Strange Vanishings Preceded by Bizarre Behavior

Mysterious vanishings are always weird. Here you have people who have stepped off the face of the earth, often under strange circumstances, surrounded by bizarre clues. Some of these are stranger than others. In some cases, the person who vanished did so while leaving a trail of bizarre and uncharacteristic behavior in their wake, which could provide clues but which more often than not provides more questions than answers. 

In 1990, 18-year-old Justin Burgwinkel joined the U.S. Army with high hopes for his future. He dreamed of joining the elite combat unit known as the Army Rangers, and it seemed that this was well within his reach. He excelled in tests and in training; he was very bright, and he especially showed great promise in languages, becoming fluent in Korean and an expert in language training. At this rate, he would have easily been able to go through with joining the Rangers, but he would lose his shot when he was caught for shoplifting and taken out of the program. Luckily for him, he wasn’t expelled from the military altogether, but the Rangers were no longer an option for him, so it was in disgrace that he was transferred to Fort Ord, California, to be assigned as a cook. Little did anyone know that this unassuming man would become the center of a great mystery, involving conspiracies, strange clues, and bizarre behavior.

While at Fort Ord, Justin would meet a local college student by the name of Iolanda Antunes, and the two would start dating. At first, things were great; they met each other as often as possible, and by all accounts were very happy together, even though she lived in Santa Clara, about 85 miles away. For several months, there was nothing amiss, but then, according to Antunes, Justin’s behavior began to change. It began with weird behavior when they were out on dates, such as suddenly becoming quiet and morose, or on other occasions cutting the date short and suddenly proclaiming that he had to get back to base. On other occasions, he would end dates and give her no explanation at all, and when she pressed for more information, he would tell her that it was best she didn’t know. Antunes would say of this weird behavior on the TV program Unsolved Mysteries:

“All of a sudden, he would just stop what he’s doing with me in the afternoon and he would just say, ‘I’m sorry. But I have to go to Monterey and see some people. But I’ll be right back.’ I’ll be just saying, ‘Just like that? Out of the blue?' And then he started getting more vague: ‘I can’t tell you, it’s, I really can’t–can’t discuss this with you right now. I’m doing something you know, kind of secret and I, I can’t reveal it to you.’”

Despite this odd behavior, she stayed with him, thinking that it was perhaps just the stress of his job or something going on in his life that he wasn’t quite ready to talk about yet. The weirdness continued, but they stayed together, and Justin was eventually transferred to Fort Lewis in Washington state in February of 1993, after which they still met each other whenever they could. However, it was with his transfer that things would get even stranger. That May, he took a 2-week leave to visit Antunes, and he arrived at her apartment with a briefcase that he was very secretive about. He refused to tell her what was in it and would hide it and keep it away from her as much as possible, sometimes clutching it tightly. On one occasion, she spied him taking papers out of the briefcase and shredding them by hand into tiny pieces, and another time she found him sitting alone on the sofa crying, the briefcase in his lap, and no explanation given as to what was wrong. She asked him what was going on, but he said it was just nothing, and it was all very suspicious. Strangest of all was when one day she got a phone call during which a male voice on the other end simply said “The mission is off,” before hanging up. When she asked Justin what it was about, he allegedly panicked and said, “Damn it! Damn it! You don’t want to know.”

At the end of this very weird 2 weeks, Justin returned to Fort Lewis, leaving Antunes just as perplexed as ever and no closer to an answer. Shortly after this, he would purchase two handguns and a large amount of ammunition, but people at the base said he was behaving normally. During this time, he made several calls to his parents, who would also claim that there was nothing strange about the way he was acting. Then, on June 4, 1993, Justin didn’t show up for duty, and three days after this, he was declared AWOL, but he hadn’t vanished just yet. In fact, he showed up at Antunes’ apartment asking her to stay there. From her apartment, he called both his parents and the base, telling them that he was not AWOL and would return to duty soon, telling them that “he was working” and that he had some things he needed to take care of. In the meantime, he went out on several occasions, telling Antunes that he had to meet with someone at his old base at Fort Ord. As usual, when his girlfriend asked him what was going on, he was evasive, but this time he simply told her to watch the movie White Sands, which is about the CIA, FBI, intense intrigue, and international arms smuggling. He said that if she saw that movie, it would all make sense. On June 12, he left Antunes’ apartment on one of his secret rendezvous at Fort Ord, and this would be the last time anyone would ever see him again.

