The Mysterious Disappearance of Agatha Christie

On Saturday the 4th of December 1926, a Morris County car was found halfway down a grassy slope with its engine still running and headlights still on. It was wedged in the bushes well off of the main road and in the car was found a fur coat, a suitcase with women's clothing and a Thus began one of the largest manhunts ever recorded. Hello friends! Today we're here to discuss one of the biggest unsolved mysteries to surround the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie, when she disappeared for 11 days in 1926. By this stage Agatha was already a celebrity. The murder of Roger Ackroyd had just come out to roaring success and she'd just been given a 500 pound advance for her next book. You might be thinking 500 pounds? It's not a lot. That's about 25,000 pounds today. So that's quite a large advance. So obviously her disappearance was immediately news. It was immediately a big deal. So in order to take you through it, let's go through this chronologically from that moment on the morning of Saturday 4th of December when the car was first discovered. Kind of chronologically, you'll see. After discovering the car, the police promptly called Agatha's home. They found out from servants that about 9.30pm the previous night, Agatha got off from her chair, climbed the stairs, kissed goodnight to her daughter Rosalind and left in her Morris County car. She would not be seen again for 11 days. At this point police are speaking to Carlotta. So Carlotta was Agatha's closest friend, her secretary, her live-in governess to Rosalind. Carlotta was all the things at once. And she told police that when she got home, she'd been out the previous night, and when she got home there was a letter to her from Agatha. And most of it was just scheduling stuff, but it is reported to also have lines in it like, my head is bursting. There was also a letter for Archie, Agatha's husband of 12 years. He had been away the weekend, he rushes home, he reads his letter and then promptly destroys it. Okay. Sure. All right. That's a great thing. Your wife's missing, let's destroy the one thing that could help find her. Great idea, Archie. We'll come back to that letter and Archie a lot later, I'll tell you now. Meanwhile, Superintendent William Kenwood is mounting the search nearby where Agatha's car was found. Now, Kenwood is reportedly a very kind and caring police officer, he liked to feed the ducks, you know what I mean? But he also loves drama. He lives for the drama. Kenwood loves drama. And of course this case is dramatic. It's the queen of mystery surrounding a mystery, which I'm going to help you solve. But anyway, so he's immediately like, oh God, I love drama. You know, that's going to come into play throughout this as well. He spent the weekend with about seven or eight police officers, as well as some civilians searching the countryside immediately around where Agatha's car was discovered. There's a lot of kind of quarries and like chalk pits and just like, it's a very bumpy area. So they were searching the area, but found nothing. The next day by Sunday, police and people close to Agatha were growing increasingly frustrated that Archie had destroyed his letter. They're like, girl, what the hell? Like, why would you destroy the ones that your wife has gone missing? And Carlotta had turned her letter over to the police, even though she found, you know, there's nothing in there that I think will help. But Archie destroyed his immediately. So the suspect, I wonder what he's trying to protect. By Tuesday, the stakes were rising in the hunt for Agatha. The Daily Mail published a £100 award, which was a lot, for anyone with information that led to finding Agatha Christie. By now, the disappearance was big in the press. It was everywhere. Everyone was talking about it and everyone had theories as to what was happening. One of the big theories was that it was a publicity stunt. This didn't make people happy, and it also wasn't helped by the fact that her publisher started using the publicity of the disappearance to promote her books. It would be like in newspapers, like, featuring the Okay, great idea. So people were angry. People thought it was a publicity stunt and they thought that, you know, she was wasting police resources and time. Other theories were that she was just a petty, vindictive woman punishing her husband for something that he did wrong that she didn't like. Like, you know, he didn't wash the dishes up or whatever. Not that he would be expected to. Or there were also rumours, because of his kind of, you know, skirting around what happened, people suspected Archie. When he was asked about what the letter had said, he was very cagey and he said it referred to a purely personal matter. I cannot discuss what it was. Okay, Archie. On Wednesday, we get our first kind of breakthrough piece of information. Up till now, there hasn't really been much information. Agatha's brother-in-law is like, I got a letter from her, sent from London, saying she's going to a spa in Yorkshire, guys. That's what she told me. Now, you would expect this would mean