The Puzzling Disappearance of Polly Melton

if I had a nickel for every time a woman disappeared after separating from her friends on a well-marked trail in the Great Smoky Mountains I'd have two nickels which is not a lot in today's economy I'm Aiden Madison welcome back to the lore [Music] Lodge it's pretty easy to get lost in the woods in fact considerably more so than most people think paths will sometimes become overgrown weather conditions May obscure landmarks and false Trails often lead people astray even well-trod and marked routes like the Appalachian Trail can become confusing in some places and in some

places people leave simply because they think they can car a better path by themselves the vast majority of these individuals are eventually found though not necessarily alive but even when somebody is found deceased the state of their remains and their physical location usually allows investigators to piece together what happened from the point that they left the trail to the point that they met their fate every once in a while however someone just vanishes into thin air such as 7-year-old Dennis Martin or 16-year-old trenny Gibson both of whom disappeared in the Smokies without leaving a single

clue as to where they'd gone having looked over a number of these disappearances in the Great Smokies over the last several months what I did notice is that most of these people are young between the ages of you know seven at the youngest with Dennis Martin and then up into the mid 20s with Mark Hansen so at first glance it might seem like it's something to do with youth but when it comes to Thelma Pauline Melton that simply can't be the case the 58-year-old woman who stood at 5 10 in tall and weighed around 180

lbs was last seen walking in the Deep Creek area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park a place with which she was deeply familiar Pauline's Father Fred McAllister was a part owner of a campground just south of the Deep Creek entrance to the park and for over 20 years Pauline had spent her Summers there in late September of 19 1981 Pauline and her husband Bob were staying at that Campground when the former left to go on a walk with her friends Trula gudger and Pauline Canon and she would never return and unlike many of our

other cases this one did not occur deep inside of the park miles from pave roads in Civilization nor did this happen along a more wild trail with plenty of confusing offshoots no Pauline went missing just one mile into the park along a gravel road which she'd walk without incident for over 2 decades a trail which was right next to the very Deep Creek after which the campground and the area were named between her familiarity with the trail the fact that that trail was for all intents and purposes a gravel road and the fact that Deep

Creek runs directly out of the park and back to the very doorstep of what was once their Campground you have to wonder how the hell did she get lost despite how odd the circumstances of her disappearance were Pauline's story is not nearly as well known as many of the Missing 411 cases you'll find on YouTube in fact even David potus's entry in his Eastern United States book is really only about two pages long according to politus his information regarding this case was gleaned from National Park Service documents retrieved via a Foya request review of archived

newspaper articles and interviews with potential Witnesses and participants in the search now the majority of his narrative seems to come from one book that we've seen him site before unsolved disappearances in the Great Smoky Mountains by Juanita Baldwin even though it is not listed as a source in this section however in the Abe Ramsey case that we covered he mentioned this book by name and his chapter on the instant reads a little bit more like a summary of the material in Baldwin's book than it does David's original work that said while I've been unable to

find any National Park Service files online about this case myself it is possible that David politus has access to something that is not yet on the internet so it is possible that he got his information that way and then of course there's the papers now speaking of papers one thing that has been a constant struggle for me when researching these cases in the past has been finding reliable information about what happened via the news media newspapers.com has been an absolute godsend because I'm almost always able to find a contemporary article on whatever I'm researching but

when I can't I'm forced to sign up for subscription after subscription after subscription to random local news websites and then I see them show up you know in in my bank statements every month and I'm like when did I subscribe to the the news media in some small town in Australia when did I do that and because you know it's something that I do really quickly and then never think about again I I I don't notice it until I've spent hundreds of dollars on a website I don't read and that's why I wanted to talk

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can go to rocketman.com Lodge or click the link right in the description to get started for free today and if you like the free version and you're looking for a few more features well rocket money offers a paid premium version once again if you'd like to give rocket money a try you can go to Rocket money.com lorod or click the link in the description and get started for free [Music] today on October 2nd 1981 the Knoxville News Sentinel published an article by staff writer Carson Brewer entitled frightening mystery of great Smokey's hiker sorry frightening mystery

of missing great Smokey's hiker grows it is a frightening puzzle Brewer wrote what happened to Thelma Pauline Melton missing from a much-used easy Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a week today Pauline who went by ply was part of a group of about 10 families which leased a plot of land beside Deep Creek just outside the park and plac their trailer homes there according to Ranger Ron Cornelius the reason they did this was that they wanted to stay in the area longer than the Park Service would allow at their campgrounds to give you

