I went to a big city recently and was shocked by the number of missing posters around. People seemed to treat them as normal, just walking by. There were posters for little kids and people in their 80’s and 90’s, and everywhere in between. What happens to those people? Where are they? At least, from what we know of those who were found? It honestly kind of startled me how this is ‘normal’ to some level in an area with way more people.
Most kids, it's a parental dispute. Teens.. runaways. Definitely some murders, especially if you were a gay male back in the day. Where I'm at, there was this notorious gay serial killer. Since they were seen as people on the fringe, when they went missing, the authorities didn't even bother to check or follow up.
To follow up, a lot of the “fringe” people rarely get looked for outside of perhaps family. And that often just means “anyone not white, young, and abled”. I just read a novel about a Black family trying to disappear and start over, and one of the things they relied on was, sadly, that not many people would be looking for them. Anyway, that to say that there’s probably at least one other missing person for every poster you see that never had posters up, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.
What’s the name of the book?
The Spite House by Johnny Compton. Scary and a bit grim but really good.
I believe the concept is called “lesser dead” “less dead” (though a book by the same name is making it very difficult to search) vagrants, minorities, prostitutes, drug addicts etc were all targeted by serial killers because their deaths wouldn’t be investigated as seriously. It’s fucked up but we as a society care a lot more about a pretty young girl gone missing than a homeless drug addict who was murdered.
Its also a lot harder to notice someone is missing and find them if they are generally hard to track down, even when alive (no fixed address, no job, not in contact with family, regularly moves around/leaves town). Its an entirely different ballgame than finding Mary-Sue who got yoinked on her way home from cheerleading practice.
On a slight tangent, there's an incredible article I read once about a quest by a collector to track down every boxer who fought Muhammad Ali. He caught up with everyone except one guy, Jim Robinson, who Ali fought early in his career, the best he was able to do was track him down to a community he'd been living in a year or so before, but the guy had no known address or family, so even finding out if he was still alive proved to be impossible.
It really hit home just how transient a lot of people's lives are, especially if they lack close family.
http://www.espn.co.uk/espn/eticket/story?page=091216/JimmyRobinson&redirected=true
My niece’s soon to be ex husband is hard to find—-his family doesn’t know where he is and hasn’t heard from him in a couple of years. Not even to mooch off them. She had to advertise her intention to divorce ($1,000) because she can’t notify him in a more usual way.
This happens when DCF is trying to terminate parental rights, they have to advertise in areas where a parent was known to be.
I find the opposite fascinating.
I remember in 7th or 8th grade overhearing a couple of kids talking "remember that time in kindergarten when you took your pants off?" It blew my mind that someone might've known someone else since kindergarten. I had gone to 6 different schools in 3 different cities in 2 different states by then. Longest I had ever known anyone aside from immediate family was a couple years.
Since then, over the decades, I've lived in many places in five different states. But those people that had known each other since kindergarten probably still live in the same place they were born and still see each other regularly. It's weird to think how stable and predictable some people's lives are.
Yah, does it ever bother you, the security questions some applications want to ask- what was your 3rd grade teacher’s name, what street did you live on in 6th grade, your childhood best friend’s name, etc. It’s a real peak into how… stable/boring/sedentary some people’s lives are. It’s annoying (that they think everyone grew up like that) and saddening (that I didn’t grow up like that?) at the same time.
Yeah, and then you have those team-building events at work or whatever where you're supposed to tell people about your hometown. Ok, which one?
Thank you for sharing this article. It is excellent.
This is super interesting, thanks!
My brother is an addict (sober for five years) and he was always difficult to track down when using. We’d call jails, hospitals, etc to find him until he eventually turned up. Makes sense why they’d go missing sooner. It was never a shock when he disappeared, but we always knew why.
Very true
When they caught the Green River Killer, a cop looked at the guy’s arrest history and saw he’d gotten jail time for badly treating a date, and a mild scolding for badly treating a prostitute. So he went on to murder women who were prostitutes or sex work adjacent.
“We trained him to kill prostitutes,” the cop said.
Damn.
In Criminal Minds they always said "high risk victims"
That is true. My area, we’re a tourist town. And we get visa workers. We’ve heard from the police how human trafficking is very real here. Easy to slip away being a tourist area.
And yet, the ones that make the news are Brittany Drexel and Heather Elvis.
See also: “missing white woman syndrome”. As a society we absolutely care more about some people who disappear more than others.
Especially if they're white, there's even a term for it- missing white woman syndrome.
No More Stolen Sisters
A pretty young white girl anyway.
If anyone wants proof, just look at the media attention given to attractive white females vs any of the other 700,000 children reported missing every year.
