The Disappearance of David Lang

In the autumn of 1880, a Tennessee famer named David Lang was walking across his field when he vanished into thin air in front of 5 witnesses.  This story is one of the most recognized and referenced in the "true mystery" genre and has been a mainstay in strange tales anthologies for decades.  But did David Lang actually disappear as the legend states, or is there more to the story?  In this episode of Beyond the Fringe we'll take an in-depth look at the mystery and the legend surrounding the Disappearance of David Lang.

Transcript

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DAVID LANG
Narrated by Jay Nix

Hello and welcome to the pilot episode of "Beyond the Fringe", the a weekly podcast examining some of the world’s greatest, strangest and most baffling mysteries, and then trying to make sense of it all.  

I decided not to waste precious time on my first podcast running down my resume as to what qualifies me to host a show on the paranormal.  On future episodes I'll share with you my life-long enthusiasm for true-to-life mysteries and even share some of my own mysterious experiences as well.  Suffice to say that I wouldn't start a paranormal podcast -- make that a podcast about the paranormal -- without knowing a great deal about the subject.  That said, let's jump right into tonight’s episode.

I chose this story for tonight’s episode for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s a great story.  It’s one of the most recognizable true mysteries in the associated history of the subject.  You’ll find it in anthologies, magazines and it even makes its way into the national media from time to time.  But this story also serves as a cautionary tale about what can happen when we assume too much about the nature and facts in said stories.  So, with that said, let’s jump right into tonight’s episode.

On a small farm just outside of Gallatin, Tennessee lived a farmer by the name of David Lang, his wife, Emily, and their two children: Sarah (age 10) and George (6).  September 23rd, 1880 was a crisp fall day, and David had just returned home from a trip to Nashville where he had purchased seed for his crops, equipment for farm and toys for his children. 

As Sarah and George were playing with their new toys, David made his way across the pasture toward his horses to see how their new shoes were holding up.  Just then, a horse-drawn carriage appeared around a bend in the road and approached the house.  In the box seat was Judge August Peck, a respected member of the community and close family friend.   At the reins was the judge's brother-in-law, Lucas.  Upon seeing the judge’s vehicle, David Lang patted the horse on the hind quarter and watched it trot away before turning and making his way back toward the house.  Emily rose from her seat on the porch and waved as she took the steps down from the porch to the driveway to greet her guests.  David waved as well as he took perhaps four strides in the direction of the house.

But there would not be another step.  Before David Lang’s boot touched the earth again, he would vanish into thin air.  

One moment he was there, the next he was gone.  Emily screamed and raced to the spot where she last saw her husband.  Judge Peck and his brother-in-law leapt from the carriage and rush to meet Emily, who was closely followed by Sarah, George and the housekeeper Sukie, who had been alerted by the screaming and came out of the house to investigate.  When the group reached the spot, there was no trace of David.  There were no trees or buildings to obscure their view or behind which David Lang could have been hidden.  There were no wells, gullies, or sinkholes into which he could have fallen.  The group began to fan out and scoured the field as Lucas ran to a nearby farm for help.  Soon friends and neighbors from across Gallatin joined in the search and by nightfall, the local authorities had joined in as well.  Woods, fields, and farmhouses surrounding the Lang farm for 5 miles in every direction we searched and searched again.  But there was no sign of the missing man.  Not a shred of clothing, not a drop of blood, not a footprint, nothing.

David Lang had completely vanished off the face of the earth.

An intensive search continued for more than a week, but after that the authorities could think of nothing more to be done, nowhere else to look and the neighbors began to turn their attention back to their own farms where there was much work to be done to prepare for the coming winter.  But Emily refused to give up.  Day after day she would walk the field, often alone but occasionally accompanied by the children.  Some days Sukie would keep her company.  Though Emily held on to what hope she could of finding her husband, Sarah, and George, as well as the rest of Gallatin, were beginning to realize David Lang was not coming home.

Unable to work the farm herself, Emily leased the fields to other farmers which allowed the family to stay in the house and a provided them meager but livable income.

Almost a year past before one day Sarah and George ventured out into the field where they had last seen their father.  As they approached the spot where David Lang had vanished, they noticed a circular patch in the field, perhaps 12 feet in diameter, where the grass was faded and brown and nothing else it seemed to grow.  George picked up grasshopper he found chirping on a nearby, but when it jumped out of the child’s hand the insect and landed inside the circle, it immediately fell silent.  It was only after the it leapt out of the circle that the grasshopper resumed chirping.

