In 1950, a man appeared in Times Square, New York, with tight sideburns and a Victorian-style suit. According to eyewitnesses, he was very frightened and completely confused. Literally a couple of minutes after the strange man was first noticed, he, unfortunately, was hit by a car and died.
In the morgue, the following items were removed from the pockets of the deceased's clothes:
- a 5-cent beer token with the name of a bar that was unknown even to the oldest residents of the area;
- an invoice for horse service and car wash, issued by a paid stable located on Lexington Avenue, but at that time was not listed in any directory;
- about 70 dollars in old dollar bills;
- a business card with the name of Rudolf Fenz, according to which his place of residence was an apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York;
- a letter sent to the same address in June 1876 from Philadelphia;
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- None of these items showed signs of aging or oxidation.
Captain Hubert Rim of the Missing Persons Department tried to use this data to identify a strange person.
There was a commercial enterprise at the address indicated on the business card, but the owner did not know the name of Rudolf Fenz.
The investigation revealed the following:
There was a commercial enterprise at the address on the business card on 5th Avenue, and the name of Rudolf Fenz was not familiar to its then owner. Nor was Fenz in the city's address book, and his prints were not found in any database. Nobody reported that this person was missing.
Rome continued to investigate and eventually found one Rudolf Fenz Jr. in a telephone directory from 1939. Rome interrogated the residents at the indicated address and found out that once Rudolf Fenz, about 60 years old, who worked nearby, really lived here. After retiring in 1940, he moved elsewhere.
The investigator found out that he mysteriously disappeared in 1876 at the age of 29.
Rome tracked down the address of the alleged Fenz, but he died five years before the incident, but his wife was still alive and lived in Florida. An investigator contacted her and found out that her husband's father had mysteriously disappeared in 1876 at the age of 29. He just left the house for an evening walk and no one else saw him.
This story was published in many newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, 1980s and up until 2000 it was presented as a real event. Nevertheless, there was a researcher of oral folklore Chris Aubek, who decided to check the accuracy of what was described, and came to the conclusion that the people and events indicated in this story are completely fictional, but he could not determine the original source.
The real Rudolf Fenz
In 2002, Pastor George Murphy claimed the original source was either one of Robert Heinlein's anthology Tomorrow, The Stars, or a story published in the September 15, 1951 issue of Collier's Weekly. The real author of this story is science fiction writer Jack Finney, and the fictional episode with Robert Fenz is part of the story "I'm afraid", which first appeared in Collier's Weekly. And everything seemed to fall into place - Robert Fenz turned out to be a literary hero in a fantastic work.
However, in 2007, a scholar working for the Berlin News Archive found a news article dated April 1951 that mentioned the same story. This note was printed 5 months before Jack Finney's story appeared. In addition, the article mentioned that several researchers managed to find evidence of the existence of the real Rudolf Fenz, as well as confirm the fact of his disappearance in 1876 at the age of 29.