Dahmer
Oh yea. That was a big one. Especially for young boy. Here, it's this guy who only got arrested in his later 60s. I'm guessing there's way more unsolved cases and there's got to be more of these killer types throughout the years that wasn't as prolific. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47125443
Its really sad, there is a famous serial killer in america that targeted the gay community by "pretending" to be gay and killing them when they got back to the house (its controversial whether he was truly a straight homophobic or a closeted internalized homophobic).
There was a victim who had seen the killer and escaped, but he refused to testify, because it would have meant publicly admitting he was gay (it was a very high profile case understandably). The city governor actually stood up to speak for the victim, saying that he totally understood and that it wasn't his fault at all to not testify. It was our fault as a society, for making a society so unfriendly to gay people they have to let a murderer go free in fear of the consequences of what would happen to them for their orientation.
This has happened as recent as 2016 in London
Stephen Port? Absolutely terrible
Yes, unbelievable
If you look at the number of homeless its obvious where a lot of them are. Drug addicted, and/or alcoholics, living on the streets where they have lost any means of communicating with friends or family. Also people who just fell on hard times and can't get a break.
This makes me realize again what a dark place the world actually is. It is beautiful but so bleak at the same time. Being on the good side of it all can be taken from you at any given time and you won’t be able to do anything about that. Makes me appreciative of my situation, I don’t take it for granted though.
Wow. I never thought about it like that. Being on the good side of life or the world then out of nowhere being introduced to a much darker side of it. Either by choice or just bad luck. Kinda give me a little bit of anxiety there.
Yeah it is a scary thought but also an integral part of life. Things don’t happen for some “higher” reason, they just happen. Sometimes shit just happens. But you probably shouldn’t dwell on it too much but it is interesting to think about nonetheless.
And a fair chunk of the "missing" people are those running away from abusers who then report them missing.
And many are found or come back. Don’t forget that. People just leave the posters up.
My estimated breakdown, before you ask me for sources keep in mind I’m a tenured professor of Reddit University:
30% custody disputes 60% runaways 5% suicide 4% trafficking 1% murder
Some probably were trafficked.
I mean, human trafficking definitely happens, but there's a bonkers perception nowadays that it's happening regularly to people in wealthy, developed nations.
Suffice to say if you live in the first world you're much more likely to be in a destination for human trafficking, rather than a source.
Sorry if that's not what you meant, but it's genuinely nuts how prevalent the worry over human trafficking has become in the US, absent any real documentation. Like... this is a thing that happens, it absolutely happens, but it's not the weird Taken fantasy the American middle-class is constantly expressing on Tiktok.
Hard agree. People hop on social media like "omg I almost got sex trafficked" because there was a guy next to a white van acting shady in the grocery store parking lot and it's like ma'am he was just trying to make sure you weren't gonna interrupt his drug deal, no one is fucking kidnapping people for sex trafficking (which is also a very small portion of trafficking) from the Walmart parking lot in Glenwood on a Tuesday at 7pm. Drink a lacroix and calm the fuck down.
Some kids grow up not knowing they were missing until they found out on the internet years later that they were kept from the other parent.
I had a family member with a mental health condition and it manifested when she was 16. Her family woke up in the morning and she was gone but all her stuff was there and it was like she just vanished. When she tuned 40, years later, she showed up to her family home as if she’d just come back from a short walk and forgot her keys. She knocked on the door. She had a duffel bag full of cash and thankfully her sister had inherited the home from their parents and was living there and answered the door. She was placed in an old age assisted living facility at just 40 years old and lived the rest of her life there. I know a bit about what her life was like while she was gone, why she left, where she went, but she didn’t like sharing that information with most people.
I had an uncle with some mental health issues and he liked to go for walks. He would walk all around town everyday, except one day he just didn’t come home. He was missing and everyone was looking for him for 2 days, then someone spotted him walking down the freeway miles away and reported it. He just got confused and kept walking I guess. I always wondered where he slept and if he ate anything during those 2 days but my family didn’t like talking about it so I never found out.
I’m glad they found him! It’s awful losing someone you love. They must have been so relieved!
My great aunt did the opposite. She loved to go for walks but the people at the nursing home told her she had to stop due to how old and frail she was. She was 90 and had no cognitive issues or memory issues so she just kept going on walks. They kept frantically looking for her when she’d go (she had to sneak out) and she’d just collect bottles because she enjoyed tidying green spaces and getting loose change when she turned them in. She was a fantastic lady and lived a great life.
Good for her. A little walk in the outdoors is good for your health. They should have found a volunteer to accompany her on her daily walks to make sure she was safe.
My grandma had similar issues: loved to walk but absolutely no sense of direction. So when she moved to a retirement community, we found one built in a loop shape so she could walk around the community as much as she liked and eventually she'd pass home since it was all one big circle. She walked daily into her nineties.
