The wilderness seems to beckon people to join it at times. Here we see some of the most mysterious vanishings there are, with people who have just gone off into the trees to evaporate into thin air. These dark places at times have a habit of drawing the unwary in and not letting go, leaving behind vanishings with a wake of strange circumstances and bizarre clues.
Our earliest case here brings us back to August of 1934, when 21-year-old Olga Mauger seemed to have things going pretty well for her. She had just married wealthy Wyoming oil magnate Carl Mauger after a two-week whirlwind romance and the two were madly in love. They also had an upcoming elk hunting trip in the scenic wilderness near Dubois, Wyoming, that they saw as a romantic honeymoon. It seemed as if she had her whole future ahead of her, but she was about to become the center of one of Wyoming’s oldest and strangest unsolved mysteries.
The couple made their way to a place called Floyd Stalnacker camp, at Togwotee Pass up in the remote mountains, just six days after their wedding, and at first, the trip was everything they had hoped it would be. On September 17, 1934, the sixth day of their trip, the couple headed out into the wilderness on a scout expedition for elk. At some point during their hike, Carl told his wife he wanted to go up a small ridge not too far away, but Olga said that she was tired and wanted to take a rest. It was a bit strange because Olga was an avid hunter, athletic, and in incredible shape, to the point that it was usually Carl trying to keep up with her, but at the time, he didn’t think much of it and continued up the ridge as she sat down on a rock to rest. Little did he know that this would be the last time he would ever see her again.
When Carl returned to the same spot 20 minutes later, his wife was nowhere to be seen. A quick search around the area turned up nothing else, and his calls out to her remained unanswered. Not long after this, authorities were summoned and they would launch a massive search involving an aircraft and over 300 people, bloodhounds, and even 20 Native American trackers, but they could find no trace of her. The dogs brought in could not find a scent trail; there was nothing. The only thing they managed to turn up was an empty paper sack in which there had been three sandwiches, but no sign of the food. How is it that she could so completely vanish within 20 minutes to the point that not even dogs and expert Native trackers could pick up her trail? No one had a clue, but as night approached and the weather got very cold, it was feared that wherever she had gone, Olga, who had been lightly dressed, might not survive.
Nevertheless, the search continued into the coming weeks, and there were some clues that would show up during this time. One was that some local campers would claim to have heard a woman screaming out in the woods of a nearby canyon three days after she had gone missing, but this could not be confirmed to have been her. There was also much excitement when a set of footprints was found at a wooded area known as Turpin Meadows, about 8 miles from where Olga had gone missing. The tracks were first thought to be hers, but it turned out that they were not. There were also some reports of seeing a woman walking along the nearby Togwotee Pass Road, but these could not be verified to have been her. The search went on into October, until a massive snowstorm hit, and it was called off for good. Rather oddly, shortly after the end of the search, a woman was found in Bridgeport, Nebraska, who allegedly looked so much like Olga that she had to be ruled out.
At the time, it was seen as a very odd disappearance for several reasons. One was that Olga had been hunting and fishing in that same area since she was a child and was very familiar with the terrain, meaning that it seems unlikely she could have gotten lost, and even if she had, why hadn’t she called out for help or answered calls out to her? Carl had allegedly been gone for only 20 minutes, so wouldn’t she be able to hear him? Also, how could she have managed to so completely elude the dogs and trackers? Why would she have wandered off from her spot on that rock in the first place? No one knew, but there were ideas.
One idea was that she had gone down to the road and either hitchhiked a ride or been kidnapped, but why would she have gone there? Another was that she had simply gotten lost and met with misfortune, but with her knowledge of the area, this seemed unlikely, and again, why would she have gone off into the wilderness to begin with? It could also have been a bear attack, but again, this would have made a commotion, and no body or signs of an animal attack had been found. As more information came in, there was also seen the possibility that she had run away to start a new life. It would turn out that her marriage was not as blissful as had been thought when Olga’s sister claimed that the couple had been on the rocks, arguing frequently, and that Olga had been unhappy with the marriage and had regretted having the wedding so soon. In this scenario, Olga had used the elk-hunting trip as a ruse for her escape, knowing that with her outdoor survival skills, no one would be able to follow her. After this, all she had to do was go to the nearby road and hitch a ride to a new life. This might help explain how she was able to evade the search party, and it would also explain the oddity of her wanting her husband to continue on while she took a rest. If she had run away, then it was actually a pretty good plan.
