The Crystal Man: The Scientist Who Erased Himself

On a dark New York street, a man collides with a stranger who leaves almost no trace behind him. Minutes later that stranger vanishes into thin air, and the mystery refuses to leave the narrator’s mind.

The answer arrives in the most astonishing way imaginable. Guided by unseen hands into a hidden room, the narrator meets a man who should not exist—a living scientist whose body has been stripped of every pigment until nothing remains to catch the light. He can speak, move, breathe, and think like any other human being, yet the world can never see him again.

Stephen Flack once worked beside a daring European physiologist whose experiments pushed the limits of chemistry and biology. Their research began by altering the colors of living tissue. It ended with a discovery that erased color entirely, leaving Flack transparent as glass and nearly impossible to detect. When his mentor suddenly died, the formula died with him, trapping Flack forever in a body that casts no shadow and leaves no reflection.

Now he lives unseen in the very house where the woman he loves still resides. Each day he passes her on the staircase. Each day she walks by without knowing he is there. Desperate to learn whether she still cares for him, Flack turns to the only person who might help—a skeptical friend who must carry a message between the visible world and the invisible man.

Edward Page Mitchell crafts a chilling and strangely emotional tale in which science achieves a miracle but destroys a life. Long before invisibility became a familiar science fiction idea, this remarkable story imagined the terrible cost of disappearing from the world while still being forced to live inside it.

Edward Page Mitchell (1852–1927) was an American journalist and fiction writer associated with The New York Sun.