This Article Originally Ran On Blumhouse.com
As we get older, even with the modern technological marvels of cell phones, email, Twitter, and Facebook, we sometimes lose contact with people. Old work friends. Neighbors who moved away. That cute guy or girl who worked at Krogers and was always nice when you tried to remember your number code for your Kroger Rewards.
These people, in some sense, vanish. One day they are there, the next, they are gone. We’ll think about them from time to time, wondering how they’re doing, hoping they’re happy, or maybe hoping they are suffering depending on how mean they, or you, are. These people are, as far as our minds are concerned, in the ether, never to be seen again. They have vanished, not literally, but figuratively. Oliver Larch, on the other hand, literally vanished.
As the story goes, on snowy Christmas Eve in 1890, the Larch family was throwing a party. As their guests laughed and drank, Oliver put on his coat, grabbed two water buckets, and headed to the well outside. A few moments later, the party people heard Oliver screaming in terror.
When they ran outside, everyone saw the same thing - Oliver’s footprints in the snow stopping a few feet away from the well, a single water bucket laying on the ground with no signs of a struggle. The revelers called out to Oliver and searched around, but found nothing. Then the screams started again.
According to witnesses, Oliver’s voice could be heard calling for help, moaning in pain, and crying in fear. The sound of Oliver continued for five minutes, sometimes sounding so close that one would think Oliver was standing right next to them, then suddenly it would be muffled, as if he were hundreds of feet away. Still, what he was crying out was clear as the moonlit sky above them…
“Help me. Please help me. It’s got me.”
Oliver Larch, and the water bucket, were never seen again.
The disappearance of Oliver Larch - who is sometimes credited as Lerch - went mostly unreported in the papers. Afterall, he was just one man. The same could not be said for the Royal Norfolk Regiment, a British battalion that vanished during World War One.
At the end of the war, as peace treaties were signed and prisoners of war were freed, England called up Turkey and kindly asked for an ETA on when the Royal Norfolk Regiment would be returned. Turkey, a bit confused, claimed that they didn’t have the Royal Norfolk Regiment. England disagreed, but they had no way to prove otherwise.
In reality, only three people knew what happened to the Royal Norfolk Regiment. Three soldiers from New Zealand claimed to see the Royal Norfolk Regiment casually walk up a hill that had a low hanging cloud settled over it. One by one, the members of the battalion reached the top of the hill and were enveloped by the cloud. When the last soldier of the Royal Norfolk Regiment entered into the cloud, the cloud rose up and dispersed. The soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment were gone.
The Royal Norfolk Regiment wouldn’t be the only soldiers to vanish mysteriously.
James Tedford served in the military during World War Two. A Vermont native, he couldn’t wait to get home to his wife Pearl. Peal, all of 28, was everything to the 56 year old James, and for too long the war had kept them apart. When James arrived home to Fletcher Town, he entered the home he and Pearl rented, but she was not there. James would never get his reunion with his wife Pearl. She was last seen walking to the local Amoco. Devastated by the vanishing of his wife, James Tedford moved into the Veteran’s Home in Bennington, Vermont. From time to time, James would leave Bennington for a spell to visit friends and family, but for the most part, the man kept to himself, thoughts of Pearl front and center in his mind.
On December 1st, 1949, James Tedford was traveling by bus from St. Albans back home to Bennington. He got on a bus, and waved goodbye to some family as his eight hour journey started, traveling through the Green Mountain National Forest non stop. James, his bags securely placed on the luggage rack, closed his eyes and fell asleep.
When the bus arrived in Bennington, James Tedford was gone. The fourteen other passengers all testified to seeing Tedford sleeping on the bus and his bags were still on the luggage rack, but Tedford himself was gone. Laying on his seat was a bus schedule.
Unlike James or the Royal Norfolk Regiment, there is an answer to what happened to another soldier, Gil Perez.
In 1593, Gil Perez was a member of the Filipino Guardia Civil, working as a palace guard for the Governor General in Manila, Philippines. On October 23, Chinese pirates assassinated the Governor General, suggesting that maybe Gil and his buddies were not all that great at guarding people. There were fears of more attacks, so Gil and the rest of the Spanish military in Manila were pulling double time. Soldiers watched the streets of Manila, looking for any hint of Chinese pirates. Gil’s eyes grew weary, and he leaned against a wall, closing his peepers for just a second.
When he opened his eyes, Gil didn’t recognize where he was. I suppose Gil was an easy going guy, because he decided to just keep guarding the area he now found himself in. He guarded the area until a Mexican guard came across him. It was then that Gil learned he was in Mexico City.
Gil was taken to the higher authorities where he told them of the assassination of the Governor General in Manila. The Mexican authorities listened to Gil’s story of how he was in Manila, blinked, and was suddenly in Mexico City and they promptly locked him up. As far they could figure, Gil was either a deserter, insane, or in league with the Devil. Whichever one it was, the heads of Mexico City didn’t want this dude walking their streets.
A month later, a ship from Manila arrived in Mexico City bringing news of the death of the Governor General. The Mexican authorities asked the Filipino soldiers on the ship if they knew of Gil Perez. Indeed they did. Gil had become a semi-celebrity after he went missing. Mexico handed Gil back over to his peeps, everyone agreeing to just try and forget that this guy somehow traveled nearly nine thousand miles in the blink of an eye.