Another, more ominous possibility was that it had been foul play. It would be found that Carl had been dating a woman by the name of Ella Tchack for five or six years when he met Olga at a dance. It had apparently been serious enough that they had been considering marriage, and Ella was reported as having been very upset about Carl running off with Olga, to the point that it was claimed she had threatened to commit suicide. Yet another witness close to her claimed that Ella and Carl had continued seeing each other after Carl’s marriage to Olga, something that Carl vehemently denied. The idea here is that Carl had perhaps murdered Olga to get out of his marriage and get back with Ella, and there were some sinister clues that supported this. One was that he would later contradict his statement that he had been gone 20 minutes, giving a different figure. Even more damning is that the Native guides made the observation that Carl Mauger's path away from his wife to the spot he claimed to have gone would have kept him in full view of her sitting place from the moment he left her to the moment he claimed he had returned. An excerpt from the Casper Star-Tribune says of this:
“They also pointed out that, although the country is rugged, it is open and that Mauger was in full view of the place, where he claimed he left his wife until he reached a small path where he said he turned around and retraced his steps.”
If this is true, then she would have never been out of his line of sight at all. It seems pretty ominous, but without any real evidence of wrongdoing, there was nothing to go on, and Carl Mauger was never pursued as a suspect. In a curious aside, he would be arrested not long after and put in jail after being mistaken for a wanted criminal who just happened to be his doppelganger and had the name Carl Mager. Weird. Also, rather odd, or to be expected, depending on your stance, Carl would later remarry, this time with Ella, the one he had been dating when he married Olga. Coincidence or not? We are left to ask ourselves what happened to Olga? Was this a tragic accident or foul play? Where did she go that day, and what became of her? Considering it is one of Wisconsin's oldest cold cases and there have been no new clues in decades, we will probably never know for sure.
Moving along, Susan Adams, 42, and her husband, Tom, of Austin, Texas, had been looking forward to their next big camping trip for months. Both avid campers, hunters, and birdwatchers, their plan was to take a wilderness tour with a group called Iron Horse Outfitters, their destination being a protected wilderness area near the Idaho/Montana border called the Selway–Bitterroot Wilderness. Lying along the Bitterroot Mountain range, it is a rugged domain of thick forests and alpine parkland that spans 1.3 million acres, making it one of the largest such wilderness areas in the entire country. The couple was very excited about exploring it, they both had experience with the outdoors, and they were going in with a reputable wilderness tour company and seasoned guides in good spirits. There was no reason to suspect this would be anything other than the trip of a lifetime, but this was an excursion that only one of them would return from.
On September 22 of 1990, the couple arrived in Idaho Falls ready for their adventure and met with the owner of the tour company, Art Griffith, before heading out a few days later to take a long horseback ride through pristine wilderness to the outfitters' camp in the Battle Lake area. There they were greeted by the rest of the crew, consisting of a group of hunters, guides, and the camp’s cook. They then spent about a week leisurely exploring the area, hunting, and engaging in their hobby of birdwatching, before Tom decided to go out on September 29 with some of the camp hunters for an overnight hunting trip. Susan decided she would stay behind at camp, and after escorting her husband by horseback to a ridge, she said her goodbyes and returned to camp. No one at the time realized that this would prove to be their final goodbye.
The following day at around 9 AM, Susan decided to go do some birdwatching at a nearby meadow. The weather was clear and calm, and so she only had with her light clothing, her binoculars, and her camera. The meadow was nearby and an easy short hike away, so when she told the camp cook that she was headed over there, no one thought anything of it. She walked off, but never came back. No one in the camp seemed to really be all that alarmed, as it was a nice day, the meadow was so close, and Susan had not said anything about when she planned to return. It didn’t even cross anyone’s mind that something was amiss until Tom came back from his hunting trip in the late afternoon, and she had still not returned.
