Hello everyone, and welcome back to Scary Interesting. In this video, we're gonna go over three more incredibly creepy, but only partially unsolved disappearances. Because sometimes, even if a person is found, that can make the circumstances of their disappearance even stranger.
You'll see what I mean, and as always, viewer discretion is advised. [intro music] Today's video is sponsored by Babbel, one of the top language-learning apps in the world. If you're a long-time subscriber, you probably know I'm Canadian.
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So, if you're curious to give Babbel a try, click my link below to take Babbel's quiz and save up to 60 percent today. That means: "And now, today's video. " Growing up in Oregon, both of Hannah Upp's parents were pastors who dedicated their life to serving Japanese-American Christians and spreading the words to the unconverted.
Hannah had a relatively normal and happy childhood, but at some point, her parents' views on religion went in opposite directions. Eventually, this rift between her parents became so great that her mother filed for divorce. Hannah was just 15 years old at the time, and when the divorce was finalized, her father set off to work as a missionary in countries like India, Malta, and Zimbabwe.
And while Hannah may not have agreed with her father on many of his views, she loved and respected him, and made a point to visit him nearly every year. Meanwhile, her mother moved to a retreat near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young woman, Hannah's friends described her as trustworthy, positive, caring, and sincere, but tellingly, they also knew that she had a particularly low tolerance for stress and conflict, and that she seemed to not be able to cope with trying and traumatic situations as well as most other people.
She later became a teacher and would spend the summer of 2008 in New York City, preparing for a new school year to begin on August 28th. As a teacher, she finally felt like she found her place in the world, and everyone knew how excited she was to meet her new students. So when she failed to turn up on the first day of school, school administrators called her apartment to see if she was sick or had just overslept or something.
Her roommate would say that she wasn't there, but she found Hannah's phone, purse, and passport on her bedroom floor. As hours passed without word, Hannah's friends and coworkers organized a city-wide search starting with the places she was known to frequent. By the following day, the disappearance was big news all over the city, and pictures of Hannah were featured in newspapers and on posters and news broadcasts all across the five boroughs.
And while nobody heard from her while she was missing, she was actually captured on security cameras at a number of businesses. First, she was seen in an Apple store in Manhattan wearing running clothes and checking her email on one of the display computers. One man even asked if she was the young woman who'd recently gone missing, but she managed to convince him that she wasn't.
Then, two weeks later, she was seen in a Starbucks in SoHo. This time, a concerned bystander called the police to report that she'd seen the missing woman, but Hannah slipped out of the back door before officers arrived. Hannah's mother confirmed that it was definitely her daughter on the cameras, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance wouldn't be solved until September 16th-- nearly three weeks after she went missing.
That morning, a ferry boat captain saw what he thought was a dead body floating in New York Harbor, not far from the Statue of Liberty. It was severely sunburned and appeared to have been in the water for quite some time. As the boat pulled alongside the body, crewmen grabbed it by the ankles and shoulders to bring it on board.
But to their surprise, the woman took a deep breath and immediately began sobbing. Hannah was then rushed to the local hospital where she was treated for hypothermia, sunburn, and a severe case of dehydration. When doctors stabilized her condition, investigators questioned her to figure out what had happened and how she ended up in the water.
But weirdly, Hannah had absolutely no recollection of anything that happened between when she disappeared and when she was found in the harbor. However, she remembered nearly everything that had happened beforehand. She also surprised investigators by telling them that she needed to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible because she had a lot of work to do before the first day of school.
In other words, she thought it was still the day she disappeared. Shortly thereafter, Hannah was diagnosed with dissociative fugue. Dissociative fugue is a rare condition characterized by temporary memory loss and large periods of lost time that can last from a few hours to a few years.
Symptoms generally appear first in adolescents and young adults, and they tend to worsen over time for unknown reasons. The most famous patient was a preacher from Rhode Island named Ansel Bourne. In the late 1880s, he traveled to Pennsylvania and set up a stationery and confectioner's business under one name.
