So Supernatural - DISAPPEARED: Barbara Newhall Follett

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Celebrated author Barbara Newhall Follett went missing in December 1939. She's never been seen or heard from again. Is the key to solving her mysterious disappearance in the books she left behind?

At some point, we've all probably felt the call of the wild, the overwhelming urge to just retreat into nature, disconnect, and get away. Away from the noise, the screams, the monotony. Barbara Newhall Follett certainly did. At age eight, she told everyone around her she wanted to move to the woods or the mountains. At age 13, she set sail on the open ocean. At 19, she backpacked through the French Alps. And then, at 25, she vanished into thin air, leaving only the wind in her wake and her loved ones wondering

what became of her. But maybe they should have been asking what did she become? This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're discussing the disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett, an adventurous author who went missing in 1939. To this day, no evidence has ever confirmed what happened to her. Her case has been examined by investigators, journalists, relatives, you name it. But as far as I know, nobody's ever raised the possibility that her disappearance might have been supernatural, at least not until now.

All that and more is coming up. Stay with us. In 1923, Barbara Newhall Follett tacks a note on the bedroom door of her Connecticut apartment. It reads, If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room, the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone.

Then she shuts the door tight. Barbara's writing her first novel and she's given herself a very strict one year deadline to finish. Fortunately, she has almost no other obligations, which is partly due to the fact that she has almost no friends and zero job, which is entirely due to the fact that she is eight years old. When Barbara's telling people her book is about a child who runs away from loneliness to find companions in the woods, she's literally a child herself. So clearly she's a prodigy and a precocious one at that. Barbara's version of a good time includes figure skating with imaginary dead composers like Mozart, you know, other child prodigies who'd struggled with relating to their peers. And most of the time when kids ask Barbara to play with them, she basically tells them to take a hike and get a job.

She's too busy writing her novel. And she's not kidding. Barbara spends days on end plucking away at her typewriter, writing upwards of 4,000 to 5,000 words in a single sitting. I mean, for perspective, 4,000 to 5,000 words is about the length of this episode. So I don't know what you were up to at age eight, but I was probably in my backyard in a Mickey Mouse tent putting up posters of Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, thanks to Barbara's militant discipline, she finishes the first draft of her novel in March 1923, shortly after she blows out the candles on her ninth

birthday cake. She calls it The Adventures of Ebersip, with Ebersip being the name of her protagonist. Barbara then gifts the book to her mother, Helen, but Helen doesn't get to cherish the present for long because in October 1923, a fire rips through the Follett's home, destroying almost everything inside, including Barbara's manuscript. Months worth of work turns to ash in a second. Devastated doesn't begin to describe Barbara's emotions. There are no hard drives, no iCloud. The only way to recover the story is to literally piece it back together again from memory. But that's exactly what she does. A few short months later, Barbara sits back down at her typewriter and brings the adventures of Eepersip back to life. As you can imagine, this process is painstaking and frustrating. This time around, the story comes in bursts. She works on it in between other projects

and occasionally sets it aside for months at a time. But in the spring of 1926, Barbara basically climbs Everest twice. She finishes her first novel for the second time at only 12 years old, which, if you ask me, isn't just remarkable, it is miraculous. Now, it's not a word-for-word replica, but Barbara doesn't care. She actually likes this version even better. And she gives it a new title, The House Without Windows. The book isn't beautiful for a 12-year-old. It is just beautiful.

And it's worth a recap. So here it is in a nutshell. A lonely little girl named Epersip decides that her family's little brown shingled cottage is too restrictive, so she asks her parents to build a garden in their backyard, and they do. They create this expansive fenced-in paradise with winding paths, fruit-bearing trees, and every color and species of flower imaginable, which attract all kinds of butterflies and birds. At first, Ebersip loves her garden, but it doesn't cure her loneliness. So eventually, she runs away from home and into the wilderness. She travels through the meadows to the sea and then the mountains. And there, surrounded by insects, woodland creatures, and fairies,

yes, fairies, she never feels lonely again. Of course, there's conflict in the book too. Ypresip coerces her younger sister into the wilderness for a bit, but the sister gets homesick, and adults periodically try to capture Ypresip and bring her back to civilization, but they always fail. As the sun sets in the final moments of the book, a swarm of butterflies whisper a secret into Ebersip's ear. You never find out what the secret is though, because the butterflies form a crown on her head, two land on each wrist, and then, well, I'll just read you the final passage verbatim. She rose into the air, and hovering an instant over a great laurel bush, vanished. She was a fairy, a wood nymph. She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever

present, the spirit of nature, a sprite of the meadow, a niad of lakes, a nymph of the woods. So that's the book Barbara finishes when she's 12. Not bad, right? Barbara's father certainly doesn't think so. His name is Wilson Follett, and he's an editor for a prestigious publishing house in New York. It's a position he landed after working for Yale University Press, Dartmouth College, and Brown University. In other words, dude's got some clout. And because Wilson believes in the adult-sized merits of his pint-sized daughter's book, he brings a copy to

his boss. The next thing Barbara knows, her novel's accepted for publication. At first, the publisher orders a 2,500-copy trial run, but it's nowhere near enough. Word of Barbara's talents travel fast, and the book sells out before it even hits shelves. Everyone wants to know what's up with this wonderkind novelist. During the second run, The House Without Windows goes international, and it's embraced as a darling among literary critics. The New York Times fawns over Barbara's unbridled imagination. The New York World recommends it to anyone who appreciates, quote, beauty and good writing. The Saturday Review of Literature calls it almost unbearably beautiful.

But as soon as publishers and readers start clamoring for a follow-up, Barbara surprises everyone by deciding to set sail on the open ocean. Seriously, in June 1927, at just 13 years old, Barbara joins the crew of a lumber ship called the Frederick H. She begins a 10-day-long journey to Nova Scotia and back as their, quote, cabin boy. Barbara spends most of her time performing manual labor, like cooking, sweeping, and mopping, which, like, good for her for living out her dreams. But her time on board the Frederick isn't just for kicks. It's fodder for her writing career. See, before she's even out of puberty, Barbara's manifested a life most writers only dream of having.

When she's not writing to live, she is living to write. On or off the page, Barbara's this walking adventure. She feels on top of the world. But unfortunately, that feeling is short-lived. Just months after returning from sea, the rugs pulled out from underneath her dreamscape. And life, as Barbara knows it, all comes crashing down. Her father, Wilson, the man who acted as Barbara's editor, hiking partner, and most trusted confidant, reveals he'll be moving to New York to be with his mistress. They've been seeing each other for quite some time now.

So in one fell swoop, he severs ties with his old family to start a new one. Wilson doesn't even pause for a second to look in the rear view. He just moves on. Now, Barbara's learned a lot from her father so far. But this important lesson sticks with her most of all. There are no consequences to running away. Coming up, Barbara goes into hiding. Now back to the story.

In May 1928, a 14-year-old Barbara publishes her second hit novel, The Voyage of the Norman Dee, which is based on her time at sea. But with her father out of the picture, she's in no mood to celebrate the book's success. All she really wants is to escape. So four months later, in September 1928, Barbara and her mother Helen embark on an adventure for two. They leave with only a suitcase and two portable typewriters. From New York, they head to the Caribbean islands. They explore Barbados, then Tahiti, Fiji, the Tonga Islands, and Samoa before landing in Honolulu in May 1929, eight months later. The whole thing sounds like a dream vacation. But the trip doesn't go as planned.

Barbara and her mother fight through a good portion of it, and apparently, Barbara has a full emotional and nervous breakdown. Her mother, Helen, writes to a friend that she's afraid Barbara might actually take her own life. Like, she uses the word suicide. And she blames the whole thing on her ex-husband, Barbara's father, saying his, quote, attempt to smash his family for his own individual freedom has worked 100%, end quote. But on their way back to the States, things turn around for Barbara. For the first time in her life, she falls in love with something other than freedom. His name is Edward Anderson, a sailor. He goes by Anderson and he's 25. Now Barbara's 15 at this point, 10 years Anderson's junior. She doesn't go into too much detail in her letters, but we know they have so-called cherry and ice cream parties together aboard the ship. And they take long walks

through quote, virgin forests once they're ashore so read into that whatever you will. And if their relationship was sexual Anderson's behavior would be considered statutory rape in all 50 states today and in the majority of states even then so he's not exactly a hero or a gentleman but nonetheless Barbara's smitten. In a letter to a friend, she describes her time with Anderson as the happiest month of her life. But the happiness is short-lived. When they land in Washington, they're pulled in different directions. Anderson back to his ship and Barbara to Southern California. Barbara's going to stay with a family friend in Pasadena while her mother goes back to Hawaii to write a book.

Now, she's not in Pasadena long, but three major events happen. Barbara enrolls in school, she starts seeing a psychiatrist, and the Great Depression begins. Now, you'd assume the Great Depression tops any list of disastrous failures, but Barbara is miserable despite the worst economic disaster in modern history.

