I’ve always been totally fascinated by true stories of missing people.
I think part of it is because I was (and still am) a huge fan of Unsolved Mysteries and so many of that TV show’s stories revolved around the creepiest missing persons stories you could ever imagine.
If you can imagine Robert Stack’s voice in your head, you know exactly what I’m talking about…
And now we’re going to get some stories from folks who actually went missing and they spilled their guts about what happened.
AskReddit users shared stories that we all should find very interesting…
1. Finally showed up.
“When I was 8, I decided to walk to my sisters apartment, 3.2 miles away (I checked the distance as an adult 30 years later.) My mom couldn’t find me at my usual haunts, so she called the police.
The last she saw me, I was topless, so the police were looking for a little boy in no shirt, when I had actually stopped by the house and put one on.
She was relieved when my sister called and said “Guess who just showed up.””
2. Oh, boy…
“When I was a teenager, I was on a cruise with my mom.
We went dancing at night and I met a cute boy and we decided to go on a little adventure and explore the boat and run amok like two kids in love. We hooked up in a bunch of places and hung out behind a cave at the mini golf course for awhile.
Well…that week someone had just been pushed off the boat on the same cruise line, and my mom apparently had been looking for me for hours (cell phones didn’t exist yet) so the cruise people had hundreds of pictures printed of me and put under everyone’s door along the lines of “Have you seen me?”.
Eventually this boy and I went to his room and there was my picture, like a kid on a milk carton.
Needless to say everyone was pissed and I gained some unwanted fame for the rest of that trip. Still…WORTH IT!”
3. A bit odd…
“Was out for a walk late at night 2 years ago (ish, I think I was 14 so it must have been 2 years), i saw some dude with his leg stuck in a fence. I got him free but he was fully drunk and had been taking shrooms so I insisted on helping him get back to his house.
It was all good but I was back 1.5 hours late and my parents were super freaked out.
This is also the story of how I got offered shrooms by some drunk guy.
Also he was convinced that I was a girl.
It was a bit odd.”
4. There you are.
“Back in 2006 my family and I went to San Diego to a tennis summer camp in an university.
One day my mom was there having fun and talking with an aunt of mine that was there too with her sons, so I went to my mom to let her know I was going to a computers café inside the campus to play video games.
I think she didn’t hear me because she was so caught up in the talk, fast forward 4 hours a cop busts into the café I look at him, he looks at me and shows me a picture of my younger self and asks me if that’s me, I say yes and he proceeds to radio that they’ve found me.
MFW there was an amber alert because I decided to play RuneScape. I was 12 at the time and man did I love that game.”
5. Missing.
“When I was 16 (I am female), my best friend was a gay man. We hung out all the time, his home life wasn’t good because he was gay. My home life wasn’t good because my father is an *sshole. My father absolutely forbid me from hanging out with a gay man. This was improper for his daughter.
We decide we wanted to go see a show in another city about 90 minutes away. He was bringing along his then potential live interest. The plan was that I would say I was spending the night at my friend Amy’s house, she would cover for me.
I’d actually be spending the night there, I just wouldn’t arrive until later. All was going well until a late March snowstorm prevented us from going home. The highway was closed and the county roads were more dangerous with the snow.
My friends did some smooth talking and got us an insanely cheap snow rate at one of the nicer hotels downtown. We were going to sleep for a bit and then try to head home.
All was going according to plan until my parents called Amy’s mom time make sure we were not out in the snow. Her mom wasn’t aware I was supposed to be there. My parents panicked. Overly panicked.
There had been a teen girl murdered recently, she was caught in the middle of drug deal gone bad. I had worked with her at a grocery store. My parents reported me missing. My dad drove all over the county all night looking for my car or my dumped body. He was convinced I was killed the same way.
The next morning, we started home, unaware that I was reported missing. I arrived home to a very angry father and police at my house. My mom was crying. My father was screaming. It was a mess.
My dad tried to get the cops to take me to the hospital to see if I had s*x with the gay men (???). The cops laughed at him.”
6. Out all night.
“I had just met my husband and stayed out all night.
To be fair to my mother, I had just moved home after leaving an extremely abusive relationship. He had tried to murder me but make it look like an accident a few times. He was drug addled so his attempts were a bit lame in my eyes at the time.
Looking back it was sheer dumb luck I am alive today.”
7. Tubing on the river.
“My friend and I (11 at the time) tried to go tubing down a river where our families were camping. We thought the river was a “lazy river” style like at six flags, where we would end up where we started.
Well after four hours of mostly walking & some slight tubing we decided to turn around and walk back since the water wasn’t high enough, taking another four hours.
Came back to our parents and the police frantically looking for us around the campsite and water. I wasn’t allowed to leave the camper until I understood rivers do not in fact go in a circle.”
8. Mugged.
“I got too drunk in a foreign country and got mugged.
I was lost, terrified, and didn’t speak the language well enough, so I broke into a basement cellar to hide and passed out. But then I got arrested because apparently the cellar was an apartment.
I kept trying to give them my parents phone number, but they couldn’t understand me and it was Thanksgiving so the American embassy was closed. 2 days later, they let me go. My parents were less than thrilled, but because things were so poorly handled they let me off as long as I paid for repairs.
So, the moral of the story is dont go to Spain.”
9. When I was your age…
“On a visit to my grandparents, my cousin and I wanted to go in town (they lived about 15 miles out in the country). My grandpa said “when I was your age, I walked everywhere”, so that’s what we did, set off walking (we were 13).
