30 People Who Disappeared Share What Happened To Them

When I was 4 I got lost in a city and was rescued by what my dad thought was a gang. We had dinner in Chinatown with another family. 5 kids in all. Crossing the street after dinner, we were holding hands in a big chain. My older sibling let go. When the light changed and everyone crossed I stayed on the sidewalk - I was looking through a window into a barber shop where some huge guy was having his head shaved - can still picture the scene. When I finally looked around everyone was gone. I started to cry. A group of teenagers approached and asked if I was lost. I said yes. A tall kid hoisted me into his shoulders and started down the block. Other kids split up and went in different directions. We rounded a corner and I saw my dad. He turned white and ran toward us. The kid lowered me to the ground. A few other kids were there. They stood around awkwardly while the tall kid explained what happened to my dad. My dad (not a demonstrative guy) flung himself at the kid and hugged him. My mom appeared and picked me up. Years later my dad told me he saw the same group of kids hanging around when he first parked in the city that evening and was suspicious that they were a gang. He was embarrassed and tried to be less judgmental after that. Wish I could thank those guys. This was a long time ago.

Throwaway account because I don't want this story tied to my main account.

My friend and I were 15 at the time when we were both drugged and taken various places within the state for 3 days.

During this time we were constantly separated, reunited, drugged, emotionally/physically abused, and honestly feared that we would end up being murdered.

for 3 days we were constantly on the move. We never visited any homes. They made us sleep in wooded areas with thin blankets, separated from each other. This was during winter although there was no snow yet.

The man (sounds strange calling him a man) that I was will was nicer than the other. He seemed to be the follower. He never did anything as cruel as the other did, but to this day I can't stand certain names, accents, clothing, looks in general. When I say he was nicer it's because he was rather gentle instead of forceful.

on the third day they took us to a town about 40 miles south of our home in the middle of frankly no where. It's a town with one gas station, and few homes. They left us on the mountainside, told us the common " if you call the police blah blah we'll kill you, blah blah" We were there for a while before another car came around (hunting is rather popular around those parts)

The guys who found us thought we had been stabbed or shot. Looking back I was a f**king chaotic mess as they tried to approach us. I became very defensive as my friend was still mostly lethargic and I didn't believe that they were there to help us.

Another half hour maybe passed and police finally showed up. I hadn't felt so happy to see officers before in my entire life because I had been one of those "f**k the police" stupid girls back then. I remember falling and just crying. I remember grabbing my friend and telling her it was going to be okay.

about a week later they found the guys. they arrested them, and they went to prison for some time. They both plead guilty for reduced sentences.

The drugs they gave us make a lot of the details sketchy, so I can't really remember to much. I have scars still, I have trust issues. My friend on the other hand turned to drugs quickly after and we've lost touch with one another.

Edit: Thank you everyone for such kind words. I'm trying to reply to just about everyone. Also there are common questions that keep coming up so i'll just add them here too for easiness and such.

How did they take you, how did it begin? We met them at the local mall, after about an hour or so they offered us dinner from a local truck shop just out of our town. (they had cheap food, and pretty dang good food at that). After dinner we drove around for a bit believing that they were going to be taking us home as we were pretty close to home. From there the start of the situation began.

What drugs did they give you? Over the course of 3 days we were given different drugs, and i'm not sure about how many my friend was given or what kind but I know I was given among other things: Pain killers, adderoll, ecstasy, ambien, and a form of a date rape drug.

How old were they? One had just turned 18, and the other was 19.

What type of abuse happened. I still don't really like to talk about and i'll just paste what i've already written to someone else: To this day i'm not 100% sure what happened to my friend, but just some of the things that happened to me was being, slapped, kicked, hair-grabbed, forced to perform sexual acts, and some other things.

Again, thank you guys for your support, and your love. It is truly amazing and I appreciate it.