That’s such a great idea, she must have really loved it there
She had a duffel bag full of cash
No questions asked ???
There were many questions asked but she never clearly stated how exactly she got the money. Or why it was in a duffel bag. I’m assuming it was from her friends that she made after leaving that took care of her. She certainly wasn’t in any shape to work.
What did she do all those years?
Due to her condition I’m not sure how true this was, but what she shared with me was that she just didn’t feel like living there which is why she left. She made it clear that she wasn’t unhappy, bored, or anything worse. Just didn’t feel like living there so she just left.
She got in with some people and from what she said they were like a gang, mafia, something like that but she just said she spent time with them and they talked and laughed a lot. But they took care of her and she never did anything illegal. A lot of what she talked about was really normal every day stuff. She did talk about a romantic partner but she wouldn’t talk about him much so maybe there was something there.
I never understood why she didn’t want to share that with other people. Though with the diagnosis she received after coming home, I think there was a lot more that happened that she maybe didn’t understand. She was never excited about coming home either. No relief, frustration, nothing. Her emotions were pretty muted before leaving and after coming back.
That’s even more mysterious. 24 years gone is a long time. Thanks for sharing.
24 years gone 😳
I'm curious of what her diagnostic is?
Schizophrenia. So she had a psychotic break at 16 and never really came out of it. So she has little perception of reality as most others experience it. I feel like there was more there but after that diagnosis I’m not aware of whether or not they pursued anything further in terms of looking into any other medical conditions.
That makes it hard to know what actually happened and what she thinks happened too. I'm glad she came home safe. It could have ended badly for her
Sounds like she might have ended up in a cult.
Why was she placed in an old age assisted living facility at age 40?
Her sister made that decision and the facility accepted her and enjoyed having her. She seemed happy there when I called and visited.
There was no other facility equipped to care for her and her sister couldn’t manage the symptoms of her condition on her own safely.
Sounds just like my uncle. Disappeared in his early 20’s, no one knew where he went. Then one day when he was 40-something he was found living on the streets in a city 4hrs away. He was severely mentally ill and was put into the same independent care facility his mom/my grandma was in. I’ve never met the guy, or if I did, I was a baby at the time.
Can you share why she left, (vaguely) where she went, where the duffel money came from, why she was put in a home, etc?
After coming back, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia which the doctors say is the reason she left. They say she had a psychotic break and has been unable to get out of it ever since then. It’s also the reason why we’ll never really know what happened while she was gone unless we find the people she was living with.
She very clearly told me that she left because she felt like it. Similar to how people decide to go for a walk. She wasn’t running away, wasn’t mistreated, nothing.
Given landmarks she talked about it sounds like she travelled around a bit but didn’t go more than a few hours from her childhood home.
No one - including me - knows where the money came from. As a reference point, there was enough for her to live in the facility for 40-50 years before she passed and still have something like a weekly allowance for shopping.
Unfortunately given a lack of support and a lack of facilities that support her needs, this was the only option available to her so her sister made that decision for her. The facility was close to their childhood home so the area was familiar, her sister could visit often, and it really was a loving place. She had really great relationships with residents and caregivers alike.
In 2018, my friend Lauralyn Palmer went missing on April 20th after walking her step daughters dog. Lyn, as we called her, had recently been diagnosed with very early stage of dementia. She was still functional and doing fine without much assistance. She and her husband lived in a pretty remote wooded area. They knew the property like the back of their hands. They frequently walked the trails. The walk would have normally taken maybe 15 minutes at the most. She never returned. After searching and waiting for 2 hours, unable to locate his wife or the dog, her husband reported her missing. Everyone in town turned out to search for her. People on horseback, ATV's, drones, search dogs, everything possible. Lucy, the dog, was also not found by the search party but returned on her own several days later in good condition. To this day, not a single shred of Lyn has been found. We're thinking she fell into a crevice or was taken by a bear, wild cat, but really, we have no idea.
Lyn was a wonderful person, and I'm so grateful to call her a friend. She was a nurse and was so helpful to us young'ins coming up in this career. She volunteered at the hospital thrift shop and had an active social life. Her husband has been cleared of having any connection to her disappearance. When I moved away in 2017, she gave me a big hug and wished me all the luck she had for a safe journey across the country. We said our goodbyes through tears. I'm so thankful we had that moment and will keep her in my heart forever.
It's been 5 years. The case is still open, and people are still out there looking for her. Not knowing is the worst.
I'm sorry I don't have an answer to your question. Sometimes, we never get an answer. We have to lean on faith but also accept the reality that she may never be found.
We loved you Lyn. You will never be forgotten ❤️
This made me so sad for everyone who knew her. I assume no foul play was noticed.
