Even though it might seem impossible, some people really do vanish into thin air. While some evidence may point to foul play, other times, the circumstances of a missing-persons case are simply too bewildering to fathom. From secret stalkers to faulty surveillance footage to laptops at the bottom of a riverbank, these unsolved disappearances are the strangest, most unsettling cases of all time…
Lars Mittank
On June 30, 2014, 28-year-old German man Lars Mittank was vacationing at a seaside resort with his friends. A few days later, on July 6, Mittank got into a fight with four other men over football. Mittank ruptured his eardrum in the fight. As a result, his doctor encouraged him not to fly home with the rest of his group. Mittank checked into a cheap Bulgarian hotel alone. He had been prescribed an antibiotic, Cefuroxime, at the hospital.
Strange Behavior
The day after Mittank’s friends departed, he began to exhibit erratic behavior that was captured on the hotel’s security cameras. Mittank spent the night at the hotel, but he sent a text to his mother stating that he felt unsafe and asked her to cancel his credit card. Mittank said that he was hiding from four men who were allegedly following him and asking him about pills. He was last seen at the Varna Airport. Security footage shows him running away, hopping a fence, and disappearing into the woods. He has not been seen since.
Ray Gricar
Ray Gricar was an American attorney who once served as the district attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, from 1985 until his presumed death in 2005. On the morning of his disappearance, he informed his girlfriend and said he was going to play hooky from work. He then set off on his own down Route 192 in his red Mini Cooper. By 5:00 p.m. the next day, Gricar’s vehicle was located 50 miles from his home, parked across from an antique mall.
Mysterious Circumstances
Gricar’s cell phone was locked inside his car along with a water bottle, but his keys and wallet were nowhere to be found. Cigarette ash was found on a floor mat despite Gricar’s detestation of the habit. His missing laptop was discovered by two fishermen in the Susquehanna River three months later, but the hard drive was missing. It washed up on the banks of the river in September of that year. Gricar’s death is speculated to have connections with the Penn State scandal, as Gricar failed to prosecute Jerry Sandusky in 2011.
Bobby Dunbar
In 1912, Bobby Dunbar went missing after his parents took him fishing on a lake in Lousiana. 8 months later, police found a man named William Cantwell Walters who was traveling with a boy who resembled Bobby Dunbar. Walters claimed the boy was named Bruce Anderson, and he was the son of a friend who had granted Walters custody. Investigators determined the child actually was Bobby Dunbar and awarded custody to his parents. However, that wasn’t the end.
Wrong Boy
During the trial, a woman named Julia Anderson asserted that the child was indeed her son Bruce and that she had given Walters custody of him. However, because she had three children out of wedlock, the courts dismissed her. In 2008, a granddaughter of the supposed “Bobby Dunbar” took a DNA test and compared her grandfather’s DNA to that of his own brothers. They weren’t related.
Dorothy Jane Scott
On May 27, 1980, 32-year-old Dorothy Jane Scott dropped off her young son at her parents’ house in Anaheim, California and attended a company meeting. At the meeting, Scott’s coworker, Conrad Bostron, complained of such severe pain that Scott and another coworker, Pam Head, volunteered to drive him to the hospital. It was determined that Bostron had been bitten by a black widow spider. By 11 p.m., he had recovered enough that he was discharged.
Never Look Back
Scott went to get her car while Head stayed with Bostron to fill out paperwork. When Head looked out the window a few minutes later, she saw Scott’s car exiting the hospital parking lot. The vehicle was traveling the wrong way at high speed. Two hours later, she had not returned. Then, the police found their first major lead: Scott was being stalked.
Unidentified Caller
Scott had received a number of phone calls at work in the weeks prior to her disappearance. She revealed to a coworker that the unidentified caller watched her every move, describing the details of her life in such a specific way that she had deduced the calls were not a prank. Even after Scott vanished, the caller continued every Wednesday for four years.
