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Christmas Eve, in the story · its correction in Unsolved Mysteries
The pointer: the tale of Oliver Lerch — the South Bend young man who stepped out to the well on Christmas Eve with a bucket, called for help from the dark, and was never seen again, his voice fading into the sky — is the most successful story ever attached to this city, and it is told in full, with its papers, in this history's Unsolved Mysteries section, where its tested correction stands: the vanishing-man story is a work of literature, Ambrose Bierce's “Charles Ashmore's Trail,” retold for more than a century in books of the unexplained, and its Lerch form belongs to South Bend Township in Indiana County, Pennsylvania — not to this city. It is carried here at this size, and no larger, on purpose: the whole tale is in the other section with its verdict beside it, and a folklore record that reprinted it in full here would be laundering it back into a South Bend story by the act of telling it twice. It fooled a region for a hundred years; its place in this section is the pointer that says where the fooling is documented and undone.
Sources:
- This history, Unsolved Mysteries section — the Lerch tale in full, its Bierce source, and the correction, from the South Bend Tribune column and the St. Joseph County Public Library's local-history writing.