For three months, there was no sign of Justin Burgwinkel, and then his car turned up at a beachfront hotel in Monterey, California, right near Fort Ord. The vehicle had obviously been there for a while, gathering dust and cobwebs, and within it, in the trunk, was found his mysterious briefcase, where police found Justin’s wallet, cash, credit cards, car keys, military ID, and dog tags. A check of the hotel’s register showed that he had not signed in to stay there, and no employees had seen him. When Antunes found out about this, she saw it as very ominous, recalling a conversation she had had with him about the dog tags. She would say of this:

“We were driving down one time in his car and Justin had his dog tags and he said, ‘Do you know what they’re for?’ I kinda had an idea but I just said, ‘No, no, what, what are they for?’ And he says ‘Well, when a soldier dies they put it in his teeth so, you can identify him. If you ever see these, you know, lying around, that means I’m dead.’"

Justin Burgwinkel has never been seen or heard from again. What exactly happened here? What was the meaning behind all of his weird behavior and the strange clues? Was he caught up in something that had brought him in over his head, perhaps some secret mission? Or was he just a deranged individual who ultimately created this ruse to go off and start a new life? We have answers to none of these questions, and it remains an intriguing, but lesser-known known mysterious vanishing.

Our next case begins in 1995, with a 29-year-old truck driver by the name of Devin Williams, who lived with his beloved wife and three children in Emporia, Kansas. By all accounts, he was a loving husband and father, as well as a dedicated, hard worker, so in May of that year, there was no way anyone could have suspected the strange series of events that would play out. On May 23, Williams kissed his family goodbye and headed out towards California to deliver a shipment, picking up a load of lettuce for the return trip. Although it was a route he had taken many times before, he would never make it home, and leave behind a baffling mystery that has not been solved.

Fast forward to May 28, Memorial Day Weekend in the United States, and in the Tonto National Forest, near Kingman, Arizona, and far from the truck driver’s route, families had flocked in to enjoy the pleasant weather, camping, and other outdoor activities. It would have been a picture-perfect day if it weren’t for Devin’s massive 10-ton, 18-wheeler semi-truck, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere to go barreling through a campground to send people running and scattering in a panic trying to seek cover. It would have been a terrifying sight, with two people nearly run over in the incident, and some witnesses described the eerie trance-like state the driver seemed to be in. One camper, Lynn Yarrington, would say of this:

“There was no expression on his face at all. He didn’t attempt to slow down or look over to see if they needed help or anything, he just kept on going.”

The truck careened away to roar off down the narrow campground road out of sight, and the next time anyone saw it would be stalled in a field surrounded by woods some distance away, when two hikers stumbled upon it and a seemingly dazed and confused Williams. As the hikers wondered what to do, Williams allegedly said to them, “They made me do it. I'm going to jail.” One of the witnesses to this, Charles Hall, felt it was all rather bizarre and imagined that some sort of suspicious activity was going on, and he describes the strange scenario:

“I envisioned a hostage situation, a hijacking, kidnapping, whatever. A jail break, maybe, and someone had a gun on someone in the cab. He made no effort to keep us there, no effort to ask for help, do anything for him.”

Authorities were notified, but when they arrived, the truck driver was nowhere to be seen. Considering the testimony of the hikers, it was thought that some sort of foul play was going on, but the inside of the truck was found to be clean and well-cared for, with no sign of any struggle. Williams had left behind his briefcase; nothing seemed to be missing, and the cargo was completely intact. The truck was found to have definitely been that of Williams, and no one could figure out what had possessed him to make a detour to Arizona off the highway to go rampaging through a crowded campground he had never been to before, only to drive out into the forest and abandon his truck and cargo. What was going on here? No one knew, and we still don't.

Things would get weirder when the following day, two campers driving through came upon the missing Williams, who they described as walking along in a sort of trance, talking to himself. When they pulled over to ask if he needed help, Williams bizarrely just said “I gotta light the grill,” and proceeded to take a rock and strike a $20 bill he was holding in his hand with it. It was quite an outlandish thing to see, and an odd sight to watch this man banging his rock against the bill almost as if trying to start a fire. What was he doing? What was the “grill” he was talking about, lighting? What was wrong with him? They were not able to find out because Williams then suddenly threw the rock at their car, and they decided to drive off, thinking that the man was insane. This is the last time anyone would see Williams alive.

