6. Solomon Northrup was promoting his book Twelve Years a Slave when he vanished
The book Twelve Years a Slave tells the true story of Solomon Northrup, a free black man, who was kidnapped into slavery. Northrup was on a trip to Washington DC, a city where slavery was legal, to perform as a professional violinist when he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold to James Birch, one of the city’s most notorious slave traders. Birch shipped him to New Orleans, where he was sold to William Ford, a Louisiana farmer and Baptist preacher. He was later sold again, to a carpenter named Tibaut, who once tried to kill him, and then once again sold, to a cruel master who held Northrup for almost a decade. After finally regaining his freedom through the courts, Northrup documented his slavery in a book which was promoted heavily by abolitionists in the Northern American states.
In 1857 Northrup was on a tour of various Canadian towns and cities delivering lectures on abolitionism and promoting his book when he disappeared. The last known location for the lecturer was Streetsville, in Ontario, where he arrived to deliver a lecture but was prevented from doing so by hostile crowds, which demanded that he leave. When the writer failed to appear anywhere, rumors that he had been again kidnapped by slave traders and returned to the south emerged. There were occasional reported sightings of an anecdotal nature, including Northrup being seen helping to guide escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, but no definitive reports that he was still alive, either in the north or the slave-holding south. His abrupt disappearance from Ontario remains a mystery.