After a few hours my mom and grandpa started to panic because they thought we’d give up and come back so they set out looking for us. What they didn’t know was that we took a road that had been washed out and was not driveable, but certainly walkable.
Once we got in town, we decided it was too far to walk home so we hitchhiked to a bar where my aunt worked. She fed us and gave us a ride back, we were gone about 6 hours total.
My grandpa didn’t speak to us for two days.”
10. Road trip.
“A couple years back I was driving across country east to west. My entire family was watching my progress on the Life360 app while I kept an eye on my maps app.
I thought it a bit strange that I had zero cell reception on my phone for the entire I-90 corridor but attributed it to the funky quirks I had been experiencing with the device. After all, the maps was tracking my progress just fine.
It has been a nice day and the drive was uneventful for me. I had the occasional stops for food, gas, and leg stretching. When I reached the Pennsylvania border I grew concerned that I still had no cell reception so I restarted my phone.
As it was restarting I noticed a message saying, “call anyone in the family”. Too late, the phone was in restart mode.
The first call was to my husband at my destination. “Oh thank God! Where are you? We have the New York State Police looking for you!”
When I started the drive I was a little tired so I had taken a few extra minutes at a shoulder stop in the Adirondacks. That was where the Life360 app froze. After hours of seeing no progress on my trip, my husband called the state police to help locate me.
Our son drove from another state to the last known location to see if I was still there. There was a trail off the stop that led into the woods. He followed that to what he described as a military compound and, not finding me, returned and waited for any news at all.
Meanwhile, our daughter was on a camping trip where cell reception was sketchy at best. She received the message, “Mom’s missing. The police have been called.” She then had people theorizing what could be happening, doing online searches of the expected trip and what side stops I could be at where reception might be an issue.
When I talked to my husband I had him call the kids to fill them in while I called my dad to let the rest of the family know what had happened. I spoke to a lot of exasperated family members that day.
I have since replaced the phone.”
11. Disappeared.
“I went on a hike and just disappeared from everyone I knew.
One day I told my friends i was going on a hike and I just never showed up to work or my house again. After a couple of day I was declared missing and after a couple of months most people assumed I was dead.
I hitchhiked across the US, Mexico and Canada for 2 years.”
12. Whoops.
“So back when I was like 11 and on an holiday in Turkey my parents forgot me one time in a mall, what happened?
While outside a bar in the mall I got bored and told them I’m going to the souvenir store next to the bar. My parents told me to pick me up when they where about to leave. Little did they know that the store had a second floor.
Was up there for almost 4 hours just playing on their playstation. While my parents went looking for me they couldn’t find me in that store they went looking for me back at the hotel. Well after those 4 hours I got bored and couldn’t find my parents anywhere in the mall. So at that point I decided to go back to the hotel myself.
Halfway the walk back I find my parents walking in my direction.”
13. Wow.
“I went missing in Hawaii when i was 4 I was told by my father before he passed away.
The family always had parties at the beach when I lived out there and once they left me. I used to explore all the time out there in the rainforest. I remember wandering along a road but my father said I found my way back home.
On an unrelated note my oldest brother went missing in Hawaii 18 years ago and never been found since.”
14. Sounds a little bit controlling.
“My ex-fiancé reported me missing to the police after I left the house without permission or telling him where I was going after I found out he’d cheated on me.
He was a piece of sh*t, he told the police that he was worried I was going to take my own life and all sorts of crap.
I’d literally gone to the library to do some work and get some headspace. My walk home was past the police station where they spotted me and took me home… yay.”
15. Frantic.
“This was about 10 years ago. I had just moved to California with my ex husband and the downstairs neighbor in our first apartment was a crazy drug addict that would always bother and harass us.
One day the next door neighbors decided to rearrange their apartment and my downstairs neighbor came up threatening to kill me thinking i was making that noise on purpose. She was a nightmare to deal with. I was sneaking out of my own apartment just so she wouldn’t hear me and come running up stairs to hang out.
Anyways. I reported this anonymously to the apartments and filed a police report. Apparently this lady had many complaints about her to begin with. After the report my ex picked me up and we went out for lunch. Well those dumbasses at the apartment complex went and talked to her and told her everything I had said…
Came back to find her knocking on our door screaming. We kept driving and thought.. well f*ck. Went to Walmart, got some camping gear and drove off to go camp at Yosemite for the weekend to escape. I believe we managed to sneak into our apt to sleep for a few hours and told another neighbor a quick “oh just goin camping this weekend” and I sent texts to my mother, brother and sister.
Well, only the text to my sister went through.
So the last thing my mom heard from me was about the ordeal with the downstairs neighbor threatening to kill me and then nothing. Gone for 4 days come back to cell service and my phone is flooded with frantic voice mails from my mother and brother.
They filed a police report thinking my downstairs neighbor had murdered us and was convinced she was wearing our skin as a mask. She didn’t believe the other neighbor when they said, “oh ya, they went camping” She thought..that’s a cover up.. my daughter has never even been camping! Which was true.
That was the first time. After a 3 day ordeal they finally call my sister to report the bad news that I was murdered. She laughs and tells them I’m camping and my mother pauses and says.. what… how do you know this. “She texted me and told me. Why didn’t anyone bother calling me when this all started?”
I get back into cell service, hear these messages and immediately call the parents and call off the missing persons report.
After a few years I tried to bring it up as a joke “Hey! Remember when you thought I done got murdered?! What a crazy weekend that was!”
Still no laughs. Maybe a few more years need to pass.”
How about you?
Do you know any true stories of people you know who have gone missing?
If so, please talk to us in the comments.
We look forward to hearing from you!