Disturbing Murder
The calls usually came when Scott’s mother was home alone. He would ask for Scott or state that he had murdered her after she’d been held captive. In 1984, Scott’s skeletal remains were found along the Santa Ana Canyon Road. Her car was found burned in an alley. The circumstances of her death and disappearance, as well as the caller’s identity, remain a mystery.
Mary Marshall-Lands
Mary Marshall-Lands disappeared from her apartment on March 12, 2004. At the time, Marshall-Lands was living with her fiance, Chris Pratt. Pratt was the last person to see her alive. The couple had an argument and Marshall-Lands told him she was going to “take a walk” to cool down. She left the apartment around 10 P.M. left without her keys, wallet, and cell phone, but she did take her empty purse along.
Pig Farm
Pratt was known for abusing prior partners, so he became the number one suspect in Marshall-Lands’ case. His family owned and operated a pig farm, which the town believes is her final resting place. Years later, Pratt was arrested and sentenced to 6 years in prison for sexually abusing his then-girlfriend. The private investigator hired by Marshall-Lands’ family believes that “her remains are within 10 miles of the fountain in the middle of town.”
The Lost Boys
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1995, six teenage boys went missing from Pickering, Ontario. The friends had spent the night partying and snuck down to the local marina to steal a couple of boats. They took two small boats out onto freezing Lake Ontario for a joyride. None of the boys were wearing life jackets.
Disappearing Act
Before they left for the marina around 12:50 a.m., the group told a friend they were going to go “goof around” on a boat. The boys were all students at a local high school. The only evidence of their fate was surveillance camera footage taken at 1:48 a.m. of the boys sneaking into East Shore Marina. Police believe the boats capsized and the boys succumbed to hypothermia, but no bodies, clothing, or boats were ever recovered.
The Springfield Three
On June 7, 1992, Suzanne Streeter, Stacy McCall, and Streeter’s mother, Sherrill Levitt, all went missing from Levitt’s home in Springfield, MO. Their personal effects, including vehicles and purses, were left behind. The only sign of a struggle was a broken porch light. Police believed a message left on the answering machine might have provided crucial information pertaining to their whereabouts, but the message was accidentally erased.
Five Years Later
In 1997, convicted kidnapper and robber Robert Craig Cox claimed he knew the women had been murdered; he said their bodies would never be found. To this day, the women’s remains have yet to be discovered.
Lauren Spierer
20-year-old Lauren Spierer was a college student at Indiana University. Originally from Scarsdale, New York, Spierer went out in downtown Bloomington on June 2, 2011. Her boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, sent her a text, but her phone had been left at a bar. An employee of the bar responded to Wolff’s message the next morning, prompting him to contact the authorities and report her missing.
Gone Without a Trace
Surveillance footage depicts Spierer entering Smallwood Plaza at 2:30 a.m., the apartment complex where her residence was located. A passerby noticed she was severely inebriated and asked if she was okay. Twenty minutes later, Spierer can be seen entering and exiting an alley, walking toward a nearby lot. Her purse and keys were later found in the alley. Spierer refused to sleep at a friend’s apartment despite his insistence. At 4:30 a.m., she was seen at the intersection of 11th Street and College Avenue, barefoot. Nobody has seen Spierer since.
Rico Harris
The 6’9″ former Harlem Globetrotter disappeared on his way to move in with his long-distance girlfriend. Harris decided to visit his mother and brother in LA one last time before officially moving to Seattle for good. While driving along the I-5, he pulled over somewhere north of Sacramento, exhausted. Harris told his girlfriend he wanted to check out the mountains.
Size 18 Footprints
A few days later, his car was found near a rest stop in the mountains. Despite a comprehensive search, Harris was still missing. One week after Harris’ disappearance, a driver reported seeing a massive, 6’9″ man wandering along the highway only a mile from where the car was found. The search relaunched, and size 18 footprints were found leading from the parking lot where his car was found to a nearby creek, but they had not been there during the previous search. Harris was never located.