I am so sorry for your loss! never knowing is whole different kind of loss.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. It's very hard to have someone you care about just gone poof. It's painful. My heart breaks for her family. She really was/is the coolest lady who always came in with a smile. That smile is what I remember the most.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful memories of your friend with us.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend. Has a write up been done about her on r/unresolvedmysteries yet? Maybe post there to get her some more exposure? I also love her name! How pretty
I don't think so. I switched accts a while back so I'll have to check my old acct. I didn't know that was a sub. There's a sub for everything! Thank you & happy turkey day 🦃 (if you're US 🙂)
That’s just the numbers talking. If you live in a town with 50,000 people, every once in a while there’d be a missing person. If you live in a town with 2,000,000 people, someone’s missing every once in a while… 40 times over. When you’ve got more people together, you see more problems.
I live in a town of 16K, and we have a case of a missing girl that's 40 years old. The worst part is most of us KNOW that someone knows what happened and isn't talking. She was very popular.
We don't get many randos here, and they are watched by the locals like a hawk until they can prove themselves to be trustworthy.
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6mo
Sounds like a typical small town unfortunately.
I find it very strange that a town with that many people would all be on the same page and "watch non-locals like a hawk". I live between two towns with a very similar total population and other than a few nosey neighbors in select areas honestly most of the general population wouldn't notice if 800 non-locals entered the vicinity, nor would they have any reason to care about that.
Each neighborhood has its own little group of people that help keep the peace. Someone acts up at the local store, people will talk and those who live near them will keep a close eye on them to see if they try any stunts at home.
We do have groups of kids that no one seems to be able to corral, and their parents aren't much better. We do what we can to keep people safe.
Yeah, I live in a town of 19000 people (though, it was 16k when I was growing up). That's way too big to be an everyone-know-everyone town. I mean, I didn't even know everyone in my graduating class in highschool.
I was super shocked and deeply saddened when I visited Niagara falls(Canadian side) and there were multiple missing persons posters on practically every post you saw. Busy tourist locations must be particularly bad
Niagara Falls is a Nexus for missing people- crossing the border to disappear is a bit easier, and it is a place known for suicides.
A friend of mine disappeared in 2016. He was a well-loved member of a thriving community.
Had a parter he was happy with. (as far as we know)
Wasn't in to drugs. (as far as we know)
Wasn't suicidal. (as far as we know)
His car was found about 500 miles away a few days later. Never heard another word from him. I still hope he'll pop up and be like "hey, I just needed some space." In my heart, I'm pretty sure that he was murdered.
There's a man by the name of David Paulides who has written extensively about missing persons. Some are found dead, some alive, but many of these cases are just....weird.
Is that the guy that looked into how many people go missing in national parks? Saw a documentary on it once and people will go missing and search parties will comb an area and find nothing then days later articles of clothing and items from the missing person are found in a place already searched. It's certainly weird.
I'm sure the vast majority are animal attacks, lost and death due to exposure, people trying to get away from something, but some of the cases are really weird and speak to something more sinister going on.
I know the FBI believes there are 30-40 active serial killers in the US they don't know about. Looking at the news and world today there is a lot of outright public violence and threats. Going further back to pre organized policing and criminal databases people got up to all sorts of nasty stuff... HH Holmes comes to mind. Elizabeth Bathory etc. Humans have a strong element of violence I think and when there's no one around for miles, I can only imagine how many people engage in violent acts in the privacy of the woods and remote places of the world.
Yes, it's the same man. He has written about disappearances in other settings as well, like cities. He has written the Missing: 411 series. Sometimes the missing person will be found in an area that's already been searched several times. I do think we humans have a tendency towards violence. I worked in forensics for a long time; I'm still trying to figure out the motives behind some of the things I saw.
Its so scary when people get murderded. How can some people be so cruel:(!
Many of them don't want to be found, many ran away for a reason and aren't eager to return to pick up the pieces. A person can be "missing" in your big city, when they're just living their normal life the next state over with their same name, or having changed their last name.
There isn't really a mechanism to find the lost, when police encounter someone they may take their name and run it through the system, but if the missing person never comes into contact with the police there isn't much more you can do. You might be listed as "missing" in your state police, but when you go to the DMV the next state over you get your licence and are none the wiser that you're being looked for.
Tragically, some have gone missing for more nefarious reasons, some may have been taken, some might have died with no identification and were buried as paupers, some might have been killed and didn't have ID on their bodies.
But really those missing person posters are evidence that someone loves that person and wants to find them, even if they person doesn't want to be found.
sometimes people drive their cars in the water accidentally
Yes! I’ve been surprised at how many people have been found by some of the youtubers that scan the bottoms of lakes and rivers and I think there are a lot more of these cases than we think. A few of them were older folks who they suspect got turned around/confused while driving at night and accidentally drove into a river.
i live in a suburban commuter town in nj (usa) its not a big city or anything and even we have a water rescue team for people driving off the sides of these colonial-era roadways.
