Vanished

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And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff, right after the episode. How do you explain it? A person is here one instant and gone the next? Like Brian Shaffer, a med student in Ohio who disappeared on April 1st, 2006.

He was with friends that night at the Ugly Tuna Saloona in Columbus, Ohio. Shaffer was clearly visible on the bar's security video, that's the very same video that didn't show him leaving. Because when the night ended and the tuna's patrons trickled out, Brian wasn't among them. The place was searched, it was turned upside down, but there was no sign of Brian Shaffer.

Friends and family panicked when there was no word from Brian and no sign of him. Search after search came up empty. Days became months that turned into years, more than 19 years now. Brian Shaffer was right there. And then suddenly, it was as though Brian Shaffer had never existed. We're such optimistic creatures, cocky really, in our conviction that the world can be mapped, that the world can be known, that reality itself is what we say it is.

But what if there are cracks or holes, openings where things and maybe people too, can somehow slip through and be lost forever? People come out of them, they think I'm dumb. True. Weird. Stuff. People poofing into thin air isn't some new phenomenon fed by the internet. Let's go way back to June 1768, when all Owen Parfitt wanted was to sit on the front porch that summer evening and listen as the long warm day settled into night.

As a lavender and blue dusk deepened the sky, Owen could hear workers on a neighboring farm calling out to each other as they hustled to finish their labors before full dark. You wouldn't think that a man sitting on his own front porch would be anything remarkable, but Owen Parfitt didn't take even that simple pleasure for granted.

Owen was immobilized, possibly or probably as the result of a stroke. One day Parfitt was walking away from his sister's cottage when he stumbled and fell heavily on the pathway. He had taken his last step, for he had been stricken with paralysis. They carried him to the cottage where doctors pronounced their awful verdict.

For the remainder of his life, Owen Parfitt would be as helpless as a newborn child. He had no use of his legs, and in order to sit on that porch and enjoy that evening, Owen had to be carried out of the house and helped into his chair. It was his sister and a neighbor named Susannah Snook that helped him that day. His sister went back inside the house and thought nothing more about it. It was just a typical day, and as she later explained, she didn't worry about Owen, at least not until the wind started to kick up. One of those wild, gusting summer storms that just whips up out of nowhere.

She hurried to the front porch to get her brother inside before the clouds exploded. But Owen's chair was empty, and Owen was gone. The alarm rapidly spread through the town, and search was immediately made everywhere in the neighborhood, in the roads, and in the fields, for a great distance around. All the wells and ponds were searched, but to no purpose.

Owen Parfitt was described by all who knew him as a quiet and sober man. He'd served in the British Army in Africa, and upon returning home, he became a tailor. The home he shared with his sister was a small cottage on the edge of the village of Shepton Mallet, population somewhere between three and four thousand people. Owen's porch faced the Turnpike Road. So basically, this was no isolated cabin in the forest. There were people all around Owen that night, and as his sister later told police, any number of neighbors would have easily seen a person approach Owen, much less drag the man from his chair. And even if unseen, such a thing would never go unheard. It was impossible.

Here was a bedridden cripple who could not move a yard without assistance, who had to be carried up and down stairs, disappearing from his home with a swiftness and suddenness which were nothing short of miraculous. That anyone else could have carried him off seemed equally impossible, for Parfitt was a stout, heavy man, and even if he had been taken away by force, those who had abducted him could not have carried him far before the alarm was given. No horse or vehicle had been seen on any of the roads of anywhere in the vicinity of the cottage, and no more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed between the time when Susannah Snook left the cottage and spoke to Owen in his chair by the door, and when she returned and found the sister bewailing her lost brother. What in the world had become of Owen Parfitt?

Jehoshaphat Stone said he knew Owen Parfitt well. He declared that the general opinion was that Owen Parfitt was carried away by supernatural means, and not just any old supernatural entity, but the devil himself. That was the rumor, or one of them. Some said that Owen had been spirited away by pirates who thought he knew the location of some buried treasure.

Another neighbor was convinced that Owen had tumbled off the porch into the garden and died, his remains slowly decomposing until only the bones remained, because yes, a human skeleton was found in that exact spot in 1813, some 45 years after Owen's bewildering disappearance. Testing, though, revealed that the skeleton was that of a young female, leaving investigators no closer to solving the mystery of Owen Parfitt, and also, if he had tumbled off of his own porch and lay there decomposing, it seems that his sister and the neighbors would have caught on to that. Depositions were taken from multiple witnesses, but no matter how deep the magistrates dug, not a single clue was found, which only fed the growing fear and annoyance in the town. The village of Shepton Mallet once had a reputation for witchcraft.

It was whispered that more than one old woman had been put to death for the casting of spells. One or two of Owen Parfitt's neighbors recalled the fact that they had heard him tell strange tales of magicians and necromancers and wizards and obi medicine men with whom he had been brought in contact in Africa. Possibly he had, in days gone by, had unholy traffic with these children of the devil, and some of them, at the bidding of their master, had whisked him away to the realms of brimstone unseen of mortal eyes. That sudden violent summer storm? It fed right into this theory. The storm itself an indication that the prince of the power of the air had had a hand in spiriting away his victim. This belief rapidly gained ground as years went on. Amongst the ignorant and uneducated, it became an accepted theory that Owen Parfitt had been carried off by the devil or his emissaries. Naming the devil as the prime suspect was a bold move, but there were other peculiar theories too. Hugh Pearson was a dispensing chemist in a town 30 miles from Owen Parfitt's village. A dispensing chemist, that's what we call a pharmacist. Pearson was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer. He had a telescope in his garden and kept a nightly log of observations.