Susan Powell
Susan Powell was reported missing along with her entire family on December 7, 2009. However, that same day, her husband Joshua and their two children returned home. Joshua claimed they had gone camping. Susan’s purse, wallet, and ID were left at the house, but her cell phone was found in their minivan. When asked why he would take his wife and young sons on a camping trip past midnight on a Sunday, he claimed that he didn’t realize what day it was. Susan was nowhere to be found.
Tragic Ending
Susan’s blood was found on the floor along with a life insurance policy for $1.5 million and a handwritten letter expressing fear for her life. At daycare several months after her disappearance, Susan’s son drew a picture of a van with three people in it and said that “mommy was in the trunk.” It was also revealed that Joshua’s father was obsessed with Susan. On February 5, 2012, Joshua killed himself and his two children in a home explosion. Susan’s case was closed in 2013. Police stated they believed she had been murdered by her husband.
Ben McDaniel
Ben McDaniel was a scuba diver who disappeared on August 18, 2010. McDaniel was last seen by two employees of Vortex Spring, a dive shop north of Ponce de Leon, Floria. McDaniel, an uncertified diver, went missing while attempting to dive in a cave that was notoriously difficult to navigate. Even though his body was never found, experts claim McDaniel was too large to have entered the cave’s narrower passages.
Ben’s Vortex
The McDaniel family believes Ben’s death was not an accident, but instead the result of foul play. The following year, the owner of Vortex Spring, Lowell Kelly, died under suspicious circumstances. Cadaver dogs and water tests showed no signs that a decomposing human body was in the area. It is believed by the McDaniels that Ben’s disappearance might have been staged as a coverup for his murder.
The Jamison Family
On October 8, 2009, the Jamison family disappeared into the woods of Oklahoma. Bobby Dale Jamison, his wife Sherilynn, and their six-year-old daughter Madyson all mysteriously vanished from their home without warning. A few days later, the police recovered the Jamison’s truck an hour away. Inside were their IDs, wallets, phones, Sherilynn’s purse, $32,000 in cash, and the family dog, who was malnourished, but still alive.
How Did They Die?
Four years later, on November 16, 2013, the skeletal remains of the Jamison family were found just three miles from where their truck was once located. The cause of death couldn’t be determined, but Bobby Dale had confessed to his pastor that he believed their house was haunted shortly before they disappeared. Police also uncovered an angry letter from Sherilynn to Bobby that was 11 pages long, leading them to believe their deaths could have been a murder-suicide.
Maura Murray
On the evening of February 9, 2004, Maura Murray disappeared after a car crash on Route 112 in Woodsville, New Hampshire. Murray was a nursing student finishing her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time of her disappearance. Before she left campus, Murray sent an email to her professors stating that she was taking a week off due to a death in the family. However, her family stated this was false; there were no recent deaths.
Was It Intentional?
At 7:27 p.m., a local woman reported the accident across from her home, and a passing motorist stopped to ask if Murray needed help. Murray declined, stating she had already called roadside assistance. The motorist reported the accident once he arrived home several minutes later. When law enforcement arrived at 7:46 p.m., Murray had disappeared. Her whereabouts are still unknown.
Jodi Huisentruit
When 27-year-old Jodi Huisentruit didn’t show up for her 6 a.m. KIMT broadcast on June 27, 1995, her producer ordered a welfare check to be performed at her apartment. Huisentruit had answered a call from her producer earlier that morning saying that she had overslept and was going to head into the office. He called again at 5 a.m. with no response.
Abduction
A red pair of shoes, a hairdryer, and a bottle of hairspray were found strewn by Huisentruit’s car outside of her apartment. Police believe she was grabbed as she tried to unlock her red Mazda Miata shortly after 4 a.m. A palm print was found on the vehicle and authorities discovered signs of a struggle, including a bent car key. At least three neighbors reported hearing screams around the time Huisneruit was leaving for work.