The only thing she hates more than the family friend she's staying with is formal education. Not to mention her psychiatrist is actually a convicted sex offender without any qualification who moonlights as a masseuse to Hollywood starlets. Now, Barbara never mentions any inappropriate behavior directed at her specifically, but by September 1929, she decides to run away. It's hard to imagine her mental state at this point, but before she goes, she writes this really odd cryptic letter to her mother. She says, quote, I'm not going to tell you for the time being where I'll be. I want to be alone with my disillusion or my fairy tale, and I expect I'll be seeing you again in this incarnation, end quote. Then she flees to San Francisco where she

rents a room in a boarding house under the pseudonym Kay Andrews. Naturally, the family friend she's been staying with in Pasadena reports her missing and it's not long before the cops track her down just as she is about to jump out a window. Now, I don't know how high this window is, that info has been lost to time, but it could have been an attempt by Barbara to end her life, which casts a particularly dark light on the letter she just wrote to her mother. I want to be alone with my disillusion or my fairy tale. Or she could have just been trying to get away. In either case, she's desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful. Officials toss Barbara in a juvenile detention center, but they don't know what to do with her exactly. Her mother's on an

island, it'll be days before she arrives, Her father's on a different coast, and she refuses to go back to the family friend she'd been staying with. Meanwhile, the press is having a field day. Salacious headlines are splashed across newspapers. Girl writer 15 tries suicide to cheat law. In the end, Helen returns to the States, and in June 1930, they move to New York City to begin yet another chapter in their lives. Barbara's now watched her life burn down around her for the second time in 16 years, first literally and then figuratively. Her years in New York are spent trying to, once again, reconstruct her dreams from the ashes. But success is harder to come by. She's dirt poor now, and her name's losing social capital by the minute. So Barbara takes a job writing synopses of bad novels for Fox Film

while enrolling in business classes. The longer she spends in the city, the more her mental state suffers. In a letter to a friend, she describes New York as the place where moths feed on the wings of your soul. In other words, it's a place of loneliness and she needs to get away. So in the summer of 1931, Barbara retreats to the Vermont wilderness to swim, hike, and write a new book. And while she's there, she makes three friends. They're all kindred spirits in love with nature and adventure. And by fall, the four of them have made plans to quit their respective jobs

and hike the Appalachian Trail. But when it's time to pull the trigger, only two of them are still committed. Barbara and a recent Dartmouth grad named Nickerson Rogers, or Nick for short. They're not going to let the others hold them back, so in July 1932, the two friends, Barbara and Nick, venture into the New England wilderness alone. Now, they hike some of the Appalachian Trail, but when it gets cold, they head overseas to Spain. From there, they backpack across Europe, hitting the Mediterranean islands, France, Switzerland, Germany, and living off the kindness of strangers. Like, clearly these two are not sick of each other, and to avoid certain

stigmas, they pretend to be married. Meanwhile, back at home, people are starting to wonder if there's any real chemistry behind this faux marriage, and they're especially curious considering her history with Anderson, as in Sailor Anderson, as in Barbara's first love. Yet he's still in the picture. It turns out they've been exchanging letters for years and seeing each other when they can. In times of upheaval, like after the police captured Barbara and threw her in jail, Anderson literally dropped everything to be by her side. But ever since Barbara left with Nick, she's mostly been ghosting Anderson. And on the rare occasion she does send him a letter, she only vaguely refers to Nick. So Anderson's just on his ship, scratching his head, wishing read receipts were a thing, wondering, you know, what's happening? Who is this other guy? And the not

knowing kills him. While Nick's prancing through the Alps with Barbara, Anderson keeps writing Barbara letters asking her why she's drifting away. Letters that end like this, if there's a ray of your affection left, don't try to kill it, for I love you. So from the outside looking in, Barbara's at a fork in the woods. One path leads to Anderson and another to Nick. No one, not even her mother Helen, knows what her next step will be. That is, until she returns to the States in November 1933, and Barbara's choice becomes crystal clear. Coming up, Barbara vanishes. Now back to the story.

