Do you know anyone who did the "I'm just going to the shop to buy a paper" thing and who then disappeared forever?

[AliceAir]

Another thread on here reminded me of a girl I was in school with years ago. Her mother apparently popped to the shop to but some potatoes and never came home, and was never heard of again.

I'm not meaning people who have met with foul play but people who have decided to disappear and then done so.

My paternal GFs dad did this in the 1940s. They never heard from him again.

@JemimaRacktool

Just after the war an uncle of my DMums was a wrong un and had been involved in the black market and killed a man in a fight in London.

Shortly after, he was seen to fall in the Thames and disappeared forever.

My Dad knew this man well and said he was powerfully built and a champion swimmer and it was all likely staged and he would have got on a ship and gone abroad to avaoid charges.

That sounds like a wonderful urban myth

My grandfather. He didn't exactly pop to the shops - he was in Italy at the time, at the end of WW2. But he just didn't come home for several years, for no reason: he wasn't injured or a prisoner of war, and he had been demobbed. He just didn't come back. No one knows why or WTF he was doing. Not surprisingly my grandparents divorced a few years later.

All his children were quite fucked up by the whole thing.

So sad reading all these stories. Sorry for all the posters who have experienced this in any way x

First thought - how cruel to families.
Second thought - how bad was life to make them run?

My grandfather's brother, born 1902, got a woman pregnant and disappeared. Turns out he'd gone to Canada. Was 'missing' for years until in WW2 he was stationed in the UK and went back to look at his home town. Wouldn't have contacted family except that a neighbour spotted him, had a chat, told him his parents were still at the old address. His mother had refused to leave, in case he came home. Persuaded Uncle Bill to go and say hello to his mother. I met the son whose mum he abandoned, when he traced my grandad.

My grandma's sister's husband disappeared, leaving her with a child and taking in washing to support herself. He went to the army.

Someone I knew got on a train and kept going until he found work, across several countries and eventually to the UK. He was avoiding certain people, so he said.

These are such sad stories. I cannot imagine the pain of any loved one being missing, but the thought of not knowing where my children are, or if they are safe makes me feel unable to breathe.

My friend's dad didn't disappear exactly, but he did abruptly move in with the next door neighbour (with whom he was having an affair) with his wife and 4 kids left in the next house. He then left the NDN and has lived a addict/vagrant life since. He was a university professor and a lovely man when I knew him growing up. Now he occasionally phones/messages my friend to advise that he's had enough and really is going to commit suicide this time. She tries to extract his location and informs the police, and then it's silence for another 6 months until he does it again. It's awful.

At primary school a friend's mother suddenly left, leaving behind five children, aged around 4 - 16. The 16 year old sister brought them up, and their dad worked shifts - they all went off the rails in one way or another. Turned out the mother had gone off with a colleague. Decades later she turned up, having not even sent a birthday card to her children throughout her absence, total silence.

A friend's brother in law, single, aged around 30, left his office on a Friday lunch time and has never been seen since. He was close to his family and still lived at home. His bank cards etc have never been used. It's now 25 years and his parents have since died. All very sad.

My best friend, when I lived in Germany, had a twin sister who disappeared when she was in her early twenties, leaving behind a husband and two young daughters. No word for years and years and years. A few decades later my friend saw her running a market stall in the town where they lived. She did not make contact. How awful for those little girls!

There’s a current podcast called ‘The Missing’ which looks at cases a bit like this. Not exactly the same but it covers a lot of the questions people have asked here which some might find interesting. Hosted by Pandora Sykes.

My DH s stepbrother ( who I mentioned on the other thread ) had a history of MH issues and alcoholism. We had placed death notices for his dead in all the local papers of areas he had previously lived in, we can only assume that he saw one and that is what prompted him to contact us through the police. He has made his decision and Iwish the best for him.

@JovialNickname whatever has caused you to do this I am not going to ask, though at least you have spared your relatives any anguish at thinking you are dead by relaying a message to them.

My DH tells the story of a neighbour who after years of being taken for granted by her husband and numerous kids she very quietly and calmly one afternoon packed her case, called a taxi and walked out of the house with all of her family open mouthed, the neighbours and their kids open mouthed. Got into the taxi and left for good!

