When you're famous, just how easy is it to pull off a disappearing act? While wealth can allow someone more mobility than the average absconder, the disappearance of a well-known celebrity is relatively uncommon, and when it happens, it's big news.
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00:00Other than having gobs of money, being a celebrity can't be easy. Sometimes people
00:04might be out to get you, or you just might want to vanish and stay gone.
00:08Was that what happened to these celebrities? We'll give you the facts and let you decide.
00:12Imagine if Lord Byron, Sid Vicious, and a moody teenager all managed to magically
00:16meld together and create a single person. That person would look and act a whole lot
00:21like Manic Street Preacher's rhythm guitarist and lyricist Richie Edwards,
00:25a mid-1990s British rock idol whom The Guardian called a lightning rod of sorts for adolescent
00:30angst. Edwards was handsome, moody, and dreamy, with a talent for writing lyrics about depression
00:36and an even bigger talent for disturbing publicity stunts. When a journalist with
00:40music magazine NME implied his band's posturing was insincere, Edwards grabbed a razor blade and
00:45carved for real in his own arm. It's not surprising, then, that when he first went
00:50missing in February 1995, it could have just been interpreted as another chapter in his twin
00:55stories of self-destruction and self-promotion. However, it quickly became apparent that the
01:00young poet was gone for good. Edwards had been due to fly to the U.S.
01:04with MSP frontman James Dean Bradfield when he disappeared from his hotel room.
01:09His car was later found abandoned near the Severn Bridge, which connects England and Wales.
01:14Edwards was legally declared dead in 2008, but no body has ever surfaced.
01:19Still, sightings of the musician have reached halfway across the world and all the way to Goa,
01:23India. And, published in 2019, Withdrawn Traces Searching for the Truth About Richie Manick
01:28alleges that Edwards faked his own disappearance. Did he? It's looking more and more unlikely that
01:34we'll ever know. Here's some advice for any disappointed artists out there. Just because
01:38no one likes your stuff now doesn't mean people won't one day be discussing how underrated you
01:42are. Just look at Connie Converse. A 1950s musician, she's now considered the first modern
01:48singer-songwriter, crooning intimate, lyrical ballads suffused with melancholy, long before
01:52anyone was talking about Bob Dylan. Not that her contemporaries were aware how groundbreaking
01:57Converse was. In 1961, she quit music altogether, unknown and convinced she was a failure.
02:03In a happier universe, Converse's tale would now take a redemptive turn. In 2009, a handful of
02:09songs she'd recorded in the kitchen of illustrator and audio engineer Gene Deitch were released by
02:13Deitch's record label. The album How Sad, How Lovely became a cult hit. The New Yorker profiled
02:19her. People realized she'd been amazing. Sadly, Converse saw none of this success because she
02:24disappeared in 1974. 74 was a bad year for Converse. She'd just turned 50, and she felt like
02:30a failure. That summer, she wrote to her friends that she was going to make a fresh start, loaded
02:34up her car, and drove off into legend. No trace of her has ever surfaced. And there's a chance she's
02:40out there, way into her old age, maybe even aware that her talent has finally been discovered.
02:45If Jim Sullivan's name isn't ringing any bells, that's because he's the definition of a cult
02:50artist. A folk rocker who was part of the L.A. scene in the 60s and early 70s, Sullivan cut
02:55just two records before heading to Nashville for what was meant to be his big break. He never made
03:00it. His car was found abandoned in the desert outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His wallets,
03:05clothes, and guitar were all found in a nearby motel. Of Sullivan himself, there was no trace.
03:11As record company Lightning Attic explained in its notes for the re-release of Sullivan's UFO
03:16album, he was a guy who should have been famous. Phil Spector's wrecking crew backed him on his
03:20first record. He had a small part in Easy Rider. Oh, and he was an excellent writer of depressed,
03:25melancholy pop. Had he reached Nashville, he might be up there with the greats.
03:29But Sullivan never made it to Tennessee. As one of his friends said, Sullivan would
03:33have never left his guitar behind if he planned to vanish. Appropriately for a dude who released
03:38a record called UFO, which featured lyrics about driving into the desert and being abducted by
03:43aliens, one of the more prominent theories is that he was, you guessed it, abducted by aliens.
03:48And like, it was just going right across the sky, man. And then,
03:52I mean, it just suddenly, uh, it just changed direction and went, uh, whizzing right off.
03:59Barbara Newhoff Follett was a jazz-age writing prodigy. She published her first novel around
04:04age 13, something that's hard enough to do even when your novel is a self-published fan fiction.