Elisa Lam
Elisa Lam was a Canadian exchange student staying alone in a downtown Los Angeles hotel. Lam was supposedly acting erratically before she disappeared; surveillance footage showed Lam in the elevator right before she died. She can be seen entering and exiting the elevator several times, speaking and gesturing toward the hallway outside, and sometimes hiding in the elevator, which appeared to be malfunctioning. There was nobody else in the hallway.
Something in the Water
A maintenance worker was responding to guest complaints of issues with the water supply when he found Lam’s nude body floating in the water tank on top of the hotel. Her clothing and personal effects were also floating in the tank. It took the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office several months to determine that her death was accidental, but this has been widely disputed by Lam’s family and Internet sleuths alike.
The Sodder Children
On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder home was destroyed by a fire in Fayetteville, West Virginia. The home was occupied by George and Jennie Sodder, as well as nine of their ten children. Four of the children escaped, but the bodies of the other five were never found. The fire was blamed on “faulty wiring,” but during the inquest, one of the jurors threatened George, saying his house would be “burned” and his children “destroyed.”
Foul Play
If the fire was really caused by faulty wiring, then how had the Sodders’ Christmas lights remained on when the fire began? A phone repairman said the house’s phone line had not been burned in the fire as they initially thought, but someone had climbed up the 14-foot pole and severed it. A missing ladder belonging to the Sodders was also found at the bottom of an embankment. The only bone fragments ever found were human vertebrae, but they had never been exposed to the fire.
Heather Teague
Heather Teague was sunbathing at Newburgh Beach on August 26, 1995, when a witness observed her through a telescope being dragged into the woods at gunpoint. Parts of Teague’s bathing suit were discovered near the abduction site where she was last seen.
Main Suspect
A man named Marvin “Ray” Dill was pulled over during a routine traffic stop following Heather’s disappearance. Dill’s car was a white and red Ford Bronco, the same car that was reported as having parked next to Heather’s at the beach. During the stop, authorities discovered guns, knives, a roll of duct tape, rubber gloves, rope, and hair that looked similar to Heather’s. There was also a bloodstain on its inside tailgate. Once investigators arrived at his home for questioning, Dill told his wife to leave the premises and committed suicide.
Tara Calico
On September 20, 1988, Tara Calico went for her daily bike ride and never returned. Calico’s mother used to accompany her on these rides but eventually stopped because she felt as though she was being stalked by a driver. She also tried to get her daughter to bring mace with her, but Calico refused. On the day of Calico’s disappearance, a light-colored pickup truck was seen following her. Her mother recovered pieces of her walkman and a cassette tape along the bike trail.
The Polaroid
The following year on June 15, 1989, a Polaroid depicting a young woman and a boy, both bound and gagged, was found in a convenience store parking lot in Florida. The young woman had a scar on her leg, which matched a scar Calico had sustained in a car accident. More photographs of a bound and gagged female have surfaced, but they haven’t been released to the public. The woman pictured in the photos is suspected to be Tara. The gagged boy is still unknown.
The Lost Girls of Panama
Dutch students Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon disappeared on April 1, 2014, while hiking in Panama. The women went hiking with their host family’s dog around 11 a.m. near Boquete, where they were seen having brunch with two young Dutch men before embarking on the trail. Their hosts became concerned when their dog returned that evening without the two young women. A full-scale search of the forests was conducted for 10 days.
Ten Weeks Later
Froon’s backpack was turned in by a local woman ten weeks later, which she said she had found in a rice paddy. The woman asserted that it had not been there the previous day. The backpack contained Froon’s money and personal belongings. A distress call had been made from both Kremer and Froon’s phones on April 3. Between April 7 and April 10, 77 emergency calls were attempted on Kremers’ iPhone.
