unstable and had been seen sleeping rough in Morningside Park. None of these theories were based on any evidence. Adele was gone for three days.
Then, on April 26, two residents of Boston contacted the police with information. A man named Adolf Hether confirmed that Adele was in New England, roughly two hundred miles north of New York, and was already on a train heading back to Manhattan. That afternoon, she was met at Grand Central Station by her uncle Emil and the investigators he had hired. She appeared healthy and composed.
The family physician examined her and declared her in perfect health. Newspapers reported that Adele Boas had been found alive and well. But the questions remained: where had she been, and why had she gone to Boston? The answer emerged in the hours that followed.
Adele explained that she had been upset about her parents’ overbearing approach to her schooling and her life in general. Her schoolmates teased her about being chaperoned everywhere by a maid, and she had decided to run away for a week or two to prove she could look after herself. On the day she disappeared, her mother had given her such painstaking instructions for walking the few blocks home that Adele felt insulted, as though she were a small child who did not know her own neighborhood. She did go home, but only long enough to collect her savings, about fourteen dollars.
Then she took a cross-town car to Grand Central Station and boarded a train to Boston, a city she had heard much about and could reach directly. Once there, she rented a room in a boarding house, gave a false name, and found work as a waitress at a restaurant in the Charlestown district, where she worked for a woman named Elizabeth Upton. Her plan fell apart on her first shift when she cut her finger slicing bread. Deciding she did not like the job, she set off back to New York on April 26.
During the journey, police boarded the train looking for her. When questioned, Adele lied, claiming her name was Freda Dalton and putting on a fake German accent, pretending she barely understood English. The ruse worked; the police reported that the missing girl was not on the train. About an hour before arriving in New York, however, a detective identified her and eventually persuaded her to admit who she was.
When asked why she had lied about her identity, she said she did not want to go to jail, and that she was afraid someone might claim the five-thousand-dollar reward her father was offering. By the end of her strange three-day odyssey, Adele had one dollar left and was glad to be home. Her story became an early template for later cases of women vanishing under mysterious circumstances and drawing intense media attention, though few of those stories ended as happily. Adele Boas’s tale was one of several bizarre episodes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that reveal how fear, privilege, and the hunger for sensation could shape public imagination.
A far stranger fate awaited Hannah Beswick, a wealthy woman from Manchester whose fear of being buried alive led her to become the subject of an unusual medical arrangement. Hannah Beswick was born in 1688 to a wealthy business family in the cloth trade. When her father died in 1706, she inherited a substantial fortune, worth millions in today’s money, and used it to purchase the manor of Birch Hall near Manchester. She lived an unremarkable life there until her death in February 1758, but her eccentricity was notable.
In 1745, when the Jacobite rebellion threatened to spread into northern England, she reportedly buried much of her fortune in a panic and never retrieved it or told anyone where it was, leaving treasure hunters searching the area for generations. Her deep fear of being buried alive began with her brother James. In the early 1750s, at his funeral, just as the coffin was about to be sealed and lowered into the ground, a mourner noticed that James appeared to be blinking. A young doctor named Charles White examined him and confirmed that James Beswick was alive.
The coffin was taken back to the house, and James regained full consciousness a few days later. The incident made a lasting impression on his sister. In 1757, Hannah amended her will to leave one hundred pounds to Dr. White, instructing that after her death her body was not to be buried but kept above ground, where he was to perform regular checks to ensure she had not been mistakenly declared dead.
After Hannah died in 1758, White went beyond her request. Rather than simply keeping her body unburied, he chose to mummify it. Turpentine and vital fluids were injected into the corpse’s arteries and veins, organs were removed, and the body was washed in spirits before being packed with resin and camphor. Finally, it was anointed with oils and placed in a sarcophagus filled with plaster of Paris.
Why White chose this method is not entirely clear, though it was likely tied to a legal dispute over the one hundred pounds he had been bequeathed. He may have believed he needed to prove he had preserved her body in some way. He may also have been driven by scientific curiosity; he was already a pioneer in surgery, obstetrics, and orthopedics. For decades, the Manchester Mummy, as she became known, was displayed in a large clock case in White’s home.
People paid a small fee to see her. After White’s death in 1813, the body passed to a colleague and eventually to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society, where she became a popular attraction in the mid-nineteenth century. Her remains were finally buried on July 22, 1868, one hundred and ten years after her death, after a legal case concluded that she was certainly dead and her desire not to be buried no longer applied. She was laid to rest in an old cemetery in Manchester.
The fear of premature burial that drove Hannah Beswick’s strange request was not unfounded. In early modern Europe, medical knowledge was limited, and people were sometimes declared dead while still alive. Scholars of the subject estimate that thousands were buried alive across Europe every year. By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, advances in medicine and training for doctors reduced the phenomenon dramatically, though rare cases still surfaced from time to time.
Even stranger tales emerged from the same era. In 1837, a creature known as Spring Heeled Jack terrorized London. The first reported attack came in late autumn, when a girl named Mary Stevens was walking through Clapham Common on her way to work. A figure with claws and an unnaturally cold touch sprang from an alley and assaulted her before fleeing.
Over the following weeks, more sightings followed across the city. Witnesses described a creature that could leap astonishing distances, jump over nine-foot walls, and appear suddenly in front of moving coaches. In January 1838, the mayor of London published a letter in The Times attempting to reassure the public that the sightings were the work of a prankster, likely a member of the aristocracy playing an elaborate hoax. Attacks continued, including one on eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop, who claimed the figure breathed blue and white flame from his mouth.
By spring, the figure had acquired the name Spring Heeled Jack, with some speculating that springs in his shoes allowed him to make his extraordinary leaps. Sightings declined by the end of 1838, though sporadic reports continued for decades, with the last believed appearance reported in Liverpool in 1904. Theories about his identity ranged from an alien to a demon summoned by occultists to an elaborate nobleman’s bet, with many contemporaries pointing to the Irish peer Henry de la Poer Beresford, Marquess of Waterford, as the likely culprit. None of these theories were ever proven.
Perhaps the most quietly mysterious figure of all was the Old Leatherman, a vagabond who walked a fixed 365-mile circuit between the Connecticut River and the Hudson River for more than thirty years. He appeared in the late 1850s and followed the same route through western Connecticut and eastern New York, taking about thirty-four days to complete each loop. He wore a handmade leather suit weighing about sixty pounds, lived in caves and rock shelters, and rarely spoke. When he did, he used only one-syllable words, grunts, and gestures, though rumors suggested he occasionally spoke French.
Locals grew fond of his punctuality and harmless nature. In some towns, his schedule was so reliable that residents used it to tell time. In 1879, when Connecticut passed a law allowing police to arrest vagrants, ten towns on his route exempted him from it. He survived brutal winters, including the Great Blizzard of 1888, during which he was found nearly frozen and revived at a hospital.
He was diagnosed as sane but emotionally afflicted, and since he had money, he was released to live as he had before. He was found dead on March 24, 1889, in one of his regular shelters near Ossining, New York. He was buried with a headstone identifying him as Jules Bourglay of Lyon, France, though that name was later proven false. When his grave was exhumed in 2011, his remains were not found, only large coffin nails.
A French prayer book and French-style footwear among his possessions suggested he was a French Roman Catholic, but little else was ever confirmed about him, making him a true man of mystery even in death.