One of the most famous recent disappearances is the disappearance of Natalie Halloween, an 18-year-old American woman who disappeared during a 2005 school trip to the island of Aruba. She has not been seen since.
It's always awful when someone goes missing, but finding it becomes especially difficult when people disappear into unfamiliar places, like the following travelers who never returned home.
John Reid
In 1980, 28-year-old John Reid left his hometown of Twin City, California, and went to Brazil. He hoped to find the lost city of Akator, an ancient underground civilization that has supposedly remained a secret in the Amazonian jungle for thousands of years. Reed learned about the city from a book called The Chronicle of Akator. The author of this book, Karl Brugger, wrote it after learning about Akator from the Brazilian guide Tatunka Nara, who claimed to have once been the leader of the tribe that ruled the city 3,000 years ago. Tatunka lived in the village of Barcelos and owned a lucrative business of organizing hikers' walks into the jungle to find Akator. Reed decided to accompany Tatunka on one of his expeditions. He left his belongings and a return flight ticket in his hotel room in Manaus, but never returned for them.
It was eventually revealed that Tatunka Nara was in fact a German citizen named Gunther Hawk. Tatunka claimed that Reed fled and hid in the jungle after they decided to return to Barcelos. However, Reed was not the only person to disappear under suspicious circumstances in Tatunka's company. In the 1980s, a Swiss named Herbert Wanner and a Swedish woman named Christine Heuser also mysteriously disappeared during the Tatunka expedition. Wanner's jawbone was later found.
In addition, Karl Brugger, the author of the book that inspired John Reed, was gunned down on the streets of Rio in 1984. Authorities still believe that Gunther Hawk was responsible for Brugger's murder and the three disappearances, but there is insufficient evidence to press charges against him.
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Julia Smith
In 1997, Judy Smith, a 50-year-old mother of two from Newton, Massachusetts, married a lawyer and decided to travel to Philadelphia to join Jeffrey's husband on his business trip. On April 10, Jeffrey went to conferences and Judy decided to go sightseeing. Judy never returned to the hotel, and Jeffrey reported her as missing. She was found five months later. On September 7, travelers found her partially buried remains in an isolated mountainous area. The strange thing about this story is that Judy's remains were found more than 960 kilometers away, in North Carolina.
The exact cause of death could not be determined, but since Judy's remains were found in a shallow grave, authorities concluded that she was the victim of premeditated murder. Since she had her engagement ring and $ 167 left, the robbery was hardly a pretext. It was also strange that she carried her things in a red backpack, but a blue backpack was found on the spot. Even stranger is that Judy apparently went there voluntarily, as four witnesses reported seeing her in nearby Asheville.
Witnesses said that Judy was in a good mood and in the conversation mentioned that her husband was a lawyer. If the woman the witness spoke to was indeed Judy Smith, no one knows why she wanted to run away without telling her family. And if Judy made the decision to disappear on her own, how did she end up dead on a distant mountain buried in a grave?
Frank Lenz
A large number of people have disappeared while trying to fly around the world on their own. However, the disappearance of Frank Lenz while trying to circumnavigate the globe has a unique difference. Lenz, 25, was a Pennsylvania cyclist who wanted to cycle around the world, and according to his calculations, the trip should take two years. Lenz began his voyage in Pittsburgh on May 25, 1892, and spent the next several months traveling across North America before he sailed to Asia. By May 1894 Lenz was cycling through Tabriz, Iran, and his next destination was Erzurum, Turkey, 450 kilometers away. But Lenz did not come to Erzurum and was never seen again.
His family and friends decided to organize a search. Unfortunately, Lenz traveled around Turkey during the peak of the Armenian massacre in the mid-1890s. During this terrible time, the Ottoman Empire killed tens of thousands of Armenians, and Lenz may have become their accidental victim.
When another cyclist named William Satchleben drove to Erzurum to find Lenz, he found out that Lenz may have passed through a small Turkish village in the Kurdistan Region, where he unintentionally insulted the Kurdish chieftain. Thirsting for revenge, the chieftain ordered the bandits to kill Lenz and bury his body. The alleged killers were blamed for Lenz's death, but most of them fled or died before they could be imprisoned. The Turkish government eventually agreed to compensate Lenz's family, but his body was never found.
Leo Vidiker
Even though he was 86 years old, Leo Vidiker still led a very active lifestyle. Leo has been married for 55 years and both spouses belonged to a Christian organization called Maranatha Volunteers International. By 2001, Vidikers organized 40 humanitarian trips. During their 41st trip, the couple left their home in North Dakota to accompany the organization in Hot Springs Tabacon, Costa Rica. On November 8th, Leo sat down on a bench in a resort hotel while his wife moved away for a while. When Virginia returned, half an hour later, her husband was gone.
There was a version that Leo may have fallen asleep on the bench, and when he woke up he forgot everything. Before he disappeared, witnesses saw Leo asking people if they knew where his wife was. He walked to the gate of the resort hotel and asked the guards if he could get out, they opened the gate and watched him go down the main road.
Already 15 minutes later, one of Leo's friends was walking along the same road, but found no sign that he was passing here. Since Leo was not moving very fast and there were few places he could go, the only logical explanation was that someone had kidnapped him. And even during the search operation, the police could not find a single trace of Leo Vidiker.
Karen Denise Wells
Karen Denise Wells was originally from Haskell, Oklahoma. She was 23 years old and she was raising a child alone. As usual, she decided to leave the child with her parents to visit a friend named Melissa Shepard. Wells rented a car and drove to New Bergen, New Jersey. Wells was last seen on April 12, 1994, when she called a friend from a motel in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Shepard agreed to meet Wells at the motel and arrived later that night with two unidentified men. Wells never returned to her room, but most of her belongings remained there.
The next lazy, early in the morning, Wells' rental car was found abandoned on a remote road 56 kilometers from the motel. The vehicle stood without gasoline, and its doors were wide open. Evidence was found in the car that indicated that Karen was in this car until the last moment. The evidence included a small amount of marijuana, but Karen's wallet and coin purse were found in a nearby ditch. The strangest clue in the abandoned vehicle was the numbers on the speedometer, which did not correspond to the distance from Haskell to Carlisle. In fact, 700 miles were redundant.
Before she arrived at a motel in Carlisle, Wells was seen in two other cities that were not at all her way. During her last phone call with Shepard, Wells mentioned that she had gotten lost several times before. However, until now no one can tell where Karen is.
Charles Horvath
In 1989, 20-year-old Charles Horvath decided to leave his native England and travel to Canada to spend several months hitchhiking around the country. By May 11, Charles arrived in British Columbia and stopped at a camping site in Kelowna. He sent a fax to his mother, Denise Allan, saying that he would try to meet her in Hong Kong for his 21st birthday. However, this was the last message his mother received. Since Charles had kept in touch up to this point, she became worried. She decided to travel to British Columbia on her own to find him. Denise discovered that Charles had left his tent and all of his belongings at the camping site when he suddenly disappeared. After informing the police about the missing Charles,Denise returned to her hotel and found a note one evening: “I saw him on May 26th. We were celebrating and two people beat him. He died. His body is in the lake behind the bridge."
Divers searched this lake, but did not find Charles's body. However, Denise soon received another note stating that they had searched the wrong side of the bridge. After a second search, the police did find the body. The victim was initially identified as Charles, but it turns out that it was a local man who committed suicide. Denise did receive confirmation that Charles was going to a late night party before disappearing. Nevertheless, his disappearance has remained a mystery for 25 years.
Ettore Majorana
Ettore Majorana was a well-known Italian theoretical physicist. In 1938, Majorana worked as a physics teacher at the University of Naples. On March 25, he wrote a strange note to the university director, stating that he had made an "inevitable" decision and apologized for any "inconvenience" that his disappearance might have caused. He also sent a message to his family asking them not to spend too much time mourning for him. Majorana withdrew a large amount of money from a bank account and boarded a boat to Palermo. After arriving in Palermo, Majorana sent another message to the director, informing him that he had reconsidered his decision to commit suicide and planned to return home. Majorana was seen boarding a ship in Naples, but he mysteriously disappeared.
There were a huge number of theories of Majorana's disappearance: suicide, escape from the country to start a new life, and even possible collaboration with the Third Reich. This mystery remained unsolved until 2008, when a witness was found who claimed that he met Majorana in Caracas in 1955. The man allegedly lived in Argentina for many years, and the witness even provided a photograph of him. After analyzing the person in the photograph and comparing it with the photographs of Majorana, the investigators concluded that a large number of similarities may indicate that they are the same person. The investigation into the disappearance of Ettore Majorana is still ongoing, but the full story of what happened remains a mystery.
Devin Williams
Devin Williams lived with his wife and three children in Lyon County, Kansas, and made a living as a truck driver. In May 1995, Williams went on a routine business trip to deliver the cargo to California. After completing the task, Williams took another cargo for delivery to Kansas City. On May 28, Williams was seen rushing in a truck through Tonto National Forest near Kingman, Arizona, driving dangerously close to some tourists' parking lots and their vehicles. The truck eventually stopped in the middle of the forest and witnesses saw Williams wander around it. He looked disoriented, mumbling incoherently "I'll go to jail" and "they made me do it." By the time the police arrived, the truck was unmanned, Williams had disappeared.
Tonto National Forest is more than 80 kilometers from the interstate highway, which usually took Williams' route to Kansas, and there was no rational explanation for his strange behavior. He had never used drugs or suffered from mental illness before, although before he left California, Williams called his doctor and said he was having trouble sleeping. The disappearance of Williams was so strange that even UFO researchers began to think he was abducted by aliens.
Finally, in May 1997, travelers discovered Devin Williams' skull about half a mile from where it was last seen. However, what actually happened to him is unknown.
Virginia carpenter
In 1946, the city of Texarkana became the birthplace of a terrible mystery when an unidentified man known as the "Phantom Killer" killed five people. A young girl named Virginia Carpenter knew the three victims and became the hub to which all the threads were leading just two years later. On June 1, 1948, 21-year-old Carpenter departed Texarkana on a six-hour train ride to Denton, where she was enrolled at the Texas State College for Women. After arriving that evening, Carpenter took a taxi from the train station to the college dorm. However, remembering that she had forgotten her bag, she returned to the station. When Carpenter found out that the luggage hadn't arrived yet, she gave her ticket to the taxi driver, Jack Zachary, and paid him to pick up the luggage the next morning. Zachary drove Carpenter to the dormwhere, he said, she went to talk to two young men in a convertible.
The next day, Zachary took Carpenter's luggage and left it in front of the dorm, where it was unclaimed for two days. When the college staff and the Carpenter family realized that none of them had heard from her for a long time, they declared her missing.
Who these two young men in the convertible were, they never knew. However, some suspicion fell on Zachary, who had a criminal record and was known for using violence against his family. Zachary's wife initially told police that he returned home shortly after dropping Carpenter off, but several years later she claimed that her alibi was false - Zachary actually arrived home a few hours later. However, there was no evidence of Zachary's involvement in Virginia Carpenter's disappearance, and no trace of her was ever found.
Benjamin Bathurst
Benjamin Bathurst was an ambitious 25-year-old British ambassador. He was sent from London to Vienna in 1809 in the hope of improving British-Austrian relations. However, when French military forces invaded Vienna, Bathurst headed back home. On November 25, he and his personal valet stopped in Perleberg, Germany, and checked into the White Swan Inn. Bathurst intended to continue the ride that evening, after his valet changed horses in their wagon. Finally, at about 9:00 pm, Bathurst learned that the horses were ready. He left his room to presumably head towards the wagon and disappeared.
Two days later, Bathurst's coat was discovered in a building owned by a man who worked at the White Swan Inn. The man's mother claimed to have found the coat at the hotel and brought it home, but one witness claimed to have seen Bathurst walking toward the building the evening he disappeared. Bathurst's trousers were soon found in a wooded area about five kilometers from town. In his trousers was an unfinished letter to Bathurst's wife, in which he expressed his fear that he would not return home to England.
It was rumored that French soldiers had kidnapped Bathurst, but the government denied the allegations. In 1862, a skeleton was found under a house that once belonged to a White Swan Inn employee. The remains could not be identified as Benjamin Bathurst, and therefore his disappearance has remained an unsolved mystery for over 200 years.