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the strange case of a 2-year-old boy who went missing near the Umatilla National Forest in Oregon. Although the boy was found 19 hours later, he was discovered in an area 12 miles away through rough, mountainous terrain, which would have been difficult for an adult and impossible for such a young child to have traversed in that amount of time.
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On November 29, 1980, the night he vanished without a trace, Granger had dinner at a diner he regularly frequented, despite the fact that a severe storm was ominously brewing outside. On that night, gale force winds were beginning to come roaring through the area, eventually knocking out large swaths of electricity and causing mass panic. Granger returned home through the storm and left an incredibly weird letter behind for his parents in the barn, which had served for his workstation where he tinkered with and built all manner of curious things. The deeply weird letter read:
Dear Mother and Father,
I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship, as recurring dreams assured a 42-month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return. I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help.
Love, Granger.
On the back of the letter was inexplicably scrawled a map of Waterloo Mountain, around 20 miles away, the significance of which has never been ascertained. After writing this letter, Granger got into his 1972 Datsun pick-up truck and drove out into the roiling storm outside, his final destination unknown. True to his word, he had indeed left behind everything he owned, including a sizable chunk of cash to the tune of $10,000, although his secretly penned last will held few clues at all. He has never been seen again. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) immediately organized a massive search for the missing man, but no sign of neither him nor his vehicle could ever be located. The only possible clue ever found was a few bits of human bone that were found 4 miles away from the Taylor property at a dynamite blast site, with the main theory being that Granger had had some dynamite in his truck that had accidentally gone off, but it has never been conclusively determined whether these remains really belonged to Granger or not.
In the years since, the bizarre vanishing has of course produced many theories as to what happened to him. One is that he had simply had enough of his life and either went off to start a new one or ended it, or that he accidentally exploded himself with dynamite, as the evidence seems to suggest. Another is that he was the victim of foul play of some sort, but there is no evidence to support this. There is also the idea that he had some sort of psychotic break from reality and fled off into the unknown, which is supported by claims from friends and family that Granger had been heavily smoking a lot of pot and frequently dropping acid in the months leading up to his inexplicable vanishing. Then of course in light of his final letter there is the notion that he actually did make contact with his beloved aliens, and that they had spirited him away to destinations unknown. Granger’s father would say of this possibility:
I can hardly believe Granger’s off in a spaceship, but if there is a flying object out there, he’s the one to find it.
Whether Granger was the victim of suicide, a demented, troubled mind, or he was truly whisked away to the stars by otherworldly beings, his case has never been solved, and it remains one of the strangest, surreal disappearances there is.
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12-year-old Jaliek Rainwalker, of Greenwich, New York. Rainwalker’s life was no doubt full of its share of drama, what with her being in the charge of a crack addict mother and having been a foster child in his youth. On November 1, 2007, Jaliek was staying at the home of his adoptive father, Stephen Burrell Kerr, when he just suddenly vanished into thin air sometime during the night. According to Kerr, he woke up in the morning to find the boy nowhere to be seen. The only clue that was found was a forlorn goodbye letter stating that he no longer wished to be a burden on them.
The father was originally named a person of interest in the case, but there was no evidence to convict him of any wrongdoing. Then, in 2008 there was another weird clue in the form of a strange letter that was received by a local media outlet, in which it was written that Jaliek was alive and had been recruited as a “foot soldier on the war on drugs.” The rambling, mostly nonsensical letter was peppered with grammar mistakes and had various weird and anomalous statements, such as weird sentences like “Who are the macaroni family?” as well as “Why does Franti yell fire?,” and “My cat name Diamond?” It is all very much like the ramblings of a diseased mind, but the last sentence is a bit odd, as Jaliek did in fact have a cat named Diamond, yet the ultimate meaning of the letter is obfuscated and muddied by all of the other random bizarreness. In the end, no further clues have been forthcoming and neither Jaliek Rainwalker, nor the meaning behind this cryptic letter, have ever been found.
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August 24, 1951, when a young, 10-year-old girl named Beverly Potts went off with a friend, Patricia Swing, to visit Halloran Park, in Cleveland, Ohio, in order to watch some performers at a lively summer festival. Swing had to return home at around 9PM, but Beverly decided to stay behind to watch the show to its end. However, she would not ever make it home that night and the following morning she was still nowhere to be seen. She had simply disappeared into thin air.
