In January 1887, a mild-mannered itinerant preacher named Ansel Bourne left his home in Greene, Rhode Island, to travel to nearby Providence. He carried a small sum of money and, by all appearances, the clear intention of returning in a few days. He did not come back.
For nearly two months, Bourne’s family had no idea about his whereabouts. They posted a missing person newspaper advertisements but nobody reported any sightings. Then, in late March a telegram arrived addressed to Bourne’s nephew Andrew Harris in Providence. His uncle had been found in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he had been living the previous two months under the name “Alfred Brown”.
Bourne had been staying with landlord Pinkston Earle at 345 East Main Street. He had rented a small room and opened a store in the front, selling candy, stationery, and other small items. He had given his name as Alfred Brown, and the Earle family had no reasons to suspect he was anything other. Brown, as they knew him, was quiet, punctual, and attended church on Sundays.
Early in the morning of 14 March, Ansel Bourne awoke to a loud noise that he later described as sounding like a gunshot. As he looked around, the room seemed strange and unfamiliar. He went to the window and drew back the curtain, but the view offered no recognition. He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there.
Stepping into the corridor, Bourne knocked on the door of the adjoining room. Pinkston Earle came out of his room and greeted him warmly, “Good morning, Mr. Brown.” Bourne replied that his name wasn’t Brown, but Ansel Bourne. He then asked, “Where am I?” Earle told Bourne that he was in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and that the date was March 14, 1887. Bourne could scarcely believe it. The last thing he remembered was seeing Adams Express Company wagons at the corner of Dorrance and Broad Streets in Providence on 17 January.
When Bourne was returned to Rhode Island, he had no memory whatsoever of his time in Pennsylvania. The shop, the customers, the journey south—all were gone from his mind. To him, the last thing he remembered was leaving home in January. The six intervening weeks had vanished as completely as if they had never happened.
This was not amnesia in the ordinary sense. During his disappearance, Bourne had not been confused, delirious, or incapacitated. On the contrary, he had functioned smoothly, adopting a new name, a new occupation, and a new daily routine. What had disappeared was not his ability to act, but his awareness of being Ansel Bourne.
The episode soon attracted the attention of psychologists, most notably William James, the pioneering American philosopher and psychologist, widely recognized as the father of American psychology. James interviewed Bourne extensively and later described the case in The Principles of Psychology (1890), calling it one of the most striking examples of what he termed “spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting two months”.
Modern psychologists believe that Ansel Bourne had experienced a dissociative fugue, a rare psychological condition in which a person suddenly travels away from home, assumes a new identity, and later has little or no memory of the episode. Unlike ordinary forgetfulness or even classic amnesia, a fugue involves organized behaviour such as planning, social interaction, and purposeful action carried out under a fractured sense of self.
In Bourne’s case, the division was stark. A. J. Brown remembered nothing of Ansel Bourne’s earlier life, while Ansel Bourne remembered nothing of A. J. Brown. The two identities were not aware of each other, and they did not overlap.
James later attempted hypnosis to explore the lost memories. Under trance, Bourne was able to recall his time as A. J. Brown in vivid detail suggesting that the memories had not been destroyed, merely sealed off from his waking consciousness. When the hypnosis ended, those memories vanished again.
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Ansel Bourne was born in New York City in 1826. When he was fifteen, Ansel and is mother went to live with his elder sister Lucy, who was married to a carpenter, under whom Ansel went into apprentice to learn carpentry.
In 1844, Ansel married Sarah A. Woodmansee. They lived successively in Providence, Cranston, and Pawtuxet, but by 1850 they were living in Westerly. While he lived in Westerly, Ansel began suffering from bouts of headache as well as weakness.
On 16 August 1857, Ansel went to cut some wood in the afternoon when he had “some feeling in his head which he does not remember” and immediately afterwards he lost consciousness, not regaining until the 18th. That night he was a little delirious and Ansel thought he was going to die, so did his family and the attending physician. However, he recovered and in about three weeks’ time, was able to return to work.
