Eerie Cases of Children Who Mysteriously Vanished off the Face of the Earth

Although many people throughout history have vanished without a trace, the cases surrounded by the most tragedy are when the victims are children. Among the cases of children who have seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, there are those that stand out as particularly bizarre and tragic, surrounded by odd details and circumstances that propel them beyond mere missing persons to firmly lodge themselves into the realm of the odd. Indeed, there is a disturbing tendency for some of the stranger vanishings to be those of children, and in many of these cases, we find mysteries and puzzles that go deep. Here we will look at some of the weirder cases of children who have vanished under odd, often sinister circumstances that only further serve to envelope them in shadows and the specter of the strange.

A bizarre vanishing related by missing persons researcher David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 series of books concerning people who have disappeared under bizarre circumstances, happened in the summer of 1938, when 4-year-old Alfred Beilhartz 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 suddenly 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 had 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.

In the summer of 1952, 10-year-old Constance Christine “Connie” Smith, of Sundance, Wyoming, was excited about staying at the summer camp called Camp Sloane, in Salisbury, Connecticut. It was her first time away from home on her own, and by all accounts, she could not stop talking about it in the days leading up to the camp. Things started out great, and the typically shy Connie came out of her shell a bit to make new friends and try new things. She seemed to have been enjoying herself, which is why it is rather odd that on July 16, she suddenly walked off on her own away from camp and seems to have kept walking right off the face of the earth.

On that morning, Connie told her tentmates that she was going to skip breakfast and return an ice pack to the camp infirmary. She had apparently used the pack to nurse a bloody nose and cut lip she had allegedly gotten by roughhousing with some other campers, and she told everyone that she was just going to return the pack and be right back to join them. She made no mention of going off anywhere, and seemed to be in good spirits despite her injured nose. She then got dressed in a bright red windbreaker and blue shorts and headed off towards the infirmary, but she would never arrive there. The next time anyone saw her was a camp counselor who saw her walking towards Indian Mountain Road, and others saw her picking daisies in the area. One daughter of a private homeowner would later claim that the girl had knocked on their door and asked how to get to Lakeville, Connecticut, with tears in her eyes, and this seems to be the last confirmed sighting of Connie Smith.

When it was clear that Connie had wandered off and gone missing, camp counselors were quick to find that the girl had never arrived at the infirmary, and indeed she had left the ice pack behind in her tent, along with her money and most of her belongings. The only thing missing was a black zippered purse in which she had kept photos of her friends. The area was searched, but no sign of the girl could be found, and calls out to her were answered with silence, after which she was officially reported missing to police. The area was searched more extensively, but again, no trace of the girl could be found, and in the meantime, police began questioning other campers, camp counselors, and motorists who had been passing by the road she had been on.

Questioning people at the camp immediately turned up some sinister clues, as there were some campers who claimed that, although Connie had told counselors she had bloodied her hose just roughhousing, it had actually been from bullying and getting in a fistfight. Other campers also claimed that Connie had been miserable there and had expressed wanting to go home, so this led to the idea that she had perhaps run away, but why do that without her money and belongings? Also, when Connie’s mother was questioned, she claimed that she had visited her daughter just two days before the vanishing and that Connie had been in good spirits and told her she was having so much fun she wanted to stay longer, so it seems strange that she should want to run away when she was so dead-set on staying. Another ominous clue that police were able to dig up was a trucker who claimed that he had seen a girl matching Connie’s description get into a vehicle on Route 44 near Belgo Road at about 8:45 a.m. on the day of her disappearance, leading police to think she might have been kidnapped. As all of this was going on there was a massive search for the girl taking place, with fliers distributed all over the country. This managed to bring in sightings of Connie from all over the place, but none of these led anywhere, and indeed it would not be until April of 1953 that they would get their first real lead.

It started with a traveling jewelry salesman by the name of Frederick Pope, who came to the police in Ohio claiming he knew what had happened to Connie Smith. He told them that he and his partner, Jack Walker, along with a woman named Wilma Sames, had picked up Connie hitchhiking up on Route 44, and they had promised to take her as far as Wyoming. He then told a shocking story of Walker attacking them in Arizona and killing Connie, after which Pope had attacked him and killed him with a tire iron in self-defense. However, no bodies could be found, and no woman named Sames, nor a Jack Walker, could be proven to have ever even existed at all. Pope would later admit it was all a demented hoax.

Rather eerily, the investigation into this false lead managed to turn up the skeletal remains of a girl in 1958 at a place called Skinner Ridge, in the Grand Canyon National Park, which have never been identified but were eventually found to not belong to Connie Smith. These remains have been nicknamed “Little Miss X,” have never been identified, and are just as mysterious as Connie’s vanishing. In later years, there would be some other leads and even suspects in connection with Connie’s disappearance. One of these was a man named George Davies, who in 1957 was doing time and awaiting execution for the brutal murders of two girls named Gaetane Boivin and Brenda Doucette in Connecticut. While languishing in prison, he came forward to admit that he had also killed Connie Smith and had buried her body on the bank of the Naugatuck River. However, police could not find the body, and Davies would toy with them by claiming he had made the whole story up. Considering that he was executed shortly after, any secrets he may have had he took to the grave with him.

Another promising suspect was a man named William Henry Redmond, who was charged in 1988 with strangling a Pennsylvania girl a year before Connie’s disappearance and was thought to have been in the Lakeville area at the time, but police could never prove this or find any hard evidence to pin him to the vanishing. Considering he died in prison in 1992, we will never know. There would be no further suspects found, but over the years, sightings of Connie Smith alive came in from all over the country, and there was even a woman who claimed that she was Connie Smith, but a DNA test refuted this. Connie’s family would continue to doggedly search for clues, but tragically her mother and father would die without ever finding the answers they sought, leaving it up to Connie’s brother, Nels J. Smith, to carry on, but the case has gone very cold. However, it is still open, and current investigator Detective Michael Downs has said of it all:

“There were some leads that were dead ends. My thoughts are that it’s a good case. It all happened so long ago. In 1952 things were done differently, and technology was very old-school. If you think back to childhood, one could walk anywhere. Times change. A 10-year-old walking down an old dirt road crying would be remarkable today. Back then, it was nothing. No one knows what actually occurred. It’s been 66 years, and no one has found her. With the Internet and technology, you would think something would have come up, but no. If a child were missing today, it would be found. With this case, there is hope for the family’s sake. I tend to be hopelessly optimistic that something will come.”

What happened to Connie Smith? How did she just wander off with so many other people around, only to vanish off the face of the earth? Did she run away, was it foul play or what? It is frustrating to know that all of these decades later, there have been few clues and no answers, and her ultimate fate remains unknown. All we know is that she walked away from that camp and has never been seen again, leaving us to merely wonder and speculate.

In 1971, 8-year-old Douglas Legg went on a family trip to a place called the Santanoni Estate, now called the Santanoni Preserve, near the town of Newcomb, in the Adirondack Mountains of Essex, New York. Also commonly called the "Great Camps," the sprawling, 12,500-acre estate was a popular summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers at the time and featured forty buildings and a 24-room main lodge. The owners of the estate, the wealthy Melvin Family, were relatives of the Leggs, and so they often made family trips there to enjoy the remote wilderness and serene vistas of forests and lakes. On this particular occasion, it was to be the extended family’s last trip there before the estate was due to be sold, but it would also be the last time anyone would ever see little Douglas again.

On July 10, 1971, Douglas went on a hike with his uncle on a clear summer day for what was meant to be an easy, short hike. As they walked along, at around 3:30 p.m., Douglas’ uncle realized that they were probably going to encounter some poison ivy along the way. In fact, he had spotted patches of it as they walked, and noticing that Douglas was wearing short pants, his uncle told him to run back to camp and change into long pants. Although he was only 8 years old, the camp was just a short distance away, just a stone’s throw, in fact, only around a half a mile along a straight path, and despite his young age he was very experienced being in the outdoors and had been to the camp many times before. As he ran off to go change his clothes, it would not have seemed like a particularly abnormal thing, so it was with some surprise that the uncle waited and waited, but Douglas never came back.

After some time waiting, Douglas’ uncle went back to camp, where he learned that the boy’s older brother had seen him near the main lodge building but had thought nothing of it. One of the boy’s cousins also claimed that he had seen Douglas near a nearby ridge, but again, it hadn’t seemed particularly strange. Indeed, everyone seemed to think that the boy was still with the uncle. When the uncle told them what had happened, they immediately fanned out to look for Douglas, calling out his name and sweeping the entire area, but there was no sign of him. As the evening approached and the temperature dropped, authorities were notified, and an official search was launched.

The ensuing search would be one of the largest the state of New York had ever seen, using helicopters, planes equipped with heat-detecting infrared FLIR, search dogs, rangers, a mountain rescue team who flew in from Sierra Madre, California, and 1,000 volunteers, although it was described as not being particularly well-organized and hampered by bad weather and treacherous terrain. Even psychics were brought in. At one point a bloodhound picked up the boy’s scent and followed it for around 30 miles over difficult terrain choked with brush and trees, which would have been nearly impossible for such a young child to have navigated on their own, where the trail ended at a pond, which was subsequently dragged and even drained but no body was found. After that, the scent trail ended, as if he had just evaporated from the face of the earth. The search would go on for 6 weeks, searching every bush and crevice, even in areas that no 8-year-old would have been able to pass through, and dragging streams and lakes, but no further traces of the boy were found, not a single clue as to where he had gone or what had happened to him. He had seemingly just ceased to exist. It was at the time assumed that the boy had simply gotten lost in the wilderness and succumbed to the many bogs and swamps in the area, but in later years, some eerie clues would seem to refute this.

In 1993, a woman came forward claiming that a relative of hers had killed Douglas Legg and dumped his body in a lake in Lewis County. She even showed authorities which specific lake it was, but there was no sign of any body found, and it was discovered that the woman was a psychiatric patient with false memory syndrome. That very same year a Montana man would come forward to claim that he had been hunting in the area back in 1973 and had stumbled across some skeletal remains that could have been those of a child, but he had shied away from coming forward with the discovery at the time because he had been on Navy leave and not supposed to be hunting there at the time. Despite all of the time that had passed, the area was thoroughly searched to no avail. It is unknown just what he actually found or what connection it has to Douglas Legg’s disappearance. Even more recently was a lead that came in 2020, when members of the New York State Police Troop B Underwater Recovery Team were doing training at a lake in front of the Santanoni Estate and came across an unidentified skull fragment. It was seen as an exciting new lead until it was analyzed and determined to be non-human.

In the end, there have been no other possible leads, no new clues, and although the case is officially still open, there has been no sign of the missing Douglas Legg, the tragic vanishing still frustratingly unsolved. What happened to him out there? How could he go so completely missing in such a short amount of time practically right under everyone's noses? Did he just get lost, despite the fact that he was within eyeshot of camp? Did he get distracted and roam off into the unknown? Was this all foul play? Or was it something else? It seems like only the trees know the answers to these various questions, and the mysterious vanishing of Douglas Legg remains unsolved, perhaps forevermore.

Sunday, March 24, 1991, started out as a great day out for four-year-old Michael Dunahee and his mother, Crystal Dunahee, and father, Bruce. It was a clear, sunny day, and the family was out at Blanshard Park Elementary School in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to watch Crystal play in a playful practice game of flag football. Shortly after arriving at the field around 12:30 PM, little Michael asked his mother if he could go to the playground right nearby. Seeing as how there were many parents and families out playing on that fine day and the playground was just a few yards away, she said it was OK, on the condition that he wait for his father when he got there. Little did anyone know that as he walked off towards the playground, this would be the last time she would see him.

Michael walked off, and his mother bent down for just a moment to put on her cleats as she called to her husband to go watch their son. However, when she looked up moments later, the boy was nowhere to be seen. She literally looked down, tied her shoes, and looked up to find him nowhere. Bruce Dunahee was at the park in moments, but couldn’t see Michael anywhere. A look around showed happy families playing and children laughing, but no Michael, who should have stuck out considering he was wearing a bright blue hooded jacket with red lining and red cuffs, as well as multi-colored rugby pants and blue canvas shoes with bright red and orange trim. It had been less than a minute since the boy had ventured towards the park just right there, just feet away from his parents, in broad daylight in a public, crowded park, so it didn’t make any sense. It was as if he had just vanished into thin air.

At this point, it was still thought that he couldn’t be far, so Crystal and Bruce searched the whole park and its surroundings but saw no sign of Michael. They managed to recruit several dozen other people from the practice game to help look, but they had no luck at all, and asking around to other people in the park proved that no one even remembered seeing the boy at all. This was enough to cause the increasingly panicked parents to call the police. The entire area was thoroughly searched, but Michael could not be found, and the search efforts would quickly escalate into one of the largest Canada had ever seen. Yet despite this massive search, wide circulation of fliers, and a reward that would reach $100,000, initially there were no leads at all. How is it that this boy could have so thoroughly disappeared within moments, mere feet from his parents in a public place, and no one had even seen anything? There were no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It was as if Michael Dunahee had just evaporated.

There would eventually be hundreds of tips that would be called in as the case gained national and then worldwide attention, but none of these led anywhere at all. One promising tip was that someone had seen a man in his 50s loitering about by the park near a brown van on that day, but there is no way at all to know if this was connected to the disappearance, and the reported brown van could not be located. Also rather chilling was a call that Crystal and Bruce Dunahee received from a man demanding a $10,000 ransom for the return of their son, but whoever it was never followed up on it, and police believe it was just a sick prank. In June of that year, there was another rather chilling lead, when a girl claimed a man had tried to abduct her and she had seen a boy tied up in the back of the van who she thought resembled Michael Dunahee, but this could not be confirmed. There were various other alleged sightings of the missing boy from all over British Columbia, but none of these panned out, and with no clear answer, there are only theories.

The best thing authorities could come up with was that it must have been an abduction that was carried out by an opportunistic perpetrator, probably a stranger, but it is unclear how they could have done it in such a short time in such a public place without anyone seeing anything suspicious at all. Police interviewed every known sex offender and criminal who had been anywhere near that park, but came up empty, with no suspects whatsoever, and since no one had witnessed anything strange, they didn’t even have a description of the kind of person they should be looking for. The case had hit a wall.

It would not be until 2006, over a decade later, that a truly promising lead would come in when it was reported that there was a young man who had been living in a small town in British Columbia who bore a striking resemblance to posters that had been released showing an age-enhanced Michael Dunahee. In fact, the resemblance was so uncanny that even Michael’s distressed parents believed it to be him, yet when authorities tracked the man down and performed a DNA test, it was found not to be Michael. There would be more cases of people looking like Michael popping up in the coming years, but in every instance, DNA testing proved otherwise. Perhaps one of the spookiest new leads came in 2009, when a 62-year-old man in Milwaukee named Vernon Seitz confessed on his deathbed that he had killed two children in 1958, and this spurred a search of his home. Police would chillingly find reams of child pornography and missing children posters, one of them eerily featuring the missing Michael Dunahee. Police could find no link between Seitz and Michael and no evidence that he had been in British Columbia in 1991, leaving it uncertain if he had anything to do with the case. If he did, then there is no proof, and he took any secrets he had to the grave with him.

The tragic and mysterious case of Michael Dunahee’s vanishing has gone on to become one of the darkest and most perplexing unsolved mysteries Canada has ever seen, and it even led to changes in the way such disappearances are handled, through the introduction of an Amber Alert system in the province. Although the case remains officially open, there has been very little progress made on it and there have never been any suspects found. Indeed, what happened to Michael Dunahee remains largely just as baffling today as it ever was, and Deputy Chief John Ducker has lamented: “I've never seen an effort like that in my history in policing. That was a very frustrating part of it. We didn't get that one piece of information we needed to." We are left to merely wonder and speculate as to what happened to this little boy and how he managed to so fully vanish in such a short time in full view of so many, and hope it doesn't happen to any of us.

In August of 2004, 12-year-old Garret Bardsley was in high spirits. He and his father, brother, and a group of Boy Scouts had just arrived at Cuberant Lake, in Utah’s majestic Uinta Mountains, for a camping and fishing trip, which he had been looking forward to for months. The trip was meant to be a fun late summer excursion before the start of the coming school year, and as they happily set up camp, no one would have had the slightest clue of the strange circumstances that were about to unfold.

On the morning of August 20, 2004, Garrett, his father, and some of the other Boy Scouts got up in the early morning hours to head off to the lake for some fishing. Things went well until the boy managed to soak his shoes, pants, and socks after accidentally falling into the water, and began complaining that the wet clothes were bothering him. According to varying reports, the campsite was just 150-300 yards away along a straight, well-marked trail he was very familiar with, so the father thought nothing of letting him go back to camp to change clothes. Some reports say the camp was a mere “150 paces” away. In fact, most of the trail back was within eyeshot, so it seemed like no big deal. The boy then trudged off up a hill toward the campsite, and as his father watched him go, he would not have been aware that this was the last time he would ever see his son again.

After around 20 minutes, everyone thought it was odd that Garrett had not yet returned to do some more fishing. Thinking that the boy had maybe decided to stay back at camp, the father hiked over there to find that the boy was not there, and no one had seen him arrive. A quick search of the area turned up no signs of the boy, and shouts out into the wilderness produced nothing but silence and the wind rustling through the trees. It was then that everyone realized that something was very amiss.

Authorities were contacted, and a massive search was launched for the missing Garrett. A huge search of the area with hundreds of official and volunteer searchers scoured the vicinity of a three-mile radius but were unable to uncover anything except a lone white sock belonging to the boy about a half a mile from where he had disappeared. Other than that, there was no sign whatsoever of the boy or his fishing pole. The official search for Bardsley was called after nine days, leaving many unanswered questions and theories on what had happened to him swirling.

Authorities believed that the location of the found sock seemed to suggest that the boy may have tried to seek shelter from the coming cold of night in a nearby boulder field, but there could be found no evidence that he had gone into the boulders. He might have also succumbed to the freezing temperatures or starvation, as he had not been carrying any warm clothing and had not had any provisions on him. A wild animal attack was not ruled out either, but there had been no screams for help, and there was no sign of the torn clothing and blood that an animal attack would have inevitably left behind. One Reddit user called “dt_diego” claims he participated in the search and believes Garrett may have fallen into a nearby stream. He says of this;

“I participated in the search for Garrett. I remember our search team met up in a meadow after we finished our assigned route. One side our our line got ahead of the other, and we ended up waiting for a bit. There was a gentle stream that passed through the meadow. The stream was unremarkable, small--perhaps two or three feet across; very easy to hop over. For no real reason other than passing time, a member of our search team picked up a big log, I remember it being several feet in length (4 feet or so), and threw it in the stream vertically. It went completely into the water, deep enough you couldn't see it all, and never came back up; apparently stuck in the muck at the bottom. We were all shocked because the stream was so small, and we all thought the log was taller than the stream was deep. The fact that the stream was so much deeper than we thought, and the muck at the bottom was thick enough to prevent a rather large log from floating back up was shocking. We also discussed the possibility the stream was wider under the top soil.

I remember everyone in my search party looking at each other as we realized Garrett could be in the water, and we'd never be able to find him. I was a volunteer, and am not a search and rescue professional. I am not suggesting that this is necessarily what happened, but I thought the story worth recording. Between all the water in the area, and the mine shafts mentioned by another poster, it saddens me, but does not surprise me, that he still has not been found.”

An even more ominous claim comes from Reddit user “Detail3347,: whose father was apparently a part of the search and would find some menacing clues pointing to perhaps an abduction. He explains;

“When this happened my dad was one of the people who went up to search, while he was up there he talked to some other volunteers who said they ran into some people acting weird when they asked questions about Garrett, they asked if they could check their tent and see who was in it but the people said their wife was in the tent and didn’t want to wake her up, the volunteers not wanting to be annoying left but after just a few minutes felt like they should go back, when they went back the tent was gone along with any trace of people, I think they kidnapped him and that’s why theirs no trace of him, and that the claims of seeing him at a grocery store years later are true.”

None of these ideas has turned up any evidence of what really happened to Garrett, and the only possible leads ever found are that sock and one report that the boy had been sighted with two men at a grocery store in Nevada at the end of July, but this has led nowhere. In the end, it is unclear just how Garrett Bardsley managed to completely vanish without a trace so close to camp and without leaving any trace, and the answers may elude us forever. 

Also, from 2004, on July 31 of that year, 9-year-old David Gonzales was camping with his family at the Hanna Flat campground campsite in the Big Bear area of Northern California’s San Bernardino National Forest. At one point, at approximately 8 a.m., David asked his mother for the car keys so that he could go get a box of cookies that he wanted to eat. The mother gave him the keys and watched as he made his way towards the car, which was only 50 yards away. At this point, the mother claims that she turned to look away just for a moment and that when she looked back, David was gone. When a cursory search of the area turned up no sign of the boy, the authorities were contacted. His mother would lament, “A second is an eternity. Witnesses will tell you, I take good care of my children ... This was a tragedy.” And so would unfurl a bizarre vanishing of an innocent child in the wilderness, surrounded by strange clues and no closer to being solved now than it was then.

It was soon found that the box of cookies that David had wanted was still in the car, meaning that he had never reached his destination, but the keys were gone. This had all happened within the space of minutes, and his parents were left baffled. A team of over 200 people in San Bernardino County meticulously scoured the woods for Gonzales, finding no trace of the boy, no signs of a struggle, nothing at all to show that he had ever even been there at all. Nothing. Even after nine days of intensive searches, there was nothing, no one at the campsite had seen him or could offer any further information, and no one had a clue as to what was going on. David’s mother remembered hearing a car speeding off at around the time of the disappearance, but there was considered to be no strong evidence that the boy had been kidnapped. An intensive, 9-day search of the area failed to find any trace of the boy, no blood or any other sign of struggle or foul play, no scraps of clothing, and he had seemingly blinked out of existence. The only clue that was turned up was some witnesses who claimed to have seen the boy walking along a road near the campsite not long after he disappeared, but that was about it. Police also questioned dozens of known sex offenders in the region, but found nothing to link them to the increasingly mysterious disappearance.

One year later, some hikers came across the decomposed remains of what were believed to be David, a mere mile away from the campsite from which he had disappeared, in an area that had already been well searched. The remains would, through dental records, prove that they were of the missing boy. They showed no obvious signs of severe trauma or injury, yet despite this, the prevailing theory at the time was that he had been attacked and dragged off by a mountain lion. There was no reason to think that it was any sort of foul play pulled off by another human being, and Sgt. Frank Bell of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s homicide unit said this:

"Everything we’re finding is pointing toward a natural death, and nothing that we’re finding is leading us to believe anything criminal occurred. The location would be too difficult for a murder suspect to carry a boy to. It would’ve taken hiking down a steep ravine and carrying the boy nearly a mile to get back there. A murder suspect is not going to do that."

The main idea continued to be that he had been attacked by a mountain lion, with the scattering of the bones and a reported mountain lion sighting in the area seeming to support this, but this seems to be a rather odd conclusion considering that the mother had been right there not far away when David had gone missing, yet had heard no scream or sound of struggle, and there had been no blood or any evidence that such a violent attack had taken place. Authorities were not entirely sure of what had happened here, but one thing that did seem apparent is that the location of the remains on the surface of the ground out in the open in such a remote area with no attempt to hide them tended to discredit the idea that the body had been dumped by a kidnapper or murderer. When pressed about why the mountain lion scenario was being entertained, San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokesman, Chip Patterson, was rather evasive, saying:

"Explanations can be found in the lack of evidence. It was such a thorough search, and there were so many resources used, you wonder why we couldn’t find him there. We searched that exact area…. Why couldn’t he hear or see the people looking for him? Why couldn’t we find him? This theory fits with what we don’t know. We were told the big cats can drag their prey one to three miles away, that they like to take it to a secluded area. There had to be a reason he wasn’t being seen."

However, others were not so sure of the mountain lion theory, with other forensics experts questioning this line of inquiry. One such expert is California Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Douglas Updike, who, while initially also suspecting a mountain lion attack, changed his mind as the forensic evidence came in, notably the lack of any tooth holes or damage to the bones consistent with such an attack. He would explain:

"There are many aspects consistent with the possibility that a mountain lion attacked this young boy: where he was found, the animal’s swift ability to take prey quietly and take it away from the site of an attack. However, I didn’t see anything that implicated a mountain lion. I didn’t see any evidence today that amounts to a smoking tooth hole. The animal typically jumps on the prey’s back and holds on with its claws while biting at the base of the skull. These are full-strength bites that typically leave marks or punctures through the skull or crush part of the vertebrae. In most lion attacks that we’ve seen, there would have been punctures or crushing. And that is not the case here. If they can find some clothing that belonged to the young boy, maybe we can find some hair on the clothing that shows a wild animal attacked the boy. But at this point, we have found nothing to indicate that it was a wild animal."

Although there were some light scratches on some of the remains, he insists that these were likely from scavengers after death and not the result of a lethal attack. Another oddity that seemed to discredit an animal attack was that the area where the body had been found had been thoroughly searched with sniffer dogs, so how had it managed to completely evade detection if this was just a random animal attack? There have been few concrete answers, and all we know for sure is that a young boy was there one second, gone the next, and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Debate has continued on what actually happened here, and at the moment, it remains an inexplicable mystery.

More recently, on July 10th of 2015, Jessica Mitchell and her fiancé Vernal DeOrr Kunz Sr., of Idaho Falls, Idaho, suddenly decided to throw everything in the car and take a spontaneous camping trip along with Mitchell’s grandfather Robert Walton and his friend Issac Reinwand, and Vernal’s 2-year old son DeOrr Jay Kunz Jr. It was seen as an exciting little spur of the moment adventure at the time, and as they headed towards the Timber Creek Campground, in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, in Lemhi County, Idaho, they were all in generally good spirits, especially little DeOrr Jr. However, things were soon about to take a detour into a dark and sinister mystery that has yet to be solved.

After their 2-hour drive, the group arrived at the remote and mountainous campground and set up their camper trailer, after which they made a fire and sat around it while Walton retreated to rest in the trailer and Reinwand went off to do some fishing. After a while, Mitchell and Vernal decided to take a walk to explore the campground and shouted to Walton that they were leaving the boy there with him. They were then gone for about 10 minutes, but when they came back their son was nowhere to be seen. Walton, who had had the camper door open, would claim that he had not heard them call out that they were leaving, and so had not been keeping an eye on the boy, although he had seen him out playing when he looked outside. It was thought that he had just wandered away, but a look around showed no sign of him, even though such a young boy should not have been able to get far through that terrain in such a short amount of time. However, calls to the child remained unanswered, and the father would later say, “He just vanished.” Oddly, he had left behind his blanket, cup, and toy monkey, items his parents claimed he never went anywhere without.

After looking all around the campground for 20 minutes, the parents called 911 at approximately 2:30 PM, and soon the hunt was on. Searchers on horseback, foot, and ATVs fanned out throughout the area, meticulously combing every inch with no sign of the missing boy. The Stone Reservoir and Creek was repeatedly searched by divers, and the search team grew to over 200 people. As the days grew into weeks, it was increasingly suspected that they were not dealing with a lost kid, but rather a possible abduction, but this seemed odd as there was no one else in the area, there was no sign of a struggle, and it was such a remote area.

As the news of the strange disappearance hit the news and investigators looked more deeply into the case, some odd details emerged that seemed to point the finger at something ominous happening with DeOrr Kunz Jr.’s parents. One oddity was the 911 call that the boy’s mother made at the time of the vanishing. It has been pointed out that during the entire 4-minute call, Mitchell seems incredibly calm and devoid of emotion, although this might not mean anything. Another suspicious detail is that police were unable to find an outside, reliable witness who could definitively place the boy at the campground at all, and this was compounded when a convenience store worker would claim that she had seen the missing boy with his parent at her store at around 8 PM on the day he disappeared. The parents have insisted that this must be a mistake, and the lead has not gone anywhere.

Not helping their case was that several inconsistencies were found in the parents’ reports, and they both failed lie-detector tests to boot. As a result of all of this, police and even their own private investigator, Phillip Klein, began to see them as persons of interest. The idea was that DeOrr had been killed, either intentionally or by accident, and that the whole vanishing story was just a cover-up, which of course the parents and the rest of the group vehemently denied. Despite these suspicions, with a lack of any physical evidence to connect them to a crime and no arrest records, none of those who were on that camping trip have ever been formally charged with anything related to the case. In 2019, there was a possible break in the case when cadaver dogs had a “hit” near the campsite where DeOrr disappeared, and bone fragments were found, yet a DNA test showed that they were not from a human being. The parents have long since broken up, and Walton died in 2019, leaving a lot of unanswered questions that will probably never be answered.

What happened to this boy? Where did he go? How could he just evaporate within minutes in such a remote place with no sign of what happened? Was this foul play, perhaps even from his own parents? Or is there something more sinister and mysterious going on here? National Parks have become a hotbed of such mysterious disappearances, so it does make one wonder. Until there is more information, the strange vanishing of DeOrr Kunz Jr. is likely to remain an unsolved mystery, and a reminder of the disturbing trend of people just stepping off the face of the earth in national parks.

There are many more cases of bizarre missing children, and I have merely selected some of the more intriguing and mysterious here. What happened to these kids? How is it that they have so completely managed to vanish right in front of people, and what is going on with those who are found in circumstances orbited by such inexplicable weirdness? Are we dealing with animal attacks, kidnappings, lost children who have wandered off, murders, or something even weirder? Why are they able to elude discovery, ultimately turn up in well-searched areas, and in many cases baffle trained bloodhounds and search crews? Vanishings of children tend to attract to them not only tragedy and sadness, but also mysteries we have yet to fully solve or understand. What has happened to these children and how they have managed to end up where they are may remain an enigma, a shadowy secret lurking along the periphery of our perceptions, and one can only hope that it will not happen again. However, we all know that it is likely just a matter of time.