Mexico also plays into the odd story of Dr. Geraldo Vidal and his wife Raffo. Leaving the city of Chascomus late one night after a family gathering in 1968, Dr. Vidal and his wife decided to stop over in Maipu to visit some friends before heading back to Buenos Aires. They hopped on national highway No. 2 and drove into the night.
As the Vidal’s drove, a thick fog formed around their car. According to Dr. Vidal, the next thing they knew, they were parked in the side of a desolate road in Mexico, some 4000 miles away from their intended destination. The paint on the car had been scorched off and their watches had both stopped at the same time. The Vidal’s car still worked despite the exterior damage, and they drove to the first town they could find. It was then that the Vidals learned that two day had passed since they left Chascomus for Maipu.
Did the Vidals teleport? It doesn’t fit with the same format of teleportation as Gil Perez, who traveled instantaneously, but it could lead to a theory of what happened to James Tedford, Oliver Larch, and the Royal Norfolk Regiment - what if these people did not magically vanish, what if they teleported not only through space, but through time. That is what Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain claimed happened to them.
In 1886, Charlotte Moberly was principal of a hall of residence for young women at St. Hugh's College in Oxford. The work of principal appeared to be too much for Charlotte, so she decided to hire an assistant, Eleanor Jourdain, the author of several textbooks used at St. Hugh’s College. Along with working together, Moberly and Jourdain became fast friends and would often travel together during their vacations. It was during one such travel that their lives were changed forever.
On August 10, 1901, Moberly and Jourdain traveled by train to Versailles and checked out the local palace, which left them cold. Wanting to see something a little more exciting, the women headed to Petit Trianon, trusting their guidebook to show them the way. The guidebook wasn’t all that helpful, and when the women were supposed to turn onto Allée des Deux Trianons, they instead entered an alleyway.
Our heroines became nervous. They would later claim that the air around them seemed to become oppressive. Moberly recalled watching a woman beating a white cloth clean, and Jourdain claimed to have seen a deserted farm house. Moberly and Jordain came across men who they believed to be palace gardeners. They asked the men, who were dressed in long greyish green coats with small tri-cornered hats for directions, and were told to keep going straight. As Moberly spoke with the men, Jourdain watched a woman and a little girl in the doorway of a cottage. The woman was holding out a jug to the girl, but neither of them were moving. Jourdain would explain it as tableau vivant, a living picture. Moberly had no memory of the cottage, but wrote that "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees."
Moberly and Jourdain continued their journey, finding themselves at the edge of some woods near the Temple de l'Amour. They saw a man dressed in a dark cloak with a large sombrero style hat sitting at a garden kiosk. The man turned to the women, his face scarred by smallpox, and his large, dark eyes gave a definitive feel that the man was evil. The man stood and walked over to the two women, towering over them.
The dark man showed Moberly and Jourdain the way to the Petit Trianon, leaving them at a bridge. The women crossed the bridge and entered into the gardens in front of the palace. There, Moberly saw a woman sitting on the grass sketching. The woman, wearing a rather old fashioned white dress with a white hat holding back her white hair, looked up and looked at Mobberly. Moberly would write that the woman was beautiful, but her scowl suggested she was no all that pleasant. While Jourdain did not see this woman, Moberly was convinced that it was Marie Antoinette.
When Moberly and Jourdain left the garden, they found themselves mixed in with another group of tourists. It would be a week before the women discussed what they saw, and three months before they each shared their own written memories on it. Moberly and Jourdain returned to Versailles hoping to retrace their steps, but were unable to find the alleyway again, nor could they find the bridge they crossed to enter the garden.
As they further researched their experience, Jourdain found that August 10, 1792, one hundred and nine years to the day that the two women had their odd adventure, the Tuileries palace in Paris was besieged. Six weeks after that, the French monarchy itself was abolished and Marie Antoinette was killed. During her research, Jourdain came across a painting of Comte de Vaudreuil, who shared an eerie resemblance with the dark man that lead the women to the bridge.
Moberly and Jourdain would publish their story in 1911. Their book, AN ADVENTURE, was released under the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book was, understandably, considered to be a hoax at the time. One reason for the story being written off as fiction was that the bridge the women claimed to have crossed never existed. At least, it didn’t until an old map of the Trianon gardens was found showing a bridge. Why this bridge only appears on a single map is still unknown.
Could this be what happened to Oliver Larch, James Tedford, and the Royal Norfolk Regiment? Could they have fallen into a time slip, but were unable to find their way back out? If so, did they travel to the past like Moberly and Jourdain? Or is it possible that Larch could have traveled into the future? Could we all wake up to the news of a World War One battalion suddenly showing up in Mexico one of these days?
Maybe Larch, Tedford, and the Royal Norfolk Regiment are gone forever. Maybe their disappearances aren’t as strange as one may think. Maybe, like so many poor souls who disappear every year around the world, these people all have very sad stories that are less para and more normal. Whatever the case may be, I do hope that somehow, somewhere, James and Pearl Tedford were able to reunite.