Mystery on Ice: The Disappearance of Gertrude Strassburger

The "Inter Ocean," January 4, 1903, via Newspapers.com

I have blogged about a number of missing-persons cases where there are an eerie lack of clues about how and why the victim disappeared. One minute someone is there, the next minute...they're not. And that's all she wrote. One of the most puzzling examples is the following long-forgotten mystery from early 20th century Minnesota.

Gertrude Strassburger was the daughter of an architect in the town of Crookston.  She led the comfortable, uneventful life of a middle-class girl of her era.  Her life had known one tragedy: when she was a teenager, her sweetheart, whom she was expected to eventually marry, suddenly died.  Gertrude was naturally devastated, but she eventually learned to cope with her loss, aided by her growing interest in spiritualism.  She consoled herself with the belief that her lover was dead only in body, not in spirit.  She was an attractive, vivacious young woman who had many men friends, but she showed no romantic interest in any of them.  On the whole, she was a pleasant, if unremarkable, example of what used to be called “the all-American girl.”

Strassburger’s life chugged along quietly.  Then, on the afternoon of December 2, 1902, twenty-one year old Gertrude and some of her friends gathered for a skating party at a nearby river.  For half an hour or so, all happily zipped across the ice.  The only odd note to the gathering was when Gertrude, who had seemed in her usual happy spirits, suddenly commented to a girlfriend, “Do you know, I feel so queer.  I have been hearing music and voices, it seems to me, and they seem to come from a distance.  Just a little while ago I heard Will [her dead beau] call for me, and it seemed for a moment as if I must go to him.”  The friend apparently took little notice of this rather disquieting statement.

Soon after this, someone proposed a race to a bend in the river, about a quarter-mile away.  The only one to demur was Gertrude.  She was feeling a bit tired, she explained, and would sit on a log by the riverside and act as judge of the competition.  One of the young men gathered a few small branches and started a fire for her.  When he left to rejoin the group, he saw Gertrude sitting near the little blaze, warming her hands.

After about five minutes, the racing party returned to where Gertrude had been sitting.  She was gone.  All that remained of her was one of her gloves, still warm, on the log where she had last been seen.  When her friends were unable to find any sign of her, they immediately alerted authorities.

The disappearance was, from the start, unusually baffling.  The only footprints found around the log where Gertrude had been sitting were the tracks in the snow she and her friend had made going to the log, and then the boy’s solo footprints returning to the river.  Nothing else.

Could she have been abducted?  No one heard any outcry, and there were no signs of any struggle.  An elopement?  No, she had no romantic attachments, and, in any case, the lack of footprints indicated that if she had run away, it would have been impossible for her to do so unless (in the words of a contemporary newspaper,) “she went up in a balloon.”  She could not have left by train, because she was well-known to all the train workers passing through the city, which would have made it easy to trace her.  Besides, she had made many plans for the upcoming Christmas holidays, and was looking forward to attending various parties and festive events.

The frozen river was scoured for holes through which Gertrude might have fallen, but none were found.  The search party went through the woods at the edge of the river.  The snow around it was completely unmarked, showing no sign of human visitation.  Detectives were brought in, and for days the area where Gertrude vanished continued to be searched, with a frightening lack of any results whatsoever.  The Crookston city council offered a reward of $250 to anyone who could provide evidence about the young woman’s disappearance.  No one ever came forward.  Evidently, not even cranks and hoaxters could come up with a plausible theory for what became of Gertrude Strassburger.

No trace of Gertrude was ever found.  One of the final newspaper reports about the mystery commented that Gertrude’s known interest in spiritualism caused some to theorize that as the girl sat alone by the river, her dead love’s apparition appeared and carried her off to the great beyond.  In short, she simply dematerialized.  The paper added that “plain, every-day, matter-of-fact men and women scoff at this theory, but they fail to offer a solution as to what has become of the girl.”

[Note: In the following years, there were a few recorded alleged “sightings” of Gertrude.  Three weeks after her disappearance, it was reported that she had been found in Culbertson, Montana. In 1904, a conductor on the Milwaukee railway came forward asserting that Gertrude was alive and well and living in Canada.  However, when he learned that the reward for information about her was not forthcoming, he disappeared almost as quickly and efficiently as Gertrude.  In 1908, a Missouri newspaper published a brief report stating that Gertrude had been located in Spokane, Washington, where she was working in a millinery.  These news items were all completely uncorroborated, and appear to be typical of the many false reports which surround missing-persons cases.]