On that June night, he was observing the planet Mars when he was aware of a moving light to the east. I tried to observe this through my telescope, but it was moving too fast to obtain a clear view. The light appeared to be greenish in color and brighter at the edges than in the middle, but it was not a meteorite or a shooting star. I observed the object with both the telescope and the naked eye for fully a minute before it dipped over the horizon. I'm completely at a loss to rationally explain the object unless it was possibly a form of a balloon carrying a loft of light, but I must confess I've never heard of such a thing and cannot imagine how it could be engineered.

A local newspaper pounced on this story and soon received nearly a dozen letters from people who claimed that they'd also seen a strange light moving in the sky that night. Now the rumors flew that Owen Parfitt had been snatched away by the man in the moon or captured by monsters from another planet. The police were exasperated by these wild tales and they remained convinced that there was a far more boring old earthly explanation for Owen's disappearance. They even made a couple of arrests. One was Job Lee. It was believed in the village that the two had formally been engaged in nefarious practices at sea. The other suspect was a widow named Lockyer whose dwelling was not far from Parfitt's. She used to hint that she knew more about the secrets of the ex-mariner than anybody else and that he had made a will in which she was the chief beneficiary. Okay, wait, nefarious practices at sea? This is the second time the whole pirate thing has come up in the story of Owen Parfitt. Wasn't he just an elderly old tailor who'd served his country with honor?

Well, turns out there was far more to Owen Parfitt than there first seemed. The part about being a but stitching and hemming didn't appeal so much to the young Owen. He was restless in his apprenticeship and hungry for adventure and craving wealth. Far more wealth than he'd ever be able to lay his hands on as an honest man. They say that one day Owen simply failed to show up for work.

The next day came and no Owen. A week went by and then two. The master tailor was furious but there was nothing to be done. Owen was gone. Eventually a message made its way to town. Owen Parfitt had enlisted at sea. Now the problem was the Royal Navy had no record of any sailor by that name. So it was assumed that Owen had become a privateer. A privateer is a pirate but it's a very specific sort of pirate. The kind of pirate who does the dirty work for his king or queen robbing and harassing only the sovereign's enemies. Privateers were given licenses by the crown to attack enemy ships during wartime. It was seen as a, you know, cost-effective way to expand the size and scope of the Royal Navy. Privateers helped the crown while helping themselves the far bigger paychecks than they could have ever ever earned as legitimate sailors. That's because the Royal Navy paid set wages from ship's cook to admiral but the privateers took a share of whatever loot they captured and many made fortunes doing it. It was a life of risk and reward of adventure and danger all wrapped up in glorious patriotism because the privateers saw themselves not as but as heroes serving their country. With this in mind the police brought a retired sea captain named Hall in for questioning. Owen Parfitt was said to have served under Captain Hall, a man described as every bit as brutal and cunning as any of the legendary old pirates including Blackbeard himself. It's not clear how the police thought Captain Hall might be involved because this was the 18th century and not an episode of Law and Order. Detailed records didn't survive assuming they ever existed but the people and the press had a very lurid theory about Captain Hall, Owen Parfitt, Job Lee and a dead sailor by the name of Lockyer. Hall was ferocious and unscrupulous. Piracy cannot be charged against him. In these modern times piracy does not pay but there are crimes in which a dishonest sea captain can indulge. He can carry away ships.

He can smuggle cargos. A hot-tempered captain has been known to murder a member of his crew. A committal to the deep and a false entry in the log cover up the fact such a crime can remain hidden if there are no witnesses. No witnesses unless there were. Did Captain Hall have secrets to keep? Secrets that were known to Lee and Parfitt and Lockyer? Secrets Hall paid the three men to blackmail. That was the theory. Rich as Captain Hall had become his little hoard of wealth was being nibbled away by the steady drip, drip, drip of payments that kept his former crew silent.

Which is why the death of Lockyer was welcome news and saved Captain Hall some money. But the man had left a grieving widow and Hall found himself troubled by what that woman might know. Was there anything to support such wild speculation? Because this was quite a tale to tell about an elderly tailor who was unable to walk from his own bed to the door. Yet what else could explain the regular monthly visits like clockwork that Job Lee paid to both Owen Parfitt and the widow Lockyer? Let us suppose that Mrs. Lockyer's demands were small in comparison to Parfitt's. He was the head of the blackmail syndicate and it was he who had suggested the plot to Lockyer and Lee. It was he who took the lion's share of the spoil and egged on the others.

Whoa now, this is one fever dream of a plot and about as far from the image presented of a weak old man unable to lift himself from his own bed as you can get. Job Lee was hardly anything but a tool in the hands of the cunning Parfitt. Thus Job Lee was the fetcher and carrier between Captain Hall and Parfitt who ruled both men from his big chair and had been heard to say what he would do to Job if the seaman played him false. The fact that Captain Hall's reputation was that of a man who had no respect for human life helped sell this story even though it would appear to be entirely made up. But by the time this version of events was being floated, Owen Parfitt had been missing for 173 years. Almost two centuries and not one scrap of evidence had ever been found to explain it. With Captain Hall, Job Lee and Lockyer and his widow all long in the grave, why not just spin big dramatic story in hopes of solving the mystery? Captain Hall became more and more desperate as the demands of Parfitt grew bigger and bigger. The insatiable leech had to be eliminated. Now according to Owen Parfitt's sister who was significantly older, probably in her early 80s at the time of his disappearance, and the neighbor Susannah Snook, there were many people around that late afternoon. On the fateful day, Owen disappeared. Many potential witnesses.