When Barbara returns from Europe in November 1933, she moves her life from New York to Boston. She wants to be closer to the person she loves, Nick Rogers. So not Anderson. As far as I know, that's over. Barbara and Nick tie the knot the following summer in July of 34, and she decides to try on a bit of domesticity for size. Barbara adopts the role of housewife and takes a job as a secretary. As you can imagine, it doesn't quite suit her. There's nothing wrong with her life, she just feels like her character, Eepersip, playing in her backyard garden. It's perfectly pleasant, but nothing is satisfying her need for adventure. So in 1939, five years into her new life, Barbara decides to pursue a new passion

across the country. She enrolls in the Bennington School of Dance in Oakland, California, where she'll study interpretive dance for the summer. And Nick's totally fine with it. He has to stay behind in Boston for his job, and he probably figures like in the span of a marriage, what's a few months apart? Well, it turns out a few months is more than enough time for Barbara to find inspiration and joy and just enough time for Nick to start seeing someone else. And to make matters worse, Barbara finds all of this out in a letter. No joke, Nick doesn't even wait for Barbara to come home to ask for a divorce. Like a true coward, he sends a message in the mail.

Given her father's betrayal, this is pretty triggering for Barbara, but she's not going to let Nick off easy. She hops on the first bus back to Boston, determined to save her marriage. And okay, here is where things start to get really messy, even a little surreal. When Barbara arrives back home, this is August 15th, she's expecting to confront Nick. But there isn't even a whisper of a welcome or an apology. Why? Because Nick's MIA and so are many of his belongings. Barbara doesn't really know what to do at this point. Is Nick gone for good? Is this just like a weekend away with his mistress? Like as far as she knows, she might never see him again. And apparently she's distressed because she calls up a doctor friend for support and the doctor brings over some non-traditional medicine to nurse Barbara's sorrow. I'm talking hamburgers, whiskey, and a bunch of sleeping pills. The combination

soothes her anxiety, basically by knocking her out for a while, and three days and an unknown quantity of intoxicants later, Nick returns home to find Barbara waiting for him. His only explanation for why he was gone? A business trip. And okay, even if he's telling the truth, it still sounds like a tired excuse if you ask me. But fine, we'll let Nick have this one. There are more important things for him and Barbara to discuss, like the divorce he asked for. But here's where the specifics of the story get even more hazy. You would think that Barbara would kick Nick out for good or give him some sort of ultimatum, at least talk about how to move forward.

But instead, Barbara and Nick seem to just like carry on their marriage as if nothing happened. Like Barbara gets home on a Tuesday, Nick gets home on a Tuesday, Nick gets home on a Friday, and by Saturday, they're vacationing together in Vermont. So this is either emotional repression at its finest, or they're suddenly living in a bizarro parallel universe where Nick didn't just try to detonate their marriage. It's not until a few months later when she and Nick are exploring the beaches and the

towns of cape cod daydreaming and pretending to pick out the summer home of their dreams that barbara decides to confront him she turns to nick and just asks him point blank do you want to make a go of things and he apparently says yes but there's more to it than that, because just as Barbara's face lights up, Nick adds, don't get too excited. I'm not sure I can. But Barbara doesn't seem worried. She responds, well, wanting is more than half the battle. With both of us wanting it so much and pulling as hard as possible, I don't see how there can be any failure. So clearly she's hopeful. And we all know about this conversation because afterwards she writes about it in a letter to a friend. Months later, she writes a follow-up letter with an update. She says, quote, on the surface, things are terribly,

terribly calm and wrong, just as wrong as they can be. I still think there is a chance that the Barbara drops this letter in the mail in November 1939. It is probably the last thing she ever writes. Barely a month later, on December 7th, 1939, Barbara walks out of the front door of her apartment with a notebook and the modern equivalent of $550 cash. And then, she's never heard from or seen again. Okay, so some of this makes sense, right? I mean, Barbara had always been a little flighty and impulsive. It's not hard to believe that things got even more sour with Nick, so she just up and left. But to disappear without a word to anyone she cared about, that's suspicious. And as far as the details of how she left, that's all according to Nick. Aside from his testimony, we don't actually know when she left, what she took with her, or even if it was voluntary.

So here's what we know for sure. At 10 p.m. on December 21st, Nick Rogers reports Barbara missing to the Brookline police. This is 14 days after he says she left. He tells them about the missing notebook and cash and admits they had an argument before she left. Nick doesn't say what the argument's about, though. He's more focused on asking police to keep a low profile. Barbara's still relatively famous, and he doesn't want publicity, which can seem fair. But on April 18th of 1940, this is four months after his wife's alleged disappearance,

Nick changes his mind. Now he wants to get the media involved. So eight days later, the Brookline Police Department releases a statement to eight surrounding states. It includes the date Barbara went missing and this description. Notice they use Barbara Rogers. left shoulder slightly higher than right, occasionally wears horn-rimmed glasses. Notice they use Barbara Rogers. Nick gave them Barbara's married name, so the press still has no idea that Barbara Newhall Follett, the celebrity kid writer, is missing. And they won't for another year. Until in May 1941, Barbara's father, Wilson Follett, publishes an open letter in The Atlantic.