Then, two months later, he woke up with no idea of who he was, where he was, or what had happened after he left Rhode Island. Although it's not always the case, dissociative fugue is usually caused by trauma like a natural disaster, war, or other physical or emotional trauma. Doctors would go on to hypnotize Hannah on numerous occasions, but they never uncovered any trauma that would have caused her condition.
Hannah also did a short stint in a psychiatric ward where doctors observed her to make sure she wasn't a danger to herself. And visitors always said she was in remarkably good spirits despite the harrowing ordeal she had just been through. And even then, Hannah wasn't convinced she had dissociative fugue.
She instead thought that she may have been drugged or knocked unconscious and dumped in the harbor after an unreported hit and run accident. Whatever the case, her doctors remained convinced that they'd made the correct diagnosis, and Hannah eventually left New York and joined her mother at the retreat. And after that, she eventually moved to Maryland to work as a teacher's assistant at a prestigious Montessori school.
But in September of 2013, she once again failed to show up on the first day of the fall semester just like she did in New York in 2008. This time, a jogger found her phone and wallet on a hiking trail. One coworker even said that she saw Hannah driving away from school that morning, and investigators also discovered that she hadn't slept in her apartment the previous night.
For Hannah's mother, it was a heartbreaking case of déjà vu, but then just two days later, she got an unexpected phone call at around 11 pm. In a nearly inaudible voice, the person on the other end just said, "Mom? " Hannah then told her mother that she remembered going for a run early that morning on the first day of school, but after that, her memory was totally blank.
When she came to, she was lying in a chilly stream in nearby Wheaton, Maryland. After coming to, Hannah was once again taken to a local hospital, and when her mother arrived, she told doctors about her daughter's condition. After another short stay in the hospital, Hannah eventually became a certified Montessori teacher and accepted a position at a school in Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.
After the harrowing disappearances in New York and Maryland, life in the Caribbean was everything Hannah hoped it would be. The scenery was amazing, the ocean was just a walk away, and she loved her new job and students. And by the fall of 2017, she had three full years as head teacher under her belt.
When she wasn't in the classroom, she spent much of her time swimming and enjoying the view from Sapphire Beach on the eastern tip of the island. In late August of that year, the Caribbean was hit by Hurricane Irma just before the start of the fall semester. Many island residents evacuated, but Hannah decided to stay and ride it out with a few of her coworkers.
During the height of the storm, they were forced to take refuge in their apartment building's tiny laundry room. The hurricane then devastated the island and claimed the lives of more than 50 people. And to make matters worse, Hurricane Maria was just a few days behind it.
Even so, Hannah cleaned out her flooded apartment and continued working on her lesson plans for the upcoming school year. Then, shortly before Hurricane Maria slammed into the island, the then-32-year-old Hannah went missing for a third time. This was first noticed when she missed a mandatory teacher's meeting, and she was last seen leaving her apartment on September 14th.
She also left her roommate a note saying that she was gonna go for a swim at Sapphire Beach and that she planned to go to school afterwards to take care of some unfinished work. Hannah never made it to school, but her unlocked car was found in a parking lot near Sapphire Beach with her purse, passport and cellphone inside. A few other personal possessions were found at a nearby hamburger stand where Hannah often hung out, but employees told investigators that she was acting strangely the last time they saw her.
More alarmingly though, the following morning, her clothes, shoes, and car keys were found in the sand near the water. Almost immediately, tons of volunteers began searching the island and the shoreline around Sapphire Beach. It appeared as though Hannah may have gone for a swim, which is something she often did.
The Coast Guard then sent three helicopters to join the search, but with so many other pressing matters in the wake of the hurricanes, they were ultimately deployed elsewhere. Hannah's mother eventually moved to Saint Thomas and spent much of her time at Sapphire Beach, hoping to find Hannah. But sadly, nobody has seen or heard from her daughter since the day she disappeared.
