06/05/2025
💔SHE BOARDED A GREYHOUND BUS IN 1960—AND NEVER CAME HOME
📍Columbus, Mississippi → St. Louis, Missouri | Summer 1960
🕊️Lyrian Wyvonne Barry was a 23-year-old mother, daughter, and sister when she walked out of her family’s home on Elmwood Street in Columbus, Mississippi, one hot summer day in 1960. She was heading to St. Louis to start over, to find stability, and to build a better life for herself and her 8-month-old daughter, Gloria.
But Lyrian never made it to that second chance. She was never seen or heard from again.
🧳She left her clothes folded on the back porch.
She left her gold Hunt High School Class of ’56 ring on the dresser.
She left her baby girl, Gloria, in the arms of her sister, Betsy.
And she boarded a Greyhound bus—her eyes on a new life.
🧩Her family said she was hurting, but hopeful. Things with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Eulice “Eddie” Stallings, had turned toxic. He was violent, allegedly abusive, and deeply involved in drugs. Lyrian had called her family for help more than once. They packed her things, helped her move out, and thought she was finally getting free.
She planned to stay with an aunt in St. Louis, look for work, and return when her sister gave birth. But that return never happened.
đź’”Years passed. Then decades.
🗣️Some said they saw her in Chicago.
Someone else said she became a live-in maid in Massachusetts or Connecticut, but they couldn’t remember her name.
One tip said she’d been found in a mental hospital in California, near where Stallings had moved.
But none of it ever led to Lyrian.
💔Her family didn’t report her missing right away. They thought maybe she was just regrouping—finding herself. She was young, independent, and capable. But as the months turned into years, silence became agony.
Her daughter Gloria grew up asking, “Why?” The weight of her mother’s disappearance nearly crushed her spirit. On Mother’s Day, she hid inside her house, unable to face the joy others had. She passed away at age 50, never knowing what happened.
đź“žThe family chased every lead.
📬They wrote to the Social Security Administration—and received letter after letter back saying the same thing: no activity. No forwarding address. No trace.
They held onto the same phone number for decades—just in case she called.
Even now, more than 60 years later, her siblings still call each other almost every day. They talk about her. They remember her laugh. They refuse to forget.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” her brother Willie Gray says.
“She wouldn’t have just left,” they all agree.
đź’”No missing persons report was ever officially filed.
No arrest was ever made.
No one ever answered the question: What happened to Lyrian Barry?
She would be 81 years old today.
Her parents are gone. Her baby is gone.
But her siblings are still searching.
📢If you know anything about the disappearance of Lyrian Wyvonne Barry—no matter how small—please come forward. Her family doesn’t need explanations. They just need truth. They just want to know she’s OK—or what happened if she’s not.
Because vanishing behind a cloud of Mississippi dust should not be the end of anyone’s story.
The Vivid Faces of the Vanished
