There were moments of particular stress. The 2002 false lead about a man in Tennessee—mentioned in some contemporaneous accounts—seems to have been one of the ordinary hazards of maintaining a missing-person status: rumors and sightings that had to be managed. The encounter with the angler in Cornwall in May 2005, where John used the name “John Williams,” was another moment when the concealment nearly came apart.
There was also the simple problem of John’s physical presence in a small town where he had lived and worked. He had taught in County Durham for eighteen years. He had worked at Holme House Prison in Stockton. He had been a present figure in a community. Seaton Carew is not a large place. The fact that he could spend years in the vicinity without being definitively identified suggests either that his concealment in the house was genuinely effective, or that the people who may have glimpsed him chose not to act on their suspicions, or both.
Darwin’s father, Ronald, had publicly said he’d always suspected there was more to it. Darwin’s aunt, Margaret Burns, had said she didn’t believe John had “got wet.” These family-level doubts may have reflected perceptions they couldn’t articulate fully, or they may simply reflect the kind of skepticism that loss can produce—the mind searching for reasons that the loss wasn’t real. It is not possible, from the available record, to know whether these relatives had specific grounds for doubt or were expressing something more generalized.