Never Found The Body / Literature

Examples of Never Found the Body in Literature. As a potential Death Trope, spoilers are unmarked

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• Accidental Detectives: Delilah Abercrombie, the titular character in The Phantom Outlaw of Wolf Creek robbed a bank, but vanished in a flood while fleeing, with an article of clothing turning up in the aftermath, but no sign of Delilah herself ever showing up, adding to the legend that she haunts the area. the final chapters confirm her survival.
• Angels of Music: Several of the Angels' cases, in accordance with tradition, end with the villain's body not being found. Specifically, Falke at the end of "Les Vampires de Paris", making it possible to reappear as one of the vengeful villains in "Deluge"; and the denouement of "Deluge" features the Phantom and his nemesis plunging to an ambiguous watery doom.
• In An Outcast in Another World, in preparation for the invasion by the Infected, Elder Cesario leaves the Village to request aid from Reviton City. Only his horse returns, riderless and carrying a bloodied note of Cesario describing how he's succumbing to his wounds and has failed in his mission.
• In Armor, Felix almost certainly died somewhere out in orbit. His people keep searching for him anyway and imply they'll do so indefinitely because he was not explicitly seen to die.
• In Robin McKinley's Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Robbie Tucker, the fiancé of Beauty's eldest sister Grace and the captain of one of their merchant father's ships, is lost at sea and presumed dead in the storm that destroys the ships and costs the family their fortune. He remains Grace's Lost Lenore throughout the next several years. Near the climax of the book, Beauty goes home to visit her family because, through the magic of the Beast's castle, she learns that Robbie is still alive and looking for Grace; she wants Grace to know so she doesn't accept a proposal from another man.
• In Book of the Dead (2006), Diogenes is pushed off of a volcano. There is much speculation since there seem to be several cases of this trope in each book of the Agent Pendergast series, even when there is a body, as with Margo Green in the same book.
• Hajime, the main character of Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest, fell off a bridge which was already deeper in the Great Orcus Labyrinth than anyone had ever gone, down several more levels into the most terrifying dungeon in the world. Since he was basically the Butt-Monkey of the entire Hero Party up to that point, the general reaction was "We won't be seeing him again. No great loss." Well, about that...
• The Builders: Barley, whose death was very hazy; either he was crushed beneath rubble or incinerated by howitzer shells. The narration even implies that he might have lived and disappeared after the carnage ensued.
• The Cat Who... Series: The driving plot of book #6 (The Cat Who Played Post Office) involves Qwill trying to figure out what happened to Daisy Mull, who disappeared five years earlier, after he gets confirmation that one of the supposed messages she sent indicating she was leaving was a forgery. She was killed by Birch Tree and her body was hidden by a mine collapse.
• Agatha Christie used this several times, usually involving a supposed drowning in which the body was swept out to sea.
  • And Then There Were None: The 'Red Herring' death involves a putative drowning which turns out to have been real.
  • Several examples from the Miss Marple short story collection, The Thirteen Problems:
    • In "The Companion", a woman who seems like an obvious suspect for an earlier suspicious drowning leaves a suicide note before presumably drowning herself; her body is not found. In fact, she had been using a fake identity when she killed the previous victim and stole her identity; the faked suicide allowed her to return to her own identity.
    • "The Bloodstained Pavement" has an interesting variation. Person A was supposedly swept out to sea; the body washed up in a very battered condition sometime later. In fact, she had been murdered some time earlier up the coast, and an accomplice had taken her place to confuse the time of death and provide the killer with an alibi.
• In John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos, the Greek gods assume Trismegistus is dead, merely because he was shot with several arrows by Phoebe, no less and fell into the Abyss. Indeed, ap Cymru justifies talking with him on the grounds it's not disobedience, as he was never forbidden to talk to him.
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, though Cloak knew the victims of the Umbra Gun were transported to the Gloom, everyone else assumed they were dead. Including the victims, who guessed it was a horrible afterlife.
• Deryni: When the mountain trail washes out in The Quest for Saint Camber, Kelson and Dhugal are seen to go over the falls with the others, but their bodies are not found. This fact is part of what sends Morgan and Duncan to go to the site of the accident and join the search.
