Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time, once disappeared for eleven days.
In December 1926 her car was found abandoned and a huge search was launched, with more than a thousand police officers and even Arthur Conan Doyle consulting a medium. She was found at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband's mistress.
Why is this true?
She never publicly explained what happened, and doctors at the time spoke of memory loss after her mother's death and her husband's affair. Her books have sold around two billion copies.
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More about famous people
Famous people accumulate stories, and only some of them are true. The entries in this category stick to documented episodes: the patents, the letters, the odd habits recorded by people who were actually there. Where a story is commonly retold in an exaggerated form, the explanation says so, which makes these facts safer to repeat than the version that usually circulates online.