Case file · High strangeness
The vanishing of Louis Le Prince
On 16 September 1890, cinema pioneer Louis Le Prince boarded a train at Dijon for Paris and was never seen again; neither his body nor his luggage was found.
1890 CE · 47.32, 5.03 · status: unexplained
The account
He had filmed moving pictures in Leeds in 1888, before Edison and the Lumières. Theories include suicide, murder over patents, or a planned disappearance.
The researched reading
A cinema pioneer who vanished from a train, or before boarding it. Suicide, murder or a deliberate departure explain it; the Edison plot is a legend.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A hoax or fabrication | 34% | Deliberate human acts fit as well: murder (his brother Albert, the last to see him, has been suspected over an inheritance) or a staged departure to start a new life, a theory argued in Christopher Rawlence’s book The Missing Reel. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 30% | He was under financial strain; suicide is a leading theory, and in 2003 a photograph of a drowned man pulled from the Seine in 1890, who resembles Le Prince, was found in the Paris police archives. |
| A cultural story | 24% | The theory that Edison’s interests had him killed to win the patent race is popular but has no evidence; the case is retold as a conspiracy. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 8% | An accident on or after leaving the train is possible but would usually leave a body or luggage. |
| Something in the surroundings | 2% | Nothing in the surroundings is implicated. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 2% | A vanishing with several ordinary explanations. |
Official position: French police found no trace of him or his luggage; no official conclusion was reached and he was declared dead in 1897.