On August 25th, 2016, The National Park Service turned 100, celebrating a century’s worth of breathtaking views, towering forests and striking landscapes - as well as unsolved vanishings and the mysterious discoveries of human remains.

It’s no secret that when venturing into the backwoods, any number of things can happen if you come unprepared. From the redwood forests to the waters of the Gulf stream, this land wasn’t made for the weak. But when thousands of people are disappearing together, it starts to feel more like something sinister is at work.

These people can’t be simply labeled as unlucky. Something out there is hunting these people down, but the question is, what?

According to Todd Matthews from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, there’s an estimate of 80,000 to 90,000 people are still classified as missing. The National Institute of Justice calls this, “the nation’s silent mass disaster”. The Department of Justice keeps a database of missing people to the best of their ability, but out of 50 states, only 10 of them require you to report missing people, not to mention that law-enforcement is all voluntary as well. This means that a vast majority of these cases are also missing from the database.

To add to the conflict, there are a disturbing amount of connections between each of these cases:

Most of the disappearances are in areas where huckleberries can be found in abundance

Most of those who have disappeared are children aging from 20 months to 12 years and the elderly ages 74 to 85

The majority of children who have disappeared had dogs with them. In some cases, the dogs returned, but the children never did.

Fifty percent of the children who go missing are found dead.

The children who are found alive won’t talk about their experience or say they don’t remember what happened to them

Those that are found alive are almost always running a fever

In 95% of the missing children cases they are eventually found, (dead or alive) no further than 2.8 miles away from where they were last seen

Not one person carrying a firearm had disappeared

Almost 98% of the disappearances occur in the afternoon
Search and rescue teams have been known to cover an area over 100 times, only to later find the person, (dead or alive) in an area they’ve already combed through before - almost as if they were deliberately planted there

In 98% to 99% of the cases, tracking dogs are unable to find a scent or simply refuse to continue following a lead, while showing clear signs of distress, such as laying down and whining, refusing to move, hackles raised, etc.

In 95% of the cases, bad weather strangely follows a disappearance, washing out footprints and other clues and making it impossible to carry on a search until the weather clears

If these connections aren’t enough to spark your interest, take a look at this map. It shows where the amount of people who vanished are more concentrated, or in clusters.

This phenomenon has been covered in the book, “Missing 411” by David Paulides. The book includes an incredibly detailed group of cases with very common and overlapping details. Paulides concentrates his research on rural cases with particular criterias. Those who meet his criteria and are found claim that they can’t recall what happened to them. One woman stated that one moment, she was fine, and the next, found herself walking around in an unfamiliar realm. She also stated that she did see other people when this happened, but they could not see her.

Two men who read his book reported that they were walking on their family farm, (which they had been familiar with their entire lives) and had an extremely odd experience. First, they realized that all sounds of nature had disappeared - everything was dead silent. They then found that, though they were sure they were on the family property, they suddenly could not identify their surroundings. They soon stepped out of what they felt was a “portal” and back into familiar grounds.

There are multiple cases such as the two described above, but the most extreme cases take place in national parks - vast areas of land, already easy to get lost in. Add in the, “suddenly lost” and “portal” phenomenons, and the result is thousands upon thousands of people vanishing into thin air.

One of the oldest recorded cases was in April 1952, when two-year-old Keith Parkinsin in Ritter, Oregon, vanished near Umatilla National Forest. He was found 19 hours later, unconscious in a frozen creek bed, which was an astounding 12 miles away. To arrive there, he would have had to run non-stop and ventured over two mountain ranges, including fences, creeks, and rivers.

There are numerous cases such as this one, where the missing child is found an impossible distance away from where they originally disappeared.

In 1957, a two year old boy disappeared in Yosemite. In this case, the boy simply vanished as he walked around his family’s camp site. Bloodhounds and hundreds of people searched for him. He had climbed 3000' straight up a mountain and was eventually found dehydrated and suffering from exposure with a tee shirt, no pants, one sock and no shoes.

Both of these children’s cases are unsettling to read about, but the next case will shock you. This time, yet another two year old boy disappeared while he was with the family dog and his mother. She called the sheriff, and searchers started to arrive in mass. By late in the afternoon, it started raining. On the first night, the volunteers hadn’t found anything.

The next day, two officers were in kayaks on a river two miles from where he was last seen. While paddling upstream, they turned a corner in the river to find the boy alive, lying on his back in the middle of a sandbar in the river. They immediately called a helicopter to the scene to pick him up and take him back to his residence. The pilot of the search and rescue chopper confirmed that he had just flown over that section of river and the boy was not on the sandbar, until just minutes later.

But why didn’t he respond to hundreds of searchers that were in the woods the first night? And how is it that he didn’t suffer from hypothermia, even though the weather had been in the low 40’s with rain?  