Tom waited a while, but as darkness began to creep in, he became worried. He went out towards the meadow, where he found footprints that led away down a trail. Oddly, he claims that at some point, the tracks just abruptly ended right in the middle of that dusty trail, with no sign of any leading off anywhere. According to Tom, it was unsettling, as if she had simply vanished right there on the spot, and he would say, “I followed the footprints to a place about 20 yards from the meadow, where the tracks stopped.” He looked everywhere for more footprints, but there were none, and his desperate calls out into the trees were answered by the sounds of the darkening forest. He was then joined by the camp guides and hunters, many of them experienced trackers, but they had no more success, and after some time scouring the area with no sign of Susan, night was finally upon them, forcing them to abandon their efforts and just hope that Susan made her way back.
The following morning, Susan was still gone, and so authorities were notified of the disappearance. A large-scale search was launched of the entire area for miles around, but nothing whatsoever was found, and the operation had to be suspended due to cold and snowy weather moving in, which was worrying since Susan had not brought any warm clothing or survival gear with her. The search then resumed with renewed efforts to find the woman, as it was thought that every minute lost was dangerous if Susan was still alive at all. Aircraft, dogs, and hundreds of volunteers meticulously combed the area, even walking side by side at arm’s length apart through large stretches of wilderness to leave no stone unturned. Some scattered footprints were found that indicated perhaps someone who was injured, but they were so faded and unclear that it was not positive that they had belonged to Susan Adams at all. The theory that was brewing among law enforcement officials at the time was that she must have gotten injured and died out there, and before the official search was closed for winter, Sheriff Randy Baldwin would say:
“I believe beyond any reasonable doubt that Susan Adams died from injuries or other related causes due to being lost or hurt in the wilderness area near Battle Lake. I also believe that Susan Adams' remains are still in that area, but feel that any future organized search would not be effective in locating her remains.”
The family was so desperate that they even hired a psychic, who rather eerily came to the same conclusion, predicting that Susan had sustained a head injury and perished not far from camp. Yet if this is all correct, then why hadn’t they found any trace of remains or indeed any sign of her at all, despite such a detailed search? Another idea was that a wild animal might have attacked her and dragged her off, but if this were the case, it is thought that she would have screamed out, which would have been heard at the nearby camp, and there was also no sign of blood, shredded clothing, no indication of a struggle, nor any tracks from a dangerous animal. It is hard to believe that a vicious wild animal could have swooped in to take her away completely silently, without any sign of blood or a fight, and without leaving any tracks behind. The idea of foul play was also briefly looked at, but neither Tom Adams nor any of the hunters or guides was found to have any evidence at all that they were linked to the vanishing.
What happened to Susan Adams? How did she just wander away so close to camp and then evaporate to never be found? Was she attacked by an animal or a nefarious party? Was her attention drawn by something to bring her out and get injured? Or was it something far stranger? Why is it she did not call out, and why was no trace of her remains ever found? Even more eerily, what is the meaning of those tracks that just stopped in the middle of a trail? We will probably never know, and it is another bizarre case to add to the considerable number of those like it.
Some of the strangest of these wilderness vanishing cases have been written of by missing persons researcher and author on the subject, David Paulides, in his Missing 411 series of books, and these accounts can range from the slightly odd to the full-on bizarre. One very weird case that has been much discussed and speculated upon is that of a seasoned, experienced hunter who went out with a group of friends only to step off the face of the earth and leave strange clues and mysteries that have not been solved to this day.
The setting for this strange case is the rather ominously named Crazy Mountains, in the northern part of the Rocky Mountains of Montana, in the United States, where, in September of 2014, a 38-year-old elk hunter by the name of Aaron Joseph Hedges was out on a hunting trip with friends Greg Leitner and Joe Depew. The trip started on September 3, when the group headed out from the Cottonwood Lake Trailhead along with two horses and a mule. The men were in good spirits, looking forward to their excursion, and things were going smoothly as they headed towards a place called Campfire Lake, but they hit an obstacle when their mule got spooked and Hedges’ sleeping bag was thrown off the trail and lost.