Then they heard something.  Very faint.  They strained their ears and turned away from the wind.  And they heard it again.  Almost like a whisper.  It grew slightly louder and more distinct.  Soon, they were able to make out a phrase: "Help me... help me".  It was then that they also realized whose voice was uttering the plea.  It was their father. 

The children rushed back to the house and burst into the kitchen where their mother and Sukie were preparing dinner.  Trembling, they breathlessly told their mother what they had heard.  Dropping a bowl that shattered on the floor, Emily ran out of the house toward the field, with Sukie and the children right behind her.  Reaching the spot, Emily held up her hand to command silence.  Then she heard it too, faint and impossibly far away, but it was there.  "Help me...help me".  As Sukie and the children rushed to her side, the faint voice grew fainter still, before fading away altogether.  Emily fell to her knees and began sobbing uncontrollably.  It was the last time anyone ever heard the voice in the field.

Emily would never recover from the traumatic event that took her husband, and she died -- some say of a broken heart – 10 years later.  Of George, little is known.  Even Sarah lost contact with him after his mother passed away, but it was rumored that the died fighting the Spanish-American War around the turn of the century.  Sarah was more fortunate.  She grew into a beautiful young woman, married, and had three children of her own.  However, the disappearance of her father always haunted her.  During the 1920’s, Sarah, like millions of others, became involved in "spiritualism": the practice of attempting to contact spirits of the dead through seances.  She consulted with several mediums and tried repeatedly to summon the spirit of her father, but without success.  On the verge of giving up, Sarah decided one last time to see if she could reach her mother and father in the afterlife, and in the spring of 1928 attended her final seance.  When it was Sarah’s turn to seek the spirits’ assistance, the medium began scribbling furiously on a note pad.  As this "automatic writing" continued, the spiritualist’s hand steadied and she began writing in long, arcing prose.  When the lights came up, Sarah looked to see what had been written on the pad.  The message read "Together now and forever, after many years.  God bless you.".   But what was even more remarkable was that Sarah recognized the handwriting.  It was that of her mother, Emily.

Happy in the knowledge that her mother and father had been reunited in the afterlife, Sarah gave up spiritualism and lived a quiet, normal life.  But in 1929, the writer Stuart Palmer was researching an article about the strange fate of David Lang and tracked Sarah down in order verify the story.  Palmer interviewed Sarah, and she recounted the tale at length, going so far as to affidavit notarized as a testament of her veracity.  Sarah lived another 36 years, passing away peacefully in her sleep in 1965 at the age of 87.

And that, my friends, is the tale of strange disappearance of David Lang.  This story became a bellwether of the true mystery genre that saw its heyday in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.  Stuart Palmer, the writer who interviews Sarah Lang published his story in Fate Magazine in July of 1953.  Since then, it has been told and retold, printed and reprinted in perhaps a dozen collections of similar tales of mystery, and even finding its way into the national media from time to time.  It is the first story of more than 70 included in Frank Edward’s “Stranger Than Science”.  It is a favorite of the paranormal set because there seems to be no explanation other than a supernatural one for David Lang having vanished into thin air.

Theories have ranged from witchcraft to time warps, interdimensional doorways, micro-sized blackholes to everyone’s favorite go-to alien abduction.  And with all things being equal, as they say, one explanation is as good as another.  Right.  Yet there is one explanation that is suspiciously absent from many of these lists of probable causes.  One explanation that never seems to occur to those who read the story for the first time.

And that explanation is that the disappearance of David Lang never happened.

I know what you’re thinking.  Wait just a darned minute.  We have all those witnesses.  We have Sarah Lang’s affidavit.  We have Stuart Palmer’s research and the research of scores of subsequent writers.  Surely all this evidence can’t be made up, right.

Oh, it can.  And it was.

To find out how the “true story” of David Lang’s disappearance originated, we’re going to have to go back almost as far as the purported tale itself.  And while some of these leads might seem to some as skeptical as the story itself, they are traceable and verifiable.

The first mention of this motif – “man disappears in an open field in front of witnesses” – comes from a Joseph Mulholland or Mulhatten, sources disagree on the spelling, and it is said that he invented the story during a lying contest in the latter part of the 19th century.  These lying contests were a popular form of entertainment before the advent of radio where contestants vie to come up with the best tall tale.  These contests are still held to this day, with the World’s Biggest Liar competition held annually in Cumbria, England.  This reference is a sketchy to say the least and is not meant to serve as rebuttal evidence to the David Lang story.  (That’ll come later).  But it does show that the story, like all tall tales has a genesis and this may very well be it.