• Discworld: Referenced in Men at Arms. Because no one ever found Big Fido's body, legends that he's leading a wolf pack somewhere in the Ramtops live on. (In fact, Gaspode did find the body and did see the body get taken away by a vagrant who sold it for the pelt. But none of the other dogs saw the body, so they chose to not believe Gaspode's version of the story.) May also be a reference to the Watership Down example below.
• The Dresden Files: Used as a Survival Mantra by Murphy in "Aftermath" and Ghost Story regarding Harry. It is painful to read. However, she is right...
• Dune expresses it as elegantly as anyone's ever gonna: "We Bene Gesserit have a saying. Do not count a human dead until you see the body; and even then, you can make a mistake."
  • Of course in the world of Dune, a dead person has a chance of coming back as Genetic Memory "possessing" one of his or her descendants as Baron Harkonnen does to Alia in Children of Dune.
  • An alternative pathway back involves the use of Gholas. These start out as reanimated dead flesh, not zombies but healthy human specimens, though later versions are more frequently grown from cell samples. Very helpful when you cannot find the body, or when the body might be headed into situations where it might not be recoverable.
  • Paul Atreides invokes this trope twice, once by flying into a sandstorm strong enough to scour flesh from bone, and once by walking into the desert with the stated intent of allowing the sandworms to eat him; he came back disguised as a preacher railing against his own out-of-control Imperial Cult. And his son Leto does something similar after an assassination attempt.
• In Alethea Kontis' Enchanted, Sunday discovers in the end that Jack Jr.'s body was not found; Rumbold only found something owned by him in a wolf's stomach. And sure enough, he turns up at the end of the second book.
• The Empirium Trilogy: In Furborn, Harkan volunteers to make a last stand against the Empire's soldiers- a suicidal move- as a means of distraction. As Eliana rides away, she hears Harkan cry out, but doesn't look back to see if he was shot. Both she and Remy believe him to be dead. Towards the beginning of Kingsbane, Harkan turns up at the Astavari castle where Eliana is staying. He's battered and dirty, but very much alive.
• In the Erebus Sequence, the body of the Majordomo isn't found where it should be, which naturally presages a return in the next book. At the end of that book, it's reported that Dino, the main protagonist died, but again, we don't see a corpse, so we can't be sure.
• Jack McDevitt's Eternity Road initially looks like it's heading for an Everybody Lives ending, so this trope is used after the first sudden death during a lighthearted section. The second such death...not so much.
• Lampshaded and subverted in Forgotten Realms: The Lady Penitent Trilogy. The battle between Vhaeraun and Eilistraee in the first book was witnessed by neither the reader nor the viewpoint characters. In the second book, one of the characters cites the fact that no one saw it to argue that Vhaeraun is still alive. By that point, however, the reader has been shown his mangled corpse floating in the Astral Plane.
• Alan Garner's novel Boneland deals with what happened to the protagonists of the much earlier books The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath after the end of the latter novel. The central character here is Colin, grown to adulthood and dealing with psychological problems brought about by his real — or imagined — childhood experiences. His sister Susan is thought of as dead, having ridden a horse to the lake of Redesmere which figured in the earlier books. The horse is found safe and well on an island in the lake. The inquest presumed she had drowned in the lake. But no body was found. At the end of the previous book, The Moon of Gomrath, Redesmere is the enchanted home of The Lady of the Lake, Angharad Goldenhand, who schooled Susan in witch-magic. She restrained Susan from riding into the Otherworld with the Sisters of the Moon, telling her "your time is not yet. But soon..." This strong hint of what really happened to Susan recurs throughout Boneland.
• Goblins in the Castle: The evil sorcerer Ishmael^note Don't call him that! disappears into thin air after falling to his death; William suspects he's dead for good though because the last of the magic around the North Tower (which said sorcerer had placed there) disappeared at the same time.
• Harry Potter:
  • Subverted with Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, whose body was never found, leading many fans to believe he was still alive. Turns out he really was dead. Specifically, Sirius' body was never found because his body was physically transferred to the afterlife, which is not a survivable or reversible event even if the spell he was hit by seconds earlier was non-lethal.