I won't name the city, but during a rare drought a car was found in a popular fishing area on a large lake. The woman and her daughter had been missing for 30-40 years after a late night booze run. Afterwards a few people said they knew about the car being there, but not the bodies.
It's crazy because many people know that's the last place they were last but nobody bothered to thoroughly search the water for them. I've seen cases were family will visit the water/lake and they know they are in there but just not having the resources or help to actually look for them that prevents them from finding them.
I've seen cases were family will visit the water/lake and they know they are in there but just not having the resources or help to actually look for them that prevents them from finding them.
oh yeah thats very true!
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube channel that helps families with suspicions of this happening to a loved one. Usually they find them within hours of starting the search. They're professional divers with pretty good equipment and they help solve loads of old cases. The channel is called 'adventures with purpose'.
I guess lots of times those kind of resources arent there for local cops or something?
Lots of need on a too small budget with too few people to work
I'm in a state with several Native American reservations. If native, they're usually found dead on the side of a highway... with a story that doesn't quite make sense. (Like suicide by hypothermia at the rest stop where she was last seen... yet it took several weeks to find her?) If they're ever found at all.
However, if tourists go missing, our state spares no expense to find them and almost always does.
California?
Nope. But there's millions of them moving here every day.
Montana? The hypothermia one sounds like a recent case
Yes, you hit that nail on the head. Selena Not Afraid, was her name. Then there's Arden Pepion, the 3 yr old off the Blackfoot rez... again, it doesn't make sense.
Oklahoma?
Nope, but the problem is endemic.
I'm right by OK so when I think about reservations and mysteriously dead natives, I think Oklahoma
There's nearly 5000 reported missing or murdered (unsolved) indigenous women across the US and Canada, so unfortunately, anyone living near a rez will hear about it.
Yeah I know, my mind just went to the area I'm close to.
Also, a damn shame that these people have to live in fear that one day they could just up and disappear... Or tossed out the back of a police car in inclement weather outside of town with no way back.
Exactly... that happens around here, too, even when it's -20° F they'll drop people out of town, and Canada is exactly the same. The rednecks in trucks heading out to beat an "injun". 🫥
It doesn't get that cold down here but it's also 105 in the summer with 30 miles back to town... That's a walk that a lot won't survive.
Ikr the racism disgusts me
I just read an article about a woman looking for her missing 21 year old son in 1995. NYPD weren't that interested because there was no evidence of crime and he was an adult. Years later she found out his body had been recovered from the river and fingerprinted. Even though his finger prints were on file with the FBI, there was never a match up made and he was buried in a mass grave along with other unidentified vagrants. Since that time I believe that missing persons cases are entered into NCIC so any law enforcement in the country can check for matches.
Some ppl get into drugs and fall off the map.
As someone whose job it is to try to find people without a phone or address, it’s basically a lost cause. I have access to programs where I can spot breadcrumbs to go off of every so often, but mostly we just don’t find them. If we had more resources to physically go out and search it would be better, but that’s super limited.
Sounds like a super interesting job but I can imagine even with your clearances and access, it can still be so frustrating with dead ends.
If we knew where they were, they wouldn’t be missing
Case closed.
Drinks at Wingers? Who’s in, fellas?
The question is, who is "we"? The odds are that SOMEONE knows where they are so for those who don't know they could certainly list them as missing.
People that were missing
Most missing children were kidnapped by one parent, and are alive, but of course some are abducted and murdered by a parent or a stranger. Teens may have run away and are on the street or staying with friends, but again some have been murdered. There is unfortunately a higher missing and murdered rate among native young women.
Nothing, the world just doesn't really care, to give you an idea, I live in a banana republic, where the last wave of far right violence left millions disappeared, even, a couple months ago, went public how paramilitary had used crematory ovens for years nazi style, yet, there's no international outrage, and locally, beyond victim's and some NGOs, no one really cares, and for the victim itself, they are either literally evaporated, or are now rotting in some jungle grave
Let me guess, Chile?
A friend of mine went missing in a presumed hiking accident. Nobody's ever found any clues but that's the assumption of what happened to him.
And I know someone who's ex husband kidnapped their child, whom he had visitation with but wasn't supposed to be alone with.
One of the theories of police was that he had taken his life in a murder suicide somewhere where they wouldn't be found, because there were clues, but thank God they found him alive two years later living in a different country.
But I'm sure that it does happen more than we think.
I saw a map once that overlaid cave systems over a map of missing people. Was surprising the number of folks who go missing around caves
So are they exploring the caves and get lost/die, or are there creatures that abduct them for dinner?
Yes
My fears about Neanderthals being alive and pissed at us are coming back again.
