Lord Lucan still haunts us – why can’t we let the vanished go?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/09/lord-lucan-george-bingham-son

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Lord Lucan is dead. How can they tell, as Dorothy Parker once asked about President Calvin Coolidge? The answer is that, although he may not really be dead, he is officially, legally dead (and has been since 1999). Not even the state can change reality, though that might perhaps be a controversial view.

Using the 2013 Presumption of Death Act, his son and heir recently launched a legal attempt to collect a death certificate, and so inherit his father’s title. The case has been complicated by the intervention of the son of Sandra Rivett, the murdered nanny of Lucan’s children, who has registered an objection.

Related: Son applies for Lord Lucan to be declared 'presumed dead'

Lucan was born in 1934, and cut short his career as a wealthy socialite and gambler in 1974 when he is assumed to have battered Rivett to death, presumably – though not definitely – mistaking her for his wife. So in the unlikely event that he really is still alive, after many years of reported sightings that turned out to be dead ends, he would now be 80 (81 next month).

It is strange nonetheless that we obsess about the reputedly undead like this. Sandra Rivett, his victim, is not a household name in quite the same way. It is as if their continued existence gives a whiff of immortality to our otherwise relentlessly mortal world. Perhaps if Amelia Earhart could turn up alive (at the age of 117) after all this time, or Glenn Miller, or Elvis Presley – who is occasionally seen, after all – it would provide a glimmer of hope for all of us.

We like the idea of people torn from the past who turn out to be still alive – they are living, breathing time capsules. Like Hiroo Onoda and Teruo Nakamura, who disappeared in the Pacific during the second world war and re-emerged in 1974 – stepping straight into a world of hi-fi, fast food and Watergate.

This is not to be cynical about it. Many of us have a continuing sense that time is not quite what it seems. Even hardened agnostics – if there are such things – sometimes cling to the idea that all the energy and complexity of a human life can’t quite be extinguished either by death or time.

Then there are those who are said to be alive but whom nobody sees, like King Arthur – who was supposed to be sleeping until our hour of need, before the monks of Glastonbury kindly dug him up in the 12th century. In a last twist, his gravestone, according to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, referred to him as the “once and future king”. Then there are those, such as Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers, who are said to be dead, but people keep claiming to have caught sight of them. Hitler, too, was frequently sighted in Latin America at one stage, and – who knows – may be living in a small guest house in Minehead at the age of 126, as the Monty Python team imagined.

What these people have in common is that they are all – notorious or heroic – people who died at the height of their fame and who were in some way larger than life. And because they were larger than life, we wonder a little whether they might also be larger than death.

Related: Lord Lucan 'lived secret life in Africa', claims former assistant

In this respect, they are like the bodies of saints, which were said to be immune to the usual processes of decomposition. Or like the Greek heroes who were supposed to have been found intact in the earth (“I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon,” the controversial 19th century archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann is supposed to have said, though actually he hadn’t). We like to imagine that they are somehow immune to the petty necessities of life, like washing up, or sorting knickers, or dying.

Legendary survivals are the same. For someone to be undead, so to speak, they have to die unexpectedly, a long way from home, and there has to be some ambiguity about it. Nobody glimpses Horatio Nelson or Margaret Thatcher wandering among us, because their deaths were pretty well attested – in the case of Thatcher, there was a gun carriage to prove it.

But for those who disappeared and were never seen again, the rumours persist – Spartacus is probably now dead. As are Roald Amundsen, Jimmy Hoffa, the Australian prime minister Harold Holt and the former slave Solomon Northup, whose fate and whereabouts remain a mystery.

There is something enticing about the heroes and villains who never come home, like Sherlock Holmes after the Reichenbach Falls. We imagine them living somewhere offstage – not like ghosts, but just as before, perched between life and death. Just like the rest of us really.