Each of the times Hannah went missing, she disappeared in the fall, around the time a new school year was about to begin. And while she was passionate about teaching, it's also possible that she found it stressful, and at times, maybe overwhelming. In Saint Thomas, she'd already gotten through three full school years without incident before going missing.
But that year, the start of the school year was delayed by Hurricane Irma and then Maria. And this may have added even more stress and uncertainty to an already difficult period. In addition, Hannah once told a good friend that the fall had always been a difficult time for her, though she never said why.
Another connection between these three disappearances is water. With each of her disappearances, she was found either in or near water for some unknown reason. Unfortunately, beyond that, not much else is known, and though it's easy to assume Hannah was swept out to sea after going for a swim, it makes it all that stranger that we have no idea why these episodes kept occurring.
On the evening of November 7th, 1997, William Moldt was driving his 1994 white Saturn as a long week was coming to a close. The 40-year-old mortgage broker didn't socialize terribly often, but it was a Thursday night, and he needed to blow off some steam, so he decided to head to a club in the Palm Beach, Florida area with some friends. Drssed that night in grey slacks, a white button-down shirt, a tie, and gold jewelry, William stood 6 feet tall and had a broad 225-pound frame.
He looked like the type of guy built to handle his drinks, but it turned out that William wasn't much of a drinker. That night, however, he decided to enjoy a couple of drinks and take the edge off the stress from work. At around 9:30 he called his girlfriend and told her that he'd be heading home soon.
He did end up staying at the club until just before midnight, but at which point, he said his goodbyes and headed to the parking lot. After he walked out of the door of the club that night, William was never seen alive again, and whatever happened to him would remain a complete mystery until an unlikely discovery more than two decades later. 22 years later, a man named Barry was on his way back to his Wellington, Florida home in the late afternoon of August 28th, 2019, when he got a text message.
It was a message from his neighbor, and when he had a chance, he stopped and checked it. Curiously, the neighbor had sent him several photos of an aerial view of a pond. Inside the murky waters, Barry noticed a large white blob that was difficult to make out, but the neighbor's message clued him in to what it might be.
She asked Barry to tell her if it looked like there was a car in the water to him, and after he zoomed in a bit, he saw exactly what his neighbor was seeing. It was definitely a car, but Barry wondered what on earth that had to do with him. When he asked where the photos were taken, he was stunned to see a response.
The car was apparently in a retaining pond in his own backyard. Barry had lived in a community known as The Grand Isles for only about 14 months, but he spent an awful lot of time outside. He enjoyed tending to his landscaping and growing and maintaining pineapple plants in his backyard, so he almost certainly should have noticed something strange in the retaining pond.
For the rest of the drive home, he wondered how a sedan could have sat in his backyard without him or any other neighbors spotting it, but when he got home, he understood. He went right from his car to the edge of the pond, and while standing there, he pulled his phone back out and looked at the images his neighbor sent to get a sense of where exactly the car was. When he was sure it would have been right in front of him, he looked into the water and saw nothing at all.
Whatever was in the water just wasn't visible from the bank, but he started to wonder if he and his neighbor had been mistaken. Barry then reached out to his aunt who also lived in the neighborhood, and she never noticed anything in the pond either. He even reached out to the previous owners of the house, and they were just as shocked to hear the news as Barry initially was.
This white blob in the water was initially discovered by chance. The neighbor's ex-husband was looking at a zoomed-out satellite view of The Grand Isles neighborhood on Google Earth, when he noticed a white speck in one of the ponds. None of the others in the neighborhood had anything that looked like that, so curious, he took a closer look.
As he zoomed in, he swore he could see what looked like a windshield, a trunk, and the roof of a car. That's when he took a few screenshots and sent them to his ex-wife to see if she noticed anything. Since the car was in Barry's backyard, she then forwarded the images to him.
Barry obviously wasn't satisfied with simply looking into the water from the bank though, so he contacted another neighbor and showed him the screenshots. It didn't take a lot of convincing to get the neighbor to come over with his drone so they could get a live view of the pond from the same perspective as the photos Barry was sent. As the drone lifted off the ground and started to gain some altitude, Barry looked over his neighbor's shoulder at the little screen showing what the drone camera was seeing.
