In cases I know of, stories told by people who go missing and are found are not what you would expect.

These stories may challenge your understanding of reality. Be warned.

I included names. It is important that we are respectful and polite of people who go missing and are returned and do not try to contact them so that they can live normal lives. They can come forward with their story if they want to.

Stories from children:

Cuddled and comforted by a bear

Ida Mae Curtis's story: [1]

In 1868, a three year old girl disappeared from her father’s lumber camp in Northern Michigan. After enlisting the help of a pair of professional hunters, who happened on the hysterical search scene by chance, the men traced the little girl’s feeble cries to a dense stand of brush. When the men advanced on the thicket, they saw what they said looked like a giant bear burst from it and run across the river, heading for the distant horizon. The men recovered the girl unharmed from the brush. She later told them that “Mr. Wolf” would not let her leave, and had eaten her hat from right off her head; although, he had also gathered berries and fed them to her.(28 – 16:42) On the night of July 2, 1955, Mrs. Curtis, summoned by her distraught older children, arrived just in time to see what she and the children said was a was a huge bear cradling her 2-year-old daughter Ida Mae Curtis in its front paw as it scurried off on three legs from their tent in a lumber camp at the wild Kootenai National Forrest in Montana (29). On July 4, after a search by 350 backwoodsmen in heavy rain, Ida was found dry and safe in a crudely built shelter across a river, just 300 yards away from where she was taken. Ida would later relate, to the best of a 2-year-old’s ability, being cuddled and comforted by the bear during the time she was missing. The Sheriff became so angry that he actually paid the Curtises three separate visits demanding that they stop telling their story of a bear abducting and caring for their little girl. He told them “quit telling that story. It could never happen. It didn’t happen and don’t say it anymore.”(30 – 54:27)

The wolf ate my hat and fed me berries

Paulides told this story in an interview he did on Paranormal Central in March 2014.[2]

To summarise:

in the 1800s a girl went missing while with her father. Similar situation - she was there, and then not there.

Two hunters help her father search. They call her name. No response, like all the cases.

The following day they are near a river and hear the girl's muffled voice and make their way there.

They hear a "huge splash" and out of the corner of their eyes they see a "huge dark figure" jumping into the river and swimming to the other side.

They see the girl standing on a log.

She's missing items of clothing. The father talks with her and asks:

Where's your hat. Girl: The wolf ate it. Where's your gloves? Girl: The wolf ate it. Why didn't you call? Why didn't you say something when we called? Girl: He wouldn't let me. Did you get anything to eat? Girl: The wolf brought me berries in its hands.

Paulides explains that:

This story was in several different newspapers in 1783 [or] 1784, reprinted again in 1920s. ... In this [Missing 411] Eastern book there are several stories of kids being taken by bears. Bears that coddle kids, bears that feed the kids. But specifically this girl said a wolfe. And it was a giant wolf.

Missing for 46 hours: "the sun shined the whole time"

Paulides told the story of Lillian Carney on Where Did the Road Go? on December 20, 2014. A summary of the story:

Lillian was from Masardis, Maine, which is 15 miles west of the Canadian boarder and surrounded by lakes, rivers, and ponds. 6 years old.

She went missing August 8, 1897 at noon.

Lillian and her parents went blueberry picking. (People going missing while picking berries is a theme in these cases.) They were there for a short amount of time, and the parents said she just vanished.

They searched for an hour, and they got some people in the area to help.

By the following morning there were 200 searchers there, calling for Lillian. Paulides said when searchers are looking for someone, they call the person's name, say that they are their friend and that they're there to help. Paulides said in the Missing 411 cases, the searchers never get a response, which is strange if people are lost, cold, or hungry.

On Tuesday around 300 residents arrive to search, and at 10am, a guy named Burt Polland (I do not know if that is spelled right) found her, somewhere between 2 and 3 miles from where her parents last saw her. There wasn't much detail in the article about where they found her.

