Alexandria Alexis – the time traveller from 1898

ByCraig Haley

Rumours that a time traveller by the name of Alexandria Alexis travelled back to the Victoria Era only to go missing on New Year’s Eve 1899 have been popular on the Internet for a number of years.

Everyone likes a good time travelling tale. We often see various claims about the alleged possibilities of time travel and are commonly presented with apparent evidence that assert to prove the existence of surreptitious time travellers who journey between different eras for reasons unknown to us.

The tale of Alexandria Alexis is one such tale. The story claims that time travel – which is to be discovered in the year 2025 – took Alexis back to the year 1898 where she made quite the impression on the people of that time. However she mysteriously disappeared on New Year’s Eve of 1899, never to be heard of again.

A social media version of the tale persistently appears with the photo of Alexandria Alexis, pictured above. The story reads –

Time travel will be invented in the year 2025. How do we know? Because that is the year that this delightful lady claimed to have traveled from. In the year 1898, according the contemporary reports, Alexandria Alexis appeared ‘as if from nowhere’ and took New York society by storm. Some fawned over her while others claimed she was insane. This debate was however rendered moot when, on New Year’s Eve 1899, she simply disappeared…

However the story comes crashing back to Earth when the facts come into play. Firstly, the photo, taken by famous portrait photographer Napoleon Sarony, was likely taken between 1866 to 1871, since between those dates he worked at his Broadway office that is marked on the photo. This does not tie into the claim that the woman in the photo time travelled back to 1898.

Also, a reverse image search gives the woman in the photo an identity. Grace Rawlinson, an English actress who was temporarily in America during the 1870s. Not much is publicly known about Rawlinson, other than a few shows in which she appeared in when in the States, and a handful of other photos gathered from across the web.

According to other Internet folklorists, the story was created as a advertisement to a steampunk novel that is still in the making.

We do, however, know she wasn’t a time traveller called Alexandria Alexis, putting an end to this story.

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