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The Vanishing
This account, which I first heard as a teenager, has haunted me for years. I didn’t know what to make of it then and still don’t to this day. That being said, it stuck with me for decades and is a tale worth sharing.
The story was told to me by a friend of my mother. She had grown up near where this event was said to have taken place in rural Tennessee in the late 1940s/early 1950s.
It begins with a farmer who was working in the fields one afternoon with his team of horses and a few farm hands. It had been a day like any other, that is, until the farmer’s helpers went home and his family came to fetch him for supper.
The man’s teenaged son was sent to retrieve his father but couldn’t find him in any of the usual places. The horses were still there, hitched to the plow they had been pulling all day. The farmer, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found.
The boy knew that his father would never leave the horses unattended unless something important had called him away. He yelled for him but got no response. As impossible as it was to believe, he seemed to have vanished without a trace.
Worried that something terrible had happened to his dad, the boy ran home to get help. He returned shortly with his older brother and sisters. Their mother soon followed. They spread out and searched the entire area, calling the man’s…