  • A similar thing happens later with Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Special attention is given to the fact that his body is never found, and Ron even suggests he might really be alive. Then they find his eye...
  • Played straight with Voldemort — it's implied that his body sorta disintegrated by the rebounded Curse and was never actually found. Not that it would have mattered...
  • All they ever found of poor Peter Pettigrew was a finger. Of course he cut it off himself so they would assume that was all that was left of his body. Given that the people who were really killed back then left considerably more of their bodies, one could have seen this as a reason to doubt Pettigrew really died. In fact, there's at least one Harry Potter fanfic where Sirius Black had a trial and this fact had been brought to the Wizengamot's attention.
• Invoked by the central character in The Highest Treason by Randall Garrett; facing death or capture, he arranges his death so that no body will be found, deliberately to promote a belief that he somehow got away and one day he'll be back.
• In The Hike (2023), a young Norwegian woman named Karin disappeared on Blafjell Mountain a year ago. No trace of her was ever found, though given Karin was an experienced hiker who grew up in the area, foul play is suspected, with many people believing her boyfriend was involved as he was the last known person to see her and they'd argued about her intention to move away. It turns out two German hikers had spotted Karin's body on a ledge below a cliff shortly after her disappearance, but Leif pushed her body off the ledge into the river far below and reported the hikers had mistook a tarp for a body, which is why she was never found.
• In Hope Leslie, this happens to Sir Philip, which the Puritans attribute to Satan taking the body of his servant back.
• The Hunger Games:
  • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes reveals that District 12's first victor, Lucy Gray Baird, vanished without a trace shortly after her Games, with no body ever found. It is implied that she was declared Legally Dead as Katniss says that, of the two District 12 tributes who won the Games before herself and Peeta, only Haymitch is still alive at the start of the original trilogy. Significantly, Lucy Gray's name is derived from a ballad about a girl who was also lost without a trace and may or may not have survived.
  • In Mockingjay Katniss and her squad are thought to have been killed in the battle to take the Capitol. When the Capitol airs the security footage from their apparent deaths, they only show their faces, as their bodies had not been found. They're still alive, obviously.
• In the Midst of Winter:
  • Enrique, Lucía's brother, is detained after the Military Coup in Chile and is never seen again. Later on, after Lucía goes off to exile, Lena Maraz is given instructions to retrieve a sealed coffin with her son's remains and orders not to open it. Of course, she does; she realizes the body they gave her is not Enrique's. Nevertheless, she has him buried in the family crypt.
  • Richard and Lucía make a plan to dispose of the body by tossing the Lexus off a cliff with Kathryn's corpse in the trunk. But when Lucía brings up how to make sure her body does not surface, she realizes that if they go through with their plan, Kathryn's loved ones will suffer like her own mother did when her brother was "disappeared". They change their plan so that Kathryn can be found during spring.
• In Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, the main character, Harrison Shepherd, is driven out of the US by the House of Un-American Activities Committee blacklisting him. He flees to Mexico, and shortly after is reported as committing suicide by drowning. In reality, he faked his death via a secret underwater passage and went on to start a new life.
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod Crane, of course. All that was left was his hat and a shattered jack-o-lantern. And they never found the head of the Headless Horseman.
• Looking even further back in time, around AD 200 Achilles Tatius wrote a novel entitled Leucippe And Clitophone where the titular character Leucippe apparently is Killed Off for Real not once but twice. She is captured by desperados (and given up as Human Sacrifice) and after her miraculous return is later captured by pirates and beheaded. In the first case, her body is carried away and in the second this trope is slightly subverted when they find the body...of the other women that got beheaded. This makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
• In Les Misérables, the recaptured Jean Valjean risks his life to rescue a man who fell from a ship's rigging; in the process, he himself "accidentally" falls into the water, from which his body is never recovered. Guess who turns up a month later in Montfermeil?