I went missing on purpose. I ran away as a teenager due to abuse and neglect. My parents did not even report me missing. However, because I was under the care of a social worker and having regular visits which I stopped going to and my parents appeared to give no s**ts when asked where I was, the social workers office reported me missing. So I live my life, started on the streets and slowly worked my way up...had kids, bought a house, doing very well for myself considering my start in life. 15 years pass....in that time I had had the usual life contact with police (traffic accident reports, one minor crime), had all my details registered in numerous govt departments as one would. Then one day I have to make a police report as a witness, and they pull up some info on the computer which shows me listed as a missing person. Somehow it had never shown up during any other government interaction?? Anyway, so they have to tell the reporting body that I have been located, but that social workers office has long been closed. Luckily my parents never reported me so they have not been notified of my status. I hope they think I'm dead.

TL:DR - Was missing in plain sight for 15 years.

So, back when I was in Boy Scouts, my troop lost me. Twice. In the same night. While I was still in my tent. This is not an exaggeration.

The story is thus: we were at Camp Decorah, in Iowa. We had the idea to go and perform a raid on the counselor's tents/cabins. I, however, was feeling ill, so I specifically said "I'm not feeling well, I'm going to sleep." They acknowledged this, expressed regret that I was not coming along, and went to have their fun.

They have their fun. They retreat into the woodline. Then they take a headcount. I am not in the headcount. They expect me to be in the headcount, because they forgot. So, now, there is a missing camper. The entire camp is set to searching for me. Some time during this, a guy from my troop decides to, get this, check the tents. I am in my tent, as I should be. So he goes to report that I am found. I go to the bathroom during this time. Someone comes back to the camp, and checks my tent. I am in the bathroom, so I am not in my tent. I am now missing again.

I get found sooner this time.

When I was a 1 or 2, my parents were hosting an annual party in the back yard for the Independence Day. It was warm and lots of family were there so why not have a small child out? Well while nobody was looking I made my way into the woods behind the house (around 50 acres of land at the time). I was gone for around an hour and at some point my parents noticed and began searching (even called the police). Well eventually I come out of the woods dangling by my clothes from our dogs mouth. My parents liked that dog :)

TL;DR infant goes into woods, parents freak out, dogs saves the day

I walked out of my life when I came home to find another man in my bed with my girlfriend. Spent a year hitch hiking.

No missing persons report. No one looked for me. No one missed me.

My oldest daughter K went missing when she was 2, she's 11 now. It was about 9 AM, I'm at work 2 hours drive away and I get a panicked call from her mother saying she can't find her anywhere and the front door is open. She had been sleeping and didn't hear K get up. I tell her to quit messing around and call 911.

I'm freaking out and leave work immediately and start calling everyone I know local to home, relatives, friends, anyone who can start looking for her.

20 minutes later a police officer pulls up front of our house with K in the front seat and her trike in the back.

Long story short, K woke up that morning missing me and decided to come find me. Went downstairs, managed to unlock the front door, went around back of the house, and hopped on her trike. She then proceeded to travel about a mile on the sidewalk on her trike, in a only a diaper before a good samaritan called 911 saying they saw a naked toddler by herself outside.

She had a few cuts and scrapes, but was otherwise ok. She was also mad that the police officer made her wear a seatbelt.

When I was a young lad, my brother and I used to go to this gymnastics play area. They had trampolines, those bars you swing around, and a tightrope over a pit full of pieces of foam. My brother and I decided to play hide and seek, I hid first.

About an hour later, the place is closing. My mum asks my brother where I am, he says we're playing hide and seek and I've hidden really well.

Three hours later, the staff have locked all of the doors and phoned the police, my mum was in a blind panic, my brother had given up on finding me and was bouncing on a trampoline, the staff were frantically tearing the place apart looking for me.

My brother got bored of trampolining so decided to play in the foam pit. He jumped in and heard a loud "OUCH". I climbed out of the foam and said "did I win?"

We never went back to that place.

