UK UK - Ada Constance Kent, 67, Whalebone Corner England, ~1939

[Thor2000]

I'm looking for info on the case of a woman named Ada Constance Kent, a reclusive woman who vanished from her home in Whalebone Corner, England. According to the case, the police searched her home but found no trace of her, but years later when a deposit was made to her bank account, the police returned to her home and found her skeletal remains sitting in a chair in her dining room. I was wondering if this was a true story or just a ghost story passed off as real?

 

[Kat]

I found this article for purchase:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A10FE3859157A93C1AB1788D85F4D8485F9

Article Preview
A Reappearing Skeleton Baffles British Police

By The Associated Press.

March 23, 1949, Wednesday

Page 19, 150 words

The first paragraph is not available for this article.

However, I got hits on up to 3 articles (could be repeats hits) from articles on ancestry.com. I no longer have a subscription, but there are members here that do.

I would go down the the genealogy forum in the private threads area for members only and request a lookup for those articles if anyone has the time to do so.

Let me know...I'm interested to, I love an old mystery.

 

[Kat]

Ohhhhhh this one might be good! I went to ancestry and there are quite a few articles that have info on her case.

You can see a few words here and there and so far it has piqued my interest

 

[missy8394]

I found several copies of newspaper articles. Rather than trying to get them uploaded to a photobucket account, it was easier to create an album on my profile page and save them there.

 

[anne11]

I found this article saying that the skeleton was not her
http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...gkRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=IpMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1705,8183558

 

[Joanie]

According to the case, the police searched her home but found no trace of her, but years later when a deposit was made to her bank account, the police returned to her home[...]

Respectfully snipped... the British use "deposit" in this instance to mean an account, in other words, there was not any recent activity to trigger anything. The bank had an account that she had started and they probably didn't know what to do with the money, so they may have asked the police to go in and figure out whether there was anything in the house that would give the name of a next of kin, etc.
Those articles are so typical of the times, aren't they? No mention of relatives, and it's amazing to think that her house sat unoccupied for years. It doesn't even sound like they looked into her disappearance very deeply. No body, no crime. The house sat for years...

It is probable that the skeleton was that of a squatter, who was living in the home long after Ada disappeared. Strange, very strange....

Thank you for posting such an interesting case!

 

[anne11]

Deposit in banking jargon means to add funds/pay money into an account. I'm trying to find the inquest details, and pictures of her.

 

[Kat]

I do find it very interesting myself. I love mysteries of course like most here do

 

[Kat]

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/69334748

Wednesday 23 March 1949

The above article states her body was unearthed from debris.

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards.page/board/general_topics/thread/1065865?d=desc
Copy and pasted article at website above.

http://www.newspaperarchive.com/SiteMap/FreePdfPreview.aspx?img=114090843
Another old article.

It looks like the facts of the case may have been distorted?

 

[anne11]

Scotland yard didn't think the size or age of the remains matched Ada, but there is a death certificate issued in 1949 for an Ada C Kent from Colchester
http://www2.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/information.pl?scan=1&r=196780083&d=bmd_1320433380
Seems to indicate it was her.

 

[Archangel85]

The case is still unsolved and it looks like she appeared on Unsolved Mysteries

http://unsolvedmysteries.wikia.com/wiki/Ada_Constance_Kent

 

[Richard]

80 years ago, Ada Constance Kent, age 67 at the time, disappeared. Ten years later (in March 1949) her body was found sitting in a chair in her cottage.

 

[Richard]

Ada Constance "Connie" Kent, (stage name Vera Verchayle)

Back in the 1930s, the woman known as Ada Constance Kent, AKA Connie Kent, was a pretty big star. She was a British actress who had appeared in both stage and film productions, often under her stage name, Vera Verchayle. Although not a worldwide sensation, she was fairly popular, and after years of some amount of success she moved out to a quaint cottage in the countryside of the English village of Fingringhoe, Essex, to become a rather reclusive spinster, unmarried and alone. By all accounts, during these years she was fairly reclusive, rarely entertaining people or even going out at all, really, only making regular appearances at the local Whalebone pub, where she would show up for a drink and to get her favorite cigarettes. Then in 1939 she showed up at the pub right on schedule and just left to keep on walking off the face of the earth, starting the beginnings of a very weird unsolved mystery.