• In The Little Prince, the Prince allows the Snake to bite him so he can return home to his asteroid, insisting that he won't really die; his body might just not be able to come with him. The Aviator, seeing the Prince fall to the ground after being bitten, takes all night to collect himself before he can bring himself to go and collect the body so he can bury him. When he goes, though, he can't find the body or any sign of the Prince. He hopes this is a sign he really did manage to go home after all, but he and the reader never know for sure what happened.
• At the climax of Lonely Werewolf Girl Big Bad Sarapen is killed on page Deader than Dead with a magic knife and yet despite this, his body proves to be unrecoverable and goes missing. Uh-huh, wonder who will be back for the sequel then?
• The Locked Tomb: At the end of the first book, Harrow is told that Gideon's body has disappeared, along with Camilla, Coronabeth, and Judith. While there's no question of her death, the mystery of what happened to the body isn't answered conclusively until As Yet Unsent, where it's revealed that Blood of Eden took it when they abducted the Canaan House survivors.
• The Lunar Chronicles: In the first book, The Lunar Chronicles, it is mentioned that they never found the body of Princess Selene of Luna, who had apparently died in a fire when she was a toddler, but they did find pieces of her burnt flesh. At the climax of the book, cyborg protagonist Cinder is told that she is Princess Selene.
• The Mortal Instruments: Valentine in City of Ashes, after his ship is destroyed — which naturally means that he's still up and kicking. That is, until he gets stabbed by the angel Raziel in City of Glass, is cremated and has a funeral. He is dead for good. Unlike his other son.
• My Babysitter Is a Vampire: In the climax of book 6, the vampire trying to kill Meg falls off a cliff with her. While Meg is rescued by Vincent, they look over the edge of the cliff and don't see the attacking vampire's body; Meg hopefully suggests a wave washed it away, while Vincent suspects she turned into a bat at the last minute and escaped.
• Nemesis Saga: In the finale of Project Nemesis, Big Bad General Gordon falls off a building and lands on a car. When Hudson reaches the ground, Gordon is nowhere to be found. The epilogue reveals what happened to him.
• Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch (Series): Subverted in The Last Watch, where Anton believes Kostya is still alive because his body was never recovered, however, it's revealed that the body was found, only Geser decided not to show Anton the incinerated body of his best friend. In Sixth Watch, though, Kostya returns, courtesy of the Twilight, and becomes one of the most powerful vampires.
• A key problem the prosecution has in The Other Side Of Midnight with their case against Noelle Page and Larry Douglas for the murder of Catherine, the latter's wife, is that her body was never found. That's because she fled the hotel before they could kill her and her rowboat capsized. But in truth, she was rescued by people employed by Constantin, whom Noelle is mistress to. Catherine, now an amnesiac, lives with an order of nuns; Constantin hides this so the lovers will pay for cuckolding him.
• Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Subverted and played straight in The Titan's Curse when Bianca di Angelo is inside a faulty automaton when it collapses into pieces and parts. Percy, Zoe Nightshade, Grover, and Thalia search for hours through the wreckage without finding "anything". They half-heartedly volunteer this as proof that she's still alive somehow, but they all really know she is dead, and her ghost is in the underworld.
  • Subverted in The Last Olympian: Percy and Beckendorf are both flung off a ship into a water that is not Soft Water. While Percy survives the fall, being a son of Poseidon, Beckendorf's body isn't found at all, not even by Poseidon's forces. However, Beckendorf is not a son of Poseidon, so Percy is fully convinced he's dead. Nico, Bianca's brother and a son of Hades, later confirms that Beckendorf is dead, having spoken to his ghost.
• Alistair Drummond in the second book of The Rampart Worlds trilogy by Julian May. The protagonist, Asahel Frost, worries occasionally about whether he's actually dead. And then the guy turns out to be alive enough to steal Asa's identity while working with villainous aliens. When he's eventually killed off, the body is immediately in evidence, although mauled by a wolverine.
• Real Mermaids: Michaela "drowned" in Talisman Lake, which is connected to the ocean by a canal and a series of locks, a year before the series takes place. Her body was never found. She was a mermaid living on land as a human, and her husband doesn't understand how she could have drowned. It turns out that Talisman Lake is used as a prison by the Mermish Council. Two of the inmates dragged Michaela underwater and held her there until she was forced to breathe water, which triggered her transformation back into a mermaid. She has spent the last year trying to escape from the lake back to the ocean so she can find the tidal pool where she first transformed into a human.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy: A major character goes missing and never reappears during a raid in the second book. The other characters speculate that she was captured, interrogated, and killed, but just to complicate matters, this character vanished and reappeared during the first book, so it's totally in character for her to just go away.