When I was 16, I got into a fight with my mother about how to properly load dishes into a dishwasher... She threw me out of the house. In typical teenage fashion, I told her if she threw me out, then I wasn't coming back. At that point, she had escalated to white-hot rage and said something like, "We don't want you here anyway." Well, that was all I needed, and really she should have been paying better attention to me.

See, I had gotten a job as soon as I had turned 14, and I had purchased my own car. I had been buying my own clothes and things for years with money from that job. I left and could honestly say that I hadn't taken anything from the house that I hadn't personally paid for. To that end, I left my cell phone on the table. They had no way to get in contact. So hours later, when my mother's anger faded and she realized that she had just thrown her 16-year-old child into the streets over the dishes, she called the police.

Well, the police showed up and heard her out. They put out the details on my car to try and find me, but they told her that since I had a car and clothes and had my own bank account and I had been gone for hours, there was no guarantee that I was even in the state anymore... After 48 hours, they had me declared missing, which apparently made my profile available to other states and such.

And that was how they found me, two weeks later, 18 hours away. I was sitting on the hood of my car eating ice cream and filling out a job application. An officer noticed I was illegally parked and casually scanned my plates while he approached to ask me to move. I don't think he was going to give me a ticket; it was just a reflexive action. I came up as a missing kid, and he stopped mid-question and sort of stuttered, "You, uh, you should call your mother."

I nodded agreeably and he gave me his cell phone... As soon as I identified myself, she turned into a screaming rage monster of hatred and insults. I casually put the phone on speaker for the officer to hear, and his eyes widened. She didn't stop to take a breath and let me get a word in, so I hung up on her. I told the officer that I was fine where I was, and since it had already escalated to this point, I was going to hold out for an apology or divine intervention. He sort of patted my shoulder and made sure I had someplace warm to sleep at night.

Two days later, my dad showed up and got me. The officer had told him that if the situation was left to my mother to resolve, they would never see me again. I agree that it was for the best. I could have gotten my GED and a job, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to make my way through college and get my master's.

Was about 5. Out of town with my family, staying at my aunts house. There was a giant country music festival going on. Me and my cousins were being babysat by some teenage girl while the adults went to the music festival. Babysitter was being a bitch and wouldn't let me in the house to use the bathroom. Only would let me use the bathroom outside. I told her I was going to run away if she didn't let me in. She didn't let me in. I ran away, barefoot in superman pj's... Was gone for about 8 hours. A car pulls up next to me, and three woman ask me if I needed help .....the three girls were the Dixie chicks....they found me and called the police.. There was a missing kid alert out for me.

I was missing for eight hours after my very first day of first grade and mobilized the entire police force of the rural town where I grew up.

Before I was old enough for school, my (single) mom used to drop me off at a daycare place every day and pick me up every evening. This was in 1986, so way before cell phones or pagers were common. When I got old enough for first grade, my mom took me out of daycare because it was expensive and school would be my daycare... My school was brand new, so my first day was also the first day the school was open. It was also the principal's first day as a principal and my teacher's first day as a full-time teacher...

The first day at school was perfectly normal: I wrote ABCs, drew pictures with crayons, etc. Just like in daycare. My only specific memory was the cafeteria staff bringing our lunches to us in the classroom, because the construction in the cafeteria wasn't complete yet.

School gets out, and I head to the buses, staring dutifully at the bus number my mom wrote on my hand... but the after-school pickup van from the daycare we used to attend was also there. The staffer from the daycare recognized me as I was walking by and called out, "Hey! We're over here. Come on, we're about to leave!" I guess she didn't know or didn't remember that my mom had taken me out of daycare. Anyhow, this lady was a known adult authority figure, so I assumed plans had changed, and I got on the bus.

My mom gets off work and waits at my bus stop... I don't get off the bus. She calls the school, and they mobilize the whole staff to look for me... They don't find me. Hours have passed, and she's in full freak-out mode... She calls the police. The police start searching the fields and farms near the school, [but no luck]. They bring in more officers and more officers until pretty much the entire police force of this tiny town is looking for me. Meanwhile, my principal and my teacher are having the worst day of their lives... How could they lose a f*cking six-year-old on their very first day?!