specifics some of the families who stay at this Campground would stay there all the way from April through the end of October so this wasn't just the kind of place where people were going for a couple of weeks during the summer staying and then heading back home this was basically where where many of these people lived half of their year for Pauline and her husband Bob their home in the winters was in Florida if I'm not mistaken Jacksonville Florida this group of families was reportedly pretty exclusive about who was allowed into the campground uh not

permitting any newcomers unless every family favored admitting the new family and having bought in back in 1958 the meltons were one of the longest running members of this group and as we mentioned earlier in the video and according to the Charlotte Observer Pauline's husband Bob wasn't her only connection to the campground her Father Fred McAllister was an old friend of her husband and an owner himself sadly paully hadn't had great luck with her husbands uh her first husband Earl Boseman dying of an unmentioned reasons in the early 1950s and then her second husband Tom mckian

died of throat cancer sometime after that it's hard to tell exactly The Observer article seems to imply he also died in the ' 50s though 20 years pulie senior Bob Melton was a widower himself and the two got married at the campground in 1975 of course along with Bob Polly had several other friends in their little Community which was mostly made up of retirees going back to that article in the Knoxville News Sentinel uh Brewer wrote near the middle of the afternoon last Friday that being September 25th 1981 Mrs Melton and two friends Mrs Trula

gudger and Mrs Pauline Cannon walked from their summer home trailers up through the Deep Creek Campground and On Up a Road along the creek to a turnaround it's about 2 miles four miles round trip the three women had been friends for a very long time Ranger Dan Bernett telling the Elizabethton star that this was a routine they followed since 1958 on many days the paper continued some of them would hike 2 miles up Deep Creek Trail an easy walking path that snakes beside Deep Creek and up to the aforementioned turnaround Point according to Ranger Chuck

Harris she liked the particular Trail she hikes on because it was an easy trail with and this is important an excellent roaded I haven't been on this Trail myself but taking a look at it over on all Trails it seems to be pretty straightforward and easy with an elevation gain of only 253 ft that's 77 M across the 2 miles to the turnaround Point according to Ranger Ron Cornelius they reached that point without any issue then after they'd walked about a half mile of the return Mrs Melton started walking faster and got several yards ahead

of her friends depending on the source the number of yards seems to vary a little bit I've seen everything from she was just a few yards ahead to she was 75 yards ahead to she was half a mile ahead I would wager that the 75 yards part seems to be the most accurate based on everything I saw part of the reason I air on the 75 yards aspect is because of the reporting by Carson Brewer who wrote that the ranger said the others considered this a little unusual and that they called to her making some

comment about her walking so fast and she looked back and laughed typically calling out is something that you say in the context of you know having to speak to somebody who's a ways off from you you wouldn't call out to somebody who's only 10 yards in front of you you would just talk to them similarly you probably wouldn't call out somebody who's like half a mile ahead of you because they probably won't hear you so to me that does imply that she was probably you know somewhere between like 50 and 100 yard away obviously that's

something of an assumption but I would argue it's a reasonable one in any case sometime following this interaction where pully was ahead of them and they called out to her she turned around looked at him and laugh about a mile from the trail head Polly rounded a bend over a slight Hill and disappeared from view based on the descriptions given in the papers which were generally that she went up a slight incline and then around a bend and they lost sight of her going over that Hill I believe it was likely about right here that

they lost sight of her Trula and the other Pauline clearly thought that this Behavior was a little bit odd but they figured that she had just gone ahead and they'd see her back at the campsite so they continued onward got home and upon reaching the campground realized oh Paulie's not here Not only was she not there but nobody had seen her return when they learned she had not come back the new Sentinel reads the two women and Mrs Cannon's husband Jack walked back over the entire route of the hike to look for her when their

search turned up nothing they alerted the park rangers who managed to get a search team out there around 5:00 p.m. before dark Rangers were able to search for miles up the Deep Creek Trail and side Trails she might have taken including the Nolan divide Trail Indian Creek Trail and the hammer Branch Trail to juny wank Falls the Indian Creek and Hammer Branch Trails both Branch off just beyond where I believe she was last seen while the Nolan divide Trail actually leaves directly from the campground in addition to the Rangers involved in the initial search dogs

were also brought in for the first 3 days but in order to limit scent contamination in the area the number of people actually involved in the search was itself also limited despite their best efforts to preserve the scent however the Asheville Times reported on Tuesday the 29th that the dogs were unable to pick up a trail and that Ranger Bernett said Monday would likely be the last day that Searchers would use the tracking dogs instead they reported on Tuesday that the search would be expanded with foot units covering a larger area in the search and

