On September 3, 1873, James Worson took on a challenge to race from the town of Leamington to the town of Coventry in England. This was supposed to be a twenty mile distance and the challenge required that Worson cover this distance in record time. According to the story, Worson would brag about his fast running ability all the time, so he was finally asked to prove himself. Two others would accompany Worson in a horse-drawn carriage that day.

As the sun rose, Worson was on his way. Running at a steady pace, he was making excellent time and was sure to beat the old record before noon. The two other men tailed behind him at all times, never losing sight of Worson. As the hours passed, everything was going along as planned until one of the men saw trouble up ahead. Running in the middle of the unobstructed road, Worson begins to stumble forward as if having tripped over something. The two men were close enough to see that there was nothing on the road around Worson that would have caused him to lose footing in such manner. Maybe he had tripped over his own feet.

The men’s attentive stare was broken when Worson, while in mid-air, let out an awful gut-wrenching scream that one of the men later recalled as being a “…ghastly sound either of us had ever heard.” As Worson is about to hit the road face first, he completely dematerializes in mid-air. Completely vanishing in plain view of the two men.

It’s said that one of the men carried with him a camera at all times. This allowed them to photograph the terrifying tracks left on the dirt road. The story that the supposed photograph shows is that of a man’s tracks that lead up to a point where Worson stumbles and then they vanish. Only to show the open and untouched road ahead.

The man hurried back and told the people of Leamington what had occurred. Although search parties were formed and bloodhounds deployed, not a single fiber of what was once, James Worson, was ever found. The man simply vanished from the face of the earth.

Stories like these have always terrorized me. As a child I couldn’t imagine anything more frightening than walking home and unknowingly walking through some “time portal” and instantly being in a foreign city, planet or even century. I should really thank the old Twilight Zone episodes for that.

But there is no need to worry about all that, you see, the story of James Worson is just that…a story. It comes from an American Journalist and Author, Ambrose Bierce. The original story varies slightly from the urban legend, but it begins and ends in the same manner.

Ambrose Bierce had written a story titled “An unfinished Race” and that had give rise to the popular urban legend. So if you thought that this was a supernatural tale, I’m sorry to have disappointed you.

But…

There is one real unexplained mystery that surrounds this story, and with an eerie coincidence, it involves a real life disappearance. The disappearance of the Author Ambrose Bierce.
You see, around 1913, the now elder Ambrose Bierce, had traveled to Mexico on an assignment in regards to the ongoing Mexican Revolution. Bierce had been an active journalist for most of his adult life and a revolution was history in the making. So it was natural that he would write about the aggressive war. His plan was to travel south and stick with the rebel troops and gain a firsthand perspective of what life was in the Mexican Revolution.

As Ambrose Bierce made his way south, he never arrived at one of his planned destinations. He vanished while on the trail and was never seen or heard from again.