The “Peter Bergmann” Mystery
An Anglo-Irish Somerton Man, Except Nobody Seems to Be Interested
This newsletter has recently been delving into the mysteries around Islam’s origins, including where it happened, the nature of the creed at the beginning and whether it is right to think of it as “Islam”, and the historicity of the first successor to the Prophet Muhammad. These have been longer articles and quite heavy-going, especially to anyone encountering the critical scholarship for the first time. There are a couple of shorter follow-up pieces planned, but otherwise I shall be leaving the subject alone for a while. To ease the transition, I thought it would be interesting to look at a less consequential mystery from more recent times.
The story begins in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, on 12 June 2009. That afternoon, a 60ish-year-old man took a bus to Sligo, over the border in the Republic of Ireland. Arriving around 18:30, the man subsequently checked in to the Sligo City Hotel: he paid in cash, signed his name as “Peter Bergmann”, and gave a home address in Vienna.
The man had arrived in Sligo with a black over-the-shoulder bag and a carry-on luggage case. During his stay at the hotel, he was seen on CCTV leaving with a purple plastic bag that contained personal effects (we assume), then returning to the hotel with nothing in his hands (the purple bag was presumably folded in his pocket). He did this thirteen times. What he had done with his items is unclear: he appeared to be aware of CCTV blind spots around town and had disposed of his things while out of sight.
On 13 June, the man went to the Sligo post office and bought a book of stamps and airmail stickers. If he sent a letter or package, it has never been found. On 14 June, he asked a taxi driver for a beach recommendation and was directed to Rosses Point; he went there and the same taxi returned him to his hotel later that day.
About 13:00 on 15 June 2009, the man checked out of the hotel, carrying his purple plastic bag, the shoulder bag, and a different black luggage case. He went into town, was seen on CCTV hovering in the doorway of the Quayside Shopping Centre, buying a coffee and sandwich, and reading and then tearing up several pieces of paper in his pocket. At 14:20, he got a bus to Rosses Point. He arrived about 16:00 and paced the beach for eight hours, wearing his glasses and carrying the purple plastic bag. Sixteen people reported seeing him in this period and exchanging pleasantries, the last at ten minutes to midnight, about half-an-hour before high tide.
The man was found dead on the beach at Rosses Point around 08:00 on the morning of 16 June. There was no evidence of drowning nor of murder. The man was found to be in the advanced stages of prostate cancer; he had weeks at most to live. He also had numerous bone tumours. Yet, the toxicology report found no drugs in his system, not even over-the-counter pain medication. The post-mortem disclosed that one of his kidneys had been removed and suggested he had survived a heart attack. It seems it was a heart attack that killed him.
The man was found in “a pair of purple striped Speedo-type swimming trunks, with his underpants over the top and a navy T-shirt tucked into them”. His clothes were stacked neatly on the shore and in his pockets were some aspirin, seemingly little use for the kind of agony he must have been in and in any case there was no evidence he had taken any, plus some money (€140 in notes and €9 in coins) in an envelope, a packet of tissues, plasters, and a sealed bar of hotel soap. The aspirin were “made by Bayer, manufactured in the Czech Republic and distributed in Germany”, and the brand of soap was not used in any hotel in Ireland.
The “new” black luggage bag was disposed of somewhere during the final trip to the beach. He was seen with the purple bag at the beach and seems to have had the shoulder bag there, too, but neither could not be found after his death. His glasses and the shirt he was wearing when he checked out of the hotel were also gone, as were the stamps he had bought.
With no wallet, and police unable to track where he had deposited his other items that might have identified him, there was nothing to go on. The man had spoken with a German accent, but the Austrian address turned out to be fake. No family, friends, neighbours, or colleagues have ever come forward to report a missing person matching the man’s description.
We do not know who the man was, where he was from, why he chose to make it impossible to identify him, how and where he entered the island of Ireland, why he chose to go to Sligo, whether he intended to die there, if he did whether things went according to plan (Did he mean to be found? Was he supposed to disappear in the sea?), how or if he induced the fatal heart attack, whether he sent letter(s) telling somebody his intentions, and if so why nobody has ever come forward to say so.
The man was buried in Sligo on 18 September 2009 and not one iota of additional evidence has surfaced in the last sixteen years.
The suspicion of espionage generally attaches to cases like this. That was certainly true for a long time of the Australian “Somerton Man” mystery from 1948, the case that the “Bergmann” episode most resembles. The recent identification of the Somerton Man suggests it was not a spy case, though a definitive answer remains elusive.
There is a major difference between “Peter Bergmann” and the Somerton Man, though: where the latter became a national and to a considerable extent international sensation for decades, the former is barely known about, even in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Apart from the initial coverage, there was a documentary about “Bergmann” in 2013 and a couple of press stories in 2019, but the case has been strangely neglected, even by online “true crime” enthusiasts. Perhaps because there is just so little to work with, even conspiracy theorists have shied away from trying to solve the “Bergmann” case.