The William Morgan Affair: Masonic Mystery in Upstate New York

Dr. Ann Webster Bunch delves into the enigmatic disappearance of William Morgan, a 19th-century figure whose threat to expose Masonic secrets led to his mysterious vanishing, igniting political turmoil and leaving a case that remains unresolved nearly 200 years later.

William Morgan was last seen in Batavia, New York, in September 1826, down on his luck and haunting the local pubs. An elusive local citizen, he had recently threatened to publish purported Masonic secrets. He was later arrested that same month in Canandaigua for petty theft and eventually transported and held in Fort Niagara. From there Morgan seems to have disappeared forever. The local Freemasons were accused of his demise. State Assemblyman and newspaper editor Thurlow Weed fanned the political flames to great effect. Yet Morgan was to return, this time in stone, atop a monument erected at Old Cemetery, Batavia, in 1882. Enigmatically, no body lies there. Thus, the case of Mr. Morgan technically remains that of a missing person almost two hundred years after his disappearance. Dr. Ann Webster Bunch takes an investigative science approach to this extremely cold case to demystify and highlight ways to resolve the fate of this highly polarizing historical figure.

Dr. Ann Webster Bunch is a forensic anthropologist who has dedicated her career to missing person searches and methods. After finishing graduate school as an Andean zooarchaeologist, she soon began to apply her academic and field training and knowledge to this facet of investigations, first with the U.S. government as a search-and-recovery team member for the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory (USA-CIL) in Hawaii. Dr. Bunch moved back to her home state of New York, where her forensic expertise now is applied to current medicolegal cases in its central and western regions.