Mildred Hall, 44, who vanished Nov. 15, 1956, and was the subject of a
Paul Coates column, resurfaced in April 1959, posing as many baffling
questions as she did when she disappeared after leaving a note for her
husband, Harold, that she was running some errands and would be back
soon.
where she went in search of information about her four children. Hall
told reporters that she had wandered the world, wondering who she was,
until she suffered a stroke and cerebral hemorrhage three weeks earlier
in a Ventura hospital.
"I always prayed. God, how I prayed someone would recognize me," said
Hall, an actress who gave up her movie career to raise a family.
"The first thing I remembered was sitting in a bus station in Meridian,
Miss., with 33 cents in my pocket and a ticket for New Orleans," she
told The Times.
She worked as a cocktail waitress in New Orleans, but after being
robbed apparently blacked out and found herself on a ship bound for
Manila. Next, she stowed away on a ship to Havana, she said.
"There, I got a job as a shill in a casino and earned enough money to
fly to Key West Fla., where I worked for six months as a singer. Then I
teamed up with a magician and his wife and traveled across the
country," Hall said.
Somehow, she got to Ventura, where she was hospitalized. While she was gone, her husband divorced her, The Times said.
There’s no further word in The Times on Hall or what became of her
children. It’s impossible to sort out all the Mildred Halls in the
California death records and the Social Security Death Index. She had a brother, Bob, who was a lifeguard in Santa Monica in the 1950s. Her mother, Adeline M. Lucas, died Feb. 24, 1976.
We also know that her father, Charles M. Lloyd (real name Charles Lloyd Maude),
an actor in silent films and vaudeville, died in Camarillo State
Hospital in 1948, so there may have been some predisposition toward mental
illness. But that is only a guess. As Coates said: "Mildred Hall is not
a simple person to explain."
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