that organizations participating were the North Carolina search and rescue dog Association team from Canton the Civil Air Patrol and several Air Force personel I would give you more details about how the search was conducted and where they went and what they found but there aren't any so far as I can tell 12 to 15 Rangers a few dogs and a helicopter were about all that they used during this search and by Friday October 2nd investigators were beginning to believe that it was more likely ply was not any longer in the park this was because during

those few days that they were searching they found absolutely no evidence that she had ever left the trail no sign of a Struggle No sign that anybody was dragged no Footprints leading away just she wasn't there granted the search area was rather limited but that was largely due to the fact that all of the people who knew pully had told investigators she did not like rugged hikes and if you've ever been down into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park it's everything is rugged even a lot of the trails themselves are pretty rugged but you go

off Trail and it's just dense underbrush as far as the eye can see which is not far one possibility ility the new Sentinel reported is that she could have left the park in an automobile which were permitted in the campground but not beyond the gate at the upper end of it while Deep Creek Trail is described as being essentially a gravel road it seems that Vehicles were not allowed beyond the campground unless it was National Park Service official business if it were the case that Polly had left the park or at least the campground in

an automobile then one thing had to be true either she intended to disappear or she was kidnapped right there in the parking lot the would be pretty Brazen given that there was a good possibility that somebody in the campground or just outside of it would have heard pulie scream if she was attacked but of course it is also possible that somebody could have pulled a gun said keep quiet things along those lines in any case her friend seemed certain that she would not have gotten into an automobile with anyone she did not know unless she

was forced to that obviously would imply Foul Play and the pot of spaghetti sauce she'd left simmering back at the campground as well as the widely reported fact that she wasn't carrying any cigarettes on her person uh despite being a two pack a day smoker supported the conclusion that she intended to return home that evening but who would have taken her and why if by some miracle she was still there in the park however Rangers were not optimistic Brewer reported that some Park officials think that if she is still in the park chances of finding

her are becoming pretty slim that said they did hold out some hope because the weather has not yet been so cold that she would have died of exposure and she probably could have found water she almost certainly could have found water there are Creeks everywhere what was more concerning was Paulie's physical condition because in addition to being a two- pack a day smoker Ranger Ron Cornelius said that she was also suffering from hypertension hypertension is when your blood pressure is consistently higher than normal and it causes an elevated risk for things like heart disease stroke

aneurysm kidney disease and even vascular dementia for reasons not noted in the paper she also recently had a prescription for a tranquilizer fill just prior to her disappearance which Paulie's sister kit Postell suggested could have had something to do with it from what I can tell the tranquilizer was the benzodiazapine Valium today you probably wouldn't hear Valium referred to as a tranquilizer but back in the 1980s the terminology was a little different vume is in the same family of drugs as Xanax and Adavan but it's a little bit faster acting and it doesn't last quite

as long it's the kind of thing you might be prescribed for acute panic attacks or just before you go into something like a a minor surgery I was given vum before I had my wisdom teeth out for example when you take volum it usually relaxes your your system to the point where you feel a little bit a little bit dazed it's not it's not like it doesn't make you loopy necessarily but you're going to be a little bit a little slow to react to things and that was the concern here the paper specifically says that

kit postell's reason to be concerned was that Pauline Melton might have become dazed and somehow wandered away she also expressed frustration in the November 5th article of the Charlotte Observer how the search was handled and communicated especially since it was given up after only four or 5 days after having patiently waited for 40 days we've had absolutely no word kit reportedly said it's easy to say she's not in the park but how do they know they haven't let the family know dudam squat dudam squats a new one for me I heard diddly squat growing up

tra gudger had similar concerns the paper reporting that she said I think she's still in those woods I don't think she walked out of there she suggested that pully may have had a mental collapse or that she could have had an aneurysm and walked off the trail in confusion but despite these concerns the Park Service remained steadfast that Polly had left the park in that same November 5th article entitled missing woman's family wants probe Observer Reporter dot Jackson uh reported that Park officials maintain Melton left the park and say there is no evidence of Foul

