A British Diplomat Stepped Out to His Carriage in 1809 and Vanished: Benjamin Bathurst

On the night of November 25, 1809, in a small town in Prussia, the horses for a traveler's carriage were finally ready.

The traveler was an Englishman. He had been waiting for hours at the local inn, writing in a private room. He was traveling under a false name, through territory dominated by Napoleon's armies.

His name was Benjamin Bathurst. He was a British diplomat. And he was trying to get home.

At about nine o'clock, he left his room and went out toward the carriage.

His courier followed a few moments later.

When the courier reached the carriage, Bathurst was not in it. He was not near it. He was not anywhere.

He was never seen again.

Who was Benjamin Bathurst?

Benjamin Bathurst was born in London on March 18, 1784. He came from a well-connected family. His father was the Bishop of Norwich. His sister was a published poet.

He entered the diplomatic service young, and by his early twenties he was secretary of the British mission in Livorno, in Italy. In 1805, he married Phillida Call, the daughter of a baronet.

He was twenty-five years old in 1809.

The mission

In 1809, Europe was at war. Napoleon controlled much of the continent. Britain was trying to build alliances against him.

Bathurst was sent to Vienna by a relative, Earl Bathurst, who was serving as Britain's foreign secretary at the time. His job was to strengthen the alliance between Britain and Austria, and to encourage Austria to go to war with France.

Austria did declare war in April 1809. But it went badly. In July, Napoleon crushed the Austrian army at the Battle of Wagram. Austria had to make peace.

Bathurst's mission was over. He was recalled to London.

But getting home was dangerous. France and its allies controlled much of the territory between Vienna and the coast. Bathurst decided to travel north, through Prussia and the German states, and sail for England from the port of Hamburg.

He traveled by carriage with a courier named Krause. To avoid attention, they used false names. Bathurst called himself "Baron de Koch." Krause called himself "Fischer."

Perleberg

On November 25, 1809, the two men reached Perleberg, a small town west of Berlin.

They stopped at the post house to order fresh horses for the next stage of the journey. While the horses were prepared, Bathurst and Krause walked over to a nearby inn, the White Swan.

Bathurst ordered an early dinner. Then he went into a private room the inn set aside for him, and spent several hours writing.

The departure was delayed. It was not until around nine o'clock at night that word came that the horses were about to be harnessed.

Nine o'clock

Bathurst left his room first. Krause followed a short time later.

When Krause reached the carriage, Bathurst was not there.

He searched. He asked around. Bathurst could not be found.

At first, the disappearance did not cause a great stir. Prussia at that time was full of danger. Deserters and stragglers from Napoleon's armies. Bandits. Robberies were common.

But this was a British diplomat. And soon, the local authorities were involved.

The search

A local officer, Captain Klitzing, took charge of the investigation. He mobilized his troops and searched vigorously. At first, he assumed Bathurst might have left of his own accord.

On November 26, the day after the disappearance, the River Stepenitz, which runs through Perleberg, was dragged. A second search of the area was ordered.

On November 27, something turned up. Bathurst's fur coat. It was an expensive coat, worth two hundred to three hundred Prussian thalers. It had been hidden in an outhouse owned by a local family.

That was suspicious. A member of that family worked as a stableman in the courtyard of the White Swan, and he had been working there that night. A woman who worked at a nearby coffee house later testified that he had asked where Bathurst had gone, and then hurried after him. But that was her belief, not something proven. He was never charged.

A reward of five hundred thalers was offered for information. Money was also paid to local police to speed up the search. It led to a flood of false reports from people hoping to collect.

The trousers

On December 16, 1809, three weeks after the disappearance, two elderly women gathering wood in the forest near the village of Quitzow, about three miles north of Perleberg, found a pair of trousers.

They were Bathurst's.

In January 1810, the London Times reported the discovery. It also reported that inside the trousers was a letter Bathurst had written to his wife. And the newspaper suggested the French government was probably responsible for his disappearance.

The French official newspaper hit back. It denied any involvement and claimed that Bathurst had been mentally unstable. It even accused the British government of choosing unfit people as diplomats.

Phillida's search

Bathurst's wife, Phillida, did not wait for answers. She traveled to Prussia herself.

In March 1810, she paid for a large, expensive search of Perleberg, including trained dogs. It found nothing.

Then she did something remarkable. In the middle of the war, she traveled to Paris, under a promise of safe passage, to ask Napoleon himself. Napoleon told her he knew nothing about the affair, and offered to help.

Benjamin Bathurst was never found.

The skeleton

The story was not quite over.

On April 15, 1852, more than forty years later, workers demolishing a house in Perleberg, about three hundred paces from the White Swan, found a skeleton buried under the threshold of a stable.

The skull had a fracture consistent with a heavy blow to the head. One tooth showed signs of a dental extraction.

The house had once belonged to a man who had worked as a servant at the White Swan. He was never charged with anything.

Bathurst's sister came to Perleberg to see the remains. She could not confirm that they were her brother's.

The legend

Over time, the story of Benjamin Bathurst grew into something supernatural.

A version spread, mostly through later books, that Bathurst had walked around to the front of his carriage to look at the horses, in full view of everyone, and simply vanished into thin air. In 1948, the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper wrote a famous short story called "He Walked Around the Horses," in which Bathurst slips into a parallel world.

But that dramatic version does not match the record. Nobody actually saw Bathurst vanish. He left his room in the dark, Krause followed later, and by the time anyone looked, he was gone.

In 1990, the writer and researcher Mike Dash investigated the case for the magazine Fortean Times. He concluded that the mysterious elements had been greatly exaggerated over the years, and that Bathurst was almost certainly murdered.

What we still don't know

So what happened to Benjamin Bathurst?

The most likely answer is also the most ordinary. A wealthy foreigner, alone, at night, in a town full of soldiers and desperate people, carrying money and a valuable fur coat. Someone saw an opportunity. He was robbed and killed, his coat hidden, his clothes dumped in the woods, and his body buried where no one would look.

Was it someone at the inn? A stranger passing through? Someone else entirely? Was it connected to his secret mission, as the British newspapers believed? Or was it a simple robbery?

Nobody was ever charged. His body has never been confirmed.

What do you think happened to Benjamin Bathurst that night in Perleberg?