Chilling Discovery
90 photos from April 8 were shot between 1 and 4 p.m. The photos were taken deep in the jungle in almost complete darkness. One photo shows the back of Kremers’ head with what appears to be blood by her temple. Kremer’s jean shorts, zipped and folded, were located on a rock near where Froon’s backpack had been discovered. Two months later, a pelvis and a boot with a foot inside were found, along with 33 scattered bones along the riverbank.
Bones Scrubbed Clean
DNA testing confirmed that the bones belonged to Kremers and Froon. Froon’s bones still had some skin attached, but Kremers’ bones had been bleached. A forensic anthropologist later claimed that under magnification, “there are no discernible scratches of any kind on the bones, neither of natural nor cultural origin – there are no marks on the bones at all.”
Jennifer Kesse
Jennifer Kesse has been missing since January 23, 2006. She was last seen leaving work at approximately 6 p.m. Kesse spoke to her father on the phone at 6:15, and then with her boyfriend around 10 p.m. Kesse never arrived at work the following morning, and her parents were contacted. Kesse’s car was missing, but otherwise, nothing appeared out of the ordinary inside her home. Evidence such as a wet towel and clothing laid out suggested she had gotten ready for work in the morning.
Lucky Break
Several days later, a tenant of a nearby apartment complex confirmed her car had been sitting in the parking lot for several days. Surveillance footage showed an unidentified person parking her car and walking away. However, the footage captured the subject in three separate snapshots, none of which reveal their face. One journalist called them “the luckiest person of interest ever.” Kesse was never found.
Amy Lynn Bradley
Amy Lynn Bradley was last seen asleep on the balcony of a cruise ship called Rhapsody of the Sea, which was en route to Curaçao. Bradley was on the cruise with her family; earlier in the evening, she had spent time with cruise performers. Shortly after the ship docked, Bradley was nowhere to be found.
Sold into Slavery
In 1998, two tourists report seeing a woman with tattoos identical to Bradley’s in Curaçao. The following year, a U.S. Naval officer claimed he met Bradley in a brothel, where she had said that “her name was Amy Bradley and [she] begged him for help.” In 2005, a witness claimed to have seen Bradley in a department store being threatened by three men in a restroom. After the men had left, Bradley told the woman her name was Amy and she was from Virginia. The men returned and took her away.
Angela Hammond
22-year-old Angela Hammond was four months pregnant and engaged to Rob Shafer, an athlete with plans to join the military. At 11:15 p.m. on April 4, 1991, Hammond called Shafer from a payphone seven blocks from his house. While on the phone, a green Ford pickup truck circled the block several times. It then pulled up beside her. A struggle ensued and Angela was abducted by the driver.
To the Rescue
After Shafer heard Hammond scream on the phone, he rushed to save her. As he was speeding down the road, the truck passed him, and Shafer damaged his car’s transmission when he threw the gear in reverse. After 2 miles following the car, Shafer’s transmission died. Neither Hammond nor the truck was ever seen again. Her abduction might be related to Cheryl Kenney’s disappearance, which took place on February 27, 1991.
Stacy Arras
On the afternoon of July 17, 1981, Stacy Arras and her father rode into Sunrise High Sierra Camp on horseback. Arras told her father she wanted to photograph a nearby lake. Arras’ father declined to go with her, but a 77-year-old man from their group tagged along.
Only a Lens
The elderly man grew tired and sat down to rest. Arras, determined to reach the water, kept going. The group’s tour guide recalls seeing Arras ‘standing on a rock about 60 yards south of the trail.’ According to her cold case file, that was Arras’ last known sighting. She vanished that day, leaving only a camera lens behind.
Asha Jaquilla Degree
9-year-old Asha Degree went missing in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, 2000. For unknown reasons, Degree packed her bookbag, left her family home in Shelby, North Carolina, and began walking along the highway despite heavy rain and wind. When a motorist saw her about 1.3 miles from her home, she sprinted into a wooded area.
Was She Abducted?