the police would go and start searching in Yorkshire, wouldn't you? That's the general line of inquiry you think we'd take. Wrong! By this time, Kenwood was convinced he was searching for a body. He was like, that's what I'm doing here. We're searching for a body. She's dead. We're trying to find her. And this new piece of the puzzle didn't fit with the jigsaw that he had been building. And so he kind of just discarded it. He couldn't make it fit in his mind with what the picture that he'd been building up. He thought maybe Agatha didn't post the letter herself. She didn't have to be alive for the letter to be posted from London on Saturday. So it was posted the day that her car was found. He thought maybe she'd asked someone to post it for her. So they sent a few police to look around some spas in Yorkshire, but they didn't really properly look. They were much more focused on Kenwood's line of inquiry, which was finding a body. Kenwood had the silent pool, which was a natural spring right near the accident, dredged in case Agatha had fallen in. It was kind of like a local haunted spot. Like I said, he lives for the drama. It was reportedly the death site of a young girl and her brother. So he thought, oh, she's falling into the silent pool. You know, I think the silent pool actually inspired one of Agatha's short stories or something similar. So it definitely had an evocative air about it. But no Agatha there. By now, the Westminster Gazette reported that over 300 police officers had been involved in the search. On Thursday the 9th, a few more developments start to come to light. We are now up to reportedly 900 police officers involved in the search, aided by even civilian airplanes. We don't need to get into this, but around the time there was this whole thing after, after the disappearance, spoiler alert, where MPs in Parliament were complaining, saying questions in Parliament about the cost that had been incurred from this on the police force. People were asking the Home Office about it. And there was a big rumour at the time that the airplanes had been like police ordered airplanes. But that's not the truth. It was like civilian airplanes from what I can tell. Archie brought Agatha's beloved terrier to the site and gave it one of her gloves to try and find the scent, but reportedly the dog just whined pitifully. He's like, I miss my mum! By the way, if you're wondering about Rosalind, because she misses her mum as well, she's just been told, I believe at this time, that Agatha had just gone away to write one of her books, which was a fairly common thing to happen. Police were so desperate they began to search through Agatha's manuscripts, particularly her current work in progress, which was The Blue Train. By the way, side note, the mystery of The Blue Train, Agatha said it's easily the worst book I've ever written. That was her opinion, but as you will see, it is perhaps more to do with what's the associates that book with and the time in which she wrote it. Something Agatha recently said to a friend comes to light. So her and Archie had recently moved into this house. It was called Sunningdale, or The Styles, named after her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. By the way, ballsy to name your book after this fictitious house that you have created where a murder happens. That's the best luck, but okay. About the house, Agatha said it stands in a lonely lane, unlit all night, which has a reputation of being haunted. The lane has been the scene of a murder of a woman and the suicide of a man. If I do not leave Sunningdale soon, Sunningdale will be the end of me. So this just fed into theories that Agatha had ended her own life, which was one of the most popular theories at the time, particularly amongst the police. But as well as the dog whining pitifully in the search and being accused of murder by strangers across England, Archie had something more to worry about. The names of the friends that he had been with the night of Agatha's disappearance were starting to be reported, including that of Nancy Neill. You see, Archie was having an affair with Nancy, something that Agatha knew about and was kind of in denial about. Afterwards, certain journalists found out that that evening that he was out and Agatha disappeared was actually reportedly a celebratory engagement dinner between Archie and Nancy. So Archie was desperate that Nancy's name wouldn't get into the press. He saw Nancy as his future, so he didn't want her reputation to be tarnished. And if it came out that he was having an affair and his wife had disappeared, he would look even worse. So Archie gives an interview to the press. The interview comes out the next day, Friday the 10th, and it was not a good idea. Well, it was maybe a good idea for Archie because I think he got what he wanted out of it, like getting the heat off Nancy. But Agatha did not come out of it looking very good. My wife, he said to a reporter, has discussed the possibility of disappearing at will. Engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally, I feel that is what happened. So people are already angry at her, but