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

My grandfather. He didn't exactly pop to the shops - he was in Italy at the time, at the end of WW2. But he just didn't come home for several years, for no reason: he wasn't injured or a prisoner of war, and he had been demobbed. He just didn't come back. No one knows why or WTF he was doing. Not surprisingly my grandparents divorced a few years later.

All his children were quite fucked up by the whole thing.

I imagine there were lots of people in Italy (and elsewhere) at the end of WW2 who weren't able to return to normal life

I commented on the other thread. My father disappeared in the 80s on a work trip, he was on the other side of the world on a small island. Checked into a hotel, visited some friends, was seen around the hotel then didn't check out when he was supposed to. Passport, bank cards, cash, wedding ring all in the room, never seen since. Most likely theory is that he went swimming and drowned, but there is always a possibility he'd just had enough and buggered off, I'm not convinced from childhood memories that my parents marriage was always a happy one and he was a bit of a free spirit by all accounts. I do wonder occasionally if he's happily living life somewhere else.

I had a landlady whose husband went to work in Africa for a summer then sent a postcard saying 'brown-skinned women are better' and left her alone with two small kids.

That sounds like a wonderful urban myth

No I asked my DDad who this man was when I saw a photo of him. Dad told me that he had more fiddles going than the symphonia and it all caught up with him. Black market petrol during the war to selling army stuff out of the back of a stolen truck.

This man never learned to read or write, like all his brothers and sisters but they were all intelligent. One of his brothers is still alive.

Dad kept a tiny newspaper clipping about the fight and 'Uncle Ed' running off and disappearing into the river.

Dad said this man never did a thing unless it was thought out and was to benefit himself and there's no way he would have drowned.

No body was ever found. Dad was confident he went to South America on a ship leaving that night and it was all planned.

There has been SEVERAL times I have gone to walk out the door with the mindset of never coming back and that they would be better without me

This is the great horror of depression; it drags you down and makes you feel that you are also ruining other people's lives, and they would be better off if you didn't exist. I'm sure that for many people this can be the reason they walk away, or eventuate their own lives.

My grandfather did, when he was a young man. He found out accidentally that he had been “adopted” (in an unofficial way not legally) within his family, and that his mother wasn't his birth mother instead another relative was. The relative had given him to his parents to raise from birth (it was done in kindness & love - his parents thought they couldn’t have children rather than birth mother abandoning him). He 17 or 18 when he found out, and it hit him very hard.
There was an argument, he ran away, joined the navy and ended up jumping ship in NZ some years later. He met my grandmother, married & had a family.

The worst of it is that his DMum died before he got back in touch with the family (once he met DGran), and she had been trying to find him through the SA. She never stopped looking, but she never knew he was safe & happy (and that he missed her). Poor DGGran and Poor DGrandad, just a sad situation which started off as an act of love and kindness from the other relative.

My experience is similar to @CoodleMoodle. My father had weaved such a tangled web of lies it was easier for him to walk away from us than to continue. This was just weeks before I was due to sit GCSEs too. He just didn’t come home when expected to. Turned out he had another family with much younger children.

There’s obviously a lot more to the story than that but don’t want to go into all the details.

The impact on our lives at the time was huge and can still affect me now almost 30 years later. There are lots of things that have happened in mine and my siblings lives that can be attributed to the impact of that time.

I think it makes it harder to understand once you have children yourself. There were no mental health reasons to factor in and I just cannot understand how you can do that to your children.

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It takes my breath away how many stories like this there are 😔

My grandfather did this. Took all of the takings from the shop he ran with my grandmother, collected the woman - a family friend, mother of 4 teen/preteen kids - he'd been having an affair with and they disappeared for 9 months. Made contact with my dad and they met up but it was a long time before he knew where he lived. My uncle went on to marry his step sister - now that livened things up.

When I was a kid on holiday I befriended two sisters. Their mum went to the airport without them. She'd had a breakdown. I felt so bad for them.

My grandma did this to my dad. Dumped him and his sister in a children’s home under a pretext, and never picked him up. His Dad was working away and only found out much later.
My Dad tracked her down as an adult - she’d done the same thing to her second family.

Happened to me, kind of with two family members.