And sure enough, the white blob was still there, and it was undeniably a car. Now, Barry's first instinct was to shrug it off, thinking it was probably some old piece of junk that an inconsiderate person wanted to get rid of, and thought the pond was a good place to dispose of it. The more he thought about it though, the more he realized he should probably call the police, just in case he was wrong.
At around 6:40 that evening, patrol cars and unmarked sedans showed up outside Barry's house, and he showed officers the photos on his phone before leading them to the back pond. Soon after, Barry's entire backyard was cordoned off with police crime scene tape, and the area hummed with the activity of detectives, police divers, and tow trucks. For much of that night, Barry watched everything happening in his backyard from his bedroom window.
He eventually had to force himself to lay down and get some rest so he could be somewhat functional at work the next day. And when he woke up around 7 o'clock that morning, all the commotion had long since come to an end. Crews had worked well past midnight before the car finally broke the surface of the cloudy retaining pond.
And when it did, it had clearly been in the water for a long time-- years for sure, maybe even decades. The car was also heavily calcified, and it was tough to determine the make and model at the scene. What they could determine shortly after the car was pulled from the water, however, was that there were skeletal remains in the driver's seat.
It would take two weeks to confirm it, but William had finally been found. This was an almost impossible discovery. William went missing without a single trace 22 years earlier, and thanks to a simple Google Earth search, the mystery of where he had been was solved.
When investigators looked into it further, they learned that the satellite image had been on Google Earth since 2007, but it would sit on the internet for 12 years before someone came across it. In 1997, the year William disappeared, The Grand Isle subdivision was just a patch of dirt, some roads, and a few retaining ponds. Construction on the houses didn't begin until the following year.
And where the car was found, houses lined both long sides of the pond while the short side closest to the street is protected by a guardrail. On the night William left the club, however, there would have been nothing there to keep him from going into the water. Now, with all of that said, while the mystery of where William was for 22 years had finally been solved, what is still unclear is how exactly he ended up anywhere near the pond, let alone inside it.
Because it was a construction zone at the time of William's disappearance, there would have been no reason for him to be in the area. Additionally, the roads in The Grand Isles are what you expect for a housing subdivision-- short and windy, with many ending in cul-de-sacs. However, based on how the car was positioned in the water, police believed William was heading eastward toward an intersection when he lost control of his car.
Judging by where the car came to rest, it appears as though William must have hit the water with some speed. Additionally, at the time William disappeared in 1997, missing persons detectives had all but ruled out the possibility that he drove into a body of water in the area. This was because witnesses who saw moments before he left the club, reported that he appeared sober and lucid despite having a couple drinks.
If this was truly the case, it makes his ending up in the pond even more of a mystery. On Sunday, May 8th, 1938, the West family left their home bright and early to attend church service in Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is located south of Buffalo, New York. After mass, Shirley and his wife, Cecilia, loaded their two daughters and one son into the car and headed down toward the white gravel road area of the Allegheny Forest.
It was Mother's Day, and the family was gonna celebrate with a picnic, and once they'd eaten their lunch, they split up to enjoy different activities. By then, it was about 3 o'clock, and Shirley wanted to go fishing, while Cecilia returned to the car to rest for a while. Meanwhile, the children were left in the care of 11-year-old Dorothea, the oldest of the siblings, and they were gonna go pick flowers together.
After a while, the children had picked a beautiful bouquet of wild violets, and Dorothea left her siblings, including the youngest, 4-year-old Marjorie, to bring the flowers to their mother. Cecilia thanked Dorothea for the thoughtful little handpicked bouquet, and then the 11-year-old turned back to catch up with her siblings. Weirdly though, when she went to look for them, only her brother was there, and little Marjorie was gone.