then her husband comes out like, yeah, she's just having a jolly. Yeah, she's just, you know, she's just seeing what it's like to disappear. That's nothing to be worried about. Yeah, that didn't go down well. People were even angrier at her. He also said that him and Agatha led their own lives. He's like, I do my thing. She does her writing, you know, you know, we're two individuals, you know, which didn't endear Agatha to those who kind of had this idea of a traditional wife. It just painted her as cold, neglectful, emotionally distant from her husband and absorbed in her work. Instead, he spent more time defending himself against people saying he's a bad husband and what have you. He said it is absolutely untrue to suggest that there was anything in the nature of a route or a tiff between my wife and myself on Friday morning. I strongly depreciate introducing any tittle-tattle into the matter. By Saturday, it had now been over a week since Agatha disappeared and so two big searches are planned on each day of the weekend to try and find out more. Saturday saw thousands of motorists and civilian amateur detectives turn up to help. Police appealed for help and asked owners of Bloodhounds to bring them to come and join in the search. The main thing found in this day was a handbag with men's clothes and documents in it. So this began the theory that Agatha had disguised herself in men's apparel as a man and was off somewhere disguised as a man. Archie also said that he conducted a thorough search of his own wardrobe to see if anything was missing. Newspapers began showing pictures of Agatha in disguises that were pretty ridiculous. Like it was like, this is what she'll look in glasses and a wig if she's disguised like, I don't know, a cook, I don't know, which was fairly ridiculous. And there was a at the crash site. The newspaper at the time reported, But people were despondent. People were starting to lose hope. The Times reported that no reliable witness has seen her since a week ago when she left Sunningdale. No one knows where she is. And not to help with this negativity, rumours began flying that she'd left another letter, another envelope that should only be opened in case her body was found. On the next day, Sunday the 12th of December, Surrey Police organised the great search, the big search. Apparently over 2,000 people came to help in the search on this day, scouring the countryside, the miles and miles of countryside surrounding where her car was found. Apparently the roads were blocked with traffic, cars aligned every area around the car where it was found. On this day we had two special guests, we had two celebrity guests. Enter Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur Conan Doyle turned up and he took a pair of Agatha's gloves and took them to a medium and the medium, not knowing whose gloves they were reportedly, said she is not as dead as everyone thinks. She is alive. I think you hear from her about Wednesday. About Wednesday. Don't worry, don't sweat it. And Dorothy L Sayers, the famous mystery author, turned up. I don't know if at this time her and Agatha had already collaborated, but I know they collaborated on some detective club works together. But yeah, she turned up and used the location actually in her book Unnatural Death. But neither of them found anything other than that. On Tuesday, Agatha had now been missing for 11 days and hope was beginning to dwindle. On Tuesday morning, the Daily Mail ran an editorial saying if Agatha was alive, she must be ready to inflict intense anxiety on her relatives and heavy expenditure on the public in a heartless practical joke. The girlies were mad. They were mad. The paper also reported that on the day previous on one of the big searches, some important items have been found nearby. Reportedly a bottle labelled poison, lead and opium, fragments of a torn up postcard, a woman's fur lined coat, a box of face powder, the end of a loaf of bread, a cardboard box and two children's books. Great searching everyone. The end of a loaf of bread. Perhaps more ominous was the detectives new theory that they gave to the press. They said we believe she had no intention of ever returning. Not great. Not great. Everyone's losing hope. But whilst searchers and police were giving up hope, unlikely help arrived in the form of two banjo players. They were members of the group the Happy Hydro Boys who played at the Harrogate Spartan Hotel. The Hydro... what's it called? The Hydropathic. Everyone just called it the Hydro. Okay, the Hydropathic was what it was called. Everyone just would just call it the Hydro. That's what everyone called it. They told local police Agatha Christie was not dead. She was very much alive. She's probably doing the Charleston as we're talking because she's been living up in our hotel for the past 11 days. Police rushed up to Harrogate. This is a town not far from Leeds in Yorkshire and descended upon the hotel. Police, reporters and Archie, they brought Archie with them, sat down in the dining room of the Hydropathic to wait for Agatha. In walked a woman wearing a handsome mauve gown, the pearl