Wrong Fair Date

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/14/vanishing-lady/

I was just checkin up the mystery when I found this:

Taylor-Blake and QI also found a version of the legend in the Detroit Free Press in 1898 titled “Porch Tales: The Disappearance of Mrs. Kneeb,” but the story’s byline designates Kenneth Herford as the author and not Karl Harriman [VLDF]. We hypothesize that Herford is a pen name for Harriman. We also hypothesize that the date 1889 given by Alexander Woollcott in While Rome Burns is a transposition error for the correct date 1898. This is a very short summary of our findings.

Not only has the quest for Harriman's treatment of TVL been hampered by his use of a pseudonym, but researchers searching for Harriman's telling have also been misled by what we suspect is a simple transposition of numbers in While Rome Burns: Harriman would have been about 14 in 1889, far too young to have published a form of TVL in The Free Press. The true year (1898) instead appears in Woollcott's third Shouts and Murmurs column: the 23-year-old Harriman would indeed have qualified as “the paper's facile young columnist” in 1898.

Although we have been unable to determine if this version, which we attribute to McClelland, had appeared in The Press in 1897, we do know that it was published, with the unusual introduction testifying to its veracity, in the cross-town Inquirer. Since the dateline of the story is 1897, the backdrop likely corresponds to the 1889 Paris Exposition, by 1897 the most recent major Exposition in the city. As suggested by the introduction in The Inquirer, McClelland may have heard the tale from travelers returning to the United States from Paris. Alternatively, she may have used the powerful skills of invention displayed in her short stories and her later successful careers to craft the compelling tale.