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The strange disappearance of novelist Barbara Newhall Follett.

At the age of 25, she walked out of her house and was never seen again.

Dani Erinn
4 min readFeb 7, 2022

Barbara Newhall Follett was an accomplished author by the young age of twelve. She wrote four novels in her childhood and garnered quite a bit of success early on. Despite her seemingly perfect start to life, Barbara grew depressed and was extremely unhappy in her marriage later on. On December 7th, 1939, she had a fight with her husband and then walked out of her house. Her husband never tried to find her and she was never seen again.

Image of Barbara Follett hard at work. Image from Crime Reads.

Barbara’s childhood and career

Barbara was born in Hanover, New Hampshire on March 4th, 1914 to a well-known literary editor and critic, Wilson Follett, and a children’s writer Helen Follett. She had an older half-sister and a younger sister. She was homeschooled which allowed her to do the things she enjoyed like writing stories and poetry. By the age of seven, Barbara was putting her thoughts to paper and even developed her own language for a story she was working on.

Barbara wrote The Adventures of Eepersip, later titled The House Without Windows when she was eight years old in 1923. The story was about a young girl who ran away from her family to live in nature and was intended as a…

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Dani Erinn
Dani Erinn

Written by Dani Erinn

I love writing true crime and fascinating stories about humans.

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