Vanishing Hotel Room

According to the Quote Investigator website and urban legend researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake, the author of the earliest known instance of the legend was Nancy Vincent McClelland, who wrote a version in an article titled A Mystery of the Paris Exposition in The Philadelphia Inquirer of November 14, 1897.

The Quote Investigator and Taylor-Blake also found a version of the legend run in the Detroit Free Press in 1898 titled Porch Tales: The Disappearance of Mrs. Kneeb, written by Kenneth Herford.

[2] In a version printed in the July 6 and July 13, 1929 issues of The New Yorker written by Alexander Woolcott and included in his book While Rome Burns (1934),[3] it is revealed that the mother died of the Black Plague and that the hotel management and the police have kept her death a secret so as to prevent mass panic and hysteria throughout the city, and so that visitors will not leave, thus ensuring and maintaining the hotel's large financial income.

[4] The story inspired several novels, including The End of Her Honeymoon by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1913), She Who Was Helena Cass by Lawrence Rising (1920), The Vanishing Of Mrs. Fraser by Basil Thomson (1925), The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway (1926) and films such as The Midnight Warning (1932), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Covered Tracks (1938), So Long at the Fair (1950), Dangerous Crossing, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Into Thin Air/The Lady Vanishes (1955), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), The Forgotten (2004), and Flightplan (2005).

[3] Similar themes have been explored in, but are not officially credited to, the novel (2006) and TV series (2023) Therapy by German author Sebastian Fitzek.