It was an unfortunate turn of events, but fortunately, the group kept another hunting camp they had used the previous year and had loaded up with an emergency cache of extra supplies just in case they ever needed it. Among these supplies were extra sleeping bags and so on. On September 5, Aaron decided to make a trek up that way, towards a place called Sunlight Lake. It wasn’t a particularly formidable distance for the experienced outdoorsman, and he had a walkie-talkie, cellphone, and was armed with a firearm and bow, so no one thought much of it, especially since he told his companions that he was just going to grab the supplies and would be back before nightfall. Little did they know that as he stalked off up that trail into the trees, it would be the last time anyone saw him alive.
Night came and went with no sign of Hedges, and the next day he still did not turn up. The group tried numerous times to call him on his walkie-talkie, but there was no response. A look at the GPS for the walkie-talkie system showed that Hedges had missed the fork in the trail that he was supposed to take to his destination, and it labelled his position as being out at the very edge of the screen. They waited around the area for several more days, hoping that he would find his way back to them, but there was no further word, and Aaron Hedges was finally reported missing on September 8. A search was mounted, and although the effort was somewhat impeded by snow that had hit the area, the surroundings were meticulously scoured using helicopters with infrared equipment, horses, and 20 tracker dog teams, all of which turned up no sign at all of the missing hunter.
It was not until the second day of the search that a clue was finally found. By a creek just east of Sunlight Lake was found a spot where someone had attempted to start a fire using a pack of cigarettes, and nearby were found the water bladder that Hedges had been carrying, the waist straps of his backpack, and his shoes sat down neatly side by side as if they had been carefully removed and placed there. Oddly, the site was found in an area the search teams had just combed the previous day without finding a thing, and it was also considered puzzling that he would have taken his shoes off and just left them behind, considering the plummeting temperatures and snow. Also unusual was that tracker dogs passing through were unable to pick up a scent trail for the missing man, which was a bit hard to explain. This was the only trace of Hedges that would be found during the search efforts, and it was as if he had just vanished into thin air, but things would get even weirder still, a full 9 months after the disappearance.
In June 0f 2015, a hiker by the name of Roger Beslanowitch was staying with relatives at a place called the Rein Anchor Ranch, when he took a walk to the top of a nearby ridge and came across someone’s outdoor gear, including a backpack containing a cellphone, an orange hunting vest, bow, clothes, a hunting license, and some scattered wrappers from granola bars. Bizarrely, at the head of the ridge was also a thermos cup placed upon a rock, along with an open energy drink nearby. Beslanowitch would report that he had been sure there had to be a body somewhere, but he could find none, just those belongings eerily piled up against a tree. When it was found through the hunting and driver’s licenses in the pack that they had belonged to Aaron Hedges, the authorities jumped all over this new lead in their cold case, but they could find no trace of any human remains.
It would not be until the following summer that remains would finally be discovered about half a mile from where the gear had been found, which was a full 15 miles from where he had last been seen and 6 miles from where his boots had been found, meaning he had somehow traversed that snow swept wilderness without his boots all of that way, along a route that had no major trails. Making it even weirder was that the area the remains were found in was within eyesight of the nearby ranch and right next to a frequently used road, which would have meant safety, but he had never managed to reach it. How could this be? He had obviously stopped to have something to drink on that ridge, from which he would have been able to clearly see the house, so why did he just stop, strip down out of his clothes, and die so close to safety?
The whole case is permeated by strange details. The fork in the trail that Hedges was originally meant to take up to his destination was clearly delineated and visible, and he was equipped with a GPS, yet he had gone right by it. He had then managed to set up a camp that evaded a complete search of the same area, then taken his boots off in freezing weather and somehow managed to walk 6 miles over rough terrain off-trail through snow, which authorities see as highly unlikely, as it would have been an incredible feat for even the most hardened survivalist. Indeed, why had he taken his shoes off to begin with? Then there is the fact that dogs could not pick up his scent, and all of this is punctuated by the rest of his belongings and his body plopped out there practically right on top of an inhabited ranch. The cause of death could also not be determined, as neither the skull nor any of the bones exhibited any sort of trauma indicating an injury of any kind. What is going on here?