All the searching turns up nothing, and it's past midnight now, so some poor officer had to tell my mom, "Ma'am, you should go home. We'll keep looking all night, but we won't be able to find much until the morning." My mom goes home thinking her baby is probably [gone] and arrives home to find her answering machine full with messages from the daycare.

So... yeah. I managed to upset an entire school system and traumatize my mom on my first day of school. I still refuse to accept responsibility. I was just doing what the grown-ups told me.

When I was about 8, my parent sent 4 of my siblings and I to summer school. One day, I was waiting for my parents to pick me up outside by the schools playground as they do 5 days a week. Normally, my siblings would wait with me, but I couldn't find them anywhere so I just sat on the sidewalk and waited. After more than an hour of waiting, my parents pulled up with all 4 of my siblings and a station wagon full of new toys from Toys R Us. Only after my parents took my siblings on a shopping spree did they realize they were missing me. They pulled up and told me that they were sorry. Yet no one picked any toys for me...

...middle child syndrome.

I went sleep walking one night when I was ten years old. Unlocked the front door and went for a stroll through the neighborhood. I woke up a few hours later in the middle of the street, barefooted, in a cul de sac I've never been in before. Scared the bejeezus out of me.

Ended up running through the streets until I found my way back home. My parents had been s**tting bricks looking all over for me. They put a lock on my door after that so I couldn't go for anymore midnight strolls.

I was living with my new husband in a town about a thousand miles away from my mother, who has always been a world class worrier. This was in the days before everyone had a cel phone. His entire family was going to be invading us in a few days, so I was polishing up the apartment to look good, and in the process of wiping fingerprints off the phone, I turned the ringer off, and did not notice. We'd just moved in, so several days without any calls wasn't unusual.

Fast forward. The in-laws have just arrived while I am lying down in the bedroom taking a nap because I have been spit shining everything in the place and making tasty baked goods all while coming down with a bad cold. There's a knock on the front door. My husband comes to the bedroom, and says there's someone who wants to talk to me. It's the police, and they insist on talking to me alone in the hallway to make sure everything is really, truly ok, then they tell me to call my mother. I come back in to see his parents, sister, brother-in-law, their seven kids, and a passel of assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins, all staring silently at me.

But wait, there's more. Mom didn't have our address, all she had was a description of the building. The town was small enough that the police knew just where that was, but they didn't know what apartment, so they knocked on every other door in the building before getting to us on the top floor corner unit.

I got lost for a few hours at a country show when I was very young, 3 or 4 years old. I had been doing that thing where you are following what you think is your parents legs but turns out it was someone else the whole time. Cause of the crowds I got completely lost, being so young I just started wandering around on my own. My parents started freaking out, mother was crying while my dad frantically got the organisers to start looking for me. Luckily after an hour or so I was noticed by a kindly group of older ladies who got hold of a steward to reunite me.

This isn't remarkable in itself but fast forward 20 years later and by coincidence I was at the show ground with my parents for another reason. I had completely forgotten about being lost but it was obviously still engrained in my parents minds. As we drove around (there was no show on at the time) my dad points to a spot and goes out of nowhere 'thats exactly where you went missing', and then a few minutes later 'And thats where they found you' and both started yattering on about what happened that day. Amazing to think after all these years that incident was fresh in their minds and they could remember it like it was yesterday, they were sort of joking around about it but you could tell the emotions of almost losing me were still raw. They can't remember where they left the TV remote but can remember the day they almost lost their kid as clear as anything.

I guess you never stop being a parent now matter how old your kids get.

My high school (American) football team had an away game in a somewhat sketchy city, bus took the team back to high school afterwards. I was too young to drive and I was grounded and had my phone taken away. I waited at the school for an hour and a half but my parents never came to pick me up. So I started the 4-mile walk back to my house carrying all my pads and school books.