Williams seemed to have just stepped off the earth after that, and extensive searches turned up absolutely nothing, leaving authorities trying to find answers, but there wasn’t much to go on. He was a devoted family man and hard worker with nothing at all in his record to show that he would want to try and mow down innocent people or abandon the truck, nor was there any history of mental problems to explain his bizarre behavior and statements. According to Williams’ boss, he had seemed totally normal before his trip to California, with nothing to indicate that anything was awry. The only slightly strange clue was that it was found that shortly before his disappearance, Williams had called his boss to say that he was having trouble sleeping, but it is unknown if this has any relevance to the case at all. In the end, there was no clear answer or clue for why he had turned up in Arizona, miles from his route and nowhere near the highway to do what he did and then vanish into thin air.

In the absence of any real evidence, all kinds of theories swirled about what had happened to Devin Williams. One was that he indeed had been kidnapped and that he had been forced to do what he did at gunpoint, but who would do this and why? What was the motive? Williams didn’t have any known enemies, and why would someone abduct a truck driver just to have them go streaming through a campground in the middle of nowhere and then disappear into thin air to abandon the truck? There was the idea that Williams had voluntarily left his life behind, but he loved his family dearly and had just bought a new house, so why would he do this? Also, how does that explain his very bizarre behavior? It has been suggested that he may have been on drugs, but he had no record of this at all. Another idea is that he had diabetes and had suffered some sort of episode, but this seems to do little to pull all of the disparate, weird clues together. There were even more fringe ideas that he had been abducted or mind-controlled by a UFO, as there was apparently a UFO sighting flap in the area at the time.

Whatever the cause was, there was no sign at all of where he had actually gone off to and no trace of his fate until May 2, 1997, when a human skull was found just a quarter of a mile from where Williams had last been seen. Authorities were able to determine that the skull was that of the missing trucker, but considering that there was no trauma or injury found on it, it was impossible to know how he had died. The proximity of the skull to where he had disappeared was also a conundrum, as the area had been searched quite extensively in the days after the vanishing, and far from some remote wilderness this was a very popular outdoor recreation area visited by scores of people, so how had he managed to evade all of these people to die there alone and then have his remains decompose to leave a skull two years later without anyone noticing? Was he killed somewhere else and then dumped there much later? It doesn’t make sense, none of it does. There has been no real theory that neatly ties it all together, and it all remains an enigma. What happened to Devin William? We may never know.

Moving on to our next case, in the fall of 2011, 26-year-old Emma Fillipoff moved to Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada, in order to experience a new life in a place she had always felt drawn to. She did a stint of seasonal work at the Red Fish Blue Fish seafood restaurant at Victoria's Inner Harbour, as well as some other odd jobs, and seemed to enjoy her time there. Fillipoff left the restaurant job on October 31, 2012, and started making preparations to return to her home in Ontario, assuring her co-workers that she would be back in the spring. By all appearances, it looked like she intended to go home and then return, but this would never come to pass, and she was about to become one of Canada’s most bizarre and baffling vanishings. 

It began with some rather erratic behavior on Emma’s part. On November 23, 2011, she called her mother, Shelley, in the middle of the night, crying, and said that she really wanted to go back home as soon as possible. Shelley would say that her daughter didn’t explain what was upsetting her, but she had strongly urged her mother to book a flight to Victoria as soon as possible to be with her and help her pack. It was a pretty odd and worrying call, but it would get even stranger the following day, when Emma called her mother back and told her not to come out after all, and that she’d “figure things out on her own.” Later that same evening, she would call her mother again in tears, saying she wanted to come home, and yet again, the following morning, she called back to tell her mother not to come. What was going on here?

That would be the last Shelley heard from Emma for a few days, and although she was worried sick, she respected her daughter’s last wishes for her not to go out to Victoria. Then on November 27, Shelley got a call from a women’s shelter about Emma, which caught her off guard because her daughter had said nothing to her about living in a shelter. On that same day, Emma would call again and ask her mother to come out, only to call back a short time later and tell her not to, ending the call with the cryptic statement “I don't know how I can face you.” Confused by Emma’s various bizarre phone calls and the shelter, she nevertheless booked a flight for the next day. In the meantime, things would only get stranger from there.