necklace and reporters were struck by her beautiful fair hair and Archie gave the nod that this was in fact his wife. Reports on how Agatha and Archie greeted each other differ wildly. Differ wildly! Some say they had an affectionate greeting, some say Agatha appeared puzzled and had really no recognition of who this man was. Others say that she told him he looked nervous. She was like, you look nervous babes, what's up? So we don't really know how they reacted to each other, they vary wildly. All's well that ends well, huh? We found her, applause everyone, it's all good. So let's all go back to our own lives, not entirely everyone. When she meets Archie and she's showing him off to her new friends who came to the hotel, she introduces him as her brother, not her husband. One of them recalls her saying, this is my my brother everyone, he's turned up unexpectedly, say hello. So it becomes clear something's not immediately right. What's going on with her? Is she introducing him as her brother to save face? Is she embarrassed? Does she truly not remember who he is? In order to find out we need to go back 14 years in time. But quickly before we do, you please know Arthur Conan Doyle was really happy because his medium turned out to be basically correct and he said this is an excellent example of the use of psychometry as an edge to the detective. So Conan Doyle's like pat on the back, pat on the back everyone, I know. Anyways, going back 14 years in time to tell the true story of In 1912, 22 year old Agatha met Archibald Archilchristie at a local dance and fell in love very quickly. Now he was called up to fight in the first world war in 1914 as a pilot I believe, but they married on Christmas Eve when he returned home from leave in 1914. Whilst he is off fighting so he has to go back to war, Agatha worked as a voluntary nurse at her local Red Cross hospital. Fun fact, that's how she picked up a lot of her knowledge about poisons that she ends up using in her books. And also reportedly there was a lot of Belgian refugees in the area at the time and that's how she got the idea for Occupy Rome. Fast forward to 1924, so a couple of years before the disappearance, Archie and Agatha had been married for 10 years and had a daughter Rosalind, but it was not all happy families. In some of her plays she wrote at the time, we have Ten Years and The Lie, she writes of women in unpassionate marriages feeling despondent, feeling alone, feeling estranged from their husband, feeling like they've lost the passion in the relationship. And obviously this is not, you know, she's not saying, oh I felt like this, but it was a theme running through some of her plays at the time. Then in April 1926, so what happened, what we were talking about, disappearance happens in December 1926, but April 1926 is when it all starts to fall apart. Agatha's beloved mother passes away, Agatha wasn't able to make it to her bedside in time before she passed and she is despondent. Archie is abroad on work at the time and he doesn't even return for the funeral. Agatha talks about how she's always known about his violent dislike of illness, death, and trouble. He was a survivor of war and he says that he could not stand tears and depression, and so he emotionally withdraws from his wife at the time that she needs him most. She is despondent, she needs his comfort, whereas he's only able to act with kind of joviality, I don't know if that's the right word, like oh everything's fine, what do you do when he returns home. Agatha begins to suffer from insomnia, she goes to a chemist to ask for a sleeping draught and he recalls that the topic got into a certain morbid kind of conversation, she said I would not commit suicide by any violent method while a poison exists to him, while she was getting the sleeping aid. By August, papers, edutism papers, were openly starting to report that she was suffering a breakdown, saying it's not a Agatha goes to her mother's house with Rosalind to try and sort through all her mother's belongings and just to feel closer to her mother, and the plan is that after that her and Archie will go away on holiday to kind of like revitalise her, repair her mental state, but when Archie turns up to the house after them being there for a couple weeks without him, he hasn't bought the tickets for the holiday. And Agatha is very confused, she says he appears very emotionally distant, she said that it was like standing in front of the person that you loved most in the world and realising they've become a stranger. And when she asked him what was wrong, he blindsides her, saying I'm having an affair with Nancy Neal and I want a divorce. Agatha refused, she's like nope, absolutely not. She didn't believe that this would last, she believed that she had the trump card, which was Rosalind, and that Archie loved Rosalind and Nancy couldn't expect him to leave her daughter. So in that autumn there was somewhat of a stalemate, they moved back to the Styles, Archie spent a couple nights a week at his nearby club, and Carlotta or Carlo said that although he was physically present at the Styles, he was emotionally