30 Creepy Disappearance Cases That Will Give You Chills

1. A young girl went missing, I think she was around 5 years old. Young enough to still be using training wheels at least. She was last seen riding her bike in her backyard. Where I lived, the media would talk about her every day, any new evidence they found they presented because this happened just a mile or two from where I lived and in the county where my brother worked. It turned out that this girl’s neighbor had been the one to kill her and his wife turned him in. I’ll always applaud this woman for this, you always hear about spouse’s trying to hide their significant other’s crimes. My brother, who is great at getting inside people’s head, told me that he made it seem like he was relating to the guy, which he said he was repulsed by, but had to do it to get an honest confession.

He said the guy wasted no time at bragging at what he did, smiling the entire time. He said he invited the little girl inside his house, got a trash bag, and used it to suffocate her. He described every detail about how long it took, how tight her held the bag, and how “thrilling” it was to be in control of someone’s else life. But the most messed up part? He admitted that he rode with the father, helping this terrified man search for his missing baby girl. The idea that that poor man was sitting right next to her daughter’s killer the entire time, bawling his eyes out to the man responsible for his pain … It’s chilling. When the father found out, he begged my brother to let him alone in the room with the guy just for a few minutes. My brother, being an over-protective father himself, was seriously considering letting this guy have some “alone time” so to speak. But, another officer, who also felt bad for the father, told him they couldn’t do that because they didn’t want the father killing this man and risk landing in prison himself.

I believe they found the little girl and, if I’m remembering this story correctly, they found her in the same trash bag the man used to suffocate her.

2. In the town I grew up in (UK) a woman in her 30’s, her 3 kids, and their car all went missing. Her husband was known for being a bit of a ‘lad’ and the immediate presumption was she’d had enough and left him, but her parents hadn’t heard from her, her bank account wasnt used etc but it was nearly a week before anybody seemed to get really worried about it. She’d picked the kids up from school and then never went home even though it was only a 10 minute journey. Eventually one of the 10 year old son’s friends mentioned that he was planning on trying to get his mum to go and get them a Mcflurry. The nearest McDonalds was a town away, they eventually realised that instead of going straight home, she’d agreed to drive to the McDonald’s and gone the back way, part of which is along what we call the Forty Foot, basically a massive dyke. Found them all still strapped into the car at the bottom.

Husband was engaged again and his fiancee pregnant within a year.

3. I did my undergrad at a college in Vermont. In the winter we would quite literally be snowed under. Over Christmas break, a sophomore went missing. He wasn’t a close friend, but we had couple of classes together. It was a small liberal arts college in a small town, so everyone in the community was pretty freaked out. His phone and wallet were left in his room, so the theory was that he’s been abducted, and maybe even killed. Campus got real scary for a few months. There was police everywhere, helicopters overhead, students marching through the snow in lines looking for a body. Finally when the snow and ice thawed they found his body in the creek. Police surmise he entered the water from the bridge in town, but no one knows if he jumped or was pushed. This one still haunts me.

4. My stepdad worked a case.

My dad and my little brother lived in an apartment down the street from this 12 year old girl who went missing

She was walking home at night and was abducted on her way. It was about 3 weeks until they found her but the guy let the officers in and right there in middle of the living room floor was her mangled remains. She had been cut up into pieces.

5. Skylar Neese went missing. Skylar’s best friend since childhood and a new friend made in high school plotted Skylar’s kidnapping and murder.

They lured Skylar out of her home at 12:30 am with the promise of socializing and smoking weed, as they’d done many times. Her friends drove her to Pennsylvania, took her to the woods, and stabbed her over 50 times. They then covered Skylar’s body with rocks, mud and sticks.

During the investigation into Skylar’s disappearance the 2 friends helped Skylar’s family distribute missing persons posters, reassuring the family that Skylar would come home soon.

They were found guilty of murder and kidnapping. One was given 30 years and the other a life sentence.

When asked why they murdered Skylar, the only answer either murderer gave was “we didn’t want to be her friend anymore”

Skylar was only 16 years old.

6. The disappearance of Cherrie Mahan has never been solved. She disappeared on Feb. 22, 1985 not far from where I grew up. Police sought a van with a painting of a skier on the side. Pretty unique so no problem, right? Nope. No one has ever reported seeing that van again either.

7. Not a cop but I track missing persons accounts for a bank in coordination with the police.

One day a cop called and said they wanted to track the accounts of a woman who had gone missing at the hands of a dangerous trafficker.

The last transactions I could trace since she disappeared was at one of our branches. I pulled the footage and the trafficker was pulling a bunch of money from her account.

I received an alert the next day from the account stating that a purchase was made. The purchase was from a hardware store. Shortly after, the next purchase was for a carpet cleaner rental.

