Wikipedia gives an article about the alleged disappearance of a James Tetford returning home from WWII. According the story he was on a crowded chartered bus. Eventually everybody else at some point or other departs from the bus but by the time it arrives at its final destination, Mr. Tetford is gone but his luggage and other personal items are supposedly still there. The bus driver has no idea where he went, and he has never been seen or heard from again. This story sounds like an urban legend to me, especially considering the fact that I can find no other references to it anywhere.
Does anyone else know this story or have any other details that I don’t have?
I searched Wikipedia for “James Tetford,” and found no entries.
I searched Google for “James Tetford,” and one full page of links about the so-called “Bennington Triangle,” where people disappear mysteriously and are never heard from again. Seems to be popular with the UFO crowd.
Anyway, looking over the accounts, there’s enough of them that I’d say the guy probably existed, and disappeared from a bus in 1949, but I don’t really see the big deal. Guy comes back from the war, maybe suffering from some PTSD (I’m not sure if the fact that he was still living at a “soldiers’ home” four years after the war should be counted as evidence of that or not) and decides to just walk out of his life altogether. It’s a little weird that no one noticed him getting off the bus, but hardly inexplicable. Here’s a recent story about a woman who unwittingly joined a search party for herself, after she got off a bus and changed her outfit. Human perceptions are really, really unreliable.
According to the Wikipedia article on the Bennington Triangle, it’s James Tedford, not Tetford. You might get more details searching for that spelling. I found a bunch of relevant hits for ‘“James Tedford” Bennington’ but I haven’t checked them out.