Harold Holt - Australian prime minister who disappeared. On or near a beach, so it was assumed he drowned, but you never know.
Richey from Manic Streeet Preachers.
Years ago I heard about restaurant owner Chuck Muir disappearing, but I can find no mention of it online. Anyone?
He’s hardly famous except to physicists, but Ettore Majorana disappeared from a ferry in 1938. It was almost certainly suicide, but there’s a surprisingly large body of speculation, particularly in Italian.
IIRC, his yacht got caught in a hurricane, and was never seen again.
Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia supposedly survived the massacre of her family, and although Anna Anderson, the most famous of claimants was proven to be a fraud, to this day, experts still cannot figure out what happened to her body when her family’s grave was found. Two bodies are missing-that of Tsarevich Alexei and either Anastasia or her sister Maria. Also, they’ve never found the remains of her uncle, Grand Duke Mikhail and his secretary who were supposedly executed in Perm.
Flashy 1920s evangelist Amie Semple McPherson disappeared for about a week-I don’t think it was ever totally explained.
King Edward V and his brother Richard, the Duke of York were last seen under guard in the Tower of London, and then they vanished.
Roald Amundsen, who led the first successful expedition to the South Pole, disappeared while flying to help rescue an Arctic expedition led by Umberto Nobile. (Nobile and Amundsen had previously made the first flight to the North Pole together.) No trace of the plane or any of its passengers has ever been found.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was starting to question my sanity.
The Belgian cartoonist Hergé, who created the iconic Tintin, went for a walk one day in 1981 and never returned. Some said his mind was starting to go at the time. Hergé left behind the partially completed draft for a new Tintin adventure called Tintin and the Alpha-Art. I’ve seen some of it. It’s weird—Tintin keeps running into these sculptures in the forms of the letters of the alphabet. I don’t think the mystery was ever solved before Hergé vanished.
Actor Leslie Howard, whose plane (he was a passenger, not a pilot or serviceman) was believed shot down by the Germans in WWII somewhere over the water between the Iberian peninsula and the U.K. There was speculation that he was on some sort of secret mission. No wreakage or bodies were ever recovered.
From Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia: “In 1943, while he was flying back to London from a secret mission in Lisbon, his plane was shot down by Nazi raiders, who erroneously had suspected that Winston Churchill was among its passengers.”
Another one: didn’t the airplane carrying the St. Louis Browns baseball team vanish in the Bermuda Triangle back in the 1950s?
How about the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel?
Ambrose Bierce.
Maybe the people weren’t famous but a famous disappearance is that of the Mary Celeste - a ship found totally abandoned in 1872.
What contributed to the mystery was Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing a short story in 1884 about the incident.
Oh, and Antoine St-Exupery (sp?) used to be missing but they’ve recently found his downed plane.
Cool- somehow I missed that story. (I went through a major fan-period for him; here’s the plane story if anybody else is interested.)
Richard Halliburton, an adventurer / explorer famous in his day and largely forgotten nowadays, disappeared in 1939 on a ship in the Pacific.
Here’s a link:
http://www.memphismagazine.com/backissues/april2001/coverstory2.htm
Jim Thompson, who revived the silk industry in Thailand?
Beat me to it! Former (?) OSS/CIA officer at the time of his disappearance in Malaysia; his house and impressive Asian art collection are now a popular tourist spot in Bangkok.