04:09When that novel is The House Without Windows, a complex work that wins rave reviews in The
04:13New York Times, publishing it as a teenager is basically a miracle. Everyone who read the book
04:18agreed Follett was going to be the next great American writer. Follett did indeed vanish,
04:22but we're not quite to that part of the story yet, and that's not the reason you've never
04:27read any of her books. After putting out just two novels, Follett was forced to give up her
04:31writing when her father suddenly took off with a younger woman, leaving Follett and her mother
04:35penniless. By age 16, Follett was working as a typist and fending for herself. Then, in 1939,
04:42the then-26-year-old Follett had an argument with her husband and left the house. She never returned,
04:47and no trace of her was ever found. According to literary magazine Lampin's Quarterly,
04:52her husband barely bothered to look for her, and the press wasn't alerted until 1966.
04:57By then, her disappearance was well into cold-case territory.
05:01If you know Rico Harris, you probably know him for disappearing. The gentle giant vanished one
05:05night in 2014 somewhere along State Route 16 near Sacramento. The resulting manhunt gripped the press,
05:12but it only gripped them because Harris used to be somebody. In 2000, Harris played basketball
05:17for the Harlem Globetrotters, a team so famous that even people who know nothing about sports
05:21recognized the name. Before that, he'd been a top 100 college basketball recruit, but substance
05:26abuse and injury kept him from reaching his full potential, and he wound up out of basketball and
05:31working as a security guard in L.A. The final blow came in 2014, when he was fired for drunkenness.
05:37He left his mom's L.A. house to drive to Seattle and stay with his girlfriend.
05:41His car was later found abandoned outside Sacramento.
05:44A 2017 profile in the L.A. Times recounts the strange details. Harris, who had been diagnosed
05:50with bipolar disorder, was known for disappearing for days on end and not taking his medication.
05:56This time, he was described as out-of-sorts. A backpack and phone that had taken a video
06:00of him were found on the roadside, but when police searched the wilderness using a heat
06:04vision camera, they found nothing. Human footprints were found in sand,
06:08and reports of a man walking down the highway trickled in, but Harris was never found.
06:13The L.A. Times suggests he was probably picked up as a hitchhiker. After that, who knows?
06:18Canadian band Loverboy was one of the biggest rock bands of the early 80s,
06:22with hard-charging hits like Hot Girls in Love and Working for the Weekend,
06:26which is still played on just about every radio station in the world, every Friday afternoon.
06:30Scott Smith was a founding member, staying with the group all the way until his mysterious and
06:34frightening disappearance at sea on November 30, 2000. After playing with his band in Vancouver,
06:40B.C., out of benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, Smith, two friends,
06:44and his girlfriend set out for Mexico on a 37-foot sailboat. As they sailed down the coast
06:49and neared San Francisco, the weather got rough, with the seas throwing up gigantic waves. One of
06:54them, estimated to be about 20 feet high, knocked Smith off the deck of the vessel and into the
06:59water. Coast Guard helicopters arrived within 20 minutes and dispatched two search boats,
07:04which scoured a 133-square-mile area to no avail. When fog and continuing high waves
07:10ended that search, Smith's family paid for a private search by a San Francisco company,
07:14and that, too, proved fruitless. Smith's remains have never surfaced.
07:18Antoine de Saint-Exupery is the guy who wrote The Little Prince, a children's book of such beauty,
07:24such power, and such simplicity, that it's tempting to say no life can be declared complete
07:28until one has read it at least once. He was also a fanatical aviator and a death-defying acrobat
07:34of the skies who once crash-landed in the Libyan desert and spent a week wandering,
07:38lost and on the brink of death, before being miraculously found by a passing Bedouin.
07:43When World War II kicked off, Saint-Exupery was desperate to do his bit for his native France.
07:48After the U.S. entered the war, he volunteered his skills as a pilot. Unfortunately, aircraft
07:53tech had kind of moved on since his heyday, to the extent that the great rider was more
07:57hindrance than help. His second-ever mission for the Allies, he managed to crash into an olive
08:02grove. On his sixth, he wound up landing on Corsica instead of Sardinia, a mistake that
08:06left him stranded for several days. It didn't help that he got drunk before some missions.
08:11In short, he was a liability. All of which may explain what happened on his tenth mission.
08:17On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupery took off on a mission over the Mediterranean. He was never
08:23seen again. Although wreckage from his plane was recovered in 2000, no body has ever been
08:28identified. It's possible he survived the wreck, but it's probably more likely that he drowned.