There have certainly been plenty of theories ranging from the plausible to the far out. The official explanation is that he had probably had hypothermia and disorientation, which had caused him to wander about aimlessly and display his odd behavior. He may have even intentionally avoided search party teams and that ranch to cover the fact that he and his friends may have been hunting in off-limits areas and poaching. Other theories are decidedly more fringe, including the pervasive idea that he somehow passed into another dimension or through a portal. One Reddit user on the Missing 411 forum called “DapperWinner” explains his spin on the theory and how it matches many of the stranger details as follows:
“The turn in the path: Aaron left his hunting buddies to go to a cache that was a hike away, there was a visible path and clear turn for him to ascend up and get to the cache. What I believe happened is somewhere just before that turn or on it he 'passed' over into another dimensional reality. It was getting late and his friends tried to call him over the walkie talkie and they did ping his GPS. Now at this point, somehow I think for a split minute or so he flickered back into this reality in just enough time for the GPS to go off and then flickered back out. I'm no expert on this stuff so forgive the terms.
The boots: The SAR has been called and they comb the area for him, dogs also cannot get a scent. Now with the dogs i believe the reason why they cannot find one is because he literally is not there, he is in some other dimensional reality overlapping our own. Further in the case they find his boots and other items AFTER they combed a particular area bythe ridgeline. Similar things have happened in other cases, so we came up with a theory that what if his items have somehow re-materialzed back into our reality? Let’s say that in the dimension he is in, whatever bad weather is happening in ours (The snow) Is not happening where he is. So perhaps he has a rest and takes his boots off to rest his feet, somehow those items reappear back in our reality and he loses them. This would explain why his boots were found just set there as if someone had placed them. Because they were.
The pack: Months pass and the somebody finds Aaron hedges backpack and drinking equipment overlooking a property with human houses and structures visible. Let’s say Aaron did make his way to this place and I think he knew where he was going expecting to find those peoples properties. But here’s the thing: They weren't physically there in that other reality! He made his way to that ridgeline expecting to find houses but did not. And again, his items have somehow re-materialized back into this reality where they were found by a neighbor. Now this is where the speculation gets a little crazy: We theorized that what if the alternate reality he stumbled in, time flows differently. As they found his pack a year or so later I believe? What if wherever he is, it’s only felt like a day or two for him being lost, but in our reality a year had passed? As I said it’s just speculation on our part, but i find it hard to believe a backpack containing food was sitting there perfectly for a year for someone to discover without it being ravaged wildlife.”
What happened to Aaron Hedges? Did he simply get lost and succumb to the stresses of the environment? Is this, as the authorities say, a case of hypothermia-induced psychosis? If so, then what are we to make of all of the weird clues orbiting the whole thing? Or is this, as some of the stranger theories have posited, something altogether more bizarre and past out ability to really grasp? Just about the only thing we really do know about this weird case is that Aaron Hedges disappeared without explanation, his remains reappeared just as mysteriously, and no one truly knows what exactly happened to him except for him and the trees.
Finally, we come to the case of Terrence Shemel Woods Jr., of Capitol Heights, Maryland, who at the age of 26 years old made a pretty good success of himself as a filmmaker. Educated in England, he had worked on numerous TV programs and documentaries, including several that had taken him out into the rugged outdoors for shoots in such far-flung places as Turkey and Alaska, making him no stranger to roughing it. In 2018, Woods was working for a London-based production company called Raw TV, which specializes in the outdoors and is perhaps best known for the Discovery Channel reality show Gold Rush. In October of that year, he was enlisted to spend a few weeks in the remote wilderness of Montana and Idaho to work on a documentary for a British show called Whitewater, in this episode about the abandoned gold mine called Penman Mine, which lies within a place called the Nez Perce Clearwater National Forest, in the heart of north-central Idaho. Terrence was there with 12 other crew members and was reportedly in good spirits at first, but things were about to take a turn for the strange.
On October 5, 2018, the crew spent the entire day out at the mine filming. It was fairly isolated, rough and mountainous terrain, but all of them were quite experienced with this sort of shoot, and it was nothing they couldn’t handle. Woods reportedly had been quieter than usual that day, which most just chalked up to tiredness. As the crew began finishing up for the day, something very strange would happen when Woods took off running for no apparent reason and just kept on running right off the face of the earth. The production manager who witnessed it all would later say in a statement to Woods’ father:
“So we were finishing up for the day and your son was talking to one of the miners. I was in one of the vehicles doing some work when your son told the miner that he had to go relieve himself. Something told me, kind of like a gut feeling, to look over near the cliff your son was at, when I looked over there all I saw was the radio lying on the ground. I originally thought your son fell off the cliff so I leaped out of the vehicle and ran over there immediately. To my shock, your son was already 15 feet down the cliff running like a hare. I’ve never seen anyone run that fast. At that point I yelled to the crew to get in a vehicle and go to the main road. I proceeded down the cliff after your son but he kept running. Due to my professional SAR training, I stopped running after him out of fear he’d be further scared. So I went back topside and the crew hadn’t found your son on the main road. At this point we found the first house with a phone and reported your son missing.”
