Laura Wright 
In August 1872, Charles J. Reid appeared to have a promising life ahead of him.
He was a bright young man, unmarried, and still living with his family in Xenia, Ohio.
One morning, his parents, two sisters, and a visiting cousin gathered around the breakfast table and waited for Charles to join them.
When he finally entered the room, everyone immediately noticed something was wrong.
Charles wasn’t himself.
He was unusually quiet.
He behaved strangely.
Then, before anyone could determine what was troubling him, Charles collapsed to the floor.
Charles Reid Collapses
Mr. Reid immediately attempted to resuscitate his son while sending the visiting cousin to fetch the family doctor.
Charles did not respond.
His distraught family carried him upstairs to his bedroom, where they continued checking his body for signs of life.
There were none.
Slowly, the terrible reality became apparent.
Charles Reid was dead.
The family pulled a sheet over his body and stepped into the hallway to wait for the physician.
The Doctor Arrives
When the family doctor finally reached the Reid home, everyone accompanied him upstairs.
Nothing appeared to have changed.
Charles’s body still seemed to be lying on the bed exactly where his father had left it, covered by the sheet.
The doctor approached the bed.
Then he pulled back the sheet.
Charles was gone.
The Body Had Vanished
The discovery sent the family into hysterics.
Several members reportedly came close to fainting.
The doctor ordered everyone out of the bedroom until they could regain their composure. Then he began examining the room himself.
The sheet remained on the bed.
But instead of covering the shape of Charles Reid’s body, it now lay there as nothing more than crumpled fabric.
There was no corpse underneath it.
Could Charles Have Escaped?
The doctor’s first thought was remarkably simple.
Perhaps Charles had not actually died.
Maybe the young man had regained consciousness and somehow left the bedroom.
But that explanation created another problem.
How?
The Reid family had been waiting immediately outside the room.
Charles could not have simply walked through the doorway without being seen.
The doctor examined the bedroom window.
It was locked from the inside.
He even went outside and searched the ground around the house for footprints or some other indication that Charles had escaped through the window.
He found nothing.
No Body, No Inquest
There was never an inquest into Charles Reid’s apparent death.
There was no body upon which to conduct one.
There was also no apparent evidence that a crime had occurred.
A young man had collapsed in front of his family.
His relatives believed he was dead.
They carried him upstairs.
They covered his body.
Then they waited outside the bedroom until the doctor arrived.
When the sheet was pulled away, the body was gone.
The Vanishing Corpse
No explanation was ever discovered.
Charles Reid was never seen again.
Neither was his body.
There was no open window.
There were no footprints.
His family had been standing outside the bedroom.
And according to the surviving account, nothing ever emerged to explain how a corpse could disappear from a room surrounded by the very people who had carried it there.
Charles J. Reid simply vanished.
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