08:33To me, you will be unique in all the world.
08:38What is essential is invisible to the eye.
08:41Theodosia Burr Alston might not be a household name these days, but let's put it this way.
08:46Imagine the chaos if Ivanka Trump one day just vanished. America got a taste of that back in
08:511813 when Alston, the daughter of former Vice President Aaron Burr, stepped onto a small boat
08:56docked in Georgetown, South Carolina, and was never seen again. At the time, Alston, who was
09:01married to a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, was as infamous as her father. Burr's duel
09:06with Alexander Hamilton had been brought on in part by rumors that the VP and his daughter were
09:11engaging in some hot and heavy incestuous loving. Then, when Burr headed out west to establish his
09:16own breakaway nation, it was Alston who bankrolled his megalomania. When he was tried for treason,
09:21she was there. And when he fled the country, it was with her help. All of this came at a cost.
09:27Alston was known to be desperately unhappy and suffering from chronic ill health after the birth
09:31of her child. After her father left the country and her son died, she slipped into an inescapable
09:36funk. When she vanished, it didn't take long for the public to put two and two together and make
09:41approximately five billion conspiracy theories. The truth is probably more mundane than any of
09:47them, including the one that suggests she ran off to be a pirate. Alston was sailing through
09:52fierce storms on a trip up the coast from South Carolina to New York, and the schooner never
09:56arrived, making it likely that the ship went down in the storm.
10:00In the two decades before rock and roll took hold, big bands ruled the music world,
10:04and there were few as successful and well-known as the operation run by Glenn Miller.
10:08After working as an arranger and trombone player, Miller formed his own band and scored one jazzy,
10:13brassy, era-defining hit after another, racking up 17 top ten hits in 1939 and 31 in 1940.
10:20World War II interrupted Miller's career. He joined the Air Force as an officer,
10:24but still played war bond rallies and for his fellow military men. In 1944,
10:29the 40-year-old Miller took his act and his band to the UK, and on December 15,
10:33he boarded a plane bound for Paris, where he was set to perform for troops.
10:37The small aircraft went up over the English Channel and was never seen again.
10:41According to Colorado Public Radio, conditions were bad that day, and it's possible that
10:45Miller's plane crashed into the English Channel after a malfunction caused by a frozen fuel intake
10:50line.
10:51While not a celebrity in the traditional sense, Jimmy Hoffa was incredibly famous as the president
10:56of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the country's largest and most powerful
11:00labor unions. That made him well-known. The crimes for which he was convicted made him notorious,
11:05as did alleged connections with the world of organized crime.
11:08After a 1965 conviction by a federal jury for taking funds from a trucking company and trying
11:13to funnel a bribe to a juror's son, Hoffa stepped down as Teamsters president, but he still held
11:18sway in the organization. On July 30, 1975, 61-year-old Hoffa called his wife from a suburban
11:25Detroit restaurant to tell her that his lunch appointment with two known organized criminals
11:29was off, because a guy said failed to show up. That's the last time anybody heard anything from
11:34Hoffa. Where did he go? There's the disproven urban legend that mobsters killed him and then
11:39buried him in Giant Stadium in New Jersey. And there's also a theory presented to a grand jury
11:43that Hoffa was the victim of a professional hit because he planned to reveal that the mob had
11:47taken control of the Teamsters and was funneling pension money into various criminal activities.
11:52At this point, it's likely we may never know the truth.
11:56The Incredible String Band was possibly the most countercultural late-60s band in existence,
12:01combining the folky, hippie musical stylings popular in the era with psychedelic rock,
12:05which also resonated with young people at the time. Founded by Robin Williamson and Mike Herron,
12:10they added their respective girlfriends, Christina Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson,
12:14to the group and enjoyed some modest success on the lower runs of the Billboard album chart.
12:18That was thanks in part to the vocal and songwriting contributions of McKechnie,
12:22who bopped around on the fringes of the folk music scene in the 1970s.
12:26A native of Edinburgh, Scotland, McKechnie returned to the area in 1986 to visit relatives,
12:31and not long after, her whereabouts veered into the unknown.
12:34Her sister later suggested that McKechnie was in Sacramento recovering from surgery in 1990,
12:39while others had reported that McKechnie's last known sighting came when she was seen
12:43hitchhiking in the Arizona desert in 1987.