When he made his sudden run into the wilderness, he was carrying his cell phone, but he left behind his two-way radio and a backpack containing his belongings. By the time authorities reached the area, it was getting dark, and after a preliminary patrol of the area with no sign of the missing man, the search was started in earnest the following morning. The search teams used dogs, helicopters, and infrared cameras, but were unable to find a trace of Woods, with even the dogs unable to pick up a scent. A fresh sheen of snow had also fallen, yet no footprints could be found, and it was claimed by a search team member that it was “as if he had never been there at all.” After a week of nothing, the search was called off. In the meantime, some strange clues were turned up.
It would be discovered that, although he had planned to be in Idaho until mid-November, Woods had texted his father to tell him that he would be returning on October 10th, with no elaboration whatsoever, and it was even odder in that he had never been known to cut an assignment short. Some friends and family would also say that he had been acting uncommonly anxious about this trip in the weeks leading up to the shoot, and that he had expressed his desire not to go. This was all very unusual for him, because Woods had always been very enthusiastic about his work and the adventures it took him on. Not everyone agrees with this, though, and his older sister, Sharnia Tisdale, would say:
“I talked to him before he went out there and he seemed fine. He was going to go out and do a job with the film crew and he was going to come home, nothing abnormal and he wasn't acting different. We talk all the time. He is not the type of person that would just run off or do anything like this, so it seems unusual to me but you know I wasn't there so I can only go by what they are saying. He's traveled around the world he really likes to do tv, he is a loving person and caring and an all around good person.”
Also rather weird is that on the morning of the day of his disappearance, he had sent his father creepy footage of a river flowing through a canyon without any explanation or discernible reason for doing so, and although nothing was thought of it at the time in retrospect it now seems a bit eerie. There also seemed to have been some disagreements between Woods and the production manager, although what connection this could have is unknown.
Flyers were distributed all around the region, and volunteer searches orchestrated by the family continued, but no trace was found, and with the cold, snowy weather that had moved in, there was little hope that he could have made it out of there alive. It was truly baffling because Woods’ family would insist that he had never done drugs and did not have any mental issues or personal problems, making it all the more unusual that he should just suddenly bolt like that. While it is easy to see how someone could get lost in this treacherous and hostile terrain, what is it that made this normally rational individual just decide to suddenly drop everything and go running over a cliff to keep on going into that remote landscape to vanish into thin air?
One of the ideas postulated by the family is that he may have been scared of one of the crew members for some reason, to the point that he might have felt his life was in danger, but authorities have said there is no sign at all of foul play. In their opinion, he suffered some sort of mental break and perhaps had even been planning on committing suicide out there, but this is not in keeping with his established character and mental history. Indeed, Woods’ father has accused the police of not properly pursuing the case due to racism. Another rather ominous scenario is that he was possibly murdered by one of the crew members, but there is no evidence of this at all and none of them have ever been considered a suspect. Other, more fringe ideas are that some sort of paranormal force took him after luring him out into the woods, or that he passed through some sort of portal.
What happened to Terrence Shemel Woods Jr.? Why did he just suddenly decide to run off like that to join the annals of strange vanishings? Was this foul play, suicidal tendencies, a death wish, or something perhaps even stranger? To this day, the case has never been solved, and it continues to haunt family, friends, and those who would seek answers.
What is it about the wilderness that draws so many mysterious disappearances to it? Is this just a result of the terrain and wilderness itself, or is there something else going on here? Did these people just get lost or succumb to the elements, and if so, how do we explain all of the strange details involved? There is no way to really know what is going on, and at the moment, some wild places have many strange mysteries, indeed, and people still have a habit of coming here never to return.
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