Needless to say, cops contacted us and says they suspect he killed her but they couldn’t locate a body.

Irked me. Felt like I had witnessed a murder through simple financial transactions.

8. Drunk lad who had a history of sleeping in some pretty weird places after a night out has potentially been crushed to death after being loaded into the back of a rubbish truck from a bin he was sleeping in.

9. College blotter: Upset student activated emergency pillars and talked to officer on speaker, said she was being chased by unknown people. No one at the scene when officers responded.

10. Brandon Lawson. He ran out of gas on the highway in the middle of the night and called his brother to come help him. Shortly after he called 911 and reported that someone had chased him into the woods and that he needed police. Eventually his brother and one police officer arrive at the scene and find his truck abandoned but no sign of Brandon. Brandon calls his brother and says he’s bleeding and is 10 minutes away from his truck. That was the last anyone ever heard from him and searches of the area turned up empty.

11. Not a policeman, but my Grandad was. He’s in his 80s now, and was in the Met Police (UK) for years. (He’s fucking brilliant, so many interesting/sad/crazy stories).

So in the 1970s he was given a case of a young girl (I think she was only 16 or 17) who’d gone missing and was part of the lead investigatory team in it – they interviewed thousands of people in the local area (a small town in Essex, UK). Turns out the girl had been basically beaten to death in an alleyway just outside her house, the killer had pushed her body through a hole in one of the fences that lined the alleyway into a garden of one of the houses. So they’d searched for her for a really long time to find out all the while her body was lying in a rose bush in one of the neighbour’s gardens…super creepy if you ask me. Also turned out that when they caught the guy, he was responsible for another killing of a young girl, also in Essex…I wish I knew more but there’s really little information about – I do know the girl’s name was Coral Vidler.

Also, in typical Grandparent fashion, he only told me this story because I had been out drinking in a local pub and it all started with “I know that pub, the Police held a huge celebration there one evening where I got punched in the head and lost all of my teeth! What was it for? Oh, they had caught a killer…etc” and coincidentally, my parents and I moved into the same row of houses that back the alleyway where the girl died, 35 years later. He didn’t think to mention this story for 15 years. Love him.

12. Not a cop but had a pretty fucked up disappearance happen about a mile away from where I live.

A girl went missing, she was 12. The whole town, state police, and I believe possibly the FBI all got involved. Search parties in the woods and through the streets for about 2 or 3 days. Turns out she had gone over to these kids house that she knew from school to have them fix her bike. Turns out the kids (brothers, one 15 and the other 17) planned on stealing it. Well, she put up a struggle and the one brother wound up strangling her in his basement. She was found a few days after she went missing, they stuffed her body in a trashcan on trash night.

13. My grandfather was a policeman and a fireman at different points in his life. His ‘spooky disappearance’ story actually came from his time as a fireman. He hasn’t told me the story in a long while so I’m a little fuzzy in the details, but here goes:

His team gets called to a house fire in a small village (rural England). It’s late at night, the fire is reported by a local who was walking home. Several other bystanders have arrived by the time the fire engine gets there, and there are multiple reports of screams for help from inside the building. They start to douse the fire and three of the responders (including my grandad) enter the building via the back door to attempt to rescue the people trapped inside.

The thing is, they don’t find a soul. Nobody is there. They clear the whole place out, stop the fire, effectively make the building safe. Later on, it’s confirmed that the fire started in the kitchen, likely the hob, where food was midway through being prepared. As far as anyone knew, the couple who lived there had been at home. Relatives had no idea where they might have gone that night.

My grandad and his colleagues have a funny feeling, so they get local police properly involved. Crime scene investigation uncover blood on the floor in one room, but any other evidence was destroyed in the fire. They can’t confirm who the blood belongs to – it apparently didn’t match the blood types of the two vanished residents.

The fire department are very suspicious at this point and apparently the police want to drop the investigation in favour of a manhunt for the missing people, but they end up expanding the investigation radius and find that apparently an unidentified van was parked outside the house that left just before the fire was reported. The investigation goes dead, but over a year later they find the burned remains of the man who lived there in a grave in the woods several towns away. They never found the woman so it was suspected that she killed him and burned down the house to conceal it. They never figured out were the screams from inside the building were coming from, though.

14. Not a police officer but my grandad was.

He was a part of the police force in the 60’s till the early 80’s. Sometime during the 70’s he was assigned to a missing persons case that had been ongoing for a while and had actually been reassigned due to the lack of new evidence.

Him and his partner spent months on the case fighting for it to stay open. One day they went and searched the missing persons home again. It caused a lot of uproar with the family as they hadn’t really moved his things or been into his home since the case had gone quiet. Anyway they got permission almost a month after asking and found a hand written recept for a car in his bathroom bin. God knows why his bins weren’t searched before unless it was just missed.