• In The Red Vixen Adventures after 6-year-old Alinadar's family is murdered by pirates and she's taken by them to become a child soldier, her brother Lu (who wasn't on their family's ship at the time) invokes this trope and keep searching twenty years for her.
• Redwall: Nothing but a few feathers is found of Bluddbeak, an old, blind, rheumy red kite from Triss. Considering he went up against a trio of adders, his demise is in no doubt.
• Invoked in Reign of the Seven Spellblades. Oliver Horn assassinates Darius Grenville in the abandoned workshop of a deceased student deep in the labyrinth under Kimberly Magic Academy, and he and his coconspirators dispose of the body. As a result, at the start of the next book, he's only listed as missing even though six months have gone by, and that's far from unheard-of for both students and faculty at Kimberly.
• Happens with two villains in Renegades:
  • At the start of the first book, Adrian doubts that the supervillain Nightmare is actually dead, as only the mask was recovered from the scene of the explosion. The reader already knows he's right to be dubious.
  • Ace Anarchy's corpse was lost in the chaos following the Battle of Gatlon. Predictably, he turns out to be alive.
• The faux-death of Sherlock Holmes at the falls left open the means for Doyle to return to the series after the public hue and cry against the seeming end of it all was so loud that nothing else he wrote had a chance of getting published. Also happens to the villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles, who is lost in a bog. Unlike Holmes, he never makes a comeback.
• Siren Novels: The siren Charlotte Bleu disappeared after her bookstore burned down in 1993. It was assumed that her body was destroyed by flames. In fact, she faked her death, and is now living in South Boston as her "sister" Willa.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has several of these, some more debated than others and one that's heavily implied regarding an Ensemble Dark Horse.
  • The Stark children's uncle, Benjen, disappears early on in the series, when he leads a ranging beyond the Wall sometime after his nephew Jon Snow joins the Night's Watch. Jon is really itching to do a ranging because he hopes to find his uncle himself, although he never does. A theory that he is the true identity of Coldhands, the mysterious figure guiding Bran Stark and his company during their journey beyond the Wall, has been Jossed by George R. R. Martin himself.
  • Forty six years before Benjen Stark disappeared, the infamous Brynden "Bloodraven" Rivers, a bastard son of Aegon IV who served four different Targaryen kings, went missing in a similar ranging beyond the Wall, and is presumed dead due to how long it has been since he was last seen. Unlike Benjen, though, we finally learn about Bloodraven's fate; it turns out that he has joined the Children of the Forest and become the Three-Eyed Crow.
  • Tyrek Lannister, a young cousin of Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion, goes missing during the riots at King's Landing and is presumed dead. Jaime suspects that he might have been abducted and/or killed by Varys, who did not come to the docks to bid off Myrcella Baratheon when she was sent to Dorne.
  • Rhaegar, Symond, and Jared Frey disappear en route from White Harbor to Barrowtown while serving as the Freys' envoys to Lord Wyman Manderly. It is popularly believed that Wyman has the three Freys killed and baked into three "pork" pies he serves during Ramsay Bolton's wedding to Jeyne Poole in Winterfell later on. This is revenge for the Freys severely violating sacred hospitality by massacring the Northern army during the Red Wedding; by contrast, Lord Manderly gave the Freys gifts when they left, a traditional formality but also signaling the formal end of guest right protection.
  • Virtually everyone who dared to go to the ruins of Valyria never returned to tell their tale. King Tommen II Lannister attempted to plunder the riches of the ruined empire, only to end up going missing alongside the ancestral Valyrian sword of the Lannisters, Brightroar. Seven years before the series begins, Tywin Lannister's younger brother Gerion launched an expedition to reclaim Brightroar. He was last seen in Volantis replacing half of his crew when they deserted him upon learning that he intended to go to Valyria, and his current whereabouts are unknown.