Immediately, the family began to search for the little girl, but there was no sign of her at all. Now, one of Marjorie's favorite games was hide-and-seek, so they initially believed that maybe she was trying to play, but after not finding her quickly, the situation became much more concerning. So, gathering everyone back up into the car, Shirley flew down the highway toward the nearest phone about 7 miles away in the town of Kane to call police.
Soon after, the area where she went missing was swarming with officers, and by that evening, more than 200 volunteers were combing the forest for her. As the sun went down, more people arrived with headlamps and flashlights to assist, and the search for Marjorie would continue until 1 am when a cold rainstorm blew into the area. What occurred in the following days was a search effort that was nearly unmatched in its scale.
The day after her disappearance, 500 people came to the forest to search, while police stopped cars within a 300-mile radius of where she went missing. Some time later, bloodhounds were also used in hopes of picking up her trail, but the reports afterward were conflicting. Some newspapers at the time reported that dogs led police to a mountain cabin that had its door nailed shut, but there was nothing related to Marjorie inside.
Marjorie's family, however, claimed that the dogs led police to a roadside where the scent suddenly disappeared, indicating that she might have been taken by a passing motorist. Whatever the case, several days after the little girl vanished, the mayor of Bradford appealed to the public for a thousand volunteers to join in the effort, and the community was so affected by the story that more than 2,500 showed up. So next, moving through the forest, shoulder-to-shoulder, they meticulously scoured the area, covering 35 square miles, or about 90 square kilometers, and would make a few notable discoveries.
The first was near a boulder where the children were picking flowers where someone discovered a torn piece of lace, but unfortunately, Marjorie's outfit that day supposedly didn't have any lace on it. A second more concerning find was made several miles from the site of her disappearance when searchers found a freshly dug hole that appeared to be about the size of a child. But as strange as it was, the men who dug the hole were actually located, and they admitted to using the forest for hiding casks of wine.
For almost this first entire week, Shirley never once left the forest, and so he came home on May 16th, just long enough to have dinner before returning to continue searching. Soon enough, posters were put up everywhere, rewards were offered, and newspapers around the US had picked up the story, which had the whole country fixated on developments coming out of Western Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, police continued to interview anyone and everyone who came forward, which produced the first potentially promising information.
Several of the people interviewed claimed to have seen three cars come through that part of the forest around the time of Marjorie's disappearance-- one of which was going so fast that an oncoming car needed to pull into a ditch to get out of its way. Two of the people in the cars were identified and cleared, but the one that sped through in a Plymouth sedan was never located, and the driver never came forward. And unfortunately, all these efforts and tips led absolutely nowhere, and for months, the search for the red-haired child named Marjorie, turned up nothing.
The search for Marjorie would then continue through October 1938, but thousands of searchers would be reduced to just four police officers assigned to the task. Just under ten years prior to Marjorie's disappearance, the stock market crash of 1929 crushed the US economy and ushered in a downturn that uprooted many lives. By 1933, more than 12 million Americans were unemployed, which was 25 percent of the total workforce.
Money was extremely tight, and that created desperate people and equally desperate schemes. At the exact same time, cars were becoming much more commonplace, and with the increased use of highways, abductions spiked. This was apparently because kids would be lured into cars and then taken to orphanages, and sold for as much as $1,000, which is equal to about $24,000 today.
Unlike the later stranger danger scare of the 1980s, there was actually substantial proof of the issue in the first half of the 20th century. Like, for example, in 1950, it was alleged that a Tennessee children's home paid $1,000,000 in the 1930s for 1,000 babies. This situation arose because poor parents in need of money were essentially convinced to sell their children.
But even worse than that, many kids ended up in the care of these homes through kidnapping by strangers. So, police at the time of Marjorie's disappearance in 1938 had to confront this possibility. And particularly, after a report came in from a neighboring state.
Just a few days after Mother's Day, a taxi driver in Thomas, West Virginia came forward to tell police about a man he encountered with a crying young girl. At around 11:30 that night, the man approached the driver, looking for a hotel room. The driver claimed that the child matched Marjorie's physical description, but even more compelling was the timeline.