In the summer of 1939, Kent showed up for her usual drink and smokes, before leaving, and none of this was odd in the slightest at the time. However, she would stop showing up after that, and when she made no efforts to contact a close friend people began to worry. Kent had been so reclusive that it took three months for anyone to fully grasp the fact that she had apparently dropped off the grid, and when police were notified, they dutifully went over to Kent’s secluded cottage to check things out. When they arrived the cottage was unlocked, the door swinging open to reveal the gloom within. On the kitchen table was a tray with a meal laid out as if someone would come home at any moment, and there was even an open book next to a chair by the fireplace, Romeo and Juliet. Her coat and all of her belongings were still there as well, untouched and all in order. However, although the scene seemed totally normal there was no sign of Kent. There was no sign of a break in, no trace of a struggle or foul play, it was as if she had just gotten up and walked on out into oblivion.

In 1942, a friend of Ava’s by the name of George Winkal broke into the abandoned cottage in a quest for answers, but he found nothing either, and all of this time no one had heard from the missing former actress. The case would linger in a limbo of no information and no leads, until in April of 1949 there was an anomaly when someone suddenly deposited a large amount of money into Ada’s bank account, followed by several more such deposits, the last one being in September of that year, all of them for hefty sums. After all of those years of no word from Ada at all, this was enough to compel police to go back to the abandoned cottage, and things would get very strange from there.

Police entered the dank dwelling not expecting to see much, but they were surprised when they entered Ada’s bedroom to find a fully-clothed skeleton positioned next to the bed, with an empty bottle next to it marked “Poison.” An examination of the skeleton seemed to show that it had been propped up there for some time, but weirdest of all is that it could not be determined if they were Ada’s remains or not. So, who was it and why had this skeleton appeared at her house out of nowhere and who had made those deposits into her bank account? No one had a clue. Interestingly, nothing seems to have been stolen except the book that had been laid out by the chair, and there had been no break in, it was just that eerie skeleton sitting there staring out at nothing with its empty eye sockets. Police would later find out that kids had been sneaking into the cottage for years and knew all about the mysterious bones, but police were sure that it had never been there during any of their searches of the property.

A full investigation of the remains by Scotland Yard would further fuel the mystery when they were found to be too large to have possibly been those of Ava Kent, and were likely those of a man, so who was it and why were they in that cottage? To this day there have been no answers, the skeleton has never been conclusively identified and we are left to wonder. What happened to Ava Kent? Where did she go and who put those deposits into her bank account? What is the meaning of that skeleton being found in her home a full decade after the disappearance and where did her book go? There are no answers to these questions, and it remains a baffling little unsolved historical oddity.

The post The Vanished Actress and a Mysterious Skeleton first appeared on Mysterious Universe.
Source: weiv

LINKS:

The Vanished Actress and a Mysterious Skeleton

History is full of people who have vanished without a trace, and there are also numerous oddities often surrounding these people. At times is is

laptrinhx.com

The unexplained mystery of Ada Constance Kent – “The skeleton in the bedroom” – Strange Unexplained Mysteries

coolinterestingstuff.com

https://laptrinhx.com/news-cdn/laptrinhx-news.png

 

[SimsGuy67]

Ada Constance "Connie" Kent, (stage name Vera Verchayle)

Back in the 1930s, the woman known as Ada Constance Kent, AKA Connie Kent, was a pretty big star. She was a British actress who had appeared in both stage and film productions, often under her stage name, Vera Verchayle. Although not a worldwide sensation, she was fairly popular, and after years of some amount of success she moved out to a quaint cottage in the countryside of the English village of Fingringhoe, Essex, to become a rather reclusive spinster, unmarried and alone. By all accounts, during these years she was fairly reclusive, rarely entertaining people or even going out at all, really, only making regular appearances at the local Whalebone pub, where she would show up for a drink and to get her favorite cigarettes. Then in 1939 she showed up at the pub right on schedule and just left to keep on walking off the face of the earth, starting the beginnings of a very weird unsolved mystery.