Now we know with a degree of certainty where the story started.  But how did this obvious lie evolve into one of the greatest true mysteries of the modern age?  We have none other than Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce to thank for that.

Who was Ambrose Bierce, you ask?  Though not well remembered today, Ambrose Bierce was one of the most recognized, prolific and respected writers in America in the late 1800’s.  A civil war veteran, poet and journalist, Bierce was one of the first writers to foray into what has become known “realistic fiction”.  His book, “The Devil’s Dictionary” is considered by many a masterpiece of American literature.  So, what does Bierce have to do with the David Lang story?  That goes back to 1888 when Bierce was a newspaper writer working for the San Francisco Examiner.  On October 14th of that year, three articles appeared in the paper under the collective title line Wither?  One article concerned a British runner who went missing during a road race, another told of a young man who disappeared just outside the door to his home and whose cries for help could be heard fading away into the sky above.  The third article was entitled The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, which told of a plantation owner in Selma, Alabama named Orion Williamson who, in front of multiple witnesses that included a “Dr. Maximillian Hern from Leipzig” (a doctor in this case instead of a judge as in the David Lang story), vanished into thin air while walking on his property.  Thirteen years later these articles appeared in an anthology written by Bierce entitled Can Such Things Be?  It was this book that effectively launched the genre of true horror and mystery fiction; stories designed to make the reader believe that the tales actually happened.  Before this, most writing of the type were tangential and lacked focus.  They would follow the paradigm of “There was once some guy in this place…”.  But Bierce honed his craft as a newspaperman and imbued his storied with names, exact dates, and real locations that convinced his readers they were reliving an event rather than reading fiction.  His writing was compared to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and influenced Crane, Hemingway and other notable writers of the 20th century.  

Whether Bierce knew about or even had access to the Mulholland/Mulhatten original is unknown.  And for all intents and purposes it really doesn’t matter.  What we do know is that Bierce’s articles and short stories containing the “man disappears crossing a field” were in print and widely available at the time Stuart Palmer enters the picture.

Stuart Palmer was author of books and screenplays best known for his character Hildegarde Withers, who was a Miss Marple-esque heroine in many of his mystery novels.  He began his writing career in the late 1920’s and was a frequent contributor to Ghost Stories magazine in which he serialized a novel titled The Gargoyles Throat.  After a successful career as a mystery novelist, he contributed often to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Fate.  It was in the later that, on July 10, 1953 that Stuart Palmer had published an article entitled The Mystery of David Lang.  This is the story that I recounted for you at the beginning of the podcast.  The names, the dates, the places, were all there.  Even the notarized affidavit signed by Sarah Lang was produced to ensure authenticity.  As such, The Mystery of David Lang became and remains to this day one of the linchpins in the true mystery genre.  

It wasn’t until after Palmer’s death in 1968 that questions about the article began to arise.  If Palmer had interviewed Sarah Palmer in 1929, as he claimed, why had he waited 24 years before publishing the story and in Fate of all places?  That’s when an unnamed but enterprising sleuth decided to have a look at the Sarah Lang affidavit.  Upon closer examination, it turns out that Sarah’s handwriting and the handwriting of the notary both were a spot-on match for the handwriting of Stuart Palmer.  He had faked the whole thing, and it took years for the ruse to be discovered.  But by that time, it was too late.  The story was already in wide circulation and had made its way into as many as 100 books and magazines, all professing factual nature of the David Lang mystery.  

In 1976, Robert Forest and Bob Richards decided it was time to put the tale of David Lang to rest once and for all.  Contracted by The Fortean Times, a British magazine along the line of Fate in the US), the two Bobs traveled to Gallatin, Tennessee for find out if there was indeed some kernel of truth to the Palmer story, or if he just made the whole thing up.  They interviewed newspapers and television stations as far away as Nashville, librarians, law enforcement officials, folklorists and just about anyone else they could think of that might shed some light on the myth of the Lang disappearance.  They drew a blank.  Next, they started combing through census records, land deeds, tax receipts, farm sale records, birth and death certificates.  After an exhaustive search, the Bobs came to two inescapable conclusions.

One:  The farm where the disappearance was supposed to have occurred had never been owned by a David Lang.  At the time of the supposed disappearance in September of 1880, the land was owned by Frake family.