As her mother was making arrangements to fly out to Victoria on the evening of the 27th, Emma was seen wandering about barefoot in the street in front of the Fairmont Empress Hotel and “acting oddly.” A concerned bystander contacted police, and they arrived to find a disheveled and slightly dazed and confused Emma standing there in her bare feet in the rain that was falling at the time. The police would talk with her for about 45 minutes before deciding that she wasn’t a threat to herself or others, and they would then just leave her there standing barefoot in the rain. At some point after this, she would just vanish off the face of the earth. The following evening, Shelley showed up at the shelter where Emma was supposed to be staying, but she was not there, and no one had seen or heard from her, and this was when she would soon be reported as a missing person.

Police would quickly locate Emma’s abandoned van, which she seemed to have been using as a storage space since it held a hodgepodge of her various belongings, including her passport, library card, digital camera, clothes, a pillow, assorted ornaments, laptop, and recently borrowed library books, among other things, but there was no sign of the missing woman herself. They would learn that Emma had been living a sort of transient lifestyle during her time in Victoria, staying at the shelter and at campgrounds, often sleeping in her van or in a tent. None of her friends or family had known anything about any of this. It was all pretty weird, but it would become even more so when the police began going through surveillance footage in an effort to track her movements. 

It would be found that on November 23, Fillipoff was captured on security footage at the Victoria YMCA, where she can be seen exiting and entering the building multiple times, either fidgeting with her hands or trying to operate a cell phone, and she appears to be distressed and acting as if she is possibly trying to avoid someone. Another piece of footage from November 28 shows her buying a prepaid cell phone from a convenience store, but she acts rather oddly, hesitating and departing the store to check the street before going back in to buy the phone. Police would verify that she had indeed bought a phone, as well as a $200 prepaid debit card, and they would talk to a taxi driver who said that he had picked up the missing woman and been told to take her to the airport. Strangely, she would then say she could not afford the $60 taxi fare and get out, despite the fact that she had that $200 prepaid card and several thousand dollars in her bank account. This was estimated to have happened shortly before she was found wandering about barefoot in front of that hotel, although why she had been there in such a disoriented state and what had happened to her shoes was unclear. 

There was not much to go on. Emma’s prepaid phone was not activated, and there were no reliable clues as to where she had gone to after speaking with those police officers in front of the hotel. Despite a massive search involving numerous police officers and volunteers, as well as flyers distributed all over the country, there was really not much to work with, but some potential leads would trickle in. On December 5, Emma’s prepaid card was flagged as being used at a gas station near the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre and Galloping Goose trail, approximately 12 km from downtown Victoria. They were able to track the card to a man who claimed to have found it lying on the ground at the recreation area and then used it to buy cigarettes. Although it seems odd that Emma would have found her way all the way out there on her own, the man was not seriously questioned and was let go. There were also several sightings of the missing woman, but these went nowhere. 

The next lead would not come until May of 2014, when a tattooed man with a limp walked into a store in Vancouver and waved around Emma’s missing person poster, claiming that it was his girlfriend before throwing it away. The police were called, but the man disappeared before he could be questioned. Although security video captured an image of the man, he has never been identified. In 2018, a witness named only "William" told police that he had dropped her off at an intersection on Vancouver Island - about 70 miles from the hotel – at around 5:15 a.m. on November 29, 2012. When asked why he had not come forward with this information sooner, he claimed that he had been afraid of being implicated in her disappearance. Although promising enough to warrant a three-day search of the vicinity with cadaver dogs, the lead was many years old and would turn out to be ultimately useless. 

With a lack of any real answers, speculation as to what happened to Emma has been rampant. One of the main ideas is that she had some sort of psychotic break or went into a sort of fugue state to wander off or possibly even commit suicide. Friends reported that she had had mental issues and bouts with depression in the past, and that she had also been afraid of her mother, whom she had described to friends as a disciplinarian. She also might have run away to start a new life, which would have fit into her transient lifestyle. Another idea is that she was the victim of foul play, as in the surveillance footage, she can be seen acting noticeably anxious and paranoid, as if she is being followed or is trying to avoid someone. However, she never did tell anyone or write in her numerous journals about anything to this effect.

