The Vanishing Prisoner - The year was 1815 and the location a Prussian prison at Weichselmunde. The prisoner's name was Diderici, a valet who was serving a sentence for assuming his employer's identity after he died from a stroke. It was an ordinary afternoon and Diderici was just one in a line of prisoners, all chained together, walking in the prison yard for the day's exercise. As Diderici walked with his prison inmates to the clanking of their shackles, he slowly began to fade - literally. His body became more and more transparent until Diderici disappeared altogether, and his manacles and leg irons fell empty to the ground. He disappeared into thin air and was never seen again. (From Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present, by Jay Robert Nash)