In 1945, an ambulance delivered a very ill man to Boston’s U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. The ambulance driver gave the patient's name as Charles Jamison, but then left. The hospital treated the man for a bone marrow infection, which left him a paraplegic. He also had amnesia, and could give no details about himself, his family, or his background. He has been a mystery ever since, but not because of a lack of investigation.
Jamison was around sixty years old, with graying hair and brown eyes. He was six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. There was a two-inch scar on his right cheek, the index finger of his left hand was missing, and both arms were covered with tattoos. His appearance was so distinctive that it was thought it might help identify him, but that failed to be the case.
The tattoos were a mixture of flags and hearts. Some of the flags were American, others British. One faded tattoo had a scroll that seemed to say “U.S. Navy.” This led to the assumption that Jamison had been a sailor in the naval and/or merchant service, a belief bolstered by the fact that he had been brought to the only hospital in Boston that specifically treated seamen. There was a theory that Jamison had been aboard a freighter that had been shelled and torpedoed by a German submarine, but that could never be verified. However, after being sent Jamison’s fingerprints, both the FBI and the military replied that they had no record of him, which would not have been the case had he served in either the Navy or the merchant marine. His photo was sent to missing persons bureaus across the country, but that proved to be just as futile as every other effort to identify him.
Over next 30 years, many possible leads were chased down. Jamison contributed some details he recalled, but they led nowhere useful. Read the story of Charles Jamison, or whoever he was, at Strange Company. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Allan C. Green)
