Ret-Gone/Oral Tradition

Examples of Ret-Gone in Oral Tradition include:

A popular Urban Legend, usually referred to as "The Vanishing Lady" or "The Vanishing Hotel Room", tells of a woman who stayed at a hotel with her ill mother. The daughter goes out to get medicine for her mother, but returns to find her mother and the room she was staying in no longer exist. She asks the hotel workers for help, but they claim to have no memory of her mother. There are two endings to the story. In the first, the frantic daughter is thrown out of the hotel, never to see her mother again. In some versions, this is followed by her going insane and being committed to an insane asylum. In the second ending, it's revealed the mother had died of the Black Plague while the daughter was out and that her death had been covered up to avoid a city-wide panic. Of course, there's a Plot Hole in this ending. If the authorities had wanted to avoid a plague outbreak, why didn't they quarantine the daughter and everyone else who had come into contact with the mother? A particularly cruel variation is to use both endings, so that the daughter ends up committed and only the audience learns what happened to the mother. The story is frequently set during the 1889 Paris Exposition with the mother and daughter portrayed as British tourists. The legend is the basis for the following fictional works:
- The 1950 film So Long at the Fair, which replaces the mother with a brother and uses the second ending. Jean Simmons plays the woman and Dirk Bogarde plays the obligatory male hero who helps her solve the mystery.
- The episode "Into Thin Air" of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which also used the second ending. In the opening of the episode, Hitch says that his film The Lady Vanishes is also based on this legend, though, if so, it's pretty loosely.
- Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories series includes a version of this story titled "Maybe You Will Remember". Again, the second ending is used.

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