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Rudolph Fentz (also spelled as Rudolf Fenz) is the focal character of "I'm Scared", a 1951 science fiction short story by Jack Finney, which was later reported as an urban legend as if the events had truly happened. The story tells of a man wearing 19th century clothes being hit by a car and killed in New York City in 1950. A subsequent investigation reveals that the man had disappeared without trace in 1876, and the items in his possession appear to reveal that the man had travelled through time from 1876 to 1950 directly. The story of Rudolph Fentz became one of the more significant urban legends of the 1970s and has been repeated occasionally since; with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, it has been reported more often as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of (involuntary) time travel. ==Urban legend== The Fentz legend describes how one evening in mid-June 1950, at about 11:15 p.m., passersby at New York City's Times Square noticed a man of about 30 years of age, dressed in the fashion of the late 19th century. No one observed how he had arrived there, and he was disoriented and confused standing in the middle of an intersection. He was hit by a taxi and fatally injured, before people were able to intervene. The officials at the morgue searched his body and found the following items in his pockets: *A copper token for a beer worth 5 cents, bearing the name of a saloon, which was unknown, even to older residents of the area; *A bill for the care of a horse and the washing of a carriage, drawn by a livery stable on Lexington Avenue that was not listed in any address book; *About 70 dollars in old banknotes; *Business cards with the name Rudolph Fentz and an address on Fifth Avenue; *A letter sent to this address, in June 1876 from Philadelphia. None of these objects showed any signs of aging. *He also had a medal for coming 3rd in a three legged race Captain Hubert V. Rihm of the Missing Persons Department of NYPD tried using this information to identify the man. He found that the address on Fifth Avenue was part of a business; its current owner did not know Rudolph Fentz. Fentz's name was not listed in the address book, his fingerprints were not recorded anywhere, and no one had reported him missing. Rihm continued the investigation and finally found a Rudolph Fentz Jr. in a telephone book from 1939. Rihm spoke to the residents of the apartment building at the listed address who remembered Fentz and described him as a man about 60 years who had worked nearby. After his retirement, he moved to an unknown location in 1940. Contacting the bank, Rihm was told that Fentz died five years before, but his widow was still alive but lived in Florida. Rihm contacted her and learned that her husband's father had disappeared in 1876, aged 29. He had left the house for an evening walk and never returned. All efforts to locate him were in vain and no trace remained. Captain Rihm checked the missing persons files on Rudolph Fentz in 1876. The description of his appearance, age, and clothing corresponded precisely to the appearance of the unidentified dead man from Times Square. The case was still marked unsolved. Fearing he would be held mentally incompetent, Rihm never noted the results of his investigation in the official files. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Rudolph Fentz」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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