I would like to see such a map
Edit - found it
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/u9e6cx/the_missing_persons_map_has_a_frightening/
After watching The Descent I’m terrified of caves
A gal who was missing from my state for four months, with all kinds of people looking, as she had four kids, recently turned up in jail in another state. Drugs are bad.
Most young people who are reported missing are with one parent and being reported by the other.
Depends on why they went missing. Could be dead, could be just fine leading another life, could be alive but in danger, may have just wandered off, kids especially are usually with a relative who isn’t supposed to have them, etc.
And keep in mind that to put up a missing poster requires no credentials or waiting period. You don’t need permission from the police or a missing person’s organization to say “I don’t know where my loved one is.” The missing person could literally just be late coming home from an errand or have left intentionally and is not missing to anyone else but whoever posted the notice. The posters may also be old; if you’re worried about your missing kid and they come back, your priority probably isn’t finding every single poster you put up to take it down.
I follow a local Facebook page and missing posts happen multiples times a day. The vast majority get answers that the person is alive within days if not hours. Teens are usually at a friend or relative’s house, elderly or mentally ill people have usually just gone walking or driving and gotten confused, adults with addiction issues are usually hanging out in places they can get drugs. Only a minority don’t get answers quickly, and it’s very likely that the majority of that minority have simply gone someplace where the locals can’t confirm their whereabouts but they are alive and unharmed, like a different city or a domestic violence shelter. Of course there is a possibility that some have been murdered or kidnapped against their will but those are the minority of the minority.
I think the show "Without a trace" shows that well.
In Toronto, it's traditional been people who have been murdered and the cops can't be bothered to do their jobs (see: Bruce McArthur and the "no, there's no serial killer in the gay village. These men just lived high risk lifestyles"). With one missing girl, the cops did such a bad job, her mom came from up north and found her own daughter's body in a stairwell.
I feel like 95% of missing people are passed away and cops are bad at their jobs.
People will sometimes decide for one reason or another that their current life is worth leaving behind and they take off. Sometimes those people who leave cross paths with a dangerous person and they end up deceased and dumped somewhere. It’s nothing new to hear about a cold case being solved and the victim started out as a teenage runaway. Family members haven’t heard anything from them in 30-40 years and it turns out they were the victim of a crime. Other times, they simply relocate and choose not to tell anyone. They start a whole new life under a different name.
Not sure how true it is, but the underground cave system in the US supposedly lines up with the map of unexplained disappearances surprisingly well.
Think hunters vanishing in the woods, hikers, etc.
Would you happen to have a link to this map?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/missing-persons-cave-maps/
I remember seeing this too, but apparently it was just a case of cherry-picking the data.
For those that don't want to click, basically they deliberately did not include missing persons cases from major metropolitan areas.
I see. Well, that really takes the conspiracy factor out of it.
Darn. Well that's disappointing. Thanks for linking!
I work in a library in an area that has a high number of people without housing and who are suffering from addiction issues, mental health issues or both. Family members will come by with flyers. We have them in our break room incase we see the person. We never call the family looking for them because don’t know the intent but we will give the flyer to the person so they have the info of who is looking for them. It’s sad.
Good on you for looking out for these folks. You are putting the ball in their court, letting them know people are looking for them and giving them the agency to decide what to do with this information.
Some people who go "missing" don't want to be found.
In 2019 in the US, 421,395 children went missing. In 2020, when most of the world was on lockdown and doing “social distancing” for 6 weeks to 6 months, depending where you live, 365,348 children went missing in just the United States. That data came from the FBI website. That’s roughly 20 kids per state go missing every day. Where are all the amber alerts?
When I tell people this stat, nobody wants to believe it. People just turn away from information like this hoping it’s fake or will stop happening.
I realize that human trafficking isn’t to blame for all of this but it IS a real problem and it doesn’t get the exposure and attention that it deserves. Let’s not let this become normal.
Were they missing posters maybe of Jewish people from Oct 7? I live in a major city and missing posters aren’t really a thing, but those have been everywhere and have a wide range of ages from baby to elderly.
A lot of them were partially ripped (just the photo and name/age) so I’m not sure if they are Jewish, but that sounds really likely.
Did they look like these? https://www.kidnappedfromisrael.com/
A good chunk of them, yes. That’s terrible. I really hope they get home safe and soon.
I'm pretty sure it's that. I live in a big city and all of a sudden overnight, there were a ton of missing posters everywhere. It's because of the Oct 7 attack.
A lot of them are being ripped down, so what you saw would track with that.
What’s the Oct 7 missing Jews thing?
Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, killing over 1,000 people and kidnapping over 200; others who were attacked survived and were not kidnapped but may have been unreachable for a time.
Is this a serious question?