Play I'm only going to bring this up right now because it's been relevant to recent discussions about recent cases that we've had but they're it's it's not super important in this case there is a serious difference between there is no evidence of Foul Play and we have ruled Foul Play out a certain group of people under public scrutiny at the time of recording this video keep saying that the police say there is no evidence of Foul Play and therefore they have been cleared that's not what that means proud foots part of the reason that this

little aside is also relevant to this discussion is that the paper also noted regarding The Disappearance of Pauline Melton that uh the FBI could not become involved in the case unless there was suspicion of Foul Play as those following the case I was referring to here I'm just going to come out and just openly say I'm talking about Sebastian Rogers uh for those who have been following that case you may be aware that the FBI recently offered a $50,000 reward uh for anybody who came forward with information leading to the the discovery the recovery of

Sebastian Rogers many people on the wonderful Cesspool known as Reddit keep saying that uh the FBI getting involved here does not imply Foul Play the FBI getting involved implies exactly one thing here and it is foul play or I should say in my opinion the FBI offering a reward for the finding of Sebastian Rogers implies that the FBI is suspicious that Foul Play may have been related to said Disappearance in my opinion allegedly perhaps per chance so in this case the National Park Service basically came out and said we're not investigating this as foul play

at all we're not suspicious that there is foul play at all therefore the FBI isn't going to get involved in addition to that the sh shiff of the county did not have any jurisdiction over the national park so he couldn't get involved without their request either but interestingly enough the government of North Carolina pretty heavily implied to the the Melton family and their their friends that they should request the assistance of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation so that would suggest that the North Carolina officials involved looked at this case and went I think

there might be Foul Play but I can't get involved without a request either since the National Park Service was refusing to make that request the uh the Melton pastel mallister family as a whole could go to the attorney general and request their involvement doing that would have allowed the state Bureau of Investigation to get involved and then one final possibly relevant detail comes out of the news reporting on November 5th which was the information that pully may have been wearing a considerable amount of diamond jewelry The Observer reported that a Bryson City man who did

not know the postels had told them that the woman who disappeared was known to wear a lot of jewelry and local people suggested sorry suspected it might have attracted the attention of someone who could have forced her off the trail pully Sister Kim confirmed that this was possible saying she probably did have on a couple of rings and a diamond watch band I will say that the specificity here raises my eyebrows a little bit regarding you know how this information came to be that's that's very specific it's totally possible that she wore the exact same

jewelry every day but kit was not there so that's why I'm question in it a bit I don't think it's something to blow up over I don't think it's something to immediately turn my eyes and go oh well this was clearly Kit's attempt to get rid of pully so that she could have the entire inheritance when their 89-year-old father who was in poor health passed away I'm not saying that and I'm not this is not an ironic thing of me being like I'm not saying this is me being serious I I I don't think this

alone is enough evidence to get there what I do think it might be evidence of is that maybe they were trying to give a reason to call for Foul Play because that piece of information did not appear until long after the formal search had ended in addition to that I have not found any corroborations from Trula the other Pauline or anyone else at the campground that Paulie was wearing that jewelry that day still with all of that information out in the open with all the reported information indicating that she intended to return to the campground

the only reason I'd hesitate to suspect foul play in this is the broad daylight of it all for Juanita Baldwin however there's a different reason [Music] Lot's wife was on Sodom and gomorah Road she looked back and became a pillar of salt her fate is explained in the Bible on September 25th 1981 Polly Melton was hiking Deep Creek Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park she looked back and vanished her fate is yet to be explained that is the opening passage of the unsolved disappearances Narrative of the Pauline Melton story and oh boy is

is that one of the paragraphs of all time strange opening passage aside Baldwin's version of events largely follows in line with the narrative that we constructed from the news reporting though several additional details present in her retelling drive her to a somewhat different conclusion instead of a kidnapping Baldwin seems partial to the idea of an intentional disappearance based upon several factors under the subheading of analyzing Paulie's life Baldwin writes that on Monday September 28th 1981 following Paulie's disappearance on Friday Tom Harris pastor of Victory Baptist Church told Park Rangers Mrs Melton had spoken with him

and seemed slightly depressed of late however he allegedly emphasized that she was not as depressed as she had been two years ago when she was a heavy user of Valium in his opinion she was not suicidal but was not as active or tidy as she had been in the spring Baldwin added that Pastor Harris had found out that a bottle of vume prescribed for Bob Melton was missing from their trailer Bob missed it after pully disappeared I'll I'll get to why I emphasized that in a moment in addition to the comments on drugs and depression