A year and a half after her disappearance, Degree’s still-packed bookbag was unearthed from a construction site along Highway 18, just north of Shelby. A billboard now stands at the mile marker where Degree was last seen running into the woods. Investigators were unable to find a clear reason as to why Degree would have run away from home. She was never seen or heard from again.
Jacob Wetterling
11-year-old Minnesota native Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on October 22, 1989. Wetterling, his younger brother, and a friend were biking home from a convenience store when a man wearing a stocking cap mask came out of a driveway with an armed revolver. He ordered the boys to lay down on the ground and asked them their age. The man told Jacob’s brother to run into the woods and not look back or he would be shot.
Tragic Fate
The man told both boys to show their faces. He then ordered Jacob’s friend to run into the woods and, like Jacob’s brother, not look back or he would be shot. This was the last time Wetterling was seen alive. In 2015, Danny James Heinrich was matched to another case of the kidnapping and sexual assault of a young boy from the same year. Heinrich then admitted to murdering Wetterling and burying him 30 miles from Wetterling’s home.
Emanuela Orlandi
Emanuela Orlandi was a young Italian girl who disappeared near her home in Vatican City on June 22, 1983. Numerous sightings of Orlandi have been reported over the years, but none have led to her rescue. Orlandi’s remains were never found.
Not What it Seems
All secret service involvement was kept under wraps and handled exclusively by the Vatican, where Orlandi’s father worked. Orlandi has been linked to a series of political happenings, including organized crime—one theory alleges Orlandi was used as a pawn for Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot Pope John Paul II.
Dennis Martin
Dennis Martin disappeared on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains on June 14, 1969. Martin was a few days shy of his 7th birthday. At 4:30 p.m., Dennis and his friends planned to separate and sneak up on his family to scare them. They intended to leap out of the woods on both sides and frighten the adults. When the time came, the boys jumped out from one side, but Dennis never appeared on the other side of the woods.
No Sign of Him
Everyone searched for Dennis only three to five minutes after he was last seen, but the boy was nowhere to be found. Park rangers were alerted to his disappearance. Soon, it began to storm, and by morning, nearly 2.5 inches of rain had accumulated. Dennis’ body was never found, despite 1,400 volunteers searching the entire area. The same afternoon that Dennis disappeared, an “unkempt man” was spotted a short distance away from the Martin’s campground, but the FBI dismissed the tip.
Jaliek Rainwalker
12-year-old Jaliek was last seen at the home of his adoptive father’s parents in Greenwich, New York on November 1, 2007. Rainwalker’s adoptive father, Stephen Burrell Kerr, spent the night there with him alone. The next morning, Kerr claims he awoke to find Rainwalker missing and a note that read: “Dear everybody, I’m sorry for everything. I won’t be a bother anymore. Goodbye, Jaliek.”
Troubled Child
Rainwalker was born addicted to crack cocaine and spent his early childhood in foster homes. He was known for violent, homicidal outbursts and was also experiencing suicidal thoughts at the time of his disappearance. However, his adoptive parents chose to lead a non-traditional lifestyle (no running water, no electricity, everyone slept in one room) and did not provide Rainwalker with medication or psychotherapy to treat his behavior. A week before his disappearance, Kerr tried to reverse Rainwalker’s adoption and failed. Rainwalker’s foster parents suspected foul play at the hands of Kerr.
Brianne Wolgram
On September 5, 1998, 19-year-old Brianne Wolgram disappeared without a trace near Revelstoke, British Columbia, Canada. She was last seen around 11:30 p.m. with three unidentified women. Wolgram was supposed to meet up with a friend that evening, but she never made it…
Years of Searching
Five days later, Wolgram’s brand new black Acura Integra with gold rims was found abandoned in a ditch several miles away. Her wallet, driver’s license, and $200 cash were still inside. Wolgram’s disappearance shook her small town, and the women with whom she was last seen have never come forward.