I have been working in the search and rescue service (SAR) for several years and have seen something interesting during that time. There are many successful cases in my track record of finding missing people. Most often, they just leave the trail or slide down a small cliff and cannot find their way back. Most of them have heard of the advice to “stand still and wait,” so they don't wander far. But in my memory there were two cases when it did not work. Both the one and the other bother me greatly. I remember them when I feel like I’m about to give up while searching.
The first was a little boy who came with his family for berries. He walked with his sister, and they disappeared together. The parents literally lost sight of them for a second, and this moment was enough for the children to disappear. When the parents could not find them, they called us. We found our daughter pretty quickly, but when we asked about her brother, she replied that he was taken by the "bear man". According to her, he gave her berries and told her not to make noise - the "bear man" wanted to play a little with his brother. The last time the girl saw her brother, he calmly sat astride the "bear-man." Naturally, our first guess was the abduction, but we did not find any other traces of a person in that place. The girl insisted that he was an unusual person: he was tall, covered with hair like a bear, and had a "strange face."We searched that area for a week, but we couldn't find anything.
In another case, the girl was resting in nature with her mother and grandmother. As the mother said, her daughter climbed a tree to inspect the surroundings, but never came down. They waited near the tree for several hours, calling her by name, until they thought to call us. And again we combed the area, but did not find any trace of the girl. I have no idea where she could go, because neither her mother nor grandmother saw her go down.
Several times I had to go out to search with dogs, and they led me straight to the cliffs. Not to the mountains, not even to tall stones. Straight, sheer cliffs with no ledges to snag on. It is always confusing. In such cases, we usually find a person on the other side of the cliff or a few kilometers from the tracks. I'm sure there must be some explanation, but it must be strange. Another incident involved the finding of a dead body. A nine-year-old girl fell off a tree and planted herself on a dead tree. The incident itself is terrible, but I will never forget her mother's cry when she found out about what happened. She saw a bag of corpses being loaded into the car and let out the most heartbreaking cry I have ever heard. As if her whole life was falling apart in parts, as if a part of her died with her daughter. I heard from another search and rescue officer that she committed suicide a few weeks later. She could not live without her daughter.
We walked together with another MSS officer, because we saw bears in that area of the forest. We were looking for a man who did not return after climbing the mountain and we had to climb too to find him. The climber was trapped in a small crevice with a broken leg. He was there for almost two days, and it was clear that his leg was infected with an infection. We loaded him into a helicopter, and later I heard from one of the doctors that the man was inconsolable. He spoke incessantly that everything was fine, but when he climbed to the top, there was a man. The man did not have any climbing equipment, but he was wearing a parka and ski pants. He went up to the man, but when the man turned around, he had no face. The face was blank. The man lost his composure and began to descend the mountain so quickly that he fell. According to him, he could hear the person all night;he came down the mountains and uttered terrible muffled screams. This story scared the hell out of me. I'm glad I didn't hear it firsthand.
One of the scariest things that happened to me happened while searching for a girl who strayed from her group on a walk. We worked late because the dogs were on the trail. When we found her, she was lying in a ball under a large rotten log. She had no shoes or a bag. She was shocked. There were no injuries, so we could walk to the base on our own. As we walked, the girl constantly looked around and asked us, "why that big man with black eyes" was following us. We didn't see anyone, so we chalked it up to an eerie symptom of shock. But the closer we got to the base, the more restless the girl became. She asked us to make the person stop making faces. At some point, she stopped, turned around and started shouting somewhere into the forest, asking him to leave her alone. She did not want to go with the man and did not want to give us to him. Then we managed to make her continue walking, but strange sounds began to be heard around us. Almost like a cough, but more rhythmic and deep. As if it were an insect … I don't know how to describe it correctly. When we were at the border of the base, the girl turned to me: her eyes were as big as they can be in a human. She touched my shoulder and said: “He asks me to tell you to go faster. He doesn't like the sight of a scratch on your neck. " I had a very small scratch on the bottom of my neck, but it was not visible under the collar, so I have no idea how the girl saw it. Immediately after that, there was a strange cough next to me. My soul almost went into my heels. I hurried the girl, trying not to show how scared I was. I was happy when we left there.
And finally, one of the most mysterious stories that I have. I do not know if this is found everywhere at MSS stations, but in my case it is something that is constantly encountered. Now we are so used to it that we do not consider it to be anything unusual. Every time we were very deep in the forest, for example, at a distance of 50-60 kilometers from the base, at some point we find a ladder in the middle of the forest. It's like someone took a ladder in an ordinary house, cut it out and inserted it into the forest. When I first saw her, I had many questions, but they told me that it was in the order of things. Now I just ignore the stairs when I meet them: this happens very often.