absent. So at this point Agatha is at a severe mental low, she has insomnia, she's depressed, her husband is having an affair, she's at a very difficult point in her life, and we're up to the morning now of the disappearance, so the morning of the Friday the 3rd. The morning of the disappearance she goes to tea with her mother-in-law Peg. At first Peg says she's in a good mood, she's lively, she's like woof woof woof, seems really happy, talks about going to a spa in Yorkshire, but then Peg notices that Agatha is not wearing her wedding ring, and when she's asked about it she sat perfectly still for some time, gazing into space and giving a hysterical laugh turned away. Now her route to Peg's house that day took her over the hills and past Newlands Corner, that place that her car was eventually found. A lot of the quotes I'm about to share with you for the rest of this from Agatha herself just take place in this one interview that she does with the Daily Mail in February of 1927. This was the only time that she really ever again spoke about the events that happened. She says at this time I was in a very despondent state of mind, I wanted my life to end. Passing by Newlands Corner she saw the quarry and she says that at the sight of it there came into my mind the thought of driving into it, however as my daughter was with me in the car I dismissed the idea at once. So Agatha returns home after the tea and it's on this lonely dark night that she finds out where Archie is. We don't really know how, whether it's through post or a note, but she finds out that Archie's with friends for the weekend and she figures out who those friends are, aka Nancy. So as we know Agatha went and kissed Rosalind goodnight, left the letters for Carlo and Archie and got in her car and drove away. So we're now the night before her disappearance and she was driving around aimlessly, this is a habit that she'd picked up that year. The cars at the time required quite a lot of gears and shifts and buttons and what have you to make it drive, so I think it required quite a lot of mental energy to just drive and so you're not allowed, you can't really think about other stuff. So this was a habit she'd picked up throughout the year and she says all that night I drove aimlessly about, in my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove automatically down roads I knew to Maidenhead where I looked at the river, I thought about jumping in but I realised that I could swim too well to drown. Then back to London again and then on to Sunningdale, from there I went to Newlands Corner. When I reached a point in the road where I thought was near the quarry I had seen in the afternoon, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it, I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly, I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something. So when the car was found the wheels were stuck in a hedge and if the car had not hit that hedge the car would have fallen down into the quarry and smashed into a million pieces. And so in this moment when Agatha was so close to ending everything, she's suddenly shocked back into life. She's got injuries to her head and chest but she walks out of her car, walks away from it and also walks away from being Mrs Christie. She becomes Mrs Theresa Neill. She does what she does best and she creates a character, not just one in a book but one to help her escape her reality. Her reality is no longer livable for her, so she creates a character to live through. So at the time when we find Agatha at the hotel, she doesn't really remember a lot of this but through later help with a psychotherapist, she comes up with a lot of this information. So she says that she finds herself at a big station and is surprised to find out that it's Waterloo. So journalists from the Daily Mail at the time found out that there's a station about three miles away from Luton's Corner which had trains that morning to Waterloo about every twice every hour, right? So Agatha probably hadn't long left her car when it was discovered at 8am. I think trains only began about 6.52 so she could have left her car not long before it is found. Now before I tell you, give you this spiel about what happened, I will tell you there is an alternative claim. Now I don't think as we'll talk about the claim makes much sense but I will tell you that there's this alternative claim. So the daughter of Nan Watts, Nan Watts was a very close friend of Agatha, she was her sister-in-law because she was Agatha's sister's husband's sister. So not her sister-in-law through her husband, her sister-in-law through her sister. But Nan's daughter claims that Agatha actually held up in their Chelsea apartment that night and then the next morning was put on a train to Harrogate. She said she wanted to give Archie a shock, if she had had amnesia she would not have signed the register in the other woman's name. My mother helped her because she was distraught. So she's saying that she was completely aware of what was happening this whole time, she did it to punish Archie. There's multiple reasons I don't think this was the case, we'll