In the summer of 1939, Kent showed up for her usual drink and smokes, before leaving, and none of this was odd in the slightest at the time. However, she would stop showing up after that, and when she made no efforts to contact a close friend people began to worry. Kent had been so reclusive that it took three months for anyone to fully grasp the fact that she had apparently dropped off the grid, and when police were notified, they dutifully went over to Kent’s secluded cottage to check things out. When they arrived the cottage was unlocked, the door swinging open to reveal the gloom within. On the kitchen table was a tray with a meal laid out as if someone would come home at any moment, and there was even an open book next to a chair by the fireplace, Romeo and Juliet. Her coat and all of her belongings were still there as well, untouched and all in order. However, although the scene seemed totally normal there was no sign of Kent. There was no sign of a break in, no trace of a struggle or foul play, it was as if she had just gotten up and walked on out into oblivion.

In 1942, a friend of Ava’s by the name of George Winkal broke into the abandoned cottage in a quest for answers, but he found nothing either, and all of this time no one had heard from the missing former actress. The case would linger in a limbo of no information and no leads, until in April of 1949 there was an anomaly when someone suddenly deposited a large amount of money into Ada’s bank account, followed by several more such deposits, the last one being in September of that year, all of them for hefty sums. After all of those years of no word from Ada at all, this was enough to compel police to go back to the abandoned cottage, and things would get very strange from there.

Police entered the dank dwelling not expecting to see much, but they were surprised when they entered Ada’s bedroom to find a fully-clothed skeleton positioned next to the bed, with an empty bottle next to it marked “Poison.” An examination of the skeleton seemed to show that it had been propped up there for some time, but weirdest of all is that it could not be determined if they were Ada’s remains or not. So, who was it and why had this skeleton appeared at her house out of nowhere and who had made those deposits into her bank account? No one had a clue. Interestingly, nothing seems to have been stolen except the book that had been laid out by the chair, and there had been no break in, it was just that eerie skeleton sitting there staring out at nothing with its empty eye sockets. Police would later find out that kids had been sneaking into the cottage for years and knew all about the mysterious bones, but police were sure that it had never been there during any of their searches of the property.

A full investigation of the remains by Scotland Yard would further fuel the mystery when they were found to be too large to have possibly been those of Ava Kent, and were likely those of a man, so who was it and why were they in that cottage? To this day there have been no answers, the skeleton has never been conclusively identified and we are left to wonder. What happened to Ava Kent? Where did she go and who put those deposits into her bank account? What is the meaning of that skeleton being found in her home a full decade after the disappearance and where did her book go? There are no answers to these questions, and it remains a baffling little unsolved historical oddity.

The post The Vanished Actress and a Mysterious Skeleton first appeared on Mysterious Universe.
Source: weiv

LINKS:

The Vanished Actress and a Mysterious Skeleton

History is full of people who have vanished without a trace, and there are also numerous oddities often surrounding these people. At times is is

laptrinhx.com

The unexplained mystery of Ada Constance Kent – “The skeleton in the bedroom” – Strange Unexplained Mysteries

coolinterestingstuff.com

https://laptrinhx.com/news-cdn/laptrinhx-news.png

I've seen many report of the photos of Ada. It seems they may not be of Ada, thought they may be. I have found a photo that is almost positively Ada. It's from an article from 1949. The article seems to detail stuff we already know.

Mar 22, 1949, page 1 - Evening Despatch at Newspapers.com - Newspapers.com

View the digital scanned newspaper from Evening Despatch dated Mar 22, 1949, page 1.

www.newspapers.com

 

[doublestop]

I'm looking for info on the case of a woman named Ada Constance Kent, a reclusive woman who vanished from her home in Whalebone Corner, England. According to the case, the police searched her home but found no trace of her, but years later when a deposit was made to her bank account, the police returned to her home and found her skeletal remains sitting in a chair in her dining room. I was wondering if this was a true story or just a ghost story passed off as real?

Looking at old newspapers it is true. She was found in her home which had been searched at least twice before. She disappeared in 1939, and her remains were found in 1949, beneath a pile of rubbish in the bedroom of the now tumbled-down cottage with a green bottle labeled poison sitting next to her. It's unclear if the rubbish is because the cottage tumbled down or if it was there before.

 

[Richard]

Whalebone Pub circa 1914

Connie Kent's cottage is seen in the right of this 1914 photo.

LINK:

The unexplained mystery of Ada Constance Kent – “The skeleton in the bedroom” – Strange Unexplained Mysteries

coolinterestingstuff.com