While Lillian didn't say a lot, she made an interesting statement: "the sun shined all the time while I was in the woods." Paulides said that's a wierd thing for a 6 year old to say. The weather was stated in the news article as being partly cloudy, and she had spent two nights outside and was missing for 46 hours.

Paulides said that's a wierd thing for a 6 year old to say. The weather was stated in the news article as being partly cloudy, and she had spent two nights outside and was missing for 46 hours. The interviewer commented that she must have been referencing something to say something like that and said while she described it as sunlight, it might not have been. He also said for the time period, you're not going to find an area like that with very bright artificial lights.

The Lewiston Evening Journal published the story in the August 12, 1987 edition.[3]

Beings that looked like robots

Paulides told this story in an interview with George Knapp on Coast to Coast Am (38 min into video). [4] A summary:

3 year old boy, John Doe, disappears from his parents in Mount Shasta along a creek river where people go fly fishing on Oct 1 2010 at 6:30pm. Paulides said people seem to go missing between 2:30pm and 6:30pm in the cases he has researched

Paulides said people say strange things happen in this area. That there are beings called Lemurians

Parents contact sherif; a search starts. They don't find him

They find him 5 hours later at 11:30pm at night sitting in a thicket

He doesn't say anything; he is taken home. He is in a state of stunned disbelief

They talk to him and ask him what happened the next morning. He tells a story that he is taken into a cave that he thinks is underground.

He says he knows it is dark outside but when when in the cave I could see the entrance and it's light outside.



He said he is with a woman who looks like his grandmother, and he thought it was his grandmother.



In the cave he saw other things in the cave that look like people, but they are robots that aren't moving.



After a while he figures out the woman isn't his grandmother, even though she is nice and polite with him. He concludes she's a robot. He said there was some unusual light coming from her head.



She started to get pushy, took out some sticky paper and put it on the ground and asked him to defecate onto it. He said he didn't have to go and she got mad. He said he saw small guns and things around the perimeter of the cave, and they had dust on them.

The boy spent time with the grandmother the following weekend and told her the story. The grandmother then tells Paulides that three weeks before the boy disappeared, she and her husband were at the same creek where he went missing, spending the night. They woke in the middle of the night because the grandmother felt a pain at the base of her neck. Her husband looked at it and there was a small bloody spot at the base of the neck. She didn't know if this was related to the boy's disappearance, but found it strange.

The boy is now fine and has not disappeared since. It's the most unusual story Paulides has heard about a boy going missing.

There is another telling of the story on a forum called "reddit."[5] I couldn't find where it was sourced from, though apparently the story appeared in Paulides book:

About three weeks after the incident, John Doe's grandmother says her grandson told her that "he didn't like his other grandma Kappy". (Kappy is the boy's name for grandma Kathy) When she asked him to explain further, he said, "[sic] Don't you remember when I was lost in the woods? The other grandma Kappy grabbed me and took me to a creepy place, she's really a robot. It was a cave with spiders, and there was purses and guns. I was too scared, so I didnt touch anything. But, when she climbed a ladder, the light made her look like a robot. There were other robots too, but they didnt move. She made me lay down to look at my tummy, then she tried to get me to poop on a sticky paper, but I couldnt go. She told me that I am from outer space, and they put me in my moms tummy. Then she took me back to the river and said to wait under the bush until someone found me." She also states that her grandson said: "[sic]she had your same hair, your feet and even your face". That scared her deeply, the idea of some kind of doppleganger taking on her own image to abduct her grandson. She says she got the impression that her grandson may have been talking about a 'hologram' because of the way he described the light sparkling on the strange woman. His grandmother was horrified and called her son (the boy's father) who told her that he had also heard the same story from the boy a few days ago. She admitted that she would've probably written off her grandson's story to a child's overactive imagination, if it wasn't for a strange experience that happened to her a year ago when she was camping in the same area near Fowler's campground in McCloud, California. She claims she woke up one morning face down in the dirt, having been removed from her tent and sleeping bag. And she had a puncture wound on the back of her head. She said she felt violently ill that morning, and felt strangely emotionless, so she thought she'd been bitten by a poisonous spider. She said she was with a friend who'd been sleeping in his separate camper, and he also woke up with a 'bite' on the back of his neck, and he felt ill as well. The only thing strange she could recall was seeing 'red eyes' shining through the trees in their flashlights night night before, which they thought were deer.