While I was walking back my mom showed up and I wasn't there. She panicked and found the coach and told him. My coach sent a group text to the entire team asking if anyone knew where I was. Came to school the next day and everyone thought I had missed the bus and gotten lost. It ended up being a team joke for the rest of the year.

Bonus: My parents never took my phone away again

Got lost in an elevator in our apartment building when I was 5. I forgot what floor we lived on and what out apartment number was. I was and am still a very visual person. I spent 7 hours going up and down the elevator, and since we had just moved into the building, nobody recognized me. I was also too shy to ask anyone for help either, and didn't know they had a directory on the ground floor. At about 5 that night, a guy named Derrick got into the elevator. He was about 6'2 and had his little daughter trailing him. The daughter was like my age, and asked me my name and what I was doing in the elevator. I told her I had gotten lost in the elevator, and when Derrick heard this, he asked if we were the new people on the 7th floor. That was our floor number, and he had reminded me of it. He took us back to my apartment, and we walked in on a cop asking my crying mom for a description of me. Since it wasn't a good neighborhood and this was like 2000-2002 New York which was still pretty s**tty at the time, the cop figured I had been kidnapped and would never be heard from again. The look on my mom's face was extreme happiness and relief, and I never forgot the floor number again. I also never saw Derrick or his daughter again, but I will never forget them.

Memphis Tennessee, the summer of 1990. I was 5 years old, and my best friend was this little black girl in my apartment complex. Her parents invited me to her birthday party at McDonalds. We all lived in a very low-income housing/projects type of place, so this was basically the height of excess, and I was hardcore excited.

So they round up all of us kids and take us in a van to the local McD's. The party was pretty pimp, cake and stuff, and we were all playing in the little inside playground there.

Long story short, I ultimately exit from the playground, and... no one was there. The little girl's parents f**king forgot me, packed everyone up and left me there.

I didn't realize it at the time, being distracted by food and seemingly awesome covered slides. I was just like, "Whoa, this is longest part ever!" The staff didn't even say anything or notice something was off about an unattended kid just hanging around.

Nine hours later (my parents weren't exactly winning any awareness awards themselves), my mom and dad and 3 cop cars finally come to get me. I remember my mom being downright irate because, "You were the only little blond-haired white girl in a f**king sea of black kids; not exactly unremarkable!"

Once when my grandfather was watching my younger sister and I, I decided to take a shower and didn't think to tell anyone. I took my leisurely shower, and when I came out no one was in the house. I went outside to see if maybe they were out there (it was summer, so reasonable to spend the evening in the yard). It turned out, my grandfather and sister had alerted the neighbors that I had gone missing, and the entire neighborhood was out looking for me. It wasn't even that long of a shower.

I had a 12-day period of dis-associative amnesia while I was in the USAF. I was doing laundry one Sunday night while waiting to start extra cleaning duty, I woke up 12 days later to my supervisor shaking me awake in my dorm room. No one saw me for those 12 days, no one heard from me. I was not a recluse, I was extremely outgoing and easily noticed. How I vanished for 12 days is amazing.

**editing this to not have to reply to everyone: I was considered AWOL, got an Article 15 out of it. Was medically separated with a $25,000 severance and told by the USAF Psychiatrist that I was "useless to the USAF". I couldn't explain it, and through every pill I was prescribed and some therapy, they couldn't unlock my brain. It's said that it does not happen to people who are in their older 20's, but it did. It happened the once. My brain scan showed that "the hole every one has, is larger in yours" kind of thing. I never looked into it, as I really don't want to know if I went to France and killed people as a transvestite, or just f***ed off for 2 weeks.

I had no reason to desert. I was in for over 6 years at that point. I'd been to PSAB (Saudi), South Korea, France, Spain, and was in Germany at the time. I f**king loved my time enlisted and would do it again.