get into more later, but number one is that Archie, Carlotta, everyone around her said that she would not like this fuss. She didn't really like fame, Agatha, even later in life when she was married to her second husband and she'd have to give her occupation, she would say housewife, she wouldn't say author, she didn't want to be known herself, she just wanted to write. And so the idea of her cooking all this up for publicity or knowing that it would get this publicity doesn't really make sense to me. So Agatha had now become Mrs Theresa Neill, she's taken the last name of Archie's mistress and she says that Mrs Theresa Neill is from South Africa and South Africa was a place that her and Archie were really happy. They had some of their most happy holidays there, so it's kind of a combination of those. Theresa, we don't really know. Some people think Saint Teresa, some people think Teaser, as in a mystery teaser, but that was the name she gave Mrs Theresa Neill. And when she got to Waterloo she went to a local shop for ladies, she cleaned herself up, apparently she bought a new hot water bottle, and then she went to King's Cross where she got a train to Harrogate. She arrived at the Hydro with no suitcase but she claimed, I've just come from South Africa, I've left it with my friends, and she ordered a room. She had those 60 pounds with her, which is a lot of money. One guest at the hotel said, I danced with Miss Christie that evening, she arrived, she does the Charleston, but not very well. Leave Agatha alone, she's going through it. On Monday morning Agatha's maid noticed that she had the London newspaper taken up with Breakfast in Bed, by this time it was international news. Agatha Christie's disappearance would be reported in the newspaper. If she had read it, she would have read about her disappearance, but either she didn't read it or she was just able to put it out of her mind and go shopping. She's like, I got money, might as well spend it. So she went shopping in Leeds, when she came back that day loads of packages were arriving, new hat, new coat, new clothes, apples, not apples, fruit, books and magazines, everything. Guests at the hotel also noticed she often had a book in her hand. She'd been to a local library and the librarian said that she noticed she had a taste for novels of sensation and mystery. That evening Agatha came down in a proper dress, she's like, right I'm dress girlies, let's do it. She danced, she played billiards, she sung aloud, she like chatted with everyone, she had a great time. She made friends and one guest noticed she still had the price tag on her scarf for 75 shillings and they asked her, is that all you're worth? And she said, I think I'm worth more than that. By Tuesday Agatha's picture had appeared on the front page of the Daily Express, this was everywhere and people at the hotel were beginning to suspect what was going on. But this lasted so long, this like Agatha being, you know, hiding in plain sight, because workers at the hotel, staff at the hotel, were not about to like sell out on one of their clients, that would have been a big problem. So they were just like, okay if she wants to be here she's here. The hotel manager recalled when she'd been there for about four days his wife said, I think that's Agatha Christie. He was like, no, because like, wait a second. But yeah, her maid said that she knew for a long time but she wasn't about to tell no client like that. Rather than beginning to figure out her identity, on Thursday Agatha began to even more fully embody her character. She actually placed an ad in the Times which said, friends and relatives of Theresa Neill, late of South Africa, please communicate. This makes me think this wasn't something that she was conscious of. I really truly believe she had disassociated herself so much from her terrible reality that she was living in, that she believed that she was Theresa Neill. She's actually reported, a guest reported her saying to them, this Miss Christie is a very elusive woman, I cannot be bothered with her. You know, commenting and chatting about the case, having found out about it. And she was also at the time showing signs of mental distress. She would press her hand to her head and say, it's my head, I cannot remember. Saying a lot of similar stuff like that. So she was in visible distress to other guests as she was around at the time. And so that was how Agatha spent her days at the Hydro. We don't know a ton more than that. All the reports are that she was dancing, singing, having a whirl of a time, making friends. She later said that she felt truly happy while she was there. People noticed that she seemed happy, seemed joyful. And so I truly believe that her situation and mental state had just got so bad that she had to deforce herself from that and become this new person who was happy. Although we don't know the full truth to what happened, and there are some discrepancies, in my opinion and a lot of other people's opinions surrounding the case, she suffered a mental breakdown after a severe period of mental illness and mental distress. Her beloved mother had died. Her