  • Queen Rhaenys Targaryen, one of Aegon the Conqueror's wives, went down alongside her dragon, Meraxes, during an attempt to conquer Dorne. The Dornish eventually returned Meraxes' skull to Aegon as a peace offering, but they stayed mum about what really happened to Rhaenys, whose death could only be inferred since the Targaryens never recovered her remains. It is implied that the letter Nymor Martell sent to Aegon, which caused him to abruptly halt the conquest of Dorne, held secrets to her ultimate fate.
  • Prince Daemon Targaryen died by jumping off his dragon, Caraxes, and ramming a sword through his nephew Aemond's eye, causing his dragon, Vhagar, to crash into a lake at some speed. Years later, the bodies of Aemond and Vhagar were recovered, but there was no sign of Daemon's. The romantically inclined Westerosi believe Daemon survived, swam to shore, and may have then quietly lived out his life in obscurity.
  • Alyn "Oakenfist" Velaryon, the presumed bastard son of Laenor Velaryon legitimized during the Dance of the Dragons, disappeared at sea during the reign of Aegon IV.
• In The Sorcerer's Daughter, the infant heiress to the throne disappears without a trace, and then the 0% Approval Rating inquisitor vanishes as well, leading savvy courtiers to suspect the latter has killed the princess and escaped. It is revealed that the princess is alive, while the inquisitor has been turned into a bat by the titular sorcerer and killed by an owl two nights later.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • Ahsoka: Invoked by Ahsoka while Faking the Dead. She and Rex created a fake grave for him, which they could do because he's a clone trooper; they simply buried an already dead clone in his place. Since they wouldn't be able to do the same for her, they put up a headstone claiming that they killed each other, and Ahsoka left her lightsabers atop the grave to sell the deception, because no one would buy that a Jedi would voluntarily leave behind her iconic weapons.
• Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series:
  • Used extensively in the ones written by Michael Stackpole. Counting off, we see...Corran, Mirax, Tycho, Bror Jace, Jan Dodonna, Ysanne Isard, and all of Rogue Squadron (in fairness, that last featured a couple getting Killed Off for Real, but not the main ones). Several characters note that they just won't stay dead; one even theorized that they were actually getting cloned, after the incident where they were all supposed to have died. Fittingly, he gets shot by one of them as they execute their incredibly over-complicated plan.
    Mirax: I could help myself get over this, I think, if I could just finally accept the fact that Corran's dead. Listening to the comlink call when he went in, that was pretty nasty, but we never found a body. I know it's stupid to make anything of that, what with the building coming down on him and all, but my father always said that if you don't see a body, don't count on someone being dead. He did once—
    Wedge: And it cost him his eye. I remember the story.
  • Discussed in another instance in the series. Wedge comments that sometimes he half-expects lost squadmates to walk into his office one day. (Usually in these cases there's no body because they were incinerated when their X-Wings were blown up.)
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: After García and Elvira ride into the river to flee from their enemies and are dragged away by the current, Guzmán and Gazul happily declare their hatred foe García dead. Several days later, García reappears in the king's camp together with Elvira, to Guzmán disbelief and amazement.
• The Syrena Legacy: In the 1940s, the Triton prince Grom was betrothed to the Poseidon princess Nalia. They were deeply in love, until they accidentally set off a mine left by humans. In the aftermath of the explosion, Grom couldn't sense Nalia anymore. When her body was never recovered, everyone assumed she'd been blown to bits. Grom spent the next seventy years grieving. It turns out his senses were discombobulated by the explosion. Nalia survived and, thinking Grom was dead, went on land to live as the human Natalie before either she or Grom could recover enough to sense each other. She enters a Marriage of Convenience with a human man and has Emma, who grows up thinking she is fully human until her Syrena abilities start to awaken when she's eighteen. Nalia and Grom are finally reunited in Of Triton.
• Lampshaded at times in Andrew Vachss' Burke books with The Dreaded Shrouded in Myth Wesley, who supposedly blew himself up live on television. While Burke, as the closest thing to a friend the man had, is sure he is dead, the rest of the underworld is not because there was not enough left to tell.