These are the questions that need to be asked - and answered. And this next case? It does just that.

A three-year-old named John Doe vanished for five hours, before a search party found him, dazed, in the middle of a grove of trees.  When asked what happened, his story was that he followed a woman who looked like his grandmother to a mountain. He then found himself in a room that had a bunch of motionless robots and weapons lying all over a dusty floor. He claimed that he noticed a strange glow coming from the  woman's head. And then, most puzzlingly of all, she asked him to defecate on a piece of paper. John said she got agitated and aggressive when he refused.

The woman then said that John was from outer space, and that he was planted in his mother's womb. She then told him to go and wait in the trees until he was found. Now, under normal circumstances, this would just be labeled as the overactive imagination of a young child. But there’s one chilling fact that completely negates that: His grandmother, who had gone camping with him, claimed that she was dragged out of her tent late that night. She woke up to a strange pain in the base of her neck, and found two small holes near the back of her head.

There have been countless debates for over a decade on whether or not aliens exist. Thousands of people all over the world recall having an encounter with extraterrestrials, and normally, they have similar stories. They’re taken against their will in the middle of the night to be experimented on, before being returned to their homes, sometimes with mysterious burning dots on their body. Sounds pretty similar to the case of John Doe, right?

But as unnerving as it may be to think that extraterrestrial beings take us in the night to experiment, perhaps it isn’t aliens. After all, it seems to be that no one has actually died at the hands of one - they just study us - and these next cases don’t follow that pattern.

Again in 1974, a family with the last name Cowden was reported missing. Witnesses described their campsite as undisturbed, as if the family left abruptly. Their bodies were later discovered in April 1975, about 100 feet from the campsite. Richard Cowden’s body was found tied to a tree, while the bodies of his wife and two small children were found in a cave with rocks sealing the entrance. What could possibly be worse? Maybe the fact that whatever was behind their deaths was never determined, and their case remains open to this day.

Mike Herdman was a man found dead on June 27, 2014. He was found at approximately 1200 feet above the river bottom which he had chased his dog into the day he disappeared. When his remains, (or what was left of them) were discovered, he was missing his shoes and chunks of his flesh were torn out. Maybe, those were bite marks.

So, if it isn’t extraterrestrial beings murdering these people, what could it be? You’re probably thinking that this couldn’t be the work of a mountain lion or some other predator you’d generally find in the wild - and you’d be right. This isn’t just any old predator-prey situation, because this situation is between two humans. Or a human and what’s left of a human’s consciousness. The things that are most likely hunting these people down are called Wendigos - humans that become possessed by the Wendigo spirit when they desperately need food and have no other choice but to become cannibalistic. Whenever a wendigo eats another person, it grows in proportion to their size, so it can never be full. They’re seen as the embodiment of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied, killing and consuming person after person, constantly searching for new victims.

Wendigos are described as so skinny that their withered skin is stretched tightly over their bones. In combination with an ashy gray complexion, and eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, Wendigos look like a skeleton of what once was man. What lips they have are described as decrepit and bloodstained. Their bodies unclean and suffering from infection, they give off a strange and eerie odor of decay and corruption.

In 1969, a 6 year-old boy disappeared in the Smoky Mountains. Two families with the last name of Martin happened upon each other, and their two sons began playing hide and seek in the nearby bushes. When they were called into camp and one didn’t return, the boy’s father went to find help. As he ran down the hill, it began to rain. At the same time, further down the hill, another family heard a sickening scream and looked up to see what they believed to be a man hiding in the bushes.

But what if what they saw in the bushes wasn’t a man at all? What if it was a wendigo? The boy was never found, which could be explained by the creature devouring him. The scream that the family heard would have been the last noise to ever find it’s way past the child’s lips as the Wendigo mutilated his body before eating him alive.

In 1974, a 19 year old boy by the name of Charles McCullar was found leaning against a log, his pants around his ankles. What makes this so disturbing is that he wasn’t found alive - the only parts left of him were part of his tibia in his right pant leg, part of his skull, and his scapula bones in exact one inch by one inch pieces.

Finding his remains in this manner would be extremely unusual to the uninformed. However, with a little bit of background knowledge, it’s easy to see that this is the work of a Wendigo. Now you may ask, what about all the other people who went missing? There’s an easy answer to that. The ones that were never found were either killed by a Wendigo or became one themselves.

You see, according to some traditions, humans overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos. But that’s not the only way to become possessed by these evil spirits - humans could also turn into wendigos by being in contact with them for too long; such as being hunted and somehow managing to survive long enough to see themselves turn into the very thing appearing in their nightmares.

When visiting one of America’s great national parks, you’d expect it to feel like a grand adventure into the wilderness and as a chance to bond with family members or friends. Having said that, while the concept is sweet, as long as evil continues to roam these lands, the only thing you should be prepared to meet here is your fate.