husband emotionally withdrew from her and began an affair. She felt alone, unmoored, under deep stress. Her workload was super high at the time as well, like ridiculously high, even for someone who wasn't stressed. And after brushing with death, like I said, it seemed like she did what she did best and created a character to live through. She wrote years later, you can't write your fate. You can do what you like with the characters you create. And so that's what she did. She did what she liked with the character that she created. Once she was found, news quickly got out and press started to swarm on the Hydro. They sent like a decoy out of these two people out through the front where the majority of people were and her and Archie snuck out through the back. But one of the photographers still managed to get a snapshot of her leaving and they stole away to a local friend's nearby house and kind of holed up in it. I find it really hard to believe the argument that she knew what she was doing because Rosalind remembers being brought up by Carlo to visit her mum and her mum didn't know who she was. She said that she didn't even remember the stories we used to tell, you know? And for a child to go through that, I don't believe a mother would. And she loved Rosalind. I don't think a mother would intentionally put her child through that. I guess I went to therapy in London where she kind of worked through what happened and she divorced Archie about 15 months after the events. Archie, if you're wondering, went on to marry Nancy Neal within like a week or something. Like he married her straight away. Nancy had actually been sent off by her parents on a round the world cruise after this whole thing broke. Her dad was in the newspapers going, I couldn't possibly imagine why Agatha used our daughter's name. I couldn't tell you. Couldn't tell you. But yeah, they went on to get married and Agatha married an archaeologist many years later who she grew old with. So a lot of the information that we know is from that one statement that she made to the Daily Mail in February. Similar cases have been reported many times where an individual goes through something stressful and enters I think what is called like a fugue state where they don't know who they are. They don't know what's going on. They don't know that they are the person everyone's looking for. And that seems to be what happened in this case. She said in that statement to the Daily Mail, many people still think I deliberately disappeared. What actually happened was this. I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate. Agatha Christie as we know her now could have been a very different story if that bush hadn't been placed where it was on the quarry. At this point the last book to be published was A Murder of Roger Ackroyd which is only like the fourth or fifth I Poirot novel. And at the time there wasn't a lot of support or discourse around mental health and mental illness. At the time I think Archie came out to press saying she was confused and she had a concussion. Whereas talking about the deep layers of trauma and stress and disassociation wasn't really in the conversation then, especially not for a woman. And so it wasn't something that she spoke a ton about going forward. I think it's clear from all the statements that we have that this was incredibly painful for her to remember. She didn't write about it in her autobiography, she pretty much just left it behind. I think she only gave the statement because she felt like she had to explain herself because so many people were angry at the waste of funds as they saw it. So although it is somewhat unsold, we will never know the absolute truth, we'll never know whether she did hole up in Nan Watt's home, I think we can assert that Agatha created a character, didn't know who she was, didn't know when she was chatting to guests at the hotel that she was the Agatha Christie that everyone was looking for, and did this because her life had just got too painful. The man she loved loved someone else, the mum that she loved was no longer here, and she felt alone. So yes, that was the story of Agatha Christie's mysterious disappearance. I hope you enjoyed that. I had a lot of fun researching and making this video, it's been incredibly time-consuming, I really wanted to get to the depth of what happened. I will leave, if you're interested in further reading, all of the information, all of the websites that I used for research on this. I also really recommend Agatha Christie, A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley. I wonder who said that about her? I've only read the sections on the disappearance, there's about 60 pages that I read, but this was incredibly helpful. Lucy Worsley is an incredible historian, and I haven't read the whole book but I'm really excited to after reading that section. So yeah, let me know what you thought of this style of video, whether you enjoyed it, I'd love to do something similar in the future. And thank you guys so much for watching, make sure you subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you soon in another video. Bye!