I am a “vanisher”. I left home when I was 17, and I moved out of state. I had about $1000 on me, and I moved from a small town to another small town. I eventually ended up in NYC where I met my ex and I moved to Canada with him. I now live in Canada.
My aunt knows where I am. No one else. My parents don’t know, my highschool classmates don’t know. None of my other family knows.
As for why I vanished; It wasn’t appearent, but there were a lot of family problems at home. I don’t think anyone suspected anything was going on. Perhaps my immediate aunts and uncles, but to everyone at school, I seemed like a normal girl.
If you have any questions, just ask, and I’ll try to come back and answer them, if I can.
I remember that one - I’m not far from that spot, too. There was another disappearance near here, too. Remember the teenaged kid out in the Rose Lake area? He was camping with friends, and (I think) got in a fight with them that night. He walked off into the woods, and was never seen again. I saw a newspaper report years later that said he was often in trouble, was suspected of selling drugs, etc. They speculate that this might be due to a drug deal gone wrong. It was also suggested that he walked into a marshy area in the dark, hit a soft spot, and simply sank out of sight.
This area’s had quite the history of disappearing people. There were some kids snatched in the Brighton area back in the late 80’s and some people went missing around Milford (although these were solved). Detroit has quite a few bizarre disappearances, including, of course, Mr. Hoffa!
For more info on that I-96 case, check out here. Also here..
I didn’t realize that it’s been over 10 years since that happened.
I’m very curious, but don’t want to pry into what must be a very personal matter. Do you think your aunt has told anyone?
My mother-in-law’s uncle disappeared: he was a sailor and spent months at sea, in different crews. The family figured he died somewhere and no one was able to or inclined to get the message back.
This is not a true a vanishing, but it’s an example of how someone can disappear for no known reason. A male coworker “Leo”, upper 50s, had moved out on his wife & kids and was living with a female coworker “Jill”. One day Jill saw Leo loading his motorcycle onto the back of his truck. Then Leo disappeared. He left a note on his manager’s desk that said “give my last paycheck to my wife”.
Apparently Leo had been setting up his disappearance for several years. His wife discovered that he had financially screwed his family royally. The family hired a P.I., and there was a paper trail for a couple of weeks and then nothing.
The girlfriend appears to know nothing; she was very upset. Noone has heard from him in several years.
Two of my siblings have a habit of disappearing for several years at a time. They just move and cease all contact with the rest of the family for reasons unknown to anyone except themselves. Every so often, I’ll get word from somebody that Mike called them out of the blue or Kathy showed up at their door.
None of us had seen Mike for nearly a decade; given his attitude we figured he finally mouthed off to the wrong guy. He had been staying with our sisters in Texas prior to his disappearance and one day they got a call, he was in Dallas and wanted the stuff he left behind.
Kathy is a different story. She’s the oldest and possibly as a result she is sort of indifferent toward the rest of us. She had returned home for a couple of years until we had to locate for Dad’s new job. None of us had seen nor really heard from her for 14 years when she showed up for our parents’ 50th Anniversary Party.
Around here, there’s the case of D’Wan Simms. D’Wan was this little boy from Detroit who was supposedly kidnapped from a suburban mall. The mall in question is a mile from the house where I grew up, and I’ve been in it hundreds of times. The kid was never found.
I say that D’Wan was “supposedly kidnapped” because the police, after viewing a zillion hours of security camera footage, couldn’t confirm that he was at the mall on the day in question. A policeman that my mother knows told her that they think the kidnapping story is bogus, and that the kid was the victim of some kind of foul play by his mother and/or her boyfriend. Possibly, D’Wan died of abuse or neglect, and the kidnapping is just a cover to explain his disappearance. Or maybe he really was kidnapped and the cops were just trying to shift blame for not finding him.