This Day in History: David Lang mysteriously disappeared on this day in 1880. David Lang was a farmer who lived near Gallatin, Tennessee. On September 23, 1880 David Lang vanished into thin air while walking through a field near his home. His wife, children, and two people who were passing by in a buggy all witnessed his disappearance.
Frank Edwards wrote of this in his book Stranger Than Science:
"David Lang had not taken more than half a dozen steps when he disappeared in full view of all those present. Mrs. Lang screamed. The children, too startled to realize what had happened, stood mutely. Instinctively, they all ran toward the spot where Lang had last been seen a few seconds before. Judge Peck and his companion, the Judge's brother-in-law, scrambled out of their buggy and raced across the field. The five of them arrived on the spot of Lang's disappearance almost simultaneously. There was not a tree, not a bush, not a hole to mar the surface. And not a single clue to indicate what had happened to David Lang.
The grownups searched the field around and around, and found nothing. Mrs. Lang became hysterical and had to be led screaming into the house. Meanwhile, neighbors had been altered by the frantic ringing of a huge bell that stood in the side yard, and they spread the alarm. By nightfall scores of people were on the scene, many of them with lanterns. They searched every foot of the field in which Lang had last been seen a few hours before. They stamped their feet on the dry hard sod in hope of detecting some hole into which he might have fallen -- but they found none.
David Lang was gone. He had vanished in full view of his wife, his two children, and the two men in the buggy. One second he was there, walking across the sunlit field, the next instant he was gone."
Over time, the grass around where Lang had disappeared turned yellow in a fifteen-foot diametric circle, leading to the belief that some form of energy had mysteriously transported him away.
Seven months later his children were said to have heard their father's voice imperceptibly calling out for help as they played near the spot of his disappearance. They never heard that voice again.
In the effort to debunk this story, the tale only becomes stranger.
Ambrose Bierce, though largely forgotten now, was a popular author in the late 1800's. Many believe that the story of David Lang was lifted from Bierce's short story, "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field" published in 1893. Or did Bierce steal the story of Lang's disappearance?
What makes this whole story stranger is that Ambrose Bierce, like the man in his story, and like David Lang...mysteriously disappeared himself. To this day, no one knows what happened to him.
The story does not end there. In 1999 an opera was composed called "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field." This opera was based on Ambrose Bierce's short story. The composer's name is DAVID LANG!.
Wikipedia writes about this piece, "Also in 1999, Lang and playwright Mac Wellman based their opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, about an Alabama planter named Williamson who purportedly vanished while walking across a field in 1854. (Bierce's story reoccurs in urban-legend form, in which, coincidentally, the vanished man is often given the name David Lang.)"
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