Some guy in my hometown just disappeared one day. Had a wife and kids and all of a sudden he vanished. They later found out that he had been living about 45 minutes away with some dude and died seemingly of natural causes. Did he just one day decide to leave his family? Did he get kidnapped? Was he running away from something? No clue!
You're going to be more and more startled the older you get as you find more and more horrific things that happen are just part of everyday life now.
My husband was abducted & missing as a child in the 70s. He had been adopted by a wonderful, loving woman & her husband. Birth mom (on crack) snatched him out of a window one night & he wasn't returned for like 3 years. I believe it was during that time period (or maybe right before) that he got shot in the chest. I seriously doubt he'd still be alive today if not for his legal, adoptive family.
A guy in his young 20s went missing about a decade ago in Australia and his family hunted nationwide for him for years, it was very publicised. His body was found underneath the family home five years later. I think he had gotten wedged in somewhere inaccessible and died. So sad.
Most missing people get found. Only a small number actually disappear
Those posters are just the tip of the iceberg. Those are people who were connected to someone who reported them missing.
There is a large and growing group of Americans who have no connections. Families are much smaller than they used to be and the connections within them more tenuous. Not everyone is into social media. Many are participating in the gig economy which gives them more freedom to wonder. Others are working entirely under the table and have complete freedom to wonder.
When these people get into the underground economies, there can often be reasons to move on. So even when people know them, there is no reason to report them missing. The assumption is they moved on.
Of course, that's not always true. Backwoods underground deals can end with one side taking both the product and money and the other side finding a permanent underground home.
The numbers of young adults disappearing and not even becoming a statistic is probably larger than the known disappearances.
They just went to get some milk from the store, they'll be right back.
Maybe there is another dimension full of people wandering endlessly, doomed to search for that milk or pack of cigarettes until the end of days.
If it helps, most of them are probably just homeless/mentally unwell, wandering the streets
Why would that help lol
I mean, what are regular people supposed to do about it unless we see them out?
I think the idea is not that you'll see the missing poster and then later see the person and go "Oh, I saw them on a missing poster" but rather that you may already know the person under a different name or have seen the person but didn't know they were missing.
If we knew what happened or where they were, then they wouldn't be missing anymore.
I just remembered once I saw a map of the continental United States overlaid with missing people and abandoned mine shafts and cave systems and they aligned disturbingly close.
A lot of them die. Either by murder or accident.
Many children and adults, especially women, are trafficked for either sex or labor, and they may or may not have also died (I think the average survival time for people who are trafficked is 7 years, if memory serves.)
Many adults who have mental illnesses or addictions or who are otherwise disconnected from their families and have few friends, become homeless and are stuck far from their place of origin.
Some children (especially babies) who are kidnapped and never found are either trafficked and adopted by the highest bidder, or are raised by their kidnappers and grow up never knowing they're a missing person.
I hear a lot about people with dementia getting lost. They usually find them eventually just wandering around somewhere. But if it's really cold they don't do very well. But there are people who just want to get lost. A neighbor of my aunt took off one day to go to the Yukon. Didn't tell anyone. Somewhere around 20 years later he showed up again.
I've always thought a lot are actually suicide victims that just haven't been found yet. But that's just an assumption on my part.
There's a few podcasts about this, you'd probably enjoy them.
If we knew, they wouldn’t be missing
I learned in my forensics class quite a few people get eaten too, so their bodies become hard to track down and identify. Stray animals and such
By what?! Dogs?
Yea, it's a problem in areas with large stray populations.
In my area (rural northern Michigan), bodies would mostly be disturbed by scavengers and insects. If you've ever watched vultures in action, they are scarily efficient.
If they're older it might be someone with dementia who wandered away and died. That happens with semi regularity in my area. If they're teenagers or young adults, it's usually mental health related or drug related, at least where I am. Kids are mostly kidnapped by family or parents. If they're Hispanic, there's a decent chance that the non-custodial parent may have taken the kid back to Mexico or Latin America. At least where I am, west coast of the United States, that's the usual pattern. There are some people trafficked and some true stranger danger kidnappings, but the latter is rare. The former is talked about a lot but I'm not sure of the actual numbers
Kidnapped, killed but never found, or at best they just left and didn’t want people to find them
The band Soul Asylum did a video for the song runaway train in the 90s. In the video they featured pictures of missing teenagers. As a result of the video, a couple of dozen of those missing kids were found. Almost all of them said they didn’t want to be found, and they were angry about the video
Most of them are in the category of "left voluntarily." Some of these were of sound mind and left the area to start over. Teenagers ran away to another state with friends or different family, adults got sick of the bullshit in their life and wanted something new, etc. The remainder were not of sound mind or didn't think their plan through, and may be far away or may actually still be in the area, but they're on the street somewhere and haven't been found. People suffering from mental illness, people suffering from addiction, people who fled abuse and didn't find a soft landing. When there's a missing person in their 80s or 90s, by far the most likely scenario is that they're suffering some form of dementia, wandered off, and either passed away or got preyed on before anyone friendly found them.
