It sounds like a story from Agatha Christie: “The Strange Affair at Crimmitschau,” we might say, or “The Adventure of the Bewildered Missionary.” Whatever we choose to call it, Jack Metcalf lived it, and he and his mission president were relieved when it was over.

Jack William Metcalf, age 22, of Salt Lake City, was called to the German and Austrian Mission in the summer of 1928. He was assigned to the town of Crimmitschau, near Zwickau and not too far from the mission headquarters of Dresden. He had been there just one week, when, on the morning of July 31, he vanished.

He had been with his companion in their lodgings, and then suddenly he was not there. Gone. Disappeared.

His companion didn’t know where he had gone, or why, and he waited for him to return. After 24 hours with no sign of Elder Metcalf, his companion contacted the mission president, probably via a telegram. President Valentine, in Dresden, immediately picked up the telephone and called A.T. Haeberle, the American Consul General, also stationed at Dresden, with whom he had a warm working relationship. With Mr. Haeberle’s help, and with his own contacts, President Valentine soon had “the whole of that section of the Saxon Police” on the search for Elder Metcalf. Presumably they checked hospitals and police stations, and may have shown Elder Metcalf’s picture around on the street, but he had been there such a few days that he had no favorite places, no friends, with whom the police could check.

That was August 1. On August 2, President Valentine took the train to Crimmitschau. What he could do beyond what the police were already doing was very little, but he wanted to be near the scene, helpless as he was, just in case he could help. “We continued,” he recorded, “in distraction, our search, without being able to find the slightest trace. The whole of the police organization did everything possible. No trace of the vanished elder.

August 3 began the same way. And then –

“Lo, Brother Metcalf returned as mysteriously as he had disappeared. But he was worn out, bewildered, and unable to give any account of himself or where he had been.” He seemed unhurt, beyond his exhaustion and his inability to recall the past three days.

President Valentine and perhaps the police searched the pockets of Elder Metcalf’s dusty clothes and examined the bits of paper they found. Eventually they pieced together where Elder Metcalf had been.

He had walked away from his lodging and continued walking into the night, with no known goal or purpose. Miles from Crimmitschau he had reached a village, and there purchased a train ticket for the city of Leipzig. In Leipzig, he changed trains to one headed for Hannover – but neglected to buy a new ticket. At some point, his lack of a ticket was discovered; he was made to leave the train, pay for the miles he had traveled, and made to buy a ticket out of Germany, perhaps because he was a foreigner who could not explain his presence there.

Because he could not explain his presence. He was not disoriented – he knew who he was, he was aware of what he was doing in the moment of walking or of buying tickets – but he did not know where he had come from or why he was traveling or what he planned to do when he reached his destination, whatever that was. He had a present, but no past and no future.

Upon reaching Rotterdam, Holland, Elder Metcalf bought a ticket on a ship sailing for Harwich, England. Once there, though, the stamps in his passport showed, he was refused permission to land – perhaps, again, because he could not answer questions satisfactorily. Evidently the same ship that had brought him from Holland returned him there. Somehow he made his way back to Crimmitschau – but when he showed up again at his lodgings, he could not tell anyone where he had been for the past three days, nor how he had returned

President Valentine took Elder Metcalf back to the mission home with him. He expected the visit of a traveling American doctor any day, and he hoped the doctor could find and correct Elder Metcalf’s problem.

With rest, Elder Metcalf began to recover. In response to President Valentine’s questions, he was sure that he had never heard of mental illness, or even “eccentricities,” in his family.

And he finally remembered something that the visiting doctor found relevant. On the morning of his disappearance, he had felt a little lightheaded, and slipped on the stairs leading up to his rooms. He did not remember hitting his head, but the doctor concluded he had, and that he had suffered an injury that caused his amnesia. He had risen from the steps where he had fallen, walked away from his lodge, and continued to walk, and walk, and walk.

Elder Metcalf stayed at the mission home for a full month. His memory returned, and President Valentine could find “nothing peculiar or funny or strange in his conduct” during all that time. Concluding that the elder was fully recovered, his president assigned him again to the field, this time to Zittau.

Elder Metcalf filled a complete and successful mission, being honorably released in August 1930. He returned to Salt Lake, married, raised a family, and lived a long and useful life, none the worse for his mysterious three-day walkabout across Europe.