Vanished Into the Unknown

History is rife with mysteries and unsettling events, but few are as unnerving as people who seemingly vanish into thin air. From D.B. Cooper and the Sodder children to the Gill family and the Springfield Three, these disappearances continue to haunt investigators and the public alike. Despite extensive searches and countless theories, no definitive answers have ever emerged. If you're drawn to the strange and unexplained, this article is sure to send a chill down your spine. 

Underwood & Underwood (active 1880 – c. 1950)[1] on Wikimedia

1. Amelia Earhart

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart hopped on a plane intending to circumnavigate the world, made an eerie last message over the radio, then disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. She was declared dead two years later, on January 5, 1939. Neither she nor her plane has ever been found, which makes her case an unfortunate and curious one.

Harris & Ewing on Wikimedia

2. D.B. Cooper

On November 24, 1971, a man named Dan Cooper (an alias; also known as D.B. Cooper) boarded a Boeing 727 bound for Seattle, Washington. As he settled into his seat, he flagged down a flight attendant and told her he had a bomb in his suitcase, then demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. Later that night, as the pilots flew a particular speed and route that he himself had instructed, Dan Cooper opened the aft staircase, leaped into the void, and disappeared forever. To this day, no one knows what happened to him or who he actually was.

Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wikimedia

3. Solomon Northup

A free-born American, Solomon Northup had just accepted a job as a traveling musician in 1841 before he was wrongly drugged, kidnapped, and sold to slavery. He was enslaved for 12 years before he met Canadian abolitionist Samuel Bass, who helped him regain freedom. Back home in New York, he wrote a memoir titled Twelve Years a Slave and gave numerous speeches—then disappeared from historical records in 1857. Though he was reported to be alive in a letter in 1863, no details regarding the rest of his life or his death have ever been documented.

Frederick M. Coffin (engraved by Nathaniel Orr) on Wikimedia

4. Jimmy Hoffa

American labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared mysteriously in 1975. Five years later, in 1982, he was presumed dead. It's widely speculated—and accepted—that Hoffa was murdered by members of the Mafia, given his alleged ties to organized crime, but to this day, his body has never been found.

Garam on Wikimedia

5. Michael Rockefeller

Son of New York Govenor—and later US Vice President—Nelson Rockefeller, Michael Rockefeller was an astute student and graduated with a degree in history and economics from Harvard University. On November 17, 1961, while he in the Asmat region of southwestern Dutch New Guinea, the dugout canoe he was in with a anthropologist companion was overturned. He attempted to swim ashore, only to never be seen again. Theories of his disappearance range from drowning to being killed and eaten by villagers, but no physical proof of his death has ever been released or found.

Michael Niessl on Unsplash

6. Liu Huijun

In 2008, a 37-year-old Taiwanese woman and her four-year-old daughter went missing on the 11th floor of a finance building. All they left behind were two red coats and their shoes. Security cameras installed on different floors, hallways, and entrances could not trace their footsteps. They were never seen again—it was almost as if they had disappeared into thin air.

Fumiaki Hayashi on Unsplash

7. Lars Mittank

On June 30, 2014, Lars Mittank had been on vacation with a few friends in Bulgaria, his first trip outside his home country Germany. They had a relaxing time, until Mittank got into a fight on July 6, one day before the group was supposed to head home, which left him with a ruptured eardrum. Deemed not fit to fly, he stayed alone in Bulgaria despite his friends offering to stay with him. A day after they left, he began to act abnormal and paranoid, and even called his mother to say that he thought he would get robbed or killed. Despite planning to fly home on July 8, his erratic behavior continued at Varna Airport, and, as he was being consulted by an airport doctor, he suddenly stood up, ran out of the building, and into a nearby forest. He has never been seen again since.

BKA Germany/ Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany) on Wikimedia

8. Sodder Children

A fire broke out and devastated a home on the Christmas Eve of 1945. Inside the home was George Sodder, his wife Jennie Sodder, and nine of their 10 children. While four of the children had escaped, the remaining five were nowhere to be found, despite many theories from arson to a planned kidnapping.

Thomas Ehling on Unsplash

9. Theodosia Burr Alston

The disappearance of Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of former US Vice President Aaron Burr, in 1813 is a longstanding mystery. The story goes that after she became the First Lady of South Carolina after her husband was sworn in as the governor during the War of 1812, she made plans to visit her father that December and boarded a schooner ship, Patriot. Weeks went by without announcement of the ship's arrival, and no one onboard was ever heard from again.

Unidentified artist, possibly by John Vanderlyn (1776-1852) on Wikimedia

10. Nicole Morin

Nicole Morin was only eight years old when she went missing in the apartment building she lived in with her mom, in Toronto, Ontario. She had left the 20th floor of the penthouse apartment, got in the elevator to meet a friend in the lobby for a swim date, and was never seen by anyone again.

