The Regiment that Vanished into Thin Air: Mystery Files

The story I am about to relate is one of the strangest reports of World War One. It is the story of how a whole regiment which was comprised of men from the Queen of England's Royal estate, just disappeared into thin air one day in front of witnesses. It is an event which has long since been presumed to have some supernatural or paranormal cause, and remains to this day, unexplained.

The year was 1915. The Great War had already been raging for almost two years. A coalition of British, Australian and New Zealand troops comprised the force that was landed at Gallipoli on the Dardanells in Turkey. Their mission to attack the Turks.

Amongst the fighting coalition, were 250 men and 16 officers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. The regiment comprised of servants, grooms and gardeners from the British Royal family estate, at Sandringham in Norfolk.

The incident happened on the day of August 12th 1915, during the height of battle, and was witnessed by soldiers of the New Zealand Field company.

The Sandringham company were ordered to carry out an attack up a hillside near Suvla Bay. Witnesses described how the company ascended the hill and began to enter some low lying cloud that was skirting the area. just as the last of the Royal Sandringhams was seen to enter the cloud, it lifted of the hill. The company of men should now have been clearly visible, but not one of them remained. The entire regiment had simply disappeared.

In the absence of any other way to explain what happened, the authorities assumed that they had all been killed and buried by the Turks under during the short lived cloud cover - an extremely challenging task. The Turks themselves, strenuously and persistantly denied that any such thing could have happened.

The only other rational option was that they had somehow been very quickly spirited off the hillside by the Turks and kept as prisoners of war. The Turks however, refuted the suggestion stressing that they new nothing about the Regiment and had never made contact with them.

Investigators today are none the wiser than they were in 1915. Witnesses said that one minute, the Royal Sandringhams were attacking the hill and the next minute they had simply vanished.

There were no known survivors - every single one of them disappeared. No bodies were ever found, and not so much as a single prisoner of war was ever discovered.

Many authorities say that the only true explanation must be paranormal or supernatural in nature, because rational explanations just don't fit.