In mid-September, Ansel suffered from another attack of dizziness: “A cold chill or spasm came upon him there, which deprived him of his strength”. He recovered in a week and was able to go out again.
In October 28, Ansel was walking from his home to the centre of Westerly, when the thought suddenly entered his mind that he should go to the meeting at the Christian Chapel. Earlier in his life, Ansel was deeply religious, but by the 1850s, “his mind was under the dark and apparently unpenetrable [sic] cloud of unbelief.” He began to hate churches, ministers and professors, some of them bitterly.
As soon as this thought about visiting a church entered his head, he was filled with repulsion and he answered to himself that “I would rather be struck deaf and dumb forever, than to go there.” A few minutes later, he felt dizzy and sat down. Suddenly, to his horror, he could neither speak, nor hear, nor see. It seemed that God had taken him at his word.
Ansel was carried home, and was swiftly attended by Dr. William Thurston who said that although deaf and blind, Ansel was aware of what was happening to him. Ansel’s eyesight returned the next morning and using a slate, he communicated with his wife reflecting on “the awful sinfulness of a life which had been brought by the hand of God to such circumstances.”
Ansel wrote a confession asking God for forgiveness for his coarse actions. This confession was read out aloud in the church, and as he stood in the pulpit and raised his hands, Ansel’s hearing and speech suddenly were restored. The congregation in attendance believed they witnessed a miracle which was eventually printed and repeated by many.
Ansel’s strange experience revived his religious fervour and he became an evangelical preacher, although he continued to work as a carpenter. He preached at revivals and otherwise offered his services wherever he happened to be. In the early 1860s, the Bourne family left Westerly and moved to Petersburg, in New York. Later, in 1875, they settled in Shelby, New York, where Bourne served as pastor of the Christian Church of West Shelby for at least two years.
After his wife died in 1881, Bourne returned to Rhode Island where he met his second wife, Isabelle. On her persuasion, he agreed to give his itinerant preaching and took up farming and apparently led an uneventful life until his trip to Providence on January 1887.
When his second wife died in 1910, Bourne moved to Buffalo, New York, where he died in 1915.
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Ansel Bourne’s strange journey leaves an enduring question that still troubles psychology today: how much of who we are depends on memory—and how easily can it slip away?
“We wake up every morning as a slightly different entity, and yet memory holds us together,” writes Psychology Today. “It’s the glue that maintains us as a single, consistent person. As James McGaugh, memory expert and professor of neurobiology at UC Irvine describes, “Memory is our most important ability. Without memory, there would be no human beings.””
Dissociative fugue sits right at the fault line between memory and identity, showing how tightly the two are bound, and how fragile that bond can be.
At its core, a fugue involves a selective failure of autobiographical memory. The person does not lose general knowledge or skills: they can speak, work, navigate cities, handle money, and interact socially. What disappears is access to the memories that normally answer the question “Who am I?”—name, personal history, relationships, and emotional attachments. Because identity is built largely from this continuous personal narrative, its collapse follows naturally from the memory loss.
In a fugue state, identity is not simply erased but often reconfigured. Individuals may adopt a new name, occupation, or role, as in the case of Ansel Bourne becoming “A. J. Brown.” This suggests that identity is not a single, indivisible entity, but something assembled moment by moment from memory, habit, and context. When autobiographical memory is cut off, the mind may construct a provisional self that fits the immediate environment.
Crucially, the memories are not destroyed. Hypnosis and later clinical studies show that fugue memories are typically inaccessible rather than lost. They exist outside conscious awareness, indicating a dissociation between memory storage and memory access. When the fugue ends, the original identity returns along with its memories, while the fugue identity is often forgotten, creating a sharp, one-way amnesia.
This asymmetry reveals something unsettling, that identity depends less on continuity of consciousness than on continuity of memory. As long as memories link past to present, the self feels stable. When that link breaks, identity can fracture without impairing rational behaviour.
Dissociative fugue therefore challenges the idea of a fixed, unified self. It shows identity to be a psychological construction, which is normally seamless, but under extreme stress is capable of splitting along the lines of memory, leaving a person intact in function yet profoundly altered in who they believe themselves to be.
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