The Paris Exposition of 1889

The Vanishing Hotel Room (also known as The Vanishing Lady) is an urban legend which claims that during an international exposition in Paris, a daughter left her mother in a hotel room and when she came back, her mother was gone and the hotel staff claimed to have no knowledge of the missing woman.

Legend

According to the legend, a woman was taken ill while traveling in a foreign country with her daughter. While she lay down in her hotel bed, the daughter made a trip across town to pick up a needed prescription. When she returned, she found that both her mother and the hotel room that they stayed in had disappeared. No one remembered having seen either her or her mother.

Origin

According to the Quote Investigator website and urban legend researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake, the author of the earliest known instance of the legend was Nancy Vincent McClelland who wrote a version in an article titled A Mystery of the Paris Exposition in The Philadelphia Inquirer dated November 14, 1897. In this version, at the end, the daughter is told the truth by a French policeman about her mother's death from disease. The Quote Investigator and Taylor-Blake also found a version of the legend in the Detroit Free Press in 1898 titled Porch Tales: The Disappearance of Mrs. Kneeb, which designated Kenneth Herford as the author. It is theorised that "Kenneth Herford" was a pen name for Karl Harriman.^[1]

Variations

There are multiple variations of the Vanishing Hotel Room story. Usually, the story is set in Paris, France, during the Paris Exposition of 1889 or 1900 where, most commonly, a woman with her daughter have just traveled. Sometimes, the women in the story aren't related; they're traveling companions of roughly the same age, and on rare occasions, both the searcher and the one sought after are male. In some versions, the daughter gets sent to a mental hospital where she spends rest of her days.^[2]

In a version printed in the July 6 and July 13, 1929 issue of The New Yorker written by Alexander Woolcott and included in his book While Rome Burns (1934)^[3] it was revealed that the mother had died of the Black Plague and that the hotel management and the police had kept her death a secret so as to avoid causing mass panic and hysteria throughout the city, and so that visitors to the city would not leave, thus ensuring and maintaining the hotel's large financial income.^[4]

In popular culture

The story inspired several novels, including The End of Her Honeymoon by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1913), She Who Was Helena Cass by Lawrence Rising (1920), The Vanishing Of Mrs. Fraser by Basil Thomson (1925), The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway (1926) and films such as The Midnight Warning (1932), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Covered Tracks (1938), So Long at the Fair (1950), Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Into Thin Air/The Lady Vanishes (1955), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), The Forgotten (2004), and Flightplan (2005).^[3][2] It was also featured as a "true story" in a 2002 episode of the Fox television program Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.^[5]

There is also an adaptation of it in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book trilogy titled Maybe You Will Remember from Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones (1991) and in the short story Hotel Splendide by Australian author Kerry Greenwood, written for a January issue of Women's Weekly magazine. It features one of Greenwood's most notable characters, the wealthy aristocrat and private investigator Phryne Fisher.^[3]

Similar themes have been explored in, but are not officially credited to, the novel (2006) and TV series (2023) Therapy by German author Sebastian Fitzek.

References