12:46Elenia Carisi was essentially already famous at the moment she was born in 1970,
12:51her father Albano Carisi, a popular Italian singer in the 1960s. In 1970, Albano married
12:57American singer-songwriter Romina Power, the daughter of mid-century movie superstar Tyrone
13:02Power, and they became a highly successful double act in Europe, as well as the parents of two kids,
13:06including Elenia. The younger Carisi made her entertainment debut in the 1984 Italian film
13:12Champagne in Paradiso before appearing in 1989 as a letter-turner on Italians' version
13:17of Wheel of Fortune. Five years after that, the 23-year-old Carisi disappeared.
13:22Taking a sabbatical from the University of London to research a novel,
13:25Carisi visited Florida and the French Quarter of New Orleans. She left her passport and luggage
13:30behind and never returned, and although she was declared dead in 2014, there's been speculation
13:35that her disappearance was purposeful. Vancouver-based musician Forrest Schaub
13:39was a rapper who performed under the stage name D.Y., an ominous abbreviation of his nickname,
13:44Die Young. He broke out big in 2009 and 2010, signed a deal with CP Records,
13:49released the hit club track Passenger, and toured Canada as an opening act for Akon.
13:54He was preparing to drop his second single, That's My Spot, and his first full-length album,
13:58when, in August 2010, the 26-year-old rapper apparently flew from Toronto to Mexico.
14:04A few weeks later, he wished a friend happy birthday on his social media accounts,
14:08and that marked the last time Schaub would make contact with anyone.
14:12Schaub's family contacted the Toronto Police Service, whose search as to the
14:15rapper's whereabouts didn't turn up any viable leads. He remains missing today.
14:20A rising pop star in his native Chechnya and other North Caucasian states,
14:24Zelimbaka performed in Chechnyan and Russian, and recorded popular songs like
14:28Nana and Without You. Then, in 2017, he was set to compete on the Russian version of Star Academy,
14:34a reality show hybrid of American Idol and Big Brother.
14:37Until then, his 25-year-old Baikov traveled to the Chechen capital city of Grozny on August 8,
14:422017. Local LGBT community advocates allege that within hours of arriving in his hometown,
14:48Baikov was arrested and was sent to a government facility where he was tortured and killed,
14:53a victim of the country's efforts to eradicate gay people in Chechnya.
14:57Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly denied that his government had anything to
15:01do with Baikov's disappearance or possible death, suggesting instead that the singer's
15:05own relatives killed him because of his sexuality. Kadyrov said,
15:09"...his family couldn't stop him and then called him back home, and his brothers,
15:13it seems, accused him. Isn't there anyone in the village, any man in the family,
15:16who can admit, we did this? They know full well who it was."
15:20The singer's father, Kouzyan Baikov, denied that this was the case, and told Radio Free Europe,
15:25"...none of his relatives laid a finger on him. There was no reason to lay a finger on him."
15:30Forward guard John Brisker moved up to the NBA in 1972, and he signed with the Seattle Supersonics.
15:35His numbers in the Moore Premier League weren't quite up to snuff with what was expected,
15:39though, and he was cut from the Sonics in 1975. According to the Seattle Times,
15:44he went to Africa in 1978 to start up an import-export venture. On April 11,
15:481978, Brisker called his girlfriend from Uganda. Brisker was not seen or heard from again.
15:54It's possible he met his end in the violent coup that rocked Uganda that year.
15:58His former teammates entertained rumors that he was slaughtered and eaten by dictator Idi Amin,
16:03or that he angered the leader who then shot him. The U.S. State Department could not actually
16:07confirm if Brisker had ever traveled to Africa in the first place, but at any rate, in May 1985,
16:12the King County Medical Examiner in Seattle declared Brisker dead so that his estate could
16:16be settled. In 1939, the NCAA held its first-ever men's college basketball tournament. The University
16:23of Oregon took home the win, and the champion players became minor celebrities, particularly
16:27towering star-center Ergol Slim Wintermute. According to the Boston Globe, the All-American
16:32from Portland could dunk the ball, a novelty at the time. After college, Wintermute worked for
16:37airplane manufacturer Boeing in Seattle, married, and fathered three children.
16:42In October 1977, the 60-year-old Wintermute took a boat out of Seattle-adjacent Lake Washington
16:47with a friend. Sometime after his companion went to sleep on the large boat, he left the craft and
16:52was never seen or heard from again. The athlete's son told police that his father was on medication
16:57for a heart issue and that he might have had a heart attack and fallen into the water.
17:00His remains were never recovered.