Kelly on Pexels

11. Owen Parfitt

Despite not being one of the more famous disappearances, the mystery behind Owen Parfitt's vanishing is still a jarring one. In June 1768, he was helped by his sister and a young women to his usual chair on the front porch. When the weather started to sour, they went back out to fetch him—only for him to be gone. Neighbors and nearby farmers reported neither seeing or hearing anything unusual. Searches for him also came up empty-handed. It was almost as if he vanished into thin air.

Francesca Tosolini on Unsplash

12. Barbara Newhall Follett

Barbara Newhall Follett was a child prodigist, publishing her first novel, The House Without Windows, when she was just 12 years old. She married her husband in 1934, but later became depressed and unhappy with her marriage. On December 7, 1939, her husband claimed that she stormed out of the house with $30 (around $700 today) during a quarrel, and was never seen or heard from again.

Florian Klauer on Unsplash

13. Jodi Huisentruit

The disappearance of American news anchor Jodi Huisentruit doesn't seem to be a disappearance at all, and yet, police was never able to solve the crime. On the morning of June 27, 1995, a colleague phoned Huisentruit after she failed to show up for her shift. Huisentruit explained that she had overslept and would now be on her way. However, she still hadn't shown up hours later, and when police showed up at her apartment, they found signs of a struggle indicating that she might have been abducted. Despite extensive investigations, it remains unclear what happened to her.

xavier xanders on Unsplash

14. Asami Chida

Sixteen-year-old Asami Chida disappeared on the afternoon of March 6, 2001, after getting off a stop to head to her part-time job at a bakery. She reportedly spoke to her boyfriend over the phone before 2PM, stating that she was busy and would call him back later. Police had immediately placed suspcion on the bakery's owner, but he had an alibi for that day, and nothing in his apartment was ever found to be related to the case when it was later demolished.

YANGHONG YU on Unsplash

15. Sneha Anne Philip

Indian-American physician Sneha Anne Philip was last seen on September 10, 2001, after getting off work. She was captured on surveillence cameras to have been shopping at a department store after 4PM, Her husband never saw her return home later that night, and she was nowhere to be found the next morning, either. Her family believes that she died trying to save the victims of the September 11 attacks, but no physical proof that she perished from the attacks were ever found.

Nightscream on Wikimedia

16. The Gill Family

The disappearances of five of the nine children of the Sodder family may already bring a chill down your spine, but the vanishing of the Gill family is even more eerie. The entire family was last seen on the night of January 12, 2002, when they were reportedly traveling to the nearby town of Viale to attend a funeral of a friend. The Gill relatives only heard of their disappearance after Alfonso Goette, the owner of the ranch the family lived on, called and claimed the Gills never returned from the three-month vacation they'd been given.

Hamid Khaleghi on Unsplash

17. Tina Lim

Fourteen-year-old Tina Lim randomly disappeared on June 22, 2002, after being last seen heading out of her apartment in Choa Chu Kang, Singapore, to visit her grandfather. She never arrived at her grandfather's house. Her father claimed that she only had $10 in her pocket at the time and did not bring anything else with her, so it was unlikely that she'd been planning to run away. When her grandfather passed on October 28, 2003, Lim's father put a note in the newspaper obituary to let Lim know, and asked her to come see him one last time. Lim's father received mysterious phone calls on the last day of the funeral wake, and believed they came from her, even though police concluded she hadn't been the one to make those calls.

Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

18. Paula Jean Welden

On December 1, 1946, American college student Paula Jean Welden was walking through Vermont's Long Trail hiking route when she mysteriously disappeared. Her abrupt vanishing fuelled the so-called Bennington Triangle, a phrase coined by American author Joseph A. Citro regarding the string of disappearances that happened in southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950. 

The Charley Project on Wikimedia

19. James Tetford

James Tetford's disappearance was another entry in the Bennington Triangle. In fact, the former veteran disappeared just three years after Paula Jean Welden, and in the same region. Before he vanished, he was last seen sleeping on a crowded bus; when it arrived at Bennington where he lived, his belongings were still on board, but Tetford was gone. Even stranger is the fact that there were supposedly no stops between where he boarded and where he intended to get off.

RDNE Stock project on Pexels

20. The Springfield Three

The Bennington Triangle is eerie, but the Springfield Three might just bring a deeper chill down your spine. The latter refers to the disappearances of three friends—Suzanne Elizabeth Streeter, Stacy Kathleen McCall, and Streeter's mother, Sherrill Elizabeth Levitt—from a home in Springfield, Missouri. All belongings were left behind, and investigators could not find any signs of a struggle aside from a broken porch light. To this day, no one has seen or heard anything from the three women.

Max Vakhtbovycn on Pexels