Don't Want to Mysteriously Vanish? Don't Do These Things!

One strange phenomenon that seems to be very pervasive is that of people just suddenly vanishing off the face of the earth, often under mysterious circumstances. Some of these are more mysterious than others, and former lawman and current author and researcher of missing person cases, David Paulides, author of the MIssing 411 series of books, has compiled some of the strangest of all. Throughout these cases there seem to be some common threads, and some thiongs that one can maybe do to make sure that they too do not vanish into thin air. 

One of the first and seemingly most important rules for not going missing is DON’T GO TO NATIONAL PARKS. National parks might be seen as a great way to see nature and enjoy the great outdoors, but according to Paulides, there have been over two thousand cases of mysterious and unsolved vanishings in such places. In fact, he was first drawn to the subject when he was approached by a national park ranger who believed that something odd was permeating many of the reports of missing people in the wilderness of national parks. Furthermore, the ranger explained there seemed to be a cover-up in that they were forbidden from talking about it and were very sketchy about revealing details of the missing people in these national parks, as well as the fact that military personnel were often called in for search and rescue efforts. 

As Paulides looked into these reports, he found that national parks seemed to hold clusters of disappearances, often with people vanishing seemingly within seconds off the face of the earth, and there were hundreds of cases like these within park boundaries. When approaching rangers about the cases, he described them as uncooperative and either unwilling to release information or just plain incompetent, meaning that many of the cases haven’t been fully investigated by authorities. Of course people get lost in the woods all of the time, or get attacked by animals, but Paulides eliminates such reports and focuses on the truly inexplicable. He has said this in an interview with George Knapp for Mystery Wire:

“There are certain elements that are eliminators. Namely, voluntary disappearance, mental health issues, animal predation. Those kind of things, once we see them, they’re eliminated. So it’s those easy answers to the cases that aren’t there in these cases. And in these cases, there’s certain elements that show themselves.”

With regards to elements of the “Missing 411” cases he speaks of, there are certain “profile points,” as he calls them. A few of these are that the person goes missing within minutes or even seconds, clothes are found removed and folded, no tracks are found, there are sudden weather changes, and in the rare cases in which the person is found, they’re not able to remember where they were or being discovered in an unlikely, inaccessible location or a location that had been thoroughly searched. Even when the remains of the vanished are found there are often weird details. Common among these are the remains being found in inaccessible places or far from where one would have expected the victim to have traveled on their own or otherwise in a place in relation to where they were last seen that “defies common sense.” Often no cause of death can be determined from the body or remains, and there will often be less scavenger damage than expected and large portions of skeletons missing. It is of course very possible that the missing parts have been carried off by wild animals that have dragged away or even discarded them at those inaccessible locations, but it is still enough to rouse curiosity.

One of the most commonly seen details in many of the so-called "Missing 411" cases is the frequent inability of search and rescue dogs to pick up a scent trail. Dogs are described as either not picking anything up at all, or following a trail to a certain spot, where it just mysteriously stops, and sometimes dogs are said to reach a point in the trail in which they display panic, confusion, or other odd behaviors. The scent trails will also sometimes lead to sheer cliffs or otherwise impenetrable terrain, and in every case, the trail is unable to be found again. Also odd is that when bodies or remains of the missing are recovered, it often happens in areas that have been swept by cadaver dogs who picked up nothing at the time. The dog issue can be found in countless cases of people going missing in the wilderness, and although it is true that there are perhaps rational explanations for this, the sheer frequency with which trained dogs fail to do what they are supposed to do in these cases is rather odd. These cases are the strange of the strange, and one overarching theme is that they tend to take place in national parks, so don’t go there.

Rule number two, STAY AWAY FROM BERRIES. According to Paulides, statistically many of the Missing 411 vanishings happened near berries, where the victim was either out picking berries or ventured into an area where there were berries around. Of course, since this is the wilderness and there are indeed wild berries out there, it seems as if this might likely be merely a coincidence, but Paulides thinks it is a prevalent and stubborn enough detail to cement itself as an important recurring theme. Indeed, the list of strange cases revolving around berries is long. 

One unusual vanishing case revolving around berry picking is the odd case of 6-year-old Lillian Carney, who in August of 1897 went missing in the U.S. state of Maine as she was out with her parents for a happy day of picking blueberries. According to the parents, she had vanished right under their noses, there one second and gone the next. A preliminary search of the area would quickly expand to over 200 hundred searchers scouring the region and calling the girl’s name, all to no avail. After an extensive search, Lillian was found in the woods in a dazed, trance-like state. When asked what had happened to her, the dazed girl replied that she had been in a place in the forest where the sun had shone the entire time she had been there. This was rather odd considering the weather at the time of her disappearance had been partly cloudy, she had been enveloped by a thick canopy of trees far from any town, and she had been missing overnight, for around 46 hours. What was this continuous “sunlight” she saw, and what significance does it have in Lillian’s disappearance? Was this a UFO abduction of some sort, or just her imagination? It remains unknown.

It is interesting that the girl in this case was found alive, albeit with an amazing story to tell, and a similar case also comes from the 1800s, concerning a 3-year-old girl named Alice Rachel Peck. On August 25th, 1898. Alice wandered off from her home to follow her mother, who was out picking berries not far away and then had gotten lost. A massive search was launched to try and find the missing girl and it stretched out for 3 days without any trace turning up. Then, on August 28, she was found safe and in good health about 5 miles from where she had vanished. The girl was reportedly in a sort of trance at first, but when she came back to her senses she was able to relate how she remembered meandering barefoot along an abandoned road, even though she had been wearing shoes shortly before her disappearance, as well as a bonnet that had also vanished, and that she had had nothing to eat but a few berries. When asked how she had managed to overcome the series of steep drops and boulders that stood in the way of where she had gone missing and where she had been found, she gave the cryptic response: “The Black Man helped me,” who she claimed had guided her and carried her over obstacles, notably away from where she had disappeared. Who was this “Black Man” and what had caused her to go missing from right in front of her house? Was this an animal or something else? Indeed, what happened to her shoes and bonnet, and what would have happened to her if she had not been found? We will probably never know.

In later years we have the case of 2-year-old Eddie Hamilton, of Saskatoon, Canada. Little Eddie was out picking berries with his parents on the day of July 6, 1928, when they looked away for just a second and their son seemed to have just disappeared right under their noses. A look around the area showed no signs of him, and it was bizarre as he had just been there literally seconds before. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) would be called in and also conduct an intensive search of the area, but the boy had seemingly just ceased to exist. A massive search operation with tracker dogs and aircraft eventually involving 2,000 police, rescue workers, and volunteers would also turn up no sign of the missing boy other than some sporadic footprints that could not be followed through the thick undergrowth.

For months there was no further word on what had happened to Eddie Hamilton, and then tragedy struck when a local duck hunter found the body of a toddler floating in White Bear Lake. At first, no connection was made to the missing Hamilton, as White Bear Lake was some distance away from where he had vanished over rough and rugged terrain, yet it would indeed be found to be him and he had died not too long after his disappearance. Yet how had he ended up in that faraway lake? It has never been explained how a toddler had traversed that distance or if he had been dumped there by someone else, and the mysterious disappearance and death of Eddie Hamilton remains an ominous enigma.

Just a few years later we have the strange account of 7-year-old Wesley Piatote, who was out picking huckleberries with his mother and grandmother on August 4, 1932, in Washington state when he wandered off a bit from the others. The sound of the woods was then punctuated by two sharp screams that had obviously come from Wesley and which seemed to have been cut off somehow. However, the boy was nowhere to be seen, and the two frantic women searched everywhere for him to no avail, and a subsequent search by authorities was equally unsuccessful. It is a mystery why he screamed and why they had seemed shortened or stifled. Was this a wild animal attack, an abductor, or what? No one knows, and Wesley Piatote remains missing.

Also in the 1930s, there was the case of 5-year-old Jack Pike, in the area of Manitoba, Canada, which is in some ways eerily similar to the Piatote case. On September 5, 1935, the family went out to do some casual blueberry picking near a place called St. Norbert, it was a calm, beautiful day, yet things would take a sharp descent into the strange rather quickly. Mere minutes after starting to pick berries, Jack’s mother said she heard the boy let out a scream that seemed to be choked off in the middle, odd considering he was right there nearby, or at least he had been. When they looked to where their son had just been seconds before he was nowhere to be seen. In an ominous twist, the boy was found several days later in an area that had been intensely searched, lying unconscious across the raging Red River on the opposite side from where he had vanished. Unfortunately, he would die in the hospital later without ever being able to explain what had happened to him or how he had mysteriously evaded search efforts or gotten across that river. What happened to him? Who knows?

In 1940 we have the case of 9-year-old Simon Skogan, who on July 2, 1940, was out spending the day picking berries with his grandfather near the town of Tuelon, near Winnipeg, Canada. At some point, the boy just sort of vanished, with the grandfather unable to quite explain how it had been possible, as they had been walking along together. An intense search turned up no trace of the boy, but some odd tales would come in from some of the Natives living in the area. It was claimed that a person had been sighted out in the surrounding swamps and marshland who seemed to be surviving off the land and even stealing milk, but who would run away when anyone approached. It is unclear if this was the missing boy or not, but it remains an odd detail in a disappearance that has never been solved. No one has ever seen Simon Skogan since.

The following decade, on July 17, 1954, 3-year-old Gary Bailey was out picking blueberries with his family at Spears Mountain, in Knox, Maine. At one point he got separated from his parents for just a moment and then seemed to have just stepped off the face of the earth. A 500-member-strong search team thoroughly combed the area, and would not find any sign of the boy until suddenly two of the searchers heard something odd around one day into the search operation. After hearing a shout, the two searchers homed in on the noise to find the missing boy, alive but noticeably shaken and with some inexplicable scratches on his face. The odd thing was that he was located on the opposite side of Spears Mountain, over remote, perilous terrain, which was deemed impossible for one so young to have traversed on foot in darkness. How did he get there to that harrowing location within the span of 24 hours? The boy himself was unable to articulate what had happened to him and it remains a mystery.

There has been some amount of speculation that these disappearances are perhaps orchestrated by mysterious forces from beyond our comprehension, and one case that seems to perfectly illustrate this is one from 1965, from Luumäki, Finland, near the village of Hermunen. On August 19, 1965, four members of the Kuninga family were out picking blueberries in the surrounding woodland, and at one point they spread out to see who could pick the most berries. At this time they still made sure to stay within eyesight of each other, but things would soon take an odd twist.

At around noon on that otherwise calm and sunny day, the father, Matti Kuningas, would claim that he had heard something rather peculiar coming from the darkened woods, which sounded like odd “bubbling sounds” coming from up on the slope he was on. Although he couldn’t see anything strange up that way, the strange gurgling noises continued, and at some point, he realized that he was not alone. Looking back up the slope he noticed “a small man-like being” perhaps around 3 feet tall, with orange skin and wearing green skintight coveralls, sitting there above staring down at him. It peered at him for some time before standing up to come walking towards the startled man with a shambling, stumbling gait as a sudden gust of wind swept through the area. The peculiar creature then veered off to the side to come to the edge of a bog before vanishing into thin air. When he looked at his watch, Matti realized that a full 30 minutes had gone by of which he could not account for.

It would later turn out that the son, Teuvo Kuningas, had also seen the strange little man, even claiming he had heard it utter “human-like speech,” and it was also found that the entity had been sitting atop a massive, mossy stone that no one could remember ever having been there before. Interestingly, although both of them had seen it, they both claimed that they had been under the influence of some paralyzing effect that had somehow prevented them from calling out for help, and they would also claim that they had experienced some sort of repelling effect that kept them from approaching the entity. Teuvo would also explain that the anomalous boulder also had a slight repelling effect, and that he had not been able get close to it.

It is unknown what connection this utterly bizarre case has to the others we have looked at here, other than its link to picking berries, but it makes one wonder, and oddly it is a theme that stretches across many of such oddball vanishings. Why berries? Why, indeed. It all seems almost absurd, as how could berries and picking them have anything to do whatsoever with such mysterious cases? What explanation could it possibly hold? How can the simple act of picking berries or being around them translate into unsolved disappearances and reappearances? What is going on here? David Paulides himself has always remained almost frustratingly elusive on giving his own judgement on what might be to blame, and we are left struggling to piece it all together with the other myriad threads of the odd that hold such cases together. Is this all just a strange coincidence? Picking berries? What significance could that possibly have? At the moment it seems almost beyond our ability to even process, and whatever is going on here is perhaps far stranger than anyone can even guess, so in the meantime, stay away from berries if you don’t want to vanish.

Rule number three, DON’T WEAR BRIGHT CLOTHING. Throughout a great number of these accounts of people who have seemingly blinked out of existence, there is the simple but nagging clue that they were wearing brightly colored clothing. It seems to be at first a meaningless quirk, but the number of reports of the mysteriously vanished and bright articles of clothing has increasingly become something that can't be easily ignored, although the answers as to why might be forever elusive.

This has been seen in many vanishings covered by Paulides, with perhaps the most well-known being the disappearance of 6-year-old Dennis Martin. On June 14, 1969, Dennis was on a camping and hiking trip to the Great Smoky Mountains when he and his family stopped off at a grassy mountain highland meadow and popular stop-off point along the Appalachian Trail known as Spence Field. As the adults sat out on the grass chatting, Dennis, his brother, and two other boys on the trip thought it would be amusing to play a prank on their parents. They decided that they would split up, go out into the woods, and then simultaneously jump out from different directions to startle the adults in what was meant to be just harmless fun.

Three of the boys went one way and Dennis, who was the youngest, went the other. The reason he had been chosen to be on his own was that he was wearing a highly visible bright red shirt. This is something to remember in relation to this article, the bright colors. Just as planned, the three older boys jumped out and scared the adults, but then the men asked where Dennis was. Since the other boys had seen him just a few minutes earlier, they assumed that he had merely missed his cue and so they waited for him to jump out of the trees as well, but he never appeared. Dennis’ father, Bill Martin, went out to get his son, expecting that he would be there hiding in the bushes as he had been instructed, but an immediate search of the area showed no signs of the boy and calls into the woods went unanswered. Increasingly worried, Bill and Dennis’ grandfather, Clyde Martin, hiked out in different directions farther and farther from the place where the boy had last been seen and still they found nothing. Park Rangers were notified and a search was launched that would last until nightfall when heavy rain began to come down along with thunder, which hampered efforts to find the boy, and the search was called off until the following day with still no trace of where Dennis had gone off to.

In a rather ominous twist, a mere hours after Dennis had gone missing a family named the Keys reported that they had been hiking around 6 miles from Spence Field when they had heard a boy’s scream. The son also claimed to have seen movement in a bush which he at first had thought to be a bear, but turned out to be a man walking in the woods with something apparently slung over his shoulder. As spooky as this may seem, authorities determined that the location was too far away from Spence Field to have possibly have anything to do with Dennis within the time frame of events.

In the following days, the search efforts would quickly grow in size to hundreds of people scouring the area, including park rangers, locals, volunteers, the FBI, National Guard, and even Green Berets and psychics, along with bloodhounds and helicopters, and meanwhile the news of the disappearance had started making major national headlines. Since Dennis was described as a robust, healthy boy with plenty of hiking experience it was thought that he was alive and would be found in short order, but continuing heavy rains flooding roads, as well as thick fogs, made efforts difficult. For their part, Dennis’s parents posted a hefty reward for any information leading to finding their son. Dennis Martin has never been found, and not a trace of what happened to him has ever been uncovered. Interestingly, this all fits several of Paulides’ criteria, including the brightly colored clothing.

Similarly, there is the case of 4-year-old Alfred Beilhartz, who in the summer of 1938 was on a fishing and camping trip with his family at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. As the boy and his parents were taking a hike along a river, little Alfred, who was wearing a brightly colored shirt, suddenly simply disappeared without explanation. One moment he had been there walking in a line behind them, and the next the parents had turned around to find he was gone without a trace. There had been no shout or sign of distress, and all calls to him went unanswered. He had seemingly just ceased to exist.

Although the parents claimed that the boy had gone nowhere near the water, authorities were nevertheless convinced that he had fallen into the river, and immediately went about blocking off the river so that it could be thoroughly searched and so that his body would not float too far away. A 6-mile stretch of the river where Alfred had vanished was searched and dredged for 5 full days without turning up any sign of the boy, and when bloodhounds were brought in they oddly tracked his scent to around 500 feet uphill from where his parents had been when he had disappeared, which was odd considering he had supposedly gone missing as he was walking behind them. Also strange was that allegedly the bloodhounds followed the trail for some time before reaching a fork and suddenly stopping and simply lying down, an odd behavior for trained scent dogs to display, and also strange because it seemed that the trail had just abruptly stopped to vanish just as surely as the boy had.

Even more bizarre than this was an odd report that came in from some hikers in the area in the early stages of the search, the very day after Alfred had vanished. The hikers, who were a couple, had been on Old Fall River Road about 6 miles away over rugged terrain and around 3,000 feet higher from where Alfred had disappeared, and at the time had had no idea that there was a missing boy in the area, yet they reported seeing a rather worrying sight. They claimed that they had seen a young boy perched up upon a high ridge in an area ominously called “The Devil’s Nest,” near the top of Mt. Chaplin. The hikers reported that the boy had been forlornly sitting alone up there and had then suddenly moved out of sight, which the hikers mysteriously allegedly said looked as if he were being “jerked back.” At the time they could not figure out how such a young boy would be out there in the remote wilderness by himself or how he could have possibly climbed up onto that formidably high ridge. According to the hikers, as soon as they had gotten home and seen the news, they realized that the boy they had seen was the missing Alfred Beilhartz.

Authorities acted on the tip and made the journey out to the Devil’s Nest, a perilous hike through thick, unforgiving forested terrain littered with rough brush and dense trees, and there at the top of the looming ridge they could find no trace of the boy. Considering the difficulty of the terrain, the elevation, and the steep, treacherous climb up to the ridge on which the hikers had claimed to have seen the boy, park rangers came to the conclusion that it would have been impossible for the boy to have made the hike out there in the timeframe involved on his own and that he could not have possibly climbed the ridge alone without specialized climbing equipment and experience. There are several weird details about this case. How did Alfred manage to just vanish right under his parents’ noses without making a sound? What happened to his scent trail and why did the bloodhounds following him act so oddly? How could Alfred hike all the way up Mt. Chaplin, trudging 6 miles and 3,000 feet through unforgiving perilous terrain in such a short time, and then climb up onto that high ridge by himself? What did the hikers mean that he was “jerked back”? We may never know, and Alfred Beilhartz has never been found. Oddly enough, it is reported that young little Beilhartz had been wearing brightly colored clothing at the time of his vanishing.

Such cases are numerous, and we also have the case of 3-year-old Jaryd Atadero, who in October of 1999 was staying with his father at a Christian retreat lodge at Poudre Canyon, Colorado. On October 2, Jaryd was out with 12 of the Christian group members on a hike along the Big South Trail when he somehow got ahead of the group and talked to some fishermen along the Cache la Poudre River, asking them if they’d seen any bears, to which they replied that the boy should get back with the others. Those fishermen would be the last ones to see Jaryd Atedero alive. In the wake of his disappearances, a massive search using bloodhounds and aircraft was unable to find any trace of the boy, and it was largely assumed that he had fallen into the frigid waters of the river and drowned.

It would not be until 4 years later that he would finally be found, when on June 4, 2003, his remains were discovered in a remote, inaccessible area up a steep incline about 500 feet above the trail he had vanished on. This is where the case gets weird. On the dead boy’s cranium were found a series of odd scratches that were assumed to be from a mountain lion, yet big cat experts pointed out that a cougar would have torn at the sweater and body near the neck and stomach, damage that was absent. Indeed, there were no other apparent injuries on the body. Paulides also claims that he spoke to forensics experts on the case who told him that, although the source of the scratches could not be determined, they were not from any known animal. Other odd details about the body were that the boy’s clothes had been turned inside out, and a single tooth from his mouth had been found placed upon a nearby log, strangely not overgrown with moss or vegetation considering that it had presumably been sitting there for 4 years. The clothes and shoes themselves were also surprisingly brightly colored and new looking for supposedly having been out in the elements for so long. And there is a key word here, they were brightly colored.

Adding to this strangeness surrounding the case of Jaryd Atadero are allegations made by the boy’s father, Allyn Atadero, that authorities were very secretive and dishonest about the whole incident, and seemed to be almost intentionally botching the investigation. One example is when the Atadero family was allegedly threatened with arrest if they tried to go off snooping around on the Big South Trail, and although it was claimed by authorities that the trail was the only way in or out of the canyon, this turned out to be a falsehood, as Allyn found records of various other entry and exit points. Another oddity was that Allyn claimed that he had discovered that the police were using his shorts as a scent sample for the dogs rather than those of his son and that when confronted about this glaring error in procedure they got confrontational and irritated, allegedly going so far as to threaten to call the search off. Allyn would also claim that although some strange hair samples had been collected from his son’s sweater, no test results were ever released and he was merely told that they were neither human nor mountain lion, but that he “shouldn’t worry about it.” To top it all off, Paulides also claims that authorities were highly uncooperative with his own investigation into the case and that the FBI had refused to get involved. What in the world happened to Jaryd Atadero? Was this an animal attack, a kidnapping, or something more? It seems we may never know.

Mysterious cases like this go on and on, with that common thread going through them that they were all wearing brightly colored clothing at the time of their bizarre vanishings. Is this, as David Paulides says, a determining factor in such vanishings? If so, then why should this be? Are the colors somehow attractive or maddening to whatever forces might be taking these people? And now that we are on it what forces would those be? Who knows, but there is a significant number of cases involving bright clothes. Coincidence or not? Who knows, but next time you are out in the woods, it might be a good idea to avoid brightly colored clothing. 

Rule number four, STAY AWAY FROM GRANITE BOULDERS. An odd little profile point to the Missing 411 cases is that the person vanishes near some large deposit of granite, usually boulders. Paulides has said of it:

“It’s strange that that came up. But there’s been many times over the years that people have talked about, “I was in boulder field and something happened.” Or somebody disappeared in a boulder field. In one of my books I wrote a story about the road department in Iceland. And in Iceland, they will not blow up a boulder to put a road through a specific spot. They’ll put the road around the boulder because they believe that people or spirits live inside the boulder. And that’s interesting because people that I’ve written about have heard things come out of boulder fields, have seen things come out of boulder fields, have disappeared in boulder fields. It’s very weird.”

Some other miscellaneous rules to avoid vanishing are to stay away from bodies of water, avoid suddenly changing weather, and never go ahead of your group around a bend, as many cases feature these elements. Enigmatic and perplexing clues and details like these across the board have served to generate a good amount of discussion on these “Missing 411” style cases, and there have been all sorts of ideas thrown around, with many of them leaning towards the decidedly paranormal. Everything from Bigfoot to portals or black holes, to faeries, interdimensional phenomena, and everything in between has been proposed for holding the answers to these cases. To Paulides’ credit and the frustration of many, he never actually gives a theory on what he thinks it all means and is very vague about it all, rather simply collecting the data, presenting the weird details, and asking that people think outside of the box and go beyond their own comfort zone when looking for answers. He has said of this in his interview with Knapp:

“Thousands of people have written to me over the years and they’ve said, “Dave, one thing we really like about you is you don’t theorize. You don’t hypothesize. And you don’t go off on wild junctures.” I will say that, if there was an answer, I would be the first one to come out and say it. I think there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered. But right now, there’s no concrete one item that you can say this is causing that. And because of no tracks, no scent trail, no witnesses to these events, we’ve had people say, “Well, it’s got to be UFOs. It’s got to be reptilians. It’s got to be Bigfoot. It’s got to be this.” In reality, I don’t think you can say it’s just one thing. And because of that, I’m very careful about what I do.”

No matter what one thinks of the work of Paulides, one thing that many agree on is that he has dug up some cases that would have otherwise never seen the light of day, and he has gathered an impressive amount of data. It is the interpretation of this data that seems to draw the most discussion, debate, and indeed criticism. Yet these details remain. The clothing, the strange locations, the dogs, the berries, the state of the bodies, all of it really does lurk in the background of many of these strange cases. What does it all mean, if anything? Is there some pattern emerging here pointing to something beyond the norm or is this just coincidence and misrepresentation? Whatever one may think, these cases largely remain unsolved, and those potential clues still flit about, inviting speculation, analysis, and a guideline for what not to do in order to avoid vanishing yourself.