Both women told police that only 15 minutes at the most had elapsed between they settled Owen into his chair, draped a heavy coat across his shoulders. The big man was prone to catching a chill and evenings in southwest England, even in June, can have a bite to the air. But the blackmail theory, it ignored the accounts of Parfitt's sister and Susannah Snook.

In the hush, three men drove up in a light trap to Owen Parfitt's garden gate. A light trap is a kind of horse drawn carriage. Not a soul was in sight. There is no desert so lonely as the English countryside at the sacred hour of dinner. The old sailor was dozing in his big chair. It was easy to spring on the helpless man, gag him and bundle him into the trap.

It was the work of a few minutes to drive the few hundred yards to Mrs. Lockyer's cottage. There, the desperadoes completed their hideous task. Owen Parfitt would trouble Captain Hall no more. I mean, OK, I guess if we're just pulling it out of thin air, the suggestion that Owen Parfitt was coldly and efficiently murdered in the widow Lockyer's house and his body disposed of without drawing any attention or leaving any evidence behind seems unlikely. Owen weighed more than 15 stone. That's 210 pounds. That's a whole lot of body to move and dump without anyone noticing. Plus, there was, remember, a pretty exhaustive investigation and even a magistrate's inquest. But there was from the beginning a circumstance that gave rise to considerable gossip. Parfitt never sought nor encouraged orders, and he did very little tailoring but was never short of money. If you've ever daydreamed of living in a cozy little village, don't forget that every single person in town will know and will be minding all of your business.

He was visited from time to time by a rough looking seaman who interviewed him at his sister's cottage and left the village directly after the visit was over. You know the saying nature abhors a vacuum? Yeah, well, people aren't crazy about a vacuum either. The sudden and baffling disappearance of Owen Parfitt created a mystery that left the village unsettled and uneasy. Into that vacuum rushed all sorts of crazy theories, including the idea that the old tailor trapped in his wrecked hulk of a body was also somehow a scheming, diabolical privateer. A man said that Parfitt had told him that he knew of an island where you can dig up diamonds by the spade for diamonds bigger than the eggs of ducks.

He went on to say that Parfitt had told him others were in on the secret and that one day they would either kill him or abduct him. Diamonds the size of a duck egg? You can't blame people for grasping at every possibility. They were afraid. They wanted an answer because they knew, they felt it in their very bones that something was deeply strange, deeply wrong about the way that Owen Parfitt had vanished off the face of the earth. For Parfitt to have moved of his own volition was impossible. Inquiries were made in the surrounding villages as to whether any stranger or any vehicle passed through that morning, but every inquiry elicited a negative reply. All the police in Bristol took up the search. Every seafaring man was questioned. Yeah, but... I can hear you thinking Yeah, but... How hard did they really look? Yeah, but... People back then were more superstitious and stuff, weren't they? Look, as someone who once hired a pet psychic to help me figure out what was going on with my dog, you will not catch me making fun of the residents of Shepton Mallet. And besides, the search for Owen Parfitt was both intense and thorough. Rivers, ponds, disused pits, woods, fields, and hedgerows were searched for weeks, but in vain. Every inhabitant, including the children near Shepton, took part. The newspapers took the matter up enthusiastically.

Pamphlets were written about it, and speeches were made. Some suggested that perhaps Owen Parfitt was a victim of spontaneous combustion. Never mind the fact that there were no signs of fire and plenty of witnesses who might have seen the man go up and smoke. Parfitt did not drink, and heavy drinking is a necessary factor in spontaneous combustion. Oh, who knew? Others thought that maybe Owen had experienced a sudden restoration of strength and health.

Whatever had happened in his brain to render him immobile? Could it have happened again, but this time reversing the symptoms? That a paralytic old man of 70 could suddenly wander and lose himself in the field, when the fields were full of people, for it was mowing time. That was also impossible. So what was left but to blame the devil himself? The influence of Satan.

That hypothesis needs no remark. Such is the story of Owen Parfitt, whose fate remains shrouded in mystery. In the UK, Owen's home, 170,000 people are reported missing every year. Nearly 96,000 of adults. Still, cases of what they call the long-term missing are rare. Most missing adults are found within two days. Only 1% of missing adults are still missing after a month.

Owen Parfitt has been missing for 257 years. Time slips, interdimensional portals, alien abduction, the devil. When a person disappears without a trace, sooner or later, any and every possibility gets thrown into the mix. The idea of slipping through time is something you can find in folklore and myth and stories throughout human history. The story of Rip Van Winkle is a classic example. Rip lost 20 years.