Stories from adults:

Unwilling to talk about it

The case of case of Steven Kubacki, who went missing for 15 months then woke up in a field wearing different clothes.

In February 1978, Steven, a student at the time learning German, went missing in the Michigan area, USA----an area known as the "Great Lakes Triangle," which is written about in a book by Jay Gourley[6] that talks about the disappearances of hundreds of ships, boats, and aircraft. Paulides said is a great book.

Steven said he was going to go skiing.

They found his skis and his poles on the beach of the Lake Michigan and footprints on the ice leading up to the lake. They flew over it. The footprints appeared to stop.

They found his backpack in the same general area.

In May 5th 1979, 15 months later, Steven walked up to his father's door and said

he didn't remember much.

He woke up in Pittsfield, 40 miles from his father's house, lying in a meadow wearing clothes that weren't his.

he had a small satchel beside him with maps, that weren't his

Where he woke up was 700 miles from Lake Michigan.

Reporters asked him if he would talk to someone. He said he didn't need to, because he didn't have any psychological problems.

After 1983, Steven got a masters in linguistics, and a PhD in clinical psychology.

Paulides got in touch with him. Steve didn't respond to his calls or emails. [7] [8]

A woman felt a hand grab her

I heard this in an interview on YouTube[9] . I think it was an interview Paulides did with Jeff Rense and Mia Pope (Paulides mentioned "Jeff" in the show intro):

A woman in France was walking along a river in the late 1950s.

She felt as though a force came over her and she felt and grabbed her from behind. She could see dark colored hand grab her up her chest and drag her from behind into a thorny bush area.

She started to scream. She heard a voice above her say something.

At about that time the weather started to change immediately to thunder and rain.

The voice said something like "well, here you go" as if he was delivering her. Then all of a sudden it stopped and she ran to a nearby farm. The farmer said he could see a large hand that had grabbed her chest - there was a red mark there.

They called the police; the police wrote a report about it.

I don't know the woman's name, or the source of the story. Paulides said someone told him about it.

Other cases

I haven't written these up, but you can listen to them --- from Coast to Coast AM, 9-29-2013.[10]

Other cases not mentioned in the Missing 411 books:

Invisible barrier

This was was mentioned by Art Bell, the host of an interview David Paulides did in 2015.[11]

Art mentioned Patrick Harpur sent him a story from an article he wrote[12] for from Fortean Times magazine issue FT141.

A summary of the story:

19 year old girl

had not returned for supper after visiting a neighbour

search parties were sent out

the girl later turned up at the house and collapsed, crying

she had made a detour to climb a fairy fort (it had a name; I didn't catch it)

the girl tried to leave the fort but felt a muscular jerk from within her body

before she realised it, she was walking in the opposite direction

when she tried to get out again, she felt like there was an invisible barrier preventing her

darkness fell [presumably nightfall] and she became desperate, afraid to stop following the encircling barrier

she could see and hear the search party, but they couldn't see or hear her

the barrier seemed to lift, and she made her way home

Harpur has a website and talks about something called Daimonic Reality. I don't know how credible Harpur is; the story sounds a little dramatised, compared to Paulides matter-of-fact presentation.

Unfamiliar surroundings

An article published on Huffington Post in 2013 by Roger Marsh mentions:

Two men who read one of Paulides' books in this series wrote to report they were walking on their family farm, property they were familiar with their entire lives, and encountered rather odd circumstances. First, they said, they realized that all sound had disappeared around them - the sounds of nature. Then they realized that although they were sure they were on the family property, they suddenly could not identify their surroundings. They soon walked out of what they felt was a "portal" and back into familiar grounds.