Had the man abducted her from the white gravel road area in Pennsylvania around 3 o'clock that day, it would have taken eight hours or so to arrive in Thomas. This means they would have gotten in town exactly when the taxi driver saw them, and Thomas just so happened to be about midway to Tennessee. In the months afterward, however, Pennsylvania police tracked down a man who was traveling with his 5-year-old daughter that night.
He would say that the fog that night had gotten so bad that instead of continuing to their home in West Virginia, he opted to find a hotel for the night and drive back in the morning when the fog had cleared. This then frustrated his daughter who just wanted to go home, which put her into tears. And unfortunately, with this explanation, not much more came of it at the time.
More than 60 years later, however, this account would come into question. In 1998, a writer and college professor named Harold "Bud" Beck, began research in the case of Marjorie's disappearance for a book he planned to write, and offered a $10,000 reward for any information about her. On his website, he uploaded images of Marjorie and her sister, Dorothea, as an older woman on the chance that the sisters might resemble one another.
Before long, Bud received a phone call from a woman who claimed to work with someone who looked exactly like Dorothea. Unfortunately, soon after when Bud traveled to Florida to meet the woman, the woman denied being Marjorie. So once again, Bud figured that that was that, but it wasn't.
In 2005, the woman he suspected of being Marjorie contacted him once again, and this time, wanted to talk. Her name was Sylvia Waldrop London, and by 2005, she had moved back to her family's farm in North Carolina. Bud went to visit her as soon as she could make it there, and when he did, Sylvia told him a story that her mother shared on her deathbed.
Before she launched into it, she told Bud there were two conditions. The first was that Bud would have to promise to protect her identity from everyone in the family, with the exception of Dorothea, who Sylvia wanted to meet. The second was that he could only publish the story after her death, which sadly came in 2009.
What she told Bud in 2005 goes as follows. In early 1938, Sylvia's father traveled to Bradford to work in the oil refineries that winter, but in the first sign of spring, he planned to return to North Carolina to tend to his crops. On Mother's Day that year, Sylvia's father began his drive south, which took him through the Allegheny Forest.
There, he accidentally hit a little girl with his car. In a panic, he scooped her up with plans of taking her to the hospital in Kane, but she was unconscious, and he was afraid of getting in trouble if she died, so he continued toward his North Carolina home. Along the way, the little girl woke up like she had just taken a nap, with no ill effects from being struck by the car.
Then, rather than turn around and take her back to Bradford to find her parents, the man kept on his way. This is because, just prior to leaving North Carolina to work at the refineries in Bradford, the couple's only daughter died. And they believed they could no longer have children, so he thought it would be the perfect Mother's Day gift to his wife if he brought this little girl home to raise together.
That little girl, according to her mother, was Sylvia. In addition to that, after her denials when Bud came to meet her in Florida in 1998, Sylvia also admitted to having memories of a previous family and living in a place with frequent heavy snow. She remembered a girl named Dorothea too, but her family in North Carolina always seemed to brush these aside as if she had gotten carried away with her imagination.
In the story she told Bud, Sylvia also remembered being at a West Virginia hotel in tears because she had been taken from her parents. Also, several years after Sylvia was allegedly taken from her family in Pennsylvania, her father was sent to fight in World War II-- during which he lost an arm. He would always say that this was God's way of punishing him for kidnapping Sylvia.
Unfortunately, however, at the time Bud was told this story, Dorothea was in such bad health that the two potential sisters never met before they passed away. By this point, you might be wondering about DNA. Sylvia did have a daughter, and several of Marjorie's relatives supplied samples via cheek swabs to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Whether or not Sylvia's daughter has supplied a sample of her own so that an analysis can be taken, is unfortunately unknown. And while Sylvia's story is compelling and Bud has unwaveringly stood by it, Marjorie's story is still in question to this day. As such, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Marjorie's disappearance is still considered unsolved.
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