Despite getting hundreds of other tips, none of these have ever led anywhere, and the case has gone completely cold. The case has been picked up by numerous private investigators, amateur sleuths, and even psychics, but no one has found any trace of Emma Fillipoff. We are left to wonder. What happened to this woman, and what was the meaning of her odd behavior? How did she manage to get out on that rainy street in her bare feet, only to talk to cops and then vanish? Was this some sort of psychotic break or foul play? In the end, she has never been found, and there is no way to know for sure. 

In our final case here, Bryce Laspisa seemed to have a lot going for him and a bright future ahead of him. After graduating from high school in Chicago, Illinois, he moved with his family to California, where he ended up enrolling at Sierra College, where he studied graphic and industrial design. The naturally artistic Laspisa apparently flourished in his new environment, doing well in his classes and making friends with his easygoing charm, as well as meeting his new girlfriend, Kim Sly. Indeed, his first year at college went incredibly smoothly, and there was no reason to think that he wouldn’t be able to make all of his dreams come true. There was certainly no reason to think that dark days were ahead of him, or to suspect that he was about to become the center of a bizarre mystery.

The summer after his first year at school, he went to visit his parents’ home in Laguna Niguel, California, and was, by all accounts, acting normally and eager to get back to school. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary at all, but as soon as he returned to school, his behavior seemed to have noticeably changed. At first, it was all rather subtle, but his girlfriend and close friends noticed that the normally open and cheerful Laspisa had become uncharacteristically morose, depressed and withdrawn. He also had strange mood swings and was described as not being quite his usual self. This soon rapidly graduated to frequent liberal drinking, something Laspisa had never really been into before. His roommate and friend Sean Dixon would report that he had taken to drinking hard liquor every night, something he had never done before, getting drunk practically every evening and passing out, which was all rather shocking to those who knew him best. Even more worrying was that Laspisa was found to have started taking a medication called Vyvanse, an amphetamine derivative used to treat ADHD, even though he didn’t have this condition, and which can produce severe side effects, including psychosis, depression, and mania. When asked about it, Laspisa shrugged it off and said he only took it to help him stay awake playing video games, but his friends were not so sure. As his behavior continued to unravel and become increasingly erratic, his friends and family began to suspect that something in his life had gone very wrong, but he told everyone he was fine and refused to talk about it. 

On August 27, 2013, Laspisa broke up with his girlfriend by e-mail, telling her that she was better off without him, and he also sent Dixon a weird message saying, “I love you, bro, seriously. You are the best person I’ve ever met. You saved my soul.” He would, on the same day, give Dixon his beloved X-Box video game console, and he also gave away a pair of expensive diamond earrings his mother had given him. On August 29, he called his mother, Karen Laspisa, to tell her that he had a lot to talk to her about and that he was going to drive home to visit them, without giving any details on what was so important that he had to suddenly go back home just a couple of weeks after having just gone back to school. He then got into his car at around 11:30 p.m. and drove off into the next chapter of the strange mystery.

At around 9 a.m. the following morning, Laspisa apparently ran out of gas outside the town of Buttonwillow, around 200 miles north of Laguna Niguel, after which he made his way to a rest stop and called roadside assistance. He was then brought some gasoline, but did not continue on his way. At this time, Laspisa’s mother had made repeated failed attempts for three hours to contact her son, but his phone was off, so she contacted the roadside service company that had brought him the gas and asked them to check on him. When the attendant arrived, he found Laspisa in the same spot as he had been when the gas had been brought to him hours before, and he then apparently called his worried Mom to tell her that he had just been trying to get some sleep and would be on the road again shortly.

The hours went by, and Laspisa never showed up at his parents’ house. When 6 p.m. rolled around and he definitely should have been at home, his mother filed a missing person report with the Orange County Sheriff's Department. They did not have to look far, because bizarrely, Laspisa was still sitting in his car at the very same rest stop he had run out of gas at that morning. He had been there at this point for at least 9 hours, so the officers suspected drug or alcohol use, but there was no evidence of this at all, and he passed a sobriety test with flying colors. When asked what he was doing out there, he said he was on his way to meet a friend and “let off some steam,” but he gave no reason for why he had been sitting in his car there at that rest stop all day. With no reason to detain him for anything and the fact that Laspisa had broken no laws, the authorities left him there to his own devices, merely telling him that his mother was worried about him and that he should turn his phone back on. The hours went by, and when the roadside service company went out to the rest stop to check at 10 p.m., it was found that Laspisa was still oddly near the spot where police had found him hours before. He had now been sitting there spacing out for around 13 hours, and this time the attendant persuaded him to be on his way. It would only get weirder from there. 