Thus would begin one of the largest scale searches in Cleveland history, as law enforcement launched an intensive search operation bolstered by thousands of concerned volunteers, who poured in to aide in the hunt for the missing child, scouring practically every inch of the city for any sign of her. In the meantime there were countless tips and leads, but none of these led anywhere, and in the end the child’s whereabouts remained frustratingly elusive. Despite pursuing every available lead and interviewing dozens of possible persons of interest, the police were never able to ever get any closer to finding out what had happened to Beverly, she remained missing, and no solid clues could be obtained.
Oddly, the only real clues began to come in decades later in the form of eerily strange letters that turned up. The first was in 1994, when a letter was discovered by accident in a renovated house, which claimed that the writer’s husband had brutally murdered Beverly and disposed of the body. Although this was seen as a groundbreaking potential clue at the time, it turned out to be a dead end when it was determined that the letter had likely been an attempt by the woman to get revenge on her husband for years of abuse by framing him for the crime. After this revelation, the letter of potential evidence.
Then, in 2000, the news publication The Plain Dealer received a series of odd and anonymous letters that served to stir up the case once again. The first letter simply stated that the writer had killed Beverly Potts after kidnapping and molesting her, and described how he had decided to confess because he was dying of an unspecified illness. Over the next year, three more such letters would arrive from the same individual, each giving further grim details into the kidnapping and murder, and they were seen as being a rather credible lead in the case at the time. Some intriguing promises were made in the exchange. The second letter promised that the writer had arranged upon his death to have sent a sealed brown envelope which would supposedly include even more details and proof of the admission in the form of a rare coin that Beverly was known to carry around with her.
Later, in the third letter, the author of the mysterious letters ended up offering to actually turn himself in. He claimed that he would appear in Halloran Park on the 50th anniversary of the mysterious vanishing, saying “Fifty years is long enough to live with what I’ve done,” yet on the anniversary he was a no-show, and merely sent one final letter. In this last letter, he merely stated that he had decided not to turn himself in after all, and gave the cryptic clue that he had checked himself into a nursing home. This would be the last letter from the mysterious sender, and no one would hear from him again.
As none of the letters were signed there is no way to know who they were sent by or how much veracity they have. They have been considered to be anything from the real deal to an elaborate and rather tasteless hoax. Nobody knows, and the disappearance of Beverly Potts has never been close to being solved, despite constant pleas for information, relentless following of new leads in the case, and increasingly hefty rewards offered. The mystery has been made into a book called Twilight of Innocence — The Disappearance of Beverly Potts, by historian James Badal, and was also the focus of the documentary Dusk and Shadow — The mystery of Beverly Potts. The mysterious vanishing has gone on to be a legendary case in Cleveland, regularly appearing in the news even to this day, and Beverly has earned the nickname “The Little Girl Clevelanders Can’t Forget.”
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Mary Shotwell Little, a 25-year old newlywed secretary at a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, mysteriously vanished after having dinner with a friend on the night of October 14, 1965. The next day, her car was found in the same lot where she had parked the night before, but there were indications that it had been driven away from this location and returned. Her undergarments were neatly folded inside and there were traces of blood throughout the vehicle. The car also had a license plate which was not registered to Mary and had been stolen from another vehicle in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The day after she disappeared, Mary’s gasoline credit card wound up being used at two separate stations in Charlotte and Raleigh. The signatures for them read “Mrs. Roy H. Little Jr.” and appeared to be in Mary’s handwriting. Both places reported seeing a disheveled woman matching Mary’s description who seemed to have a minor head injury and was in the company of two domineering men. There have been many theories about her disappearance, ranging from an obsessive secret admirer to a sex scandal at her workplace, but none of them have ever been proven and Mary Little’s fate remains an unsolved mystery.
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On April 10, 1988, 40-year old Diane Augat left her residence in Odessa, Florida and mysteriously disappeared. Three days later, Diane’s mother received a message on her answering machine from a woman who sounded just like her daughter. She was saying “Help, help, let me out” and “Hey, gimme that” as the sounds of someone trying to grab the phone away could be heard in the background. The caller ID read “Starlight”, but there was no answer when Diane’s mother called the number back.