They managed to track down the guy who sold him the car, he said that the missing person had mentioned that he was going to store his car in a garage till he had the money to insure it. He even gave them the name of the town he said the garages were in.

The went to the town and got search warrants for every single rentable garage. Even though they had no evidence he had ever rented one. After a couple of days they found the car with the guy inside it.

Apparently… His body was almost mummified because of the lack of sun, air and moisture. I can’t imagine what the smell was like.

But they think he accidentally killed himself while trying to do some work on the car. He would have had the garage door closed because his car wasn’t insured, he didn’t want anyone to see the car and steal it. It was stored in a rough neighbourhood where the garages were cheap to rent. He also paid cash in hand so he never had any receipts.

So yeah he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s painless and basically you just fall asleep and then you die. He wouldn’t have realised until it was too late. The guy was missing for five months and he seemed to just disappear for no known reason.

My grandad told me this when I was a kid and it really scared me that people can so easily just go missing or die and nobody knows where they are. Still kinda freaks me out.

15. I was in high school a kid in my class went out fishing with his dad one weekend in the bay. They never came back, searches went on but nothing. Never found any bodies, they found the boat a few weeks later empty of course. It’s been 8 years and nothing has ever been found. It’s assumed they fell overboard maybe in some rough weather and drowned. They were both avid fishers and could swim, weird that no bodies were ever found or washed up.

16. Not me personally but other officers on my department; 70 year old female with dementia would often leave her home and go for walks around her property. One day, she never came home and it should be noted that we live on an island 30 miles out from the rest of the United States. State police, K9s, our entire department, news helicopters, coast guard helicopters and boats, marine division, all searched land and ocean for this women. We reviewed security footage at the airport and steamship ferry to see if she boarded either to leave island, but she didn’t. She was never found and to this day, we don’t know what happened. Two theories have arrived though; she walked right into the ocean and somehow her body disappeared and new washed up or two, she walked into to the construction site of a sewer plant and fell into a tank full of waste just before the tank was permanently covered.

17. Madison Scott disappeared from Hogsback Lake outside of Vanderhoof, British Columbia, May 28, 2011. There was a birthday party being held by the lake and everyone was supposed to camp out, but instead, most people left. Madison had already set up her tent and decided to stay. Her friends left around midnight, the last people left around 4 am. And that was the last time anyone saw her. Her cellphone pinged off a tower at 8 am the next morning and then nothing. RCMP and countless people from small towns and communities across interior BC held multiple search parties. People dragged lake bottoms, hunters went out to check hidden hunting cabins, pilots who owned planes did massive arial searches. Found absolutely nothing. She just vanished into thin air.

18. My wife went to high school with a woman who later married, had a child, then left them both to join a cult and moved out of the area. She then disappeared, her family never heard from her again and she is assumed dead. The family hired a private detective but she was never found.

19. In 2007 my 5th grade teacher and his younger son were stabbed to death and their house set ablaze. The oldest son, Charles was found on the lawn with minor stab wounds and burns. To this day nobody knows what happened, but everyone in town had always suspected that it was Charles. To this day the case hasn’t been solved. Don was my favorite teacher. He loved teaching kids about school subjects as well as things about life in general.

20. Back in my home state there was a little girl that went missing on her way to school. It was huge news because the family was cleared pretty quickly. Like a week or so later they find part of her body in a field. Then this 19y/o guys mother notices a smell in his room, finds the rest of the little girl, and calls and has him turn himself in. This case always stuck with me.

21. In my state 2 school kids went missing… later they were found; minus the kidneys…., organ traffickers from Bangladesh. The internet of whole state was blocked for 3 days to stop the mass panic.

22. My friend Jenna married a marine. They both were druggies that cleaned up.

They were living on base down south, she posted a huge paragraph on Facebook about how excited she was to apply for jobs etc.

20 hours later I hear she killed herself. Hung herself from a shower curtain rod with a belt. Now Jenna used to be tiny back in her drug days, but she got kinda fat once they cleaned up. How does a shower curtain rod hold up a body?

Just seeing him on Facebook creeps me out.

Military takes care of their own. It doesn’t look good for the brand of you let all these stories of military husband’s killing their wives. I also believe a certain type of man is chosen to be the ‘bulk’ or ‘pawns’ in the military. The kind that is so emotionally immature, that he thinks he has the right to kill his wife and get away with it.

23. My uncle went missing about 25 years ago in New Jersey. My dad has been so sad about it ever since and this was before i was born. He had a history or mental illness, but the weird part is he has never been found. We don’t know if he changed identities or got killed or went off his meds and went homeless, but its been over two decades and it still puzzled me to this day what happened to him.