They were an eventful 20 years since he missed the entire American Revolution. For Rip though, it felt like no time at all had passed. That's the key feature of a time slip experience. For the individual, what feels like a moment can turn out to be years in their original timeline. Or maybe centuries, like in the case of Owen Parfitt, if he was a victim of this spontaneous time travel. Stories of people slipping through time aren't just the stuff of legends from the olden days. In 1996, in the city of Liverpool, an off-duty police officer was strolling along a busy street heading to Dylan's bookstore. He described suddenly feeling strange. An odd, peculiar sensation overcame him. He paused, feeling disoriented. And when he looked back up, the city street had been completely transformed. The people jostling him on the sidewalk were wearing costumes, like from a movie set in the 1950s. Then he realized that the cars, both parked and moving, were vintage models, also from the 1950s. And the bookstore, so familiar, it looked different too. Now it was called Crips. Feeling uneasy, the man stood, pedestrians flowing around him, staring in disbelief. For how long? He couldn't say, not more than a minute or two. And then, as suddenly as it happened, the whole world seemed to tremble. And then he was back in the present. The sights and sounds of mid-1990s Liverpool were just as he knew them.

Back to normal. But he wasn't. He was left profoundly shaken by the experience. Something that wasn't helped at all by a little bit of research. Dylan's bookstore? It had once had another name. Crips. Back in the 1950s. It's a great story. But the police officer insists that it really happened. And he had a witness. Because that cop wasn't the only person who slipped through time that afternoon in Liverpool. A young woman in modern 90s clothing was also heading for the door of the bookstore. And the officer followed her in. He noticed the contemporary logo on her handbag, which, given the fact that he was a cop and trained to observe details and behavior, isn't at all surprising. She appeared as confused as he was. And as the world around them resolved itself back into their familiar 1996 Liverpool, she voiced that confusion out loud. Weird as hell. And inexplicable. Easy to dismiss as a delusion or a hallucination or attention seeking. You know, people lying to get rich or famous. Though as usual, there was no fame or fortune to be had for either the cop or that young woman. Just skepticism and mockery.

Just people accusing them of lying. Which you can understand. Because people need reality to be rock solid. And dependably predictable. They need time to be linear and stable. Not a mad tangle of past, present and future. Where, if circumstances are just right, anyone can slip right through and fall. Fall into the past or into the future. Fall and keep falling. And maybe, never, ever make it back to the place and time where you belong.

Time. How we love to think of it as fixed and factual. Just because we can measure it in ticks and talks. Einstein tried to break us of this habit. But the theory of relativity is so complicated to wrap your mind around. Listen here, Einstein said, time is not absolute. Time is not what you think it is. Time can be experienced differently based on relative motion and gravitational fields.

It's simple. It's not though. Not for most of us, Einstein. For most of us, time has only one speed and one direction. And oh no, now here comes quantum mechanics to suggest that time might actually be this flexible thing that we influence and control with human consciousness. Which isn't nearly as crazy a theory as it might sound at first. Don't we already know that humans can experience time in wildly different ways? That our perception of time can be altered by everything from substances to our own emotions. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? Doesn't time drag when you're waiting in anticipation for the bell to ring or for dinner to be ready or for the dog to find just the right spot to do his business out here in the rain in the middle of the night?

Our experience of time can be every bit as stretchy as a rubber band. Fringy as the time slip phenomenon sounds. So many cases have been reported like this one from October 2024. A man named Sebastian Garrido was walking along the street heading out to visit his dying grandfather in the hospital when he noticed a mysterious figure standing nearby. A closer look revealed it was his grandfather but younger as he was in his 40s or 50s. Fancy meeting you here. Everything would be okay. Tell your dad I'll be fine the man said before disappearing. Garrido said that he broke out in goosebumps and threw up and then he broke into a run racing toward the hospital only to see his present-day grandfather finding the man was still alive resting in his bed with just weeks to live. His grandfather said I saw you in a dream. Studies have been done on people who report these time slip experiences and there's real consistency in how these events are described.

The feeling of disorientation. The incredible vividness of it all. Sight, sound, smell, touch. The powerful emotional resonance that lingers long past the moment. How transformative these experiences are. How the people who've slipped through time and returned now see time and their get at the most basic issue. Science doesn't understand what time is or really how time works.

Beyond the physical time we can measure and even that's tricky because clocks on airplanes and satellites for example measure time differently than those same clocks planted firmly on earth. Oh no not the theory of relativity again. The theory that tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light which makes any kind of time travel impossible including time slips unless enter the multiverse theory. What if instead of our boring old single and lonesome universe an infinite number of universes exist? It's mind-blowing but imagine a new universe with its own unique timelines birthed in every moment. An infinite quantity of worlds each like a soap bubble in an infinite cloud of other soap bubbles all piled up touching each other seemingly fragile but is sealed off as if each was utterly and completely alone. World upon world upon world parallel not partnered. This is a valid theory one that's backed up by a scientific concept called cosmic inflation. Think about the big bang our universe exploding from a single unimaginably dense point.

Expanding and expanding faster than the speed of light spawning other universes in the process an unlimited number of other universes each branching off the other in an infinite chaotic tumble of worlds and if that's not freaky enough for you throw this in. Cosmic inflation suggests that when our universe went big bang it expanded into something something that wasn't itself something where our laws like the speed of light just don't apply. What was that something?