A small number aren't missing at all, there was just some kind of miscommunication somewhere (e.g. you don't show up to work so your boss reports you missing, then someone finds your resignation email in a spam folder), but these are usually worked out and corrected before the public ever hears about them.
A small number died under mundane circumstances and haven't been found. Heart attack while alone at home, tripped and fell into the river. Likewise, most of these will be found and identified before the public hears of it, but not all. There are definitely people on missing posters who are also laying unidentified in a morgue or public grave, because identifying features were lost and no one has connected the two yet.
An unbelievably tiny number, probably smaller than any other, were kidnapped or murdered.
Did you just go, recently? This is part of a campaign related to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, where they kidnapped a bunch of little children and older people. People all over the world, in particular in big cities, started putting up "kidnapped" or "missing" signs relating to people's missing relatives, hoping they are still alive. Some of them have since been found dead. But others are being kept as hostages.
In fact just today they have announced some kind of cease fire where Hamas will return the hostages. I hope that most of the missing people are found alive.
Yes, that was just a few days ago. I didn’t know that was happening! That’s terrible. I hope they’re all safe and get home.
Thank you for your good wishes.
Died, runaways, addicts, trafficked
This is a very important question. Are there any books on the subject? I've started reading Carney's The Red Market about organ brokers, and if that's not enough horror, where do all these other missing people get to? OP is correct, there are large numbers of missing people.
They either start a new Life somewhere else or get killed.
They are the ones the aliens decide to keep.
We can't find them to ask.
That's what Manhattan looked like in the days and weeks after 9/11 -- "missing person" posters everywhere for the people that had died in the attacks.
It’s a weird issue that most won’t admit is a problem. I honestly think a lot of people get taken
The big majority were found but no one tells the poster that. Just like the true statistic that 460,000 kids are reported missing in America every year. Not usually mentioned is that 90% of those reports are found very quickly (at the non-custodial parents house, with other family or friends, etc. )
This is why I'm a Dateline junkie , no two stories are exactly the same .
Many of them may have returned home but the posters were never removed.
I know someone who has been missing for three years and has/had a history of addiction and sex work. My hope is that they are found alive but based on high risk activity, hope isn't always enough.
Bad things happen to good people who aren't viewed as "good" by society but it's terrible for their friends and family, no matter what.
When children go missing, they've usually been abducted by a family member, oftentimes related to a custody dispute. Parent A gets denied custody because they're an addict living in their car, but they want the kids anyway, and they come and steal them from Parent B. That sort of thing. There are regularly news stories about the kids being found and reunited with their custodial family. But I've also heard about kids growing up with their unstable abductor relative, so I suppose that happens as well.
When teenagers go missing, it's common that they've run away from home. This might be to escape from abuse at home, due to them just being rebellious, due to being manipulated by a predatory older "boyfriend" who wants to traffic them, etc. Some of them come home or are found, some grow up, some maybe never grow up.
Most of them are murder victims that people can’t prove are dead yet.
They stay missing 😔
It's sad to see missing posters, but at least those missing have people who care enough about them to keep looking. The ones who break my heart are the people found dead who can't be identified. There are folks who get on the Internet and try to match missing person reports to deceased unidentified persons; they have been successful in some cases. Still, there are some people who are never reported as missing for whatever reason.
Soul Aslyum saves them.
If we knew that, they wouldn’t be missing.
When someone goes missing, a lot of factors come into play. Sometimes, they might have run away due to personal issues, and other times, it could be a case of miscommunication or just getting lost.
The good news is that many missing people are eventually found. It might take some time, but law enforcement and organizations work hard to locate them. In some cases, missing individuals might not want to be found, and they end up living under different circumstances.
It's definitely unsettling, especially with posters for all ages. But yeah, there's a process in place to try and reunite them with their loved ones. It's one of those things that, unfortunately, happens more often than we'd like, but efforts are made to bring resolution to these situations.
TBH there is alot of things in this world that should not be called "normal" like you said missing people, but also school shootings, kids fearing for their lives.....this world sucks....we can only try to make it better for the future generations and hope that mass murder does not become a typical norm....oh wait.......................................................
All sorts of things.
Some of them just left without telling anyone. Teenagers running away, adults moving away to start a new life, or people with mental illness travelling a long way without an idea about how to get back.
Some just died in places where you wouldn't look, and aren't in a shape to be ID'd anymore if you're not already looking for someone specific when the body is found.
Some probably were trafficked.
Particulary among children, some were probably abducted by parents without parental rights.
And well, some were abducted and killed.