VANISHED INTO SPACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13369, 26 December 1906, Page 9

VANISHED INTO SPACE.

On" Christmas Eve, 1889, a party of about twenty well-to-do farmers and their families filled the house of the Lerch family near South Bend, Indiana. Among the guests were the Rev. Samuel Mallalieu, a Methodist minister, and a Chicago lawyer. About half-past ten Oliver Lerch, a young man of 20, was told by his father to fill a bucket at a well some seventy-live yards to the rear of lie house. Though snow had been falling heavily during the evening the sky was now childless, and a full moon made the nigh I almost as clear as day.

Five minutes after Oliver had gone out. with his bucket the guests heard him shout for help. They rushed to the back of the house. There they heard again theories for help, but young Lerch himself was nowhere to be seen. The cries seemed to come from tin? air above them.

"Oliver, where are you?'' shouted his father. The answer came from a, spot directly over his head and apparently about one hundred feet in the air. It's got me. Help me." At this, most of the guests bolted in terror. The father, the Rev. Mr. Mallalieu, and two others stood their ground, however, and after a while the others crept back. For an hour they shouted to Oliver and for several minutes they heard answering shouts, each time fainter than before, but of Oliver himself they saw nothing. The cries were those of a person who was being carried farther and farther away—not of one who was growing weaker. Nothing more was ever known of Oliver Lerch.

There was not then, nor is there now, any generally accepted explanation of young Lerch's disappearance. The boy's footprints in the clean snow ended about a third of the way to the well, and lie bucket was lying by the place where the footprints stopped. Since there were no other tracks, it seemed certain both that the boy. had been seized from above and that lie had been carried off through the air.

Some persons thought that a hitherto unknown monster had swooped down upon him; others that lie was the prey of a number of eagles; and one favourite theory was that he had been caught by the anchor of a balloon. There was, however, 110 evidence that any balloon ascension had been made anywhere in America 011 that day. On the other hand, the theory of the eagles was somewhat strengthened by the fact that a number of persons declared that Lerch had first cried:' "They've got me!" not "It's got me!" But the only tilings certain were that Lerch was gone and that his cries had come, front the air.