Who knows? Maybe we're all living in a charm dangling from a pug's collar and the movie Men Black wasn't a Hollywood blockbuster but a documentary trying to break the news to our sad little monkey brains as gently as it could. This is called a neuralyzer. It's a gift from some friends from out of town. This red eye here will isolate the electronic impulses in your brains and more specifically the ones for memory. Anyway in the multiverse theory time slips and travel of all kinds definitely possible. All you're doing is popping over to a neighboring parallel universe and then hopefully making it back to tell the story unless you don't unless you don't and even if you did who would believe you tell the wrong person your time travel tale you might end up on a mandatory legal hold in the psychiatric wing at your local hospital or think about it this way would you believe a story like that?

Let's say you came upon an elderly man lying on the grass in a public park. He's clearly homeless and by the looks of him he really needs medical attention. His clothes are worn and dirty but also kind of I don't know old-fashioned hard to put your finger on it really just something a little I don't know Amish maybe you kneel beside him the panic in his eyes makes your heart sink you're just trying to help you offer a bottle of water rummage in your backpack for that random cliff bar that's always knocking around in there somewhere the man is talking now rapidly but he's hard to understand he's speaking English but the heavy accent British maybe or Scottish either way it's thick and he's so frantic that he's stumbling over his own words and he's swallowing them whole it hits you that a stroke can cause a person to have garbled speech is that what this is?

I can help you I can help you find your way back home do you know your address what's your name I'm Kerry the stranger has drained the water bottle and paws at your arm as he slumps back on the grass he's a big guy so big that you know there's no way you're getting him to his feet without help and then what then what will you do now his gnarled hand is gripping your wrist his mouth is moving he's trying to speak again you bend closer as he almost whispers the words I am lost the relief you feel because lost is easy to fix lost is a problem you can solve lost is something you can handle just plug an address into your phone and boom you got this I can help you I can help you find your way back home do you know your address what's your name I'm Kerry and then he says in a soft voice my name my name is Owen Owen Parfitt you next time on true weird stuff you can hear every sound you can't see not in this stifling darkness and you can't pound your fists or kick your feet or even scream you're alive but in a body that's playing dead playing dead so convincingly that you're attending your own funeral buried alive it's something out of a nightmare and something that used to happen way more often than you'd ever imagine and for some people it was actually a career meet the living corpse on the next true weird stuff special thanks to our voice talents on this episode Kary "Doc" Bowser cool king Chris Michael and Don Morgan so this happened in the 1700s and the newspaper reports that we're reading are from the 1930s and 1940s so what was it that kept this story alive that they were writing about it then yeah what kept the mystery of Owen Parfitt alive were the circumstances of his disappearance so we have a person who is not able to move on his own power he's first of all he's quite old at this point he's had you know in this in 1786 when Owen went disappearing you know we would say that people had a fit of apoplexy or a demon we didn't know that it was a stroke so it's speculated by modern medicine that Owen suffered a stroke unless it was in the 1990s in the south where we had the satanic panic yeah then it was the devil it really was so Owen could not move on his own power he could speak but his speech was a little bit garbled and he was he was not well he was frail and tired and his sister who was a good bit older than he was took care of him and the night that he disappeared they brought him out to the porch the sister and the neighbor brought him out to the porch that afternoon and got him set up it was mowing season and so there were people everywhere he lived in a village of a village of somewhere between three and four thousand people on a busy road when his sister brought and Susanna brought Owen out they're they're waving at the neighbors who were waving back at them there were so many witnesses it was daylight the sun had not set yet no one saw anything no one heard anything Owen literally vanished from his seat on that porch as though he had never been there and a mystery like that captures people's imagination and so it really caught fire in the village of Shepton Mallet

and there were these investigations and hearings and no sign of him let me get a drink Max hmm Max and I are both afflicted we fear it may be the alien so so um that was very compelling and as time went by people wouldn't let the story go and the more time passed the more colorful the story became tales of pirates and witchcraft and the devil and dark magic and all this other stuff but nothing could even come close to accounting for this weird disappearance all the way up into um the early 2000s people were still talking about Owen Parfitt well that's and that's the thing that's sort of very interesting about this story I mean it is fascinating but it is also interesting the way this story has survived I mean that that's the thing that sort of was amazing to me about it and he so so let's talk about the the piracy stuff so he was extorting money from this captain hall that's what the story was that's the story but like so here's the thing Owen was a tailor's apprentice as a young dude and he disappeared and it was word came back to town that he had enlisted but after he vanished as an old man and the police investigation began it turned out that whatever he enlisted in it was not his majesty's royal navy they had no record and if I can tell you one thing about the British royal navy I don't care if it's today or 500 years ago they kept some records they really kept some records the British were very buttoned up so there was no evidence that he had ever been in the royal king chris michael but there was ample evidence that he had served as a privateer which is a kind of government sanctioned pirate so we we have privateers today we now we know about them but only after the fact but I'm sure they they you know they sort of exist today so that is an interesting dimension to the story and I guess what I wonder is while it's a great story is there any real evidence that this is what was going on no that's the thing there's not a scrap of evidence um so the evidence that they do find and this is kind of fascinating and I don't know if it was if they just didn't have any laws about where they buried bodies but the fact that you find the skeleton of a young woman in the 1830s near where this was about was it that to be about uh 50 years after the fact six yeah 50 60 but the fact that they found this skeleton that's kind of interesting um was there a murder or was this just somebody they buried on the property I mean if the body was buried near the porch that seems I mean and if it was buried after the house was you wouldn't bury a body that close to the porch if you were doing it as a proper burial that's where you that's where you would bury somebody if you were trying to conceal a crime I thought that was an interesting little part to this it wasn't it was a freaky little um it was a freaky little development the finding of a young woman's body all those years later but the idea that Owen I want you to imagine it is a it is a summer evening now granted um summers in that part of England are not like you know you're not in Florida okay but it's still summertime a 210 pound man falls off the porch and lays there dead and nobody sees him come on nobody smells him come on there Owen's body wasn't found not only was Owen's body not found next to his home Owen's body wasn't found anywhere and they looked everywhere they dragged ponds they