17:03In the 1930s, Amelia Earhart was an American hero and one of the most famous people on the planet,
17:08and with good reason. Earhart did amazing things with airplanes when aviation was still in its
17:13infancy, when the idea of humans flying by mechanical means was all a delightful and
17:18inspiring novelty. In 1932, the National Women's History Museum says Earhart became the first
17:23woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, unaccompanied, and she was awarded the Cross
17:27of the French Legion of Honor and the American Distinguished Flying Cross, among other achievements.
17:32In 1937, Earhart set out on a journey that would prove ambitious and mysterious.
17:37She aimed to be the first woman to fly all the way around the globe.
17:40Alongside her navigator, Fred Noonan, Earhart departed Miami on June 1.
17:45By July 2, they'd made it to New Guinea, with plans to hit Howland Island,
17:49a small, uninhabited landmass between Hawaii and Australia.
17:52Sometime en route, Earhart, dealing with poor weather and low fuel,
17:56lost contact with a Coast Guard liaison. Her plane never landed, and it was never discovered.
18:01Nor were Earhart or Noonan, despite a joint Coast Guard-Navy search effort that encompassed
18:05250,000 square miles. Her disappearance remains one of the most enduring mysteries of American history.
18:12In case you weren't listening, I'm not one to shy away from danger.
18:16How about spears? You want to shy away from spears?
18:19Hart Crane was a modernist poet in the mold of T.S. Eliot, writing in a flowery, intellectual,
18:24often tortured style, and he similarly became an emerging and leading figure in early 20th
18:29century American poetry. He was also compared to Walt Whitman, and he earned accolades for
18:33The Bridge, a long, near-epic poem ostensibly about the Brooklyn Bridge, but really about
18:38the idea of America itself. Crane's father, Clarence Arthur Crane, was a wealthy chocolatier
18:43and candy maker, and Crane had a tumultuous relationship with the man. In April 1932,
18:48after the elder Crane had died, the poet had reportedly grown depressed, according to friends
18:53who spoke to The New York Times. After winning a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and relocating
18:57to Mexico to write an epic poem about the 16th century conquest of Mexico, Crane boarded an
19:03ocean liner and was headed back to New York when, around noon one day, he either jumped into the
19:07Atlantic Ocean or fell. Crane, who was 32 at the time and reportedly struggling with his sexuality,
19:13did not leave a note, and his body never surfaced.
19:17In the late 90s and early 2000s, child and teen actor Joe Pickler appeared in a series of small
19:22and supporting roles in a number of movies and TV shows, including Lois & Clark, The New Adventures
19:27of Superman, Touched by an Angel, Varsity Blues, and most notably in two direct-to-video sequels
19:32in the Beethoven family film franchise. And then he disappeared. According to The Charlie Project,
19:37Pickler spoke with a friend at about 4 a.m. on January 5, 2006, in his northeastern Washington
19:42hometown of Bremerton. It was a few weeks before his 19th birthday when he left his apartment
19:47untouched, unlocked, and with the lights on. He took only his wallet and car keys before he
19:52disappeared without telling anyone where he might be going. He left no clues behind aside from some
19:57poems that spoke to his depressed state. Four days later, Pickler's Toyota Corolla was located
20:02in Bremerton, and authorities suspected that Pickler may have jumped to his death off of a
20:06bridge over Port Madison Narrows, but no evidence of that, nor his remains, were ever recovered.
20:12If he were alive in 1910, Dorothy Arnold's name would have been extremely familiar.
20:16The disappearance of the 25-year-old socialite was the news story of the year,
20:20mixing wealth, scandal, and mystery into a single hyperactive news cocktail.
20:24A prominent celeb in New York City, Arnold vanished in the middle of Central Park in
20:28broad daylight. The subsequent case saw her star profile go supernova. The details of the case
20:34read like the pitch for hard-boiled detective drama. Things weren't going smoothly at home.
20:38Arnold had fallen out with her millionaire father, who refused to let her move out of the house.
20:42She kept a secret post office box no one knew about, possibly connected to her writing career.
20:47She was having a fling with a man 20 years her senior, George Griscombe Jr.,
20:51and had recently pawned her jewelry after meeting him. Then, she went shopping one day,
20:55and never returned. Arnold's rich dad was so worried about the bad publicity his disappearing
21:00daughter might bring that he didn't tell the police for months. He had hired his own
21:04gumshoes to investigate, and they turned up squat. There were rumors Arnold had been murdered by
21:09Griscombe, rumors she'd committed suicide, and rumors she'd died in a botched Backstreet abortion.
21:14Over a century later, no one is the wiser.
21:18If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
21:21please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or 8255.
21:30you