She charmed jazz-age New York, vanished in the Mojave, and left behind a locked journal no one could open. If you’ve ever thumbed through a yellowed 1923 society page or squinted at a faded passenger manifest from the SS Majestic , you might have stumbled across a name that feels almost too peculiar to be real: Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde .
Since “Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde” doesn’t correspond to a widely known historical figure, I’ve written it as a fictional or mysterious “forgotten character” piece — fitting for a blog that explores oddities, unsolved mysteries, or obscure Americana. The Strange Disappearance of Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde: Heiress, Adventurer, or Ghost?
But it’s what happened after the divorce that turns Cubbi from a footnote into a mystery. cubbi thompson van wylde
The lock on the journal was never picked. A 1932 attempt by a San Francisco locksmith failed; he reported “a mechanism unlike any I’ve seen, possibly European or custom-made.” In 1951, the journal was donated to the Huntington Library with a condition: it could not be opened without permission of the “Van Wylde literary estate” — which no one has successfully claimed since Julian died childless in 1944.
Cubbi — born Cordelia Beatrice Thompson in 1899 to a Pittsburgh steel fortune — earned her nickname as a toddler when she couldn’t say “Cuddly” and called herself “Cubbi” instead. The name stuck. By eighteen, she had rejected debutante balls, bought a Stutz Bearcat with her own inheritance, and announced she was moving to New York to “write novels and make enemies of boring people.” She charmed jazz-age New York, vanished in the
To this day, the journal sits in a climate-controlled box. Catalog number: MS.VW.1928.0001. Status:
She never checked into the hotel she’d reserved in Barstow. The Strange Disappearance of Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde:
In 1924, she married , an eccentric amateur archaeologist fifteen years her senior, who claimed to have found evidence of a lost Viking settlement in the Mojave Desert. The wedding lasted six months. The divorce lasted three years.