they went into every well Max they turned that place upside down looking for this man part of the reason that the search and the investigation was so thorough was because of the magnitude of the mystery the police were like even in 1786 um the police were like no sorry this wasn't the devil this wasn't a light in the sky there's a simple explanation for this and we're going to get to the bottom of it something never could and some of the theories that were floated were just as crazy as the devil witchcraft and and that's the idea that this elderly 210 pound immobilized man was somehow silently snatched off of his own front porch brutally murdered butchered and his remains disposed of without a single drop of blood being found anywhere in any of the places that the police looked can you see why the cops were out of their minds with frustration over this and for people that have done police work I mean it's it's fun when you see interesting cases that are parts of plots of movies but generally most of their their work is it's it's easier to find somebody that has committed a crime because there's evidence around that sort of thing and they always look for the the uh the simplest explanation for whatever it is that has happened so you can understand the frustration because there is simply no simple explanation for this and every generation called this story back up which is I think how it stayed alive it became if you if you're from that part of the world that became local lore oh did you ever hear the story about old Owen Parfitt he just vanished off the face of the earth and there was never there wasn't a footprint there wasn't there wasn't a crushed leaf next there was nothing and I know because believe me my husband is constantly trying to debunk everything I do on this podcast well police back then you know they didn't have the forensic techniques the man was sitting on his porch which faced the turnpike road he was surrounded on all sides by neighbors all of whom were outdoors an entire field full of people across the road mowing hay tell me again that you think that someone was able to wrestle this significantly large man who couldn't do anything to help with his own abduction his limbs were useless not a peep his sister just inside the house nothing whatever accounts for Owen Parfitt's disappearance people have spent two and a half centuries trying to figure it out and they haven't been able to come up with much of anything beyond I guess it was the devil and the stroke was real right that was the other thing that went through my mind was was did he do this as some kind of ruse to assume another identity somewhere but at that age probably not he had been infirm as they say for a number of years and that's why his sister had come to Shepton Mallet to live with him to help care for him so it wasn't like on Tuesday he faked having a stroke and on Thursday he disappeared forever right um there was and and all of the talk about Captain Hall and you know the pirates and the privateers that was all speculation yeah I don't know why but that that part of it seemed that seemed pretty far-fetched to me him you know him him going through a portal in the space-time continuum seems more more likely to me than the Captain Hall story yeah the blood the whole oh he's a mastermind of blackmail can I say I love the story about the guy who saw his grandfather

and then went and saw him in the hospital that was that's kind of a fascinating story as a you know a little aside in this story and I I often wonder about that because um when we go into our dreams we're going to another place so what what we think is happening or what they think happens is we try to work through in dreams what's happening in our conscious world but I've often wondered that place where we're going maybe that really is another place and it's not in our own head that we're trying to work through whatever we're dealing with in our conscious world quantum physics would would um be a place where you could sketch that theory out and and make it supportable this idea that human consciousness is that the we are with our to quote the buddha with our thoughts we make the world but literally that human consciousness has such an impact on our experience of what is real and what isn't in time and all of that it gets pretty woo-woo even though it's a legitimate field of science it gets pretty woo-woo especially you know for us because we're not um very smart and we're not educated in this field I'll see something else about that story which I really love it and people always say the same thing that are always skeptical about those stories well they did it for attention they did it to get rich have you ever met anybody went boy I hoodwinked everybody I told him I saw a ufo or I saw my grandfather on the corner he was much younger and then when saw him in the hospital I did I'm I'm I'm rolling in it off of this I I don't know anybody I mean really anybody that's doing that up to more ridicule and I suspect that most people wouldn't say anything about it because when you have those sorts of things happen you go I don't know when this thing happened and you always say it like almost in hushed tones because you don't want to be ridiculed as being a kook I think you're right that a lot of people self-edit um there are lots of people that have had um uncanny and inexplicable experiences and they don't really have an answer for it and they're hesitant to tell you because they don't want to be thought apparently it's like the worst thing ever to be thought of as kooky which for me is not something I can get behind because kooky is all I've ever been thought of um I'm fascinated with the time slip phenomenon absolutely fascinated by it there was a term you used that I had never heard before cosmic inflation oh yeah that's a that's a legitimate theory in physics cosmic inflation yeah I didn't make that up um so cosmic inflation we we grew up and we still hear about you know the big bang that our universe began as um this infinite infinitesimally small and infinitely hot point and it exploded and began rapidly expanding outward that's the concept of the expanding universe and that is where our universe comes from and when you say what's outside of the universe they say hush don't interrupt because no one has the answer for that right and a lot of ours a lot of our astrophysics a lot of our science has been around um looking for support of the big bang theory like when we look through the kepler or the hubble telescope we're actually looking back in time at the beginning of the universe and there are also there's all sorts of theories about how because the universe is so rapidly expanding at some point the people on earth if there are people will look up in the night sky and they won't see stars will have expanded past the point of being able to see stars in the sky it's really trippy so that