And Two:  there was no record of any David Lang ever having lived anywhere near Gallatin, Tennessee.  The only record of a David Lang was a newspaper clipping that mentioned a “Captain David Lang of Florida” who had been visiting family in the area.  And this David Lang never disappeared.  He just returned home to Florida.

The long and the short of it: Palmer made it up.  Okay.  Fine.  Good one.  I lay less blame on Stuart Palmer for the proliferation of the David Lang tale and more on the dozens if not hundreds of other writers who, exercising zero due diligence or attempting any confirmation, just cut and pasted the story into their own works and let the chips fall where they may.  

Now it may seem strange in this day age, where with the click of a mouse we can instantly access billions of bits of information in mere seconds, that it took 23 years after Palmer first published the story for someone to come along and verify its authenticity.  In 1976 when the Bobs conducted their investigation, there was no web, there was no global database, nothing like we take for granted in today’s Google-centric world.  This hunt was conducted by two dedicated researchers utilizing old-school, hard nosed detective work, talking to people face to face, going blind watching miles of microfiche spool by and reading the tiny, faded print of handwritten document, some almost 100 years old.  Taking in that context it’s easy to see why no one bothered tracking down the veracity of Palmers story.  And have to think that’s just what Stuart Palmer was banking on.  

Thus, the mythos of the David Lang mystery is exposed.  It never happened.  It was all a fanciful creation born of a tall tale told by a competitive liar, the faux-factualized newspaper report by one of the premier horror writers of the 19th century and a magazine article written by mystery novelist.  But this should in no way diminish the legend for what it is.  While it may not be a true mystery, when all is said and done it is an entertaining and well-written story that has stood the test of time.  I’m sure if you prowl the bargain bins at Barnes and Noble or the paranormal aisles at any used bookstore, you’re sure to find at least one anthology of true mysteries containing the David Lang story.  

And I guess that should just about wrap it up.  Right?  Well not quite.

There are a couple of interesting coincidences related to the David Lang mystery that I want to share with you.  The first concerns the writer of the original newspaper article “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field”, Ambrose Bierce.  

In 1913, Bierce decided that he wanted to revisit some of his Civil War battle sights and then travel west.  So, at age 71, he departed Washington DC, and traveled through Virginia and North Carolina before arriving at the Shiloh battleground in southwestern Tennessee.  From there he turned south to New Orleans and then traced the Texas/Mexico boarder until he arrived in El Paso.  Beyond that, Bierce’s fate gets sketchy.  He wrote of his intention to ride with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, and apparently did so, accompanying the Mexican army as far as Chihuahua.  But there the trail goes cold.  Bierce was never seen or hear from again.  Rumors persist that he had somehow offended Villa and was lined up against the wall of a cemetery and shot.  Others state that he crossed back into the US where he traveled to the Grand Canyon and committed suicide.  And there is a local legend in Marfa, TX about an elderly gringo being brought to the town hospital, delirious and suffering from pneumonia.  The men who dropped him off (presumably some of Pancho Villa’s men) told the doctor the man was famous for writing a book with “devil” in the title (referring perhaps to “The Devil’s Dictionary”).  But eventually the man died and was buried in an unmarked grave in a nearby churchyard.  Whatever happened to Ambrose Bierce will in all likelihood remain and mystery.  But the fact that there is in fact a disappearance tied to the David Lang myth is an interesting footnote.

Now for the second coincidence.  In 2002, a chamber opera commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater for the Kronos Quartet was first performed at the Long Beach Opera’s Terrace Theater.  The piece was titled The Difficulty of Crossing a Field and is based on a newspaper article written in 1888 by (you guessed it) Ambrose Bierce.  The action follows closely along the lines of the original, wherein Orion Williamson, a plantation owner, disappears while walking across his field.  This in and of itself isn’t what you might call a coincidence.  But what is perhaps among the granddaddy of all coincidences is that the score of the opera was written by a Pulitzer-prize winning composer of The Little Match Girl Passion.  Want to take a wild guess as to the name of the composer?  It was David Lang.

Well, that’s going wrap it up for this week’s podcast.  I hope you’ve enjoyed listing in and hope you’ll tune in again for the next episode where I’ll be talking about another mysterious disappearance.  Spoiler alert: that one actually did happened.  So, until next time, this Jay with Beyond the Fringe reminding you to Keep it Real.