It's titled, To a Daughter One Year Lost. And it's clear from his words that he fully believes Barbara's still alive. He actually goes as far as to scold her for running away and then has the audacity to lecture her on how to maintain a healthy marriage. Two more years pass and on December 14th of 1943, four years, almost to the day since Barbara's disappearance, Nick files for divorce. Then he immediately marries a woman named Anne Bradley, the same woman he'd cheated on Barbara with. Now up until this point, Barbara's mother, Helen, also believed her daughter was alive somewhere, and she'd been under the impression that Nick was doing everything he could to find her daughter. But after the divorce, Helen digs deeper into the actions officials took after Barbara's disappearance, and she learns how Nick kept the media out of the

investigation, which she thinks is highly suspect. Helen basically spends the rest of her life writing letters to the Brookline Police Department, desperately searching for answers and pointing fingers in Nick's direction. She even writes Nick a letter on March 11th, 1953. It says, quote, Now, nothing ever actually comes out against Nick. Maybe because he's innocent. Maybe because the dead can't talk. Whatever the case, the police don't come across any leads. No new info, no sightings, nobody.

Unless someone somewhere made a huge mistake. You see, five years before Helen sent that letter to Nick, in November 1948, officials in New Hampshire get a call about some human remains found near Squam Lake. This is just south of the White Mountains. It's not much. Most fragments have been scattered by natural forces, the animals, the brook, the wind. But they find personal belongings as well. There's a purse, an empty

medicine bottle, a flask, tarnished shoes, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Investigators determined the remains belonged to a young woman around the age of 25 who died at least eight years ago, which is almost an exact match for an open missing persons case, a local woman named Elsie Whitmore. Elsie disappeared 12 years earlier in 1936 at the age of 25. So on December 1st, 1948, officials release a statement to the press

saying Elsie Whitmore's body has been found. Forensics found barbiturates in the medicine bottle, so her death is ruled a suicide. But here's the catch. The cops didn't bother to mention any of the discrepancies. Elsie Whitmore was about three inches shorter than the estimated height of the young woman they found. The shoes found at the scene didn't match Elsie's size, and Elsie didn't wear glasses at all. I mean, don't get me wrong, the timing fits, the age fits, even the location fits because Elsie lived just a few miles away from the Squam Lake area where the remains were found. But this could have easily been a case of mistaken identity. Like, why not seriously consider Barbara too?

For one thing, Squam Lake had sentimental value to Barbara. She and Nick had spent two weeks camping near the lake during their first trip together, when they set out to hike the Appalachian Trail. And like Elsie, Barbara disappeared more than eight years before the remains were found. And she was also 25. But get this, she was taller than Elsie, and we know she wore horn-rimmed glasses. So all of the things that don't match up for Elsie, they work for Barbara. Unfortunately, we may never know the truth.

I'd say we could test the remains and see if the DNA matched either of them, but nobody knows where the remains are. People have looked, but all records of their whereabouts have mysteriously vanished. So maybe Barbara ran away and started a new life, never pausing to look in the rear view. Or maybe her life was cut short at the hands of someone she loved or even her own. But I'd like to think there's a third option, something besides life or death. Maybe Barbara fulfilled the same ending she'd written for Ebersip when she was just 12 years old. She ran away from loneliness into the

woods to find companionship. And somewhere amidst a sea of butterflies, she transformed into a fairy, the spirit of nature, a sprite of the meadow, a nymph of the woods. And she's still out there somewhere waiting to be found. Sure, it sounds pretty out there, but if there's one thing we know about Barbara, it's that she always defied the odds, and she disliked anything ordinary or predictable. This is a woman who spent her entire life questioning why humanity built a world of glass

and called it civilization when we're not actually superior to the natural world. In the grand scheme of things, we're no better than a worm, let alone a butterfly. If anything, we're the problem, and we need to start acting like it before it's too late. So yeah, maybe, just maybe, Barbara's waiting for us in the forest, where she'll be invisible to all the mortals who don't have minds to believe, or eyes to see the truth. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. If you're interested in learning more about Barbara,

I found the research and writing of Barbara's half-nephew, Stefan Cook, absolutely invaluable. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.