3 year old helped by the "big black man"

This was apparently posted on the Phantoms and Monsters website:

The Little Wanderer Alice Rachel Peck, aged 3 years and four months, wandered away from her home in Burn's Valley, Thursday August 25th 1898, in search for her mother, who went on an errand. The little girl traveled an old and unused bark road, climbed over a high and very rough mountain and there, worn out with hunger and without bonnet or shoes, for three day and night had nothing to eat but a few huckleberries, while friends and neighbors were diligently searching for her or her remains. She was found on Sunday morning, August 28th at half past seven o'clock, by William Bair, sound and well. She neither smiled or cried as two hundred voices rang out the glad tidings of great joy, five miles from her home, in the mountains. While her parents were in great agony at home, they were soon relieved when hearing the many voices and trumpets, proclaiming that the lost had been found. On the same morning the child was found and in the same vicinity, from 8 until half past 11 o'clock, 13 rattlers, 2 vipers and 2 copperheads were killed. All returned happy, but some were very near worn out. The majority of those who participated in the child hunt saved their canes as relics of the day.

Mark H. wrote in and said this:

This is a copy of an old newspaper article. A friend posted this on a community Facebook page we belong. My brother-in-law had told me a longer version several years ago. The news clip seemed shorter than his version. .... His grandmother was the Alice's younger sister. The reporter makes it sound like a light-hearted adventure. They were picking berries with a group. Her mother left and went back to the house for some reason. When she came back, the group had thought that the girl had been with her mother. She had her shoes and bonnet when last seen. The area hasn't changed much since then. It has basic Pa. mountain terrain with enough dirt between the boulders and rocks to grow trees and mountain laurel. You have to crawl under or walk on top of it. Her uncle wasn't buying she traveled to where they found her on her own. Alice was asked how she got over those big rocks. She told him "the big black man helped her." That's all she could tell him. If it had been a black man in that area back then, he would have been well-known by the residents.

Invited to dinner and stayed for the night

This was a story documented in the American Ethnology Annual Report for 1897-8:[13]

The story takes place in a forested mountain setting which would be just fine for ancient Ireland or Wales or Scotland. Not only did Wafford [Mooney's confidant] hear this from the experiencer, but had heard it previously from several second hand sources [which is why he looked the fellow up for an interview]. All of Wafford's sources said that this man was "a truthful, hard-headed man". Here is what he was told: When he was 10-12 years old he was practicing with bow-and-arrow near the river and got tired of it. He sat on the riverbank building a fish trap, and was piling up some stones to wall in the fish. A normal looking stranger came up to him, remarked that this looked like hard work, and he should take a break. The boy was quite willing to do that, but didn't know if the next offer [to come up the river and have dinner at the stranger's house] was the right thing to do. But customs were different in those days, and the boy went along. The house was fine and the people very friendly. He had a nice meal, and while doing so, a friend of his family arrived at the stranger's house, and that made him feel at home. He played with the family's children, went to sleep, woke in the morning, had breakfast, and began to get started for home. He and the original gentleman began walking down a path between a cornfield on one side and a peach orchard on the other. Soon the trail connected with another one, and the man said: go by this trail to the ridge ahead and you'll come to the river road. That will take you straight home. And he turned and went back to his house and farm. The boy walked just a little way towards the river, and, in curiosity, turned and looked back. There was no peach orchard nor cornfield. There was no house nor trail. There was only the mountainside and the trees. He continued uneventfully back home, where he was greeted by many who had been looking for him. In explanation, he told his story. He saw the family friend who had visited that house also that evening. But the friend said: no, I have been with everyone else looking for you. His family told him that no house was there and that the family friend was an impersonation by the Nunne'hi.. They told him that there have sometimes been the sounds of drumming coming from that mountainside, but he had visited no men, but the Nunne'hi. The Irish know all about what happened there. Whether it's called "The Lost Sod" or the "World Alongside", the boy had passed into the parallel world of the Nunne'hi and, just there, passed back out again.