Things got really morbid on April 15 when the severed tip of Diane’s right middle finger was found in the area where she was last seen. Two weeks later, a bag containing her neatly folded clothing was discovered in a convenience store’s freezer. Two-and-a-half years after Diane went missing, a local paper published a story about her disappearance. The very next day, Diane’s brother’s girlfriend happened to discover a plastic bag in another convenience store. It had the name “Diane” written on it and contained items which may have belonged to her. In spite of these bizarre clues, no other trace of Diane Augat has ever been found.
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On March of 2000, 23-year old college student Leah Roberts left on a road trip from her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. She took most of her belongings and her cat with her, but did not tell anyone where she was going. On March 18, her jeep was discovered abandoned on a logging road in Whatcom County, Washington. The vehicle had crashed over an embankment and while it’s likely the driver would have been injured in an accident like that, there was no sign of any blood. All of Leah’s belongings (including a pair of pants containing $2500) were scattered throughout the scene, there was no trace of Leah or her cat.
To make things even stranger, blankets had been placed over the vehicle’s windows, indicating that someone had used it as a shelter. One week later, police received a call from a man claiming he saw a woman matching Leah’s description at a gas station many miles away from the crash scene. The caller said she looked disoriented, but he inexplicably hung up before giving any more details. This has been the only known sighting of Leah Roberts since her disappearance, but there’s no other indication about what may have happened to her.
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Laureen Rahn, a 14-year old girl from Manchester, New Hampshire, was last seen on the evening of April 26, 1980 during a get-together at her apartment with two friends. Laureen’s mother, Judith, came home that night and was baffled to discover that the apartment building’s hallway was dark because all the light bulbs had been unscrewed. Judith assumed Laureen was sleeping in her bed, but in the morning, she discovered that it was actually Laureen’s friend, who had no idea where Laureen was.
The police initially suspected Laureen was a runaway, but things got weird in October of that year when Judith discovered three calls to California on her phone bill which she had never made. Two of the calls were made to motels while the other was made to a teen sexual assistance hotline. The wife of the physician who ran this hotline was known for housing runaways, and at least one of these motels was often used by a notorious child pornographer known as “Dr. Z”. However, authorities could find no evidence to tie Laureen to any of these leads. For the next several years, Judith would also get mysterious phone calls from a caller who never said anything, but in the end, the ultimate fate of Laureen Rahn remains a mystery.
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On the morning of February 14, 2000, Asha Degree’s mother went to the room Asha shared with her brother to wake them up for the day and discovered Asha missing. Her brother O’Bryant was in the room but Asha’s bed was empty. They looked all over the house and across the street in her grandmother’s house but Asha was nowhere to be found. Her parents report that Asha’s bookbag, some of her clothes and personal items were missing. It appeared that Asha had packed a bag and left on her own.
Witnesses later reported seeing a girl matching Asha’s description walking down the highway at around 4:00 a.m., so it seems she may have sneaked out on her own. Asha was currently studying a fantasy book in school about children who go on adventures after running away, which could have inspired her actions. Things got even more bizarre once Asha’s belongings started turning up.
Three days after she disappeared, Asha’s pencil, marker and hair bow were found in the doorway of a tool shed approximately one mile from her home. A year-and-a-half later, Asha’s book bag was found 26 miles away. It contained more of her belongings and had been double-wrapped in plastic trash bags. This has led authorities to suspect foul play, but there are still no answers about why Asha would leave her home in the middle of the night, who she might have crossed paths with, or what ultimately happened to her.
she packed her book bag, left her family home north of the city and began walking along nearby North Carolina Highway 18 despite heavy rain and wind.
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On the morning of August 4, 1981, a 20-year old woman named Cynthia Anderson went to her job as a legal secretary at a law firm in Toledo, Ohio. When her employers arrived at work later on, Cynthia had vanished. Her purse and car keys were missing, but her vehicle was still parked outside. Eerily, a romance novel she had been reading was at her desk and it was open to the one scene in the story where the heroine is abducted at knife point. This clue could be read as a sign that she staged her own disappearance, but there has been no trace of her in over 30 years.
There have been many other theories about what happened to Cynthia. A month after her disappearance, police received an anonymous phone call that Cynthia was being held against her will in the basement of a white house, but this lead never went anywhere. One of the attorneys at Cynthia’s firm was involved in drug dealing and later went to prison, drumming up speculation that she may have overheard incriminating information which led to her murder. However, there is no concrete evidence to support any of these theories and Cynthia Anderson remains missing.