My dad even got Howard Stern one day to say live on air: “Kevin Costelloe. If you’re out there and listening to this. Your brother is looking for you”

I remember being a kid and listening to it on the radio.

He just disappeared without a trace. Its so odd. My dad went through some of his belongings and has a trunk of some of his old stuff still in storage

24. In my home town near Savannah, Ga just a month or two ago a fourteen year old girl was missing for two weeks before it was reported, one of the neighbors was concerned that she hadn’t seen the girl in so long and after a while the police figured it was the father and stepmother. They brought out the dogs and found a grave just off the property where the girl had been buried and they ended up finding her brother two who had also been murdered by their father two years prior at the age of fourteen who he said had moved out of state to live with their mother. Nobody ever questioned his disappearance but the father and stepmother had apperently been abusive their whole lives and pretty much kept them locked up.

25. This isn’t exactly a disappearance case, but a little. There was a little family in a neighborhood near me, and one morning, they were all found dead. Not very many suspects, and almost no evidence to find the guy, except for a bloody 20$ bill that was found in a local pawn shop, along with a few things in the pawn shop that had been owned by the family. They ended up tracking down the fingerprints to a man (We’ll call him Randy.)

Well, Randy was nowhere to be found in his house. The police asked all his close friends and family members, and eventually got the answer that he had gone on an Alaskan Cruise that had been planned for months. Now, the police didn’t know if he had purposely decided to murder and then leave or if he had preplanned the trip and then decided the murder, but at the moment, he was in Alaska, and the police couldn’t actually arrest him there (because it was a different state and they were Maryland state police) and so they had to contact Alaska state troopers and alert them that Randy would be in the area.

The Alaska state troopers had to have the Maryland police there to arrest him too, so my dad had to fly all the way up to Alaska and wait for Randy’s ship to dock, and when it did, they actually found more blood-stained money on him, along with multiple Rolex watches that he had either stolen from the family or from another house. Once they arrested him, they had to chain him up and fly him back, and the pilot almost refused Randy flying on his plane, but they did eventually get home.

26. Not a cop but the disappearance of Lauren Spierer is still unsolved and creepy to me. Lauren was drinking with several friends. Her boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, said he did not go out with Lauren or her friends that evening. He said he was texting back and forth with Spierer before he went to bed. According to witnesses she was very intoxicated. There isn’t much of a time line of her disappearance other than some video surveillance and her friends stories about that night. This took place in a college town, Bloomington, IN, and is still unsolved. Some people think it was a sex trafficking thing others think she OD’d and her friends got rid of her and covered it up. If you google her name more on the case will pop up.

27. One infant was found dead in a brown bag in a town just 30 minutes away from me on November 10th, 1988. He was dead for 2 days, and the cops refused to give his cause of death. Maybe a mind like mine could ask, though? It’s been almost over 30 years, and he’s still unidentified.

28. Zahra Baker and her dad were originally from Australia, but after she got sick (I believe it was a form of cancer) they moved to get better care. It was just the two of them for a while. Then her dad remarried all the while Zahra’s kicking cancers butt. She suffers hearing loss and other issues, but she’s going strong. The community adores this girl and tries to help her family as best as they can.

Then she goes missing. It’s shocking and horrible, this girl can barely do anything herself and she’s gone missing? It takes the media by storm – relatively small town so everyone cares. This area is surrounded by woods so search parties branch out everywhere. Not much is told about Zahra’s family at first – no one cares about speculation when a girl like her is missing. And then all at once these horrible details are released by the police: Zahra was locked in a room (the attic I think, I remember commentary about how hot that can get and everyone being disgusted by it), the abuse at the hands of her stepmother.

The stepmother is arrested quickly and the investigation wraps up fast. The find Zahra about a month or two later, and the entire community mourned her for years. She’s still brought up in the news occasionally. She was about the same age as me when it happened and I remember my mom not letting me play in the woods because we didn’t know what was happening.

29. A Northwestern University Medical student goes missing from her dorm. Everyone figures the boyfriend (a stockbroker) did it but no body, no case.

Times go by, stock broker skips town to Thailand or the Phillipines (yellow fever, missing student was Asian). Anyway he runs out of money so I contacts her parents and says for 50 grand he will tell them where her body is. Parents agree, get his whereabouts to send the money.

But fuck that. Mom and Dad hire a private investigator from Texas (who has steel hooks for hands) give him the 50 k and say…go get him.

So ole hooks flies to Thailand/Phillipines goes to the local cop shop, spends a bit more of money and explains the circumstances. Cops roll this guy up, beat the utter shit out of him and stick him on a non-stop to ORD.

CPD are waiting at the gate.

30. In my town, there was a very sad case of a boy who had developmental disabilities. He had been playing hide