Pastor Harris apparently also revealed that he thought one conversation with Mrs Melton might be significant and that conversation had occurred about 3 years before she disappeared it was just after Paulie's mother had passed away and Harris had tried to comfort her with the thought she would see her mother in heaven one day at which point Mrs Melton had said she wanted to go to heaven following this she talked about persons who were running around on their spouses she said she would never do that according to bald when in thinking back over their conversation Pastor Harris

said he had come to feel that Mrs Melton had committed adultery and felt guilty along with that information from Harris Baldwin also notes that on October 6 1981 Nell Rickman the supervisor at the Bryson City Presbyterian Church Nutrition Center provided the authorities with new information it should be noted that that is a different Church from Tom Harris Tom Harris was Victory Baptist this is Bryson City Presbyterian supposedly Nell had been out of town when the incident occurred and she was was therefore unable to get her relevant information to authorities until after the search had been

suspended this information does not appear in the papers but Baldwin earlier in the chapter noted that pully volunteered at that Distribution Center that Nutrition Center it appears to have been something of a food bank every Friday she went on to say that the procedure at the center was for volunteers to sign up at the end of the day for the next day they intended to work and that while she had worked on the 24th paully did not sign up to work on the 25th apparently she offered no explanation to anybody for why she hadn't signed

up though it's unclear if anybody actually asked but another unusual thing that Polly did on this particular weekend was that she allegedly made several phone calls using the church telephone and investigators were unable to determine where these calls went and nobody who knew Polly remembered receiving any calls from her on that day Baldwin says that she interviewed several of the patrons at the Nutritional Center during her research and related that they found pully to be friendly and helpful and also told Baldwin about a time that she had joked about giving up on weight loss allegedly

the 5' 10 or 11 in tall 170 or 180 lb uh poly told them if fate would grant me a wish I would wish to be light enough to walk without leaving Footprints once again I will draw your attention to the specificity of that comment earlier in the chapter Baldwin had remarked that in her youth Polly could probably have been described as an Amazonian Beauty and although she never confided that there had been lovers in her life those who knew her had little doubt at this point however she was overweight suffering from high blood pressure

and nausea and taking medication for them and Baldwin continues writing that some of those who knew her had wondered privately if Polly was on the brink of a domestic apocalypse towards the end of the chapter the author brings this notion of domestic unhappiness back around noting that there have been rumors that she simply walked away from her life and began a new life with a new partner Baldwin writing in the third person and in the sense that she said Juani to Baldwin interviewed people not the author interviewed people I don't know maybe that bugs me

for no reason but it does bug me uh she continued on to say that the Rangers She interviewed were convinced that uh poly was too intelligent and too strong to have gone with a kidnapper without a struggle now in my opinion that doesn't really track with what the Rangers told the papers about pully which was that she was very unhealthy in multiple ways and also just because she would have put up a fight does not necessarily mean that she would have won that fight on the other hand the Rangers allegedly remembered her as a big

woman and a pleasant camper who knew the area too well to have become lost even under medication and they believed that had she found herself to be lost she would have just sat down and awaited rescue Baldwin also claims they told her that there was no bear or other animal in the area large enough to have eaten or dragged away a woman her size so far that no trace of her could be found by the time the search was made while I don't doubt that the Rangers would have dismissed animal predation I am skeptical of

Baldwin's explanation for why given that black bears are absolutely big enough to do that you would also have to consider that had paully seen a black bear and become frightened of it she probably would have run away which means that she would have ended up off Trail somewhere the issue there is that given how out of shape she was and the fact that she was not accustomed to hiking rugged terrain she probably would not have made it all that far and over the course of the several days that followed the dogs probably would have smelled

her decomposing unless of course she was in fact attacked by a bear killed and then buried underground which some dogs wouldn't necessarily catch that said the dogs found absolutely no scent Trail whatsoever so this is kind of up in the air dogs are not infallible you would think that they would have found something they didn't it could go either way here point is I I I question what Baldwin said here it's not that I question how the Rangers did their search I question what Baldwin said and I'll get into my reasons later cuz I I

have more reasons than just that one thing anyway at the end of the chapter the author wraps everything up by suggesting that perhaps fate granted Paulie's wish to walk walk away without leaving Footprints and if Baldwin's information is accurate it does seem like a fair question but can we trust [Music] Baldwin when you Google the Pauline Melton disappearance you will probably see sites like the Charlie project and the do Network both amateur but generally well-regarded databases uncritically accepting Baldwin's narrative as an accurate representation of events typically I would structure this kind of critique a little