• The Vazula Chronicles: The mer couple Elric and Merminia were "killed by stingrays" while traveling outside the triple kingdoms with their infant daughter Merleisha. Their bodies were recovered, but Merleisha's never was. The merman sent to kill the three of them took pity on the infant and took her to the charity home in Tilssted instead, where she was raised as the orphan Merletta.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt, Gaunt is shown MkVenner's grave and later told they had erected it as a propaganda tool after his team had been wiped out without their recovering the body. We never see him again. However, the Ghosts' next best scout realizes there is someone nearby that he can't see, which only one person could have done, and Resistance fighters in the hands of the Inquisition nearby mysteriously vanish.
  • Also in The Guns of Tanith, a shuttle blows up, but someone onboard namely Mkoll appears later.
  • Defied in the Warhammer 40,000 novel Grey Knights: The Inquisition sends the Grey Knight expedition down to Khorion IX instead of simply calling Exterminatus on it because they need eyes on the ground to see Ghargatuloth's defeat.
  • Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) has had this happen so many times over the years that the Munitorum has finally decided to treat him as always alive (in spite of his funeral with full honors). Of course, some take the view that his burial itself was faked, so he could more efficiently serve the Inquisition.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Hollyleaf's "death": no one bothered to try digging up her body after the tunnels collapsed, and it turns out that she actually survived.
  • In Crookedstar's Promise, a minor character — RiverClan elder Duskwater — got swept away in a flood and they never found her body.
  • In Tallstar's Revenge, Sandgorse's body is lost in the collapsing, flooded tunnels.
  • In Shattered Sky, this happens for various reasons to quite a few cats who got killed off, including Dawnpelt, Needletail, Onestar, and Darktail.
• In Watership Down, General Woundwort is last seen furiously attacking a vicious dog which has driven off most of his military. One of his followers later says that since they never found his body, it meant he wasn't dead, just gone to find a more worthy warren. Eventually, he becomes a legendary figure in rabbit culture.
  And yet there endured the legend that somewhere out over the down there lived a great and solitary rabbit, a giant who drove the elil like mice and sometimes went to silflay in the sky. If ever great danger arose, he would come back to fight for those who honored his name. And mother rabbits would tell their kittens that if they did not do as they were told, the General would get them — the General who was first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself. Such was Woundwort's monument: and perhaps it would not have displeased him.
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: The body of the bomber is never found, leading to speculation that he survived his suicide.
• Simultaneously played straight and inverted in The Wheel of Time. At the end of the fifth book, Moiraine tackles Lanfear into the twisted doorframe, which is destroyed immediately after. Every character assumes them dead, particularly because Moiraine's bond with Lan seems to have been broken. Every fan assumes this to be an obvious case of No One Could Survive That!, which just causes confusion when Cyndane appears in the eighth book, obviously an altered and/or reborn Lanfear. But in the thirteenth book, we find out that Moiraine is, of course, still alive, but that Lanfear actually was killed shortly after entering the doorway!
  • Done unintentionally and subverted in case of Sammael, who got killed when Rand looked away. Jordan had to go against his "read and find out" rule and confirm that he is, indeed, dead.
  • Despite the fact that an entire palace with hundreds of occupants was literally erased from reality (and time, by several hours), many fans refused to believe that Graendal was dead. They were right.
• Where Are the Children?: Carl drowned himself in the sea after his wife was found guilty of murdering their children; his body was never recovered, though his car was found abandoned on the beach with a suicide note attached to the steering wheel. It turns out Carl faked his suicide and has been living under different identities for the past seven years.
• Where the Sidewalk Ends: In "The Crocodile's Toothache" a Depraved Dentist receives his Just Desserts from his crocodile patient. Afterwards, the narrator ponders over the dentists abrupt disappearance.
  Oops, that's the wrong one, I confess,
  But what's one crocodile's tooth, more or less?
  Then suddenly, the jaws went SNAP,
  And the dentist was gone, right off the map,
  And where he went one could only guess...
  To North or East South or West...
  He left no forwarding address.
  But what's one dentist, more or less?

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