First, my dad, who was never a good father figure to start with but amongst the very emotionally fucked up things he did was when I was very young and we were legally made to attend weekly Saturday visits with our dad in a social services facility. He attended the first one, showered us with gifts, told us about the flat he had bought and how he was preparing a bedroom for us (me and my younger brother), he then promised he would be back to the next one and we would celebrate my brother's birthday. He never came back. And because we were legally summoned to attend, every Saturday for MONTHS we were made to go to that room in that building and wait on him for at least an hour each time. It was dreadful. He showed up YEARS later on the doorstep with a baby in tow and a new wife, wanting to ''catch up'' conveniently soon after I received a FB request from the daughter of his new wife saying my dad had tried to sexually abuse her sister and was beating up her mom/his new wife (all accusations I know are true). He tried to sue my mom a few days after his visit for custody ( he wanted the money he could get for being recognized as the parent of 3 kids) and then told us he would come back and burn the house down in our sleep. I had him blocked on all social medias but finally got curious enough and unblocked him (though he can't see my page) and it's very clear that on top of being an awful human being he is also very mentally ill, he had found pictures of me and my siblings (including siblings that aren't related to him) and had been posting them on his wall, and was also calling himself the new Christ and his Facebook mostly consists of him writing very cryptic and deranged stuff, mostly related to god (though he is God in his world). And I now regularly check on him, mostly to check if he is dead yet (my hope) and to keep a trail of all his erratic posts so as to use them against him if need be.

The other person is my step-sister, non-biological daughter of my dad but ''adopted'' (his name is on the birth certificate) by my dad at her birth. I was too young to grasp her story and then she disappeared so I don't have the full story, but I am pretty positive my dad did what he did to us to her first, probably left her mom one morning with no explanation and went with my mom and came back a few years later with two kids in tow (me and my brother). Anyhow, we saw each other a few times growing up, at first with my dad and then I think our mom allied to sue my dad so we would see each other then, then we stopped, and it's only when one day I was walking around the city as a teenager (so probably a decade after we last saw each other) and she somehow recognized me. We caught up briefly she explained a bit her side and how hurt she had been by my father and how she had looked for a bio father but he didn't want anything to do with her and how she had just gotten out of a toxic relationship where the man was beating her but she would say '' I fought back." I remember being very impressed by that sudden sister who seemed confident and strong, I only had brothers at the time so I was happy we had rekindled but very shortly after us rekindling, she met a new man, a muslim man, and very quickly she totally changed, her FB went to ''do not accept men'', she ended up selling all of her clothes, started wearing the hijab, then the burka and eventually the niqab and went from feminist to ''women are born to serve men and be good wives and women who don't submit or uncover deserve whatever come their way." It was abnormal. I tried to talk with her about her sudden change (it was in the middle of the ISIS conflict) and she pretty told me to fuck off and that I couldn't possibly understand since I wasn't Muslim (neither was she a few months prior), then one day, all of her social media were gone, and since then all information about her online, even things that are accessible for any citizen such as exam results that I used to be able to access, are gone. It's like she never existed and it's not like her name is Anne Smith. For good or for bad we have the same last name and our last name is unique. If you type it on internet you only find me my brother and my dad (and before her), nobody else. (which is strange in itself and probably require investigating) And now all the old information about her, including archives by the city hall is gone. It's like she never existed.

Like I said she disappeared in the middle of the ISIS conflict (so almost 10 years ago). To this day I continuously wonder if she is alive and with a family living a pious Muslim life, if she realized she was being brainwashed or abused and escaped or if she did the stupid thing of going over to Syria and died there or is currently in a camp somewhere. I still have hope she will come back one day and tell me her story, and if not I intend to investigate once I have enough resources to hire an investigator. unfortunately as her step-sister she barely knew I have very information regarding her and I was heavily relying on our last name making it always easy to find her but I realize it's like she married the guy and changed her name. Very strange and very sad. I don't think about her often, as life continues but when I do I always wonder where she is at and what she is thinking about and if she is not alive anymore, and like I suspect, went to Syria. If before she died, she regretted her decision and wished she had taken a different path. I hope she is okay and I always feel guilty about continuing to live a semi-normal life when nobody knows what happened to her and whether she is alive or dead.