The Vanishing of Owen Parfitt

Owen Parfitt was, by 1768, a frail and nearly immobile man in his seventies. A former soldier, sailor and, according to local tradition, occasional smuggler, he had returned to Shepton Mallet in Somerset to be cared for by his sister Susannah at a small cottage on what is now Charlton Road. For some years before his disappearance he had been almost entirely paralysed by a stroke and required help to be moved from his bed to a chair. On the warm afternoon of 6 June 1768, two women lifted him from his room and settled him on a chair set against the front wall of the cottage so that he could enjoy the summer air. When they returned no more than half an hour later, the chair was empty, the greatcoat that had been laid across his shoulders was folded neatly upon it, and Owen Parfitt was gone.

The Disappearance

The most striking element of the case is the witness density. Shepton Mallet was a busy clothmaking town in 1768, and Charlton Road was a populated thoroughfare. Several haymakers were working in a field directly opposite the cottage and had a clear line of sight to the chair. A stonemason was at work on a wall a short distance up the road. Susannah Parfitt and her companion, a younger woman named Susan Snook, had only briefly stepped inside to attend to chores. None of these people, when questioned afterwards, had seen anyone approach the chair, and none had seen Owen Parfitt move from it. Yet within the space of a few minutes he had vanished.

A storm broke over the town shortly after the discovery, but the alarm was raised at once. The parish constable was summoned, the bells were rung and a search party of several hundred townspeople was organised. Hedgerows were beaten, the river was dragged, outbuildings were searched and the surrounding fields were combed. The search continued for days and was repeated at intervals over the following months. No body was ever found. No clothing, no bone, no scrap of fabric matching what Parfitt had been wearing was ever recovered, and no credible sighting of him alive was ever reported.

Investigations Through Time

The case was unusual enough that it was raised in print on several occasions during the nineteenth century. The Reverend William Phelps included it in his History and Antiquities of Somersetshire in 1839, by which time the disappearance was already a local legend. In 1813, forty-five years after the event, a skeleton was unearthed during the digging of a foundation in the town. For a brief period it was widely believed to be Parfitt’s remains, but a surgeon who examined the bones declared them to be those of a young woman, and the identification was abandoned.

The vanishing was investigated again in the early twentieth century by the writer and antiquary Henry Bagehot, and later by the folklorist Eric Maple, both of whom interviewed townspeople who claimed to preserve oral accounts handed down through their families. The remarkable consistency of the story across these retellings, including the small details of the folded coat and the failure of any of the field workers to see anything, has made the case a touchstone in the literature of unexplained disappearances.

Conventional Explanations

Several rational explanations have been proposed and none entirely satisfies. The most common suggestion is that Parfitt’s paralysis was less complete than represented, that he had recovered sufficient strength to walk away, and that he chose to leave Shepton Mallet for reasons of his own. This is undermined by the consistent testimony of those who cared for him, including the doctor who attended him, that he was incapable of standing. The notion that he was carried off by an old enemy, perhaps from his smuggling days, has also been advanced; but no kidnapper could plausibly have crossed the busy road, lifted a man from a chair, and removed him without being seen by the haymakers or the mason.

The possibility that he wandered off in a confused state and fell into the river or a disused mineshaft has been raised, but the surrounding ground was searched repeatedly and the case for accidental death without a trace is weak. Some commentators have suggested that the family fabricated the story to conceal a death in the household, perhaps to claim a pension or to dispose of an inconvenient relative; but the immediate calling of the constable and the public search are difficult to reconcile with such a deception.

Legacy

The disappearance of Owen Parfitt is one of the oldest documented cases in the English file of inexplicable vanishings, and one of the few in which the witness conditions appear, on the face of it, to rule out conventional escape. It is sometimes cited alongside the Flannan Isles disappearance and the Bennington Triangle cases in surveys of the phenomenon, and the cottage where it occurred remained a point of local interest until its demolition in the twentieth century.

Whatever happened on Charlton Road on that June afternoon, the documentary record is unusually clean. A frail old man was put outside in the sun, was watched by his sister and her companion, was within sight of haymakers and a mason, and was simply not there when next his chair was approached. The folded coat is the detail that has lingered longest in the retelling, and remains the small and stubborn fact around which every interpretation must turn.

Sources

• Phelps, W. The History and Antiquities of Somersetshire. J B Nichols and Son, 1839.
• Maple, E. Supernatural England. Robert Hale, 1977.
• Brooks, J. The Good Ghost Guide. Jarrold, 1994.
• Shepton Mallet Local History Group. Parish Records, 1768.