There are many stories and instances of people disappearing due to some reason and not being found for a considerable amount of time — some never to be found at all.

The disappearances can be explained most of the times and clues have led to the recovery of the people either alive or dead. But there is a small percentage of disappearances that totally boggle the mind and leave the people concerned wondering as to what might have happened.

We begin with The Lost Colony. In July 1587, a group of pioneers consisting of English men and women with their children set off for the Americas as the second batch of colonists sent to the New World by Sir Walter Raleigh. A month after they arrived at Roanoke Island in North Carolina, the locals and settlers welcomed the first English child born in America, named Virginia Dare. As supplies dwindled, the colony’s governor, John White set for home for fresh rations. He came back after three years to find that the entire colony of settlers had vanished. There was no sign of them. On a wooden post, a name was carved, “Croatan”. It seemed quite strange because the name belonged to a friendly local Native American tribe already known. There were many assumptions to the disappearance of the colony. Had the Croatans killed the entire settlement? Or had the colonists joined and intermarried into the local tribe? But searches of the Island gave no clues, also no English settlers from the colony were found living among the local Croatans. Where did all those people go? There are no definite answers and the incident is still a mystery.

An even stranger disappearance is of an entire village that went missing in an area called Lake Angikuni, 500 miles away from Churchill Canada. The place was inhabited by Eskimos who were said to be quite friendly with visitors and traded with them in furs and also shared their meals with the trappers. Joe LaBelle who was a French-Canadian also visited them many times during a period of 40 years and had established a good friendship with the Eskimos who lived in this otherwise isolated part of Canada.

In November of 1930, Joe stopped at the village once again for a visit. He was not greeted by the usual barking sounds of the dogs. He walked around and found no one there. He searched the entire place for an hour but found not a single person. To add to the mystery, pots of food had been sitting on the fires but had become cold. A needle was still in a cloth as if in the process of being stitched by some woman. The kayaks were still there being constantly battered by the winds. The dogs that were tied had died of starvation. Moreover, a grave had been dug and the body removed in a way not done according to Eskimo practice. Investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police drew a blank. It seemed these people had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

If this is not bizarre enough, what follows is indeed a baffling incident to say the least — the reason being that it happened in front of people who were as clueless as the people who just came to know later.

In the year 1815, a prisoner in a Prussian, (German region) prison in Weichselmunde, was being taken in the yard, chained in line with all the other prisoners. His name was Diderici, who had been a valet and was imprisoned because he had posed as his master who had died many years earlier. While walking with the other prisoners, their chains clanking as they walked, Diderici started fading slowly in front of the other inmates. He turned completely transparent and disappeared before the very eyes of everyone. His chains and shackles fell down. He had vanished actually into thin air. This account has been taken from a book by Robert Nash, titled, From Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present.

If you think this stuff is getting a bit too much to be true, what would you say to an entire lake disappearing overnight? Yes, overnight! A lake in Chile vanished leaving a 30-metre huge crater, dry soil and icebergs, which simply — if we can call the whole incident simple — is that all the water had gone from a five-mile huge lake. Nothing seemed odd or strange about the lake in Patagonia, Chile in March 2007.

The strange part was that the icebergs were intact. Geologists state that the reason sometimes for this sort of an occurrence is volcanic activity but there had been none. While investigations continue, one thing is for certain — truth is definitely stranger than fiction!