Laspisa would get back in touch with his parents again later on, calling them to update them on his location, and he claimed that he could not tell where he was, but that his GPS navigation indicated he would arrive home at 3:25 am on the 30th. At 2 a.m. that morning, just a little over an hour before he was scheduled to finally arrive home after his bizarre journey, Laspisa called one more time to tell his mother that he was tired and was going to pull over and rest along Interstate 5 in the Sierra Pelona Mountains. Although he told her he would call her later that morning, this would be the last anyone would hear from Laspisa. 

On the morning of Aug. 30, between 4:20 and 5:15 a.m., law enforcement officials participating in a training exercise found Laspisa’s car at Castaic Lake, but there was no sign of Laspisa himself. The car was in quite a rough state, having tumbled 15 feet down a steep ravine just a few hundred feet from Lake Hughes Road. Inside the vehicle were found Laspisa’s cell phone, wallet, laptop and clothing, but he was nowhere to be found, and there was no sign of blood or injury. Surveillance footage would show that at 2:15 a.m., he’d turned onto an access road rather than pulling off for a roadside nap, and approximately two hours later, at 4:29 am, the same camera photographed Laspisa's car going by again, but after that, it is unknown just what exactly had happened to him. Rather oddly, it was found that the vehicle had likely accelerated down the embankment, meaning that Laspisa had still been in control of it, and there was damage to the rear window that suggested that he had used a tool to break it to get out. What had happened here? No one had a clue.

A massive search was launched, using divers to scour the lake and aircraft, and tracker dogs managed to follow his scent to a nearby truck stop, where they lost it, and it seems as if he had just vanished into thin air. The following month, it was thought that the case had been solved when some charred human remains were found near Castaic Lake, but they turned out not to be Laspisa’s. There would also be found a human skull a few years after that, which would also prove not to have belonged to the missing man. In the meantime, there have been various unconfirmed sightings of Laspisa, primarily in Oregon, but more recently, there was a sighting of him in April of 2022 in Missoula, Montana, where he was supposedly caught on camera footage, and although it is now not believed to be him, it is apparently a spitting image of him. One Detective Ethan Smith has said of it:

"I was able to verify his identity and it’s not Bryce. I believe the photo being circulated of the young man on the bike in Missoula who looks like Bryce is this guy, but sadly, it isn’t Bryce. I was astounded by the resemblance between the two."

Over the years, the case has remained ice cold, with no real clues or evidence as to what happened to Laspisa, and at every turn, investigators have been absolutely stumped as speculation has swirled as to what happened to him. One idea is that he intentionally disappeared to start a new life, but friends and family dispute this. Another possibility is that his use of alcohol and the ADHD medication had triggered a psychotic break or fugue state in him, after which he had basically temporarily lost his mind, crashed his car, and wandered off to an unknown fate. Still another idea is that he was abducted, likely at the truck stop where the dogs lost his scent trail, or was subjected to some other foul play. 

None of these various ideas really answers all of the questions and weird clues orbiting the case. Investigators believe that whatever happened to him is most likely linked to whatever he had wanted to talk to his mother about, but what was it? Why had his behavior changed so dramatically in the days after summer vacation had ended? What prompted him to suddenly drive off to visit his parents, and why did he stay at that rest area for 13 hours even when he had gas? Why is it that he kept turning off his phone? What was the meaning of his vehicle passing by the camera twice and going off onto that access road, and how did his car end up at the bottom of that ravine? Where did he go after that, and why did he leave all of his belongings behind, especially his phone, which he could have used to call for help? What in the world happened to him? There are no solid answers to any of these questions, no new clues have come in, and it seems more and more likely with every passing year that the strange disappearance of Bryce Laspisa will never be solved. 

What are we to make of these cases? Does any of this bizarre behavior surrounding these cases offer any kind of hint or information as to what has happened to these people? For now, the answers remain vague, and it is very likely that we may never know what really happened to these people or what connection their weird behavior has to their vanishings.