bit differently but for the fact that nearly every article directly cites Baldwin's work on this case and for that reason I feel the need to address some credibility issues I initially encountered this book while researching for a different case in this cluster and to be honest it was the content of that chapter that raised my eyebrows first though I want to address some issues within the poly Melton chapter for example Baldwin claims that contacts with Paulie's two former husbands yielded no leads which is C certainly true because her two former husbands had been dead for

years according to the papers it's kind of hard to excuse that kind of an oversight is just a simple mistake and it's also not the only one Baldwin also says that Polly had her cigarettes on her when she disappeared while the papers emphatically say the opposite and then another issue is that it was paully that had the vum prescription not Bob so while it's not impossible that Bob might have noticed that a valume bottle was missing it also isn't ever said that Bob had his own valum prescription or that Pauline had a valume bottle missing

like there's absolutely no report I could find that said that there was a missing valume bottle you would think that if the investigators found a missing valum bottle that would have been mentioned somewhere considering that her being on vume was in fact mentioned specifically you would assume that in do Jackson's article on November 5th for the Charlotte Observer this would be mentioned since that is the article that mentions the tranquilizer considering the fact that Baldwin does not cite a single written Source throughout the entirety of the this chapter really throughout the entirety of the book

one should be extremely cautious in taking her words at face value especially when she claims people said something in interviews and then doesn't provide any corroboration but like I said my concerns over Baldwin's credibility extend beyond this chapter and first arose when I was researching The Abe Ramsey case I do feel like I should really quickly explain because we get comments about this sometimes that people are going why are you attacking these people why are you tearing down the work of others why can't you just be supportive I come from an academic background peer review

is just what we do I know that sounds a little dismissive a little smug maybe a little arrogant but I I'm just getting tired of explaining it to people when I criticize David potus's work I'm not imputing his character I'm saying I don't think his work is credible somebody can both be a good person and a bad researcher there's a reason that when I attack someone's work I attack their work not their person not not who they are and that's what I'm doing here I'm not coming in here to say that Wanita Baldwin is a

bad person who's making up stories I'm not saying that about David politus either I'm just saying that reading their work I'm not particularly inclined to trust it in fact if you go back and look at our comment sections on videos that are really over a year and a half old you'll see a lot of people going hey uh this person did this case also and they found some things that you got wrong here uh one of the most common that we saw was people going hey you got this wrong uh everybody go watch the the

missing Enigma videos so I went and I watched the missing Enigma videos went oh I got this wrong and then called or I I dm'd Nick and was like hey do you want to come on and talk about Missing 411 with me and now we have a great working relationship I feel that the quality of my work has improved as a result of people telling me I was wrong and need to do better research that's all I'm doing here is the exact same thing as those commenters so I apologize if that came across as rude

or smug it was not intended that way I didn't write this down it's kind of off the cuff all that is to say that when I'm criticizing somebody's work that's all I'm doing I'm not trying to ride their coattails I'm not clout chasing I do all of my own original research for these videos and I consult sources that disagree with me or sources that are popular as well just because I want to see all right how'd they do did they catch something I didn't is there a reason to worry about the popular narrative it's not

an attack on these people as individuals all of that said this book has credibility issues while unsolved disappearances does have a bibliography it does not contain endnotes footnotes or even inline citations and on top of that reading the bibliography itself Baldwin doesn't cite specific issues of archival documents but rather the entire archive that she's using as I said in the Ramsey video this makes it functionally impossible to verify anything that she's written Especially since one citation in the bibliography literally reads numerous internet websites that chapter on Abe Ramsey which refers to the missing child as

Abraham Carol Ramsey when all contemporary reports name him as Abraham Lincoln Ramsay also gets the story wrong in basically every single way to quickly recap Baldwin claimed that the family dog mle ran into the woods after hearing other dogs barking and that several hours later three-year-old Abe went off into the woods to look for the dog in reality there was no dog named Motley and Abe went missing after he tried to follow his siblings to a store she also claimed that this fictional dog was found injured under the porch which again entirely fabricated following this