The story was found by Professor Michael Swords, who found the data in Ivan Sanderson's book collection. This is what Swords had to say about the find:

Ivan Sanderson had a very poor-quality copy of several pages of James Mooney's MYTHS of the CHEROKEE from the Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report for 1897-8... I don't know why I even bothered to squint away at the crumby document, but I'm glad that I did. [ What it was was the field information gathered about a type of paranormal being [society of beings] who resemble old Celtic ideas of the Siddhe --- not the little people of Faerie, but the full-sized entities more like the Tuatha DeDanaan. I was surprised by both the tale told and the fact that Sanderson was even interested, as he shows little interest in such things elsewhere in the collection. Ivan didn't really like the paranormal that much. Maybe he thought that this tale hinted of something more like a "lost tribe". Well, I am very interested even if Ivan was only luke warm. The introduction to the story that I'm going to tell shortly spoke of this "race" of "magical"/ paranormal beings called the Nunne'hi. They were described as full-sized persons, looking just like the local Native Americans, and mainly friendly and occasionally helpful. As they were described I got more interested. They liked singing and dancing in the forests. Some were said to reside under ancient mounds --- WHOA! just a minute, I thought, what's going on here? The Cherokee and the Celts aren't supposed to have made up the same myths! Then I read the story which had been collected. There it was: the characteristic of a tale about an actual Encounter, rather than a dramatized folkwisdom tale for around-the-campfire. The more that I find of this stuff [and it has been a walloping great mound of it], the less possible I believe that one can sustain that nothing paranormal is going on in these incidents. How is the "coincidence" of these characteristics across the ocean possible, if not because they both arise from a real underlying shared cause? The Cherokee even have their second and separate group of knee-high little people to go along with the 5+ footers. I will probably go to my grave "All-The-Way-Fool" in my belief in this all-too-infrequently-manifested reality. "They" are one of the few things that I've not experienced and would like to do so. Just for fun.

Hypnosis

Paulides said in an interview he did with George Knapp on Coast to Coast Am that it would be fascinating for people who have gone missing to use hypnosis to see what happened to them. [14]

He hasn't done it yet because some people contacted him early on and advised him to be careful when you approach someone who has gone through an incident like going missing, because they can take what you're doing the wrong way and think you're trying to profit from their loss or injury, and that many people don't want to be talked to.

Paulides said the stance they take is if people want to come to them, they will absolutely talk to them.

Something positive: The rubix cube and Spiderman sunglasses

David Paulides' son, who helped with the documentary, told a story of what happened when they filmed this video about Jaryd Atadero, years before the documentary:

You can hear the story David's son told in this interview (it's different to the above video).

They saw it as spooky. I'll let you interpret it as you want to.

I saw it as heartwarming. That's Jarryd leaving a message for his dad.

I hope he got it.

Footnotes

[1] Footprints of Evil

[2] David Paulides Missing 411 Interview

[3] Google News Archive Search

[4] Mysterious Disappearances ( NEW )

[5] Missing child, robot grandma, National Parks. • /r/UnresolvedMysteries

[6] The Great Lakes Triangle: Jay Gourley: 9780449138274: Amazon.com: Books

[7] MI - Amnesia Victim-Steven Kubacki (Feb 1978-May 1979)

[8] David Paulides - Urban Disappearances

[9] MANY People Vanishing Into Thin Air! WHAT'S HAPPENING???

[10] David Paulides Strange Disappearances 9-29-2013

[11] David and Ben Paulides on Missing 411 - The Movie (Mid-Week Podcast)

[12] Landscape of Panic FT141 - Patrick Harpur

[13] MISSING 411 - Incident in Cherokee Land, page 1

[14] Mysterious Disappearances ( NEW )