was what we were we were taught cosmic inflation is also a scientific theory but we weren't taught that in school this um and probably because it's like really deep in the weeds for sherry we weren't we weren't even talking about financial inflation well along cosmic inflation one of my daughters said that to me like are we like is there were we supposed to take a class like there isn't a class they don't they don't teach us this we're just supposed to learn this like we're supposed to pick it up as we as we go so the idea of cosmic i think anytime you talk about the universe and einstein and the multiverse i think your head your brain starts to melt don't you a little bit well yeah i mean i always like to say it gives me a headache some of the things that we talk about sometimes these post-mortems it it gives it gives me a headache and that is because your mind your mind is trying to sort it out is trying to wrap its arms around it in some sort of tangible way that makes it make sense like you know the pencil that i'm holding in my hand you know and i think that's that's that's the thing that's so difficult about this well the the thing about cosmic inflation because i really you know this is one of those things that you're like i need to really try to understand this um because it's different from this idea that we were learning in school about the big bang that explosion that expansion outward faster than the other than the speed of light with cosmic inflation as the universe is expanding it's spawning other universes and god there's so many they're infinite it'd be impossible to ever count that's the idea of cosmic inflation because it says that when we when the big bang happened and the universe began rapidly expanding outward it had to expand into something which by the way like pass that doobie that is the kind of conversations you have when you know you were in college and you know you've got yeah the universe is expanding it's expanding into something well that something whatever that something is that something wouldn't have to follow our laws of physics like the speed of light and that's where the i that's where that theory that version of the multiverse comes from so as someone who's fascinated by time slips and there's something like god you could lose you could lose a week of your life just watching stuff on youtube about time slipping hang on one look in the bowl by the front door okay sorry okay um anyway anyway so i've wanted to like i think all the time about people that literally vanish off the face of the earth like owen parfait and i wanted to do i wanted to do a missing person story that could be a time slip but i you know that i won't touch someone who could have friends or family members that are alive right to hear it so you know i went looking for and it can't be amelia erhart because i i suspect that amelia erhart and her navigator fred noonan i suspect that they they hoped and prayed for rescue and died of whatever hunger thirst disease i think that maybe we'll never find proof of it but i don't think amelia erhart fell through time there are a lot of people that are missing where you go there's some famous absolute baffling mysteries and owen Parfitt this little british man that nobody's ever heard of really yeah maybe one of the most mysterious of

all because of the number of witnesses and the circumstances and so i thought let me send poor Parfitt let me let him fall through the worlds and fall through time and one of the cool things to think about let's say owen did slip through time somehow let's say that that violent summer storm with all that electromagnetic energy in the air um let's say that circumstances were absolutely unimaginably staggeringly against the odds possible to create a gap and this old man was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to fall through that gap if you remember the movie peggy sue got married yes her time travel there's a storm involved in her time travel what does doc need in back to the future he needs lightning to strike that clock right so that's the thing that runs through folklore and mythology too is this idea that violent electromagnetic storms can change reality um can i do spontaneous combustion probably is a whole episode all by itself of true weird stuff as well but you told me something in this episode that i never knew before and that is you had to have alcohol as a part of the equation in order for that to occur that's what they said back when they were looking for owen that they he couldn't have just burst into flames folks if owen parfait burst into flames on his porch i beg you to use your sense not only would people have seen the fireball but the wooden house would have had some marks right so when people do that they don't vaporize they you do find you do find remnants of the person they have they have caught on fire they have there have been actual documented cases of this this isn't theory this is something that has actually happened so the fact that they didn't have any of that evidence um would lead you to believe that that was not the situation with him but um and i can't tell you that owen parfait fell through the worlds you know but nobody knows nobody knows what happened to owen but i sort of like the idea of sending owen traveling through worlds in time because i wanted that poor sweet old man or terrible bastard of a pirate whichever story you believe i want him to be found by someone so he was found by our producer doc which i thought was a nice twist in the story um so when i was um a college student in philly there were you know so many um so many unhoused people on the streets of philadelphia at that time were people that had been turned out of mental institutions that were closed when they lost their state and federal funding and and so you'd be you know walking to down the street to the subway station or whatever and people would be actively in active states of psychosis like hallucinating yeah um shouting things out at you and and it was heartbreaking right i mean heartbreaking to imagine human beings especially when we have plenty of resources and we just don't allocate them to people that need them anyway it's heartbreaking to see but i i used to wonder like what if not all of these people but what if this man right here that is constantly yelling stuff to me that's from 200 years ago literally what if he's not from this time yeah what if he landed here by mistake you would just think it's the rantings

of a crazy person you would go with this isn't this is a homeless man who obviously has got some sort of issues but if you if you found yourself in a world that was familiar but not like the police officer in liverpool in 1996 and you didn't the world didn't reset you and send you back you would have to make your way wherever you found yourself this is the thing about people who disappear in time slips you you have to make your way you're never going to be able to get home there's a very compelling i don't know if it's true or not i don't know but there's a very compelling uh time slip story i might have mentioned it on another true weird stuff when we talked about the multiverse little boy comes home from school can't can't get the door open finally it it opens for him and the woman standing there is a complete stranger it's his house but isn't that's not his mother she has no idea who he is this kid this kid it he can't he's in the world that seems familiar but everything is slightly off he ends up at the police station ends up in foster care and to this day claims that although he's made his way and made a life for himself here he's not from here he's from a neighboring parallel world that was close but not the same and he's had to make his peace with the fact that he somehow fell between worlds and he can't go home again and of course in his world if you believe him and it's a fun story to believe i think it's fun to think about if you believe him in the world he came from he's a missing child and his parents have never ever right given up looking and there's never been any evidence there's never been a clue yeah and i i think that um if if you were to if you were to meet somebody who who said look this is what my situation is wouldn't you have a lot of questions and is there anything that they could say that would actually make you believe what they were telling you that's that was my question at the end of this episode would you believe you you know what sherry i gotta tell you i probably wouldn't because would you believe you i'd like to think i'd like to think that i'm open enough that i would be that character in the story that did believe in you and that sort of thing but probably not i mean if i'm being honest and i'm i'm pretty open to all kinds of yeah stuff that people would consider kooky you wouldn't believe you i if i went upstairs and told a member of my family listen we need to talk about something i've never shared this with anyone and then proceeded to launch a story like this at them they wouldn't my husband won't believe me he'd want to but he wouldn't he i would scare him to death he would think i was having some sort of a breakdown um you look at the people who walk amongst us who tell you point blank this is not this isn't real this isn't where this isn't what it's supposed to be and we call those people call them crazy um if we're polite we call them schizophrenic you know at least we try to give like at least a medical label to it yeah but we don't believe we don't believe those stories and you probably wouldn't believe it and no one would believe you which makes the whole time slip phenomenon so interesting because you zoom back from it and you go yeah i mean if that happened the the double triple terror of being lost in the world and not being able to get home and no one believes you and you know that if you don't

shut up you're gonna end up in an institution it's an episode of the twilight zone yeah yeah so yeah that is the legendary story of the missing owen parfait i i love this story i just i really love this story i love every part of this i just wish i mean i don't know why i'm so weirdly fascinated by this particular thing by this idea that you could fall from one world into the next but if you think about multiverse theory and we've done a couple episodes on the mandela effect and the large uh hadron collider and cern that apparently broke reality i look at the i wake up every day in this timeline and all i can think is sure there was a light what is this there was a cable channel it's the cable system we're both on but they used to have a channel and they would show missing people from the area and some of these people had been missing for 50 years but they would show their picture how old they were how what they would look like now and they would show those like on rotation do you remember that with this really do really dramatic move music i i was so fascinated with that channel i would sit and watch it i would i would sit and watch because one of them they just had some information about one of them the other day they think that you know they may have found something uh somebody who was missing for like 50 years but i am absolutely fascinated with that but the idea that somebody can vanish without a trace and there's no reasonable explanation for what happened to them man i'm all about hearing about that well and you know um that a lot of these people even like even now somebody could be missing for 87 years and we thanks to dna testing you know we find remains we test it and i'll be darned if that isn't where so-and-so was all this time or a vehicle will be pulled out of the bottom of a lake with remains inside and that solves the mystery of that missing person so i mean i am not implying that everyone who's missing and never found is you know rocketing around in the multiverse it's just there are a handful and it's a very small percentage of cases where not only is the person missing that's not the whole story it's the circumstances around their disappearance that just have you going wait a minute and owen Parfitt is one of them and skeptics and debunkers would say well that was a long time ago and they said that they they said there were neighbors and witnesses but you don't really know that well no but like why would this whole village lie what would what did these people have to gain now did they are you suggesting they all lied or that they all conspired to murder an old man who couldn't walk i'm not believing that that's like people that say the moon landing wasn't real and everybody conspired together yeah not believing that at some point at some point you can either believe or disbelieve or just agree that yeah this is one hell of a mystery and then the disappearance of owen Parfitt is one hell of a mystery i don't see how it could ever ever ever be solved at this point he's just been gone for so very very long and the thing that the thing about time slips and time itself is we think of it as tick tock tick tock and he's been gone 257 years as we measure time but if the as we

measure time um and the very same clock on your desk if i send it up um if i put it on a satellite and send it up it's going to tell a different time than it does here because time is not a fixed concept time is trippy just because owen parfait disappeared 257 years ago in his world line doesn't mean that when he landed in that public park where doc found him for all he knew a moment had passed so because we we have no way of knowing how time really behaves much less how time behaves in the multiverse and that's why this podcast is called true weird stuff and not stone cold facts that can improve the true part of this is owen parfait yeah the weird part is maybe maybe he fell through the worlds and that wraps up this episode of true weird stuff next time oh my gosh are you aware max um so no i'm not aware of the living corpse i know what i know what the topic is but i'm not aware of the living corpse no one of the things i gotta say let me say this america you one crazy bitch because the ways that people made their living it's crazy you're gonna meet a man who made his living being buried alive and you're gonna hear from another man who was buried alive by mistake and it was only a fight between the undertaker and the doctor that led to him being dug up and them realizing that oh my god the doctor's right this guy was still alive and that doesn't happen quite so much anymore at least in this part of the world because of modern mortuary science thank god yeah um oh it's gonna be oh it's so fun it's so so so fun to meet the living corpse and to take a visit six feet under to your grave and literally no one can hear you scream we'll see on the next true weird stuff and if you listen to us on apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on instagram true weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is anthony garcia this show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by kevin nash original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by jack griffin and Zane Nash copyright 2025 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered you