30 Times People Disappeared Without A Trace And Those Left Behind Were Truly Creeped Out

My sister. (Ending is positive)

She went missing during high school. She started hanging with the wrong crowd, got into d***s and just.. disappeared one day. Two years went by. Not a word.

Then on day, my mom spotted the truck of the guy she was seeing when she went missing. It was parked at a hotel. We have a few police in our family, so they went to check it out. Sure enough it was her with this scummy guy.

Guy was wanted, went to jail. Sister went to rehab. She is now a college grad, clean for over 10-15 years. Has two beautiful kids and a genuinely great husband. She is a living success story.

The Jack family disappearance.
In 1989, a whole family in Prince George, BC disappeared after a man at the pub promised a logging camp job to the father/husband, and that he could bring his wife and children along. Nobody has seen any of them since.

Terrance Willaims disappeared in 2004 after being taken into custody by a sheriff's deputy near Naples, Florida. It turned out another man named Felipe Santos had also disappeared after being taken into custody by the same deputy several years earlier.

Edit: As some people have correctly pointed out below, Santos disappeared in custody in October 2003, only 3-4 months before Williams. Sorry, got that wrong.

In about 1971 a lady in Boca Raton reported her daughter missing. Her boyfriend was also missing along with his van. At some point over the years she hired private detectives to look for the two. At one point she was told they were living in San Francisco. She was once told her daughter had a child. She never could understand why her daughter broke off contact and continued to look for her daughter.

Along the streets in South Florida there are usually drainage canals that drain the everglades to the ocean. Some are quite deep. In about 2000 they dredged a canal not far from her house and found the van. Daughter and boyfriend were both inside. All those years they were just down the street. At least she had closure.

Brandon Lawson.
He ran out of gas on the highway in the middle of the night and called his brother to come help him. Shortly after he called 911 and reported that someone had chased him into the woods and that he needed police.
Eventually his brother and one police officer arrive at the scene and find his truck abandoned but no sign of Brandon. Brandon calls his brother and says he's bleeding and is 10 minutes away from his truck. That was the last anyone ever heard from him and searches of the area turned up empty.

The **43 MISSING STUDENTS** from México. I mean, singles get lost all the time, but f*****g 43 people are hard to lose you might think.

The daughter of a friend of my mother went missing a few years ago. While they were looking for her, news crews interviewed a friend of hers from class, who was distraught. During the interview, he said he hoped she could be found, and they informed him that they had just found a piece of her body. At this, he went pale and had to walk away and sit down on the sidewalk.

Some time later, it was discovered that he was the one who did it.

Serenity Dennard is the one that sticks with me and bothers me.

She was known to run away, which was supposedly part of why she was in the residential facility - where she should have been safe. However, a 9 year old runs out of a supervised gym in the middle of the morning and is literally never seen again? They waited almost 2 hours to call the police despite it being 5 degrees out and her not having a coat. She couldn't have gotten far, and yet she's never been found.

Brian Shaffer. Went missing from the Ugly Tuna Saloona at Ohio State seemingly out of thin air. Cameras picked him up reentering the bar after talking to two women outside around 1:55am and he was never seen again.

**The Jamison family**

-The Jamison family (2 adults, 1 young daughter) was interested in purchasing a plot of land in Oklahoma

-They drive out in their pickup truck to check it out

-Truck is later found abandoned

-$32,000 cash found in truck, along with the Jamisons' IDs, wallets, mobile phones, and a GPS.

-The family dog was also left in the truck, and was extremely malnourished.

-A camera is discovered, the final picture was of their daughter, 6-year old Madyson, who looks somewhat distressed.

-Security footage is uncovered, with the family appearing "trance-like" and not speaking to one-another.

-The Jamisons' skeletal remains are found years later, dumped less than 3 miles from where the pickup truck was originally discovered.

-Remains show no signs of struggle.

Malaysia Airlines flight 370, I can’t wrap my head around how at the same time practically anything you do is monitored, recorded and stored but we somehow still manage to lose a whole f*****g passenger aircraft.

This isn’t the creepiest, it’s the first one I thought of. There was a guy who suddenly bolted out of a public facility (forgot exactly what) across the road out of camera view. I think his face was shown pretty clearly in the surveillance footage too. But he was gone

Another one was of a little kid who disappeared while on a morning paper run decades ago. His parents never gave up, until he became a grown man and returned to visit his elderly mother. He was accompanied by two men who looked like either his handlers or similar. He said he worked hard to be rewarded with a few hours of visitation, but he couldn’t talk about what happened to him and what he was doing all these years. He had to leave, and he never returned. Makes me wonder what insane underground organization he was forced to join, and what horrors he had to endure to be “rewarded.”.

Daniel Morcombe's disappearance from the Sunshine Coast Queensland was the one that haunted me, I was not that much older and also caught the school bus.


Took them 7 years i think to find him so sad for his family .

I'm sure there are stranger cases but this one always creeped me out because I knew the guy, he and I were never friends but ran in the same circles and had a lot of mutual friends.

One night he was hanging out at my buddies place playing video games and left around 9:30 or 10 pm to head back to his apartment. His place was only 3 blocks away but his keycard was swiped at the wrong building (identical towers next to each other) and he tried to make a phone call to a friend that only lasted 2 seconds but ended before our friend picked up, that was the last sign of where he was.

When he didn't show up for classes the next day our friends started putting out flyers, a few days later his family reported him missing resulting in a massive search for him with helicopters, dogs, people walking all the fields near campus, the works. Not a trace was found, although it didn't help that it was snowing. Of course the police treated our mutual friend as a suspect as he was the last person to see him (he's the nicest guy, no one who knew him suspected him for a moment) and also said maybe he was drunk and fell in the river or something but they weren't drinking that much by a long shot so that didn't make sense.

Months later his body is found in an old abandoned barn owned by the school about a mile off campus, apparently he was curled up behind some equipment in the basement with his shoes at the top of the stairs.

The cops story is that he was out taking photos, got lost, fell down the stairs and died of hypothermia, they attributed the shoes to paradoxical undressing or him literally falling out of his shoes. Except that doesn't make any sense.

According to my buddy he was hanging out with he didn't have his camera on him, there's no mention of it in the police reports, and no sign that he ever made it back to his apartment to get his camera (would have shown up on keycard records). I

n addition to that you could see his apartment tower from the building he was found in so being lost doesn't make much sense, and his body was already desiccated and partially decomposed when they found it so I'm not sure how they knew hypothermia was the cause of death. He was also found to have cuts on his hands and the room he was found in had been locked, the police claim that when he fell down the stairs he hit the door hard enough to unlock and open it, and cut his hands on the doors. Somehow. Personally I think he was m******d.

Edit: This is Jon Lacina from Iowa State I'm talking about in case you want to look it up.

The disappearance of Bobby Dunbar. In 1912 his parents took him fishing on a lake in Louisiana and he went missing. Police searched for him for 8 months, and finally found a man named William Cantwell Walters who was traveling with a boy that resembled Bobby Dunbar. Walter's claimed the boy was the son of a friend who had given him custody, and that the child's name was Bruce Anderson not Bobby Dunbar. Investigators and positive ID from the parents determined this was actually the Dunbar's child and gave custody over to them. The town had a parade for Bobby Dunbar's return.

During the trial with the Dunbar's and Walters a woman named Julia Anderson came to defend Walters, asserting this was her son Bruce and she had given Walters custody - the courts dismissed her because she had three children out of wedlock (it was 1912) and two were already deceased. The trial being in Mississippi, and her being a very poor woman from North Carolina, she gave up on fighting the case.

Then, 9 years ago in 2008 one of "Bobby Dunbar's" granddaughters had a DNA test done. She compared her grandfathers DNA to his owns brothers. They were not related.

Ohhhhh this girl who was working alone got dragged out of gas station (all seen on camera). The footage was so bad they couldnt figure out who it was so they put out a message in the paper with his coat description. Someone eventually says their janitor always wears that coat. They go to the guys house and search non stop over and over again. They find a single burned tooth in the backyard. It would have been inconclusive but the girl had gone to a dentist conference and got a just on the market filling that only like 2 people in the world had.... soo they caught him ....

edit: holy moly thanks for the upvotes
just to add to the story a girl caught a partial license plate as the guy drove past a park but his car was registered under the wrong color so they couldn't find the car.

oh yes this was a forensic files episode
and the technology back in those days wasn't what is today.

Paddy moriarty and his dog Kellie. Went missing in a outback town in australia with a population of 12 people. Last seen leaving the pub riding his quad bike the 1km distance to his house. He or his dog have never been found and no one has been charged in relation to his disappearance.

Four-year-old D’Wan Sims in Livonia, MI, 1990s. His mother reported him missing at Wonderland Mall, but when investigators pulled surveillance video, they found the mother, but no child. She kept pointing to other women with young children and claiming that was her with the child. Never solved. No one was ever charged. The mother moved away from the area, if memory serves, and she died in 2020.

I remember reading about the disappearance of Susan Powell in a similar one of these threads a few months back.

It’s a wild story - husband and wife (with 2 young sons) have a bad marriage (he’s a*****e & controlling + at one point they had to move because the husband’s father was in love with the wife).

Things get so bad she starts fearing for her life - then one night the whole family disappears, only to have the husband come back a few days later saying that he and the boys went camping and he had no idea where the wife was.

As the investigation into what happened to the wife goes on, the husband acts more and more suspiciously, eventually moving with the kids to live with his father that they moved away from in the first place, but then lost custody of the kids because the father got caught with a bunch of child p**n (and hundreds of creeper shots of Susan).

Finally, during a supervised visit, the husband grabs his sons from the social worker, holes himself up inside his house and then blows it up, killing himself and both the boys. And all the while, they never solved the mystery of what happened to Susan Powell and she is still listed as missing (although presumed m******d and dumped somewhere by the husband) - it’s a sad, crazy tale.

Rico Harris. He was a massive 6'9" former Harlem Globetrotter basketball player who had d**g issues earlier in his life, but had made a full recovery and was getting his life back on track. He was driving along California's Interstate I-5, from his home in Southern California to Seattle, to live with his girlfriend. He was somewhere just north of Sacramento, exhausted, and told his girlfriend over the phone that he wanted to check out the mountains. All calls stopped since then.

His car was found a couple days later by a patrolman near a rest stop in the mountains. A massive search was launched. No signs of him. The strangest part? A driver later reported seeing a massive 6'9" individual wandering down the highway, just a mile from where the car was found - *a week later*. A search was re-launched, massive size 17 footprints were found in the ground that were not there before, they were getting very close, and then... Nothing. No trace, no body, nothing.

Where did Rico go the first time he disappeared? Where was he for *an entire week*? And where did he disappear to again? The fact that someone could disappear twice, is what makes this so d**n mystifying to me.