Bal says that around 400 p.m. the rest of the ramsy children arrived home from school and were immediately sent out to look for Abe but they too failed to locate the child quick reminder they weren't at school they were at the store Baldwin continues the story by saying that when Abe's moonshining Father John Ramsay who also pretended to run a mill as a day job returned home that afternoon he too searched for his son miles into the forest but it was to no avail she also claims that decades later another Moonshiner or perhaps John Ramsay

himself can confess on his deathbed to having shot Abraham Lincoln ramsy and then uh burying him inside of one of the mash barrels underground allegedly this occurred because the Moonshiners were up at the still heard something trudging through the forest called out asking for the password and then hearing nothing shot randomly into the woods I did go into some more detail about this in the ab Ramsey video itself I just want to give you a summary version to move on quickly I bring this up because as you might be anticipating there is absolutely no evidence

that John Ramsey was involved in the Moonshine industry and there is also no evidence no documentation of this alleged shooting and the alleged confession of a man who mistook a three-year-old boy for a federal liquor agent if you're wondering why I'm so frustrated about this specific case it's because the real story was not particularly difficult to find it was published in multiple newspapers on March 27th 28th and 31st of 1919 and the first of which published in The Tennessean Bears the headline mystery solved as body of Lost Child is found according to the author of

that article the body of Abraham Lincoln Ramsay was found in a hollow log in a dense forest about three miles from his home it was thought the boy had crawled into the log to seek shelter and then had died there either of exposure or hunger in my opinion something like a spider bite would also be possible because it would be difficult to find after two weeks of decomposition the ab Ramsey section isn't the only one in W de Baldwin's book that has what appeared to be Fabrications in it uh as unsolved disappearances also covers the

disappearances of trenny Gibson and Dennis Martin I didn't want to make this video entirely about dunking on another researcher's work but I felt it was my responsibility to put this out there given how ubiquitous the Baldwin version of this story is now that said it is still weird as all hell looking over the evidence there's really only a few possibilities here she may have been a victim of Foul Play and there are two possible ways that could have happened one of them is that she could have been kidnapped upon reaching the parking lot that of

course begs the question of why I you know nobody ever received a ransom letter and in the trafficking industry 58-year-old women are not exactly a common Target another possibility could be that someone who was local to the area perhaps involved in the drug trade or just a petty criminal saw her hiking saw that she had on a diamond watch band and several diamond rings and thought hey I will rob this person if this is what happened it is unlikely yet possible that she could have died as a result of this encounter and that whoever was

the perpetrator you know carried her off somewhere in that circumstance I think the uh what was brought up about the bear actually is a little bit more relevant because Polly was not a small woman she was again 510 5'11 and 170 to 180 lb even just carrying that along a simple level Trail is going to be difficult carrying that much weight across this landscape damn near impossible for your average person in an isolated incident I could see why somebody might go to the conclusion of a certain you know big-footed type of creature but there's there's

no evidence of that kind of thing in this area we've we've looked at a lot of these cases so far and and not once has Bigfoot been a reasonable conclusion and I'm not even saying that from the position of like saying Bigfoot doesn't exist I'm just saying if Bigfoot exists he's not here now the tree people that's another question another thing for another time you know what no no no the tree people is a thing for right now back when we were down in Tennessee a couple of years ago riding around with wendon in this

specific Park uh he was telling us about some of the folklore of the area some stories that his grandfather had told him one of them was about the tree men or the tree knockers who were people or people like creatures that lived out in the woods of the Smoky Mountains you know long ago this is this is not in the last 20 years we're talking about the early 1900s now these tree men obviously lived out in the woods but the reason they were called tree knockers was because in the presence of humans like us they

would communicate by knocking on trees we were told that these tree knockers are neither evil nor good they just kind of live out in the woods and I you know depending on the story you're looking at some people never see them some people do encounter them some people are attacked some people are helped uh it's not dissimilar from the stories you hear about certain kinds of Fay over in Europe specifically the British Isles uh which makes sense because the Appalachian region was settled primarily by Celtic folks and of course if we are to play the

little game of you know could this be real well the Appalachians were once part of the same mountain range as those in the highlands of Scotland so if these F folk really do live underground and travel through the uh the other world well would make sense that there's an other world in the Appalachians too if I can remember which video it was and I can remember to actually do this then I will put a link in the description to a video where we talked about the history of this region the Cherokee the Celtic influence all

of that because personally I think it's interesting suffice to say my point here is that if there's a paranormal explanation I would Le lean towards the tree knockers we also just recently went on a trip to Alaska and one of the girls who came along was from uh the Smoky Mountains specifically Great Smoky Mountains National Park like lives basically in the park and she when we brought this up kind of you know half jokingly she was like oh no that's a thing there are tree there are Forest people there are people that just live in

the woods uh we're we're going to try and talk about that more extensively with her when we actually go down to the park in a couple of months to do the meta analysis video on site so I will bring you more information on that then if you are watching this video sometime after November of 2024 it's up anyway those are the options for if something else caused her to disappear another possibility would be that it was a wild animal that ran her off Trail but like we said she was pretty unhealthy uh she was a

smoker probably wasn't going to run all that far especially in this kind of terrain so it seems more likely than not that the dogs would have sented her body also people running in Terror from a bear typically aren't uh you know watching their steps so they're probably would have been tracks looking at the other main possibility which was that she intended to disappear that's certainly a more believable one you know you don't you don't need the stuff that was in Juanita Baldwin's book to be accurate in order for that to be true the stuff she

wrote about definitely builds a stronger case if we trust that she's not making it up but we can't trust that the question I would have in that circumstance is simply why what's the point why disappear if she was tired of her life you know tired of having a husband who was 20 years older than her and going and spending all of her summers at a campground she loved with her closest friends and she wanted to escape I well if it was all about the the husband aspect of it and not wanting to go through with

the whole divorce process he was suffering from a heart condition he was 78 years old it's morbid to say it but she could have waited him out in addition to that Not only was her husband a part owner of this Campground but also her father was a part owner of this Campground her 89-year-old old father if he if both of those men passed away she stood to inherit a good amount of of estate if not money so if if the issue here was that she didn't like her life as it was she could have waited

a few more years and would have been in a much better position than somebody who disappears at the age of 58 and just starts over completely it would also mean that she never again contacted a single family member that she just Into Thin Air Gone without a single care about these people who so far as I can tell from the reports she did love it's not like she was estranged from her family and you would think that somebody wouldn't you know just vanish completely without telling their ailing father that they're disappearing without saying goodbye to

the man of course all of these are assumptions but in this case all we have to work on is assumptions and I will preface this part by saying there is absolutely zero evidence of this but one other possibility I could see is that uh her sister had something to do with it because because she wanted to be the sole inheritor but like I said there's really nothing to support that it's just something that you know pops into my head as a a possible Intrigue last possible thing I can think of is witness protection but why

Ju Just why there there's just no no reason nothing suggesting she would have gone into witness protection it's just not there so looking through everything what's what's strange about this case isn't isn't necessarily there's a whole bunch of really weird things that happened it's that nothing weird happened that the only weird thing that happened here is she disappeared everything else about this entire situation is as normal as it gets and in a way everything being so normal is what makes this so strange because it's not often that we we get through the research process on

one of these cases and I'm like yeah I have absolutely no idea what could have happened here and in this case I have absolutely no idea what happened here it there's not a single likely explanation there's just a series of unlikely explanations that are slightly more likely than each other all I can think is that maybe this will be elucidated a little bit more when we actually get down there to Deep Creek when we look around ourselves I'll try and interview some people some Rangers see if I can corroborate anything Wanita Baldwin said see if

I can officially debunk anything she said and you know may maybe as we're walking along that trail we'll be like oh well that's a weird little spot maybe she's in there and who knows but I at the moment I'm I'm at a loss I don't know Aiden what do you think I'm captivated by your your use of the word I think it was elucidated that's that's what you took away from this you really just SLI that in there thinking nobody was going to notice but I am impressed yeah I ially impressed for somebody who never

took the SAT I did remember a lot of the SAT words what I was asking you was what do you think you know B having heard this anyway Aden said he thinks that I my conclusion seems most likely which makes me question if he was watching cuz I didn't have one your conclusion being the lack of clear conclusions oh okay there we go yeah all right so we're on the same page 100% no there there's there are so many different options that could have been without any even remotely concrete evidence to one being the more

likely option yeah so you know it's up in the air why did all the cars decide to start going right now they really didn't want me to talk to them I guess so you know they were like no your place is behind the camera yeah I was on the last episode too much far too much you're you're we had that little we had the little booty wiggle and I think the internet just decided no more yeah that was my fault I filmed that not intentionally it just kind of happened if you want to support what

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moment sometimes we do music sometimes we do commentary and reaction uh it typically is a Tuesday Thursday Friday schedule 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. but that's not quite as concrete but Friday is almost always a go in addition to those channels that are hosted by us particularly we have two other ones off the Record and booie mixologist as you might expect those are a music channel and a uh well music commentary Channel I should say and then also a uh Mixology Channel bartending Luke Eckles the off the Record guy he's going to talk to you

about the stories of bands uh music news things like that uh whereas celso our guy over at BO mixologist he sits down and he teaches you how to make drinks tells you the story of how something came to be why a cocktail was popular and you know General stuff like that I think that just about wraps everything up I want to thank rocket money again for sponsoring this video and I will see all of you guys on the next one I'm Aiden Madison thanks for stopping by the L watch [Music]