Where Did They Go?

 Charles R. Romer and his wife, Catherine, both retired, spent the winter of 1980 in Florida. On April 8, they started back to their home in Scarsdale, New York. That afternoon, they checked into a motel in Brunswick City, Georgia.

Later that afternoon, a highway patrolman saw their black Lincoln on the road. Were they headed somewhere for dinner? To go shopping? Wherever they were headed, they never arrived.

Three days after they checked into the motel, the management realized the room hadn’t been slept in and notified the authorities. The police, of course, were baffled. They guessed that the Romers had gone off the road into a swamp or had been robbed and killed.

The only clues were the brief glimpse of their car n the highway by the cop and their luggage, left behind in their room.

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It’s one thing when a Boeing 777 or a famous person – Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, Michael Rockfeller, to name several- disappear. But there’s something strangely troubling about the disappearance of ordinary people who are simply going about their lives.  Here’s a list of people who have vanished without trace since the 1800s.

All of these disappearances beg the question: Where did all these people go? What happened to them?

And where do mass disappearances fit into this? Among the most mysterious are the  disappearance of the citizens of Roanoke Colony, last seen alive in 1587, and of 30 men, women and children who vanished from an Inuit fishing village in the first half of the  20^th century.

After Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared, CNN concluded that the event may be the greatest mystery of all time. They followed this pronouncement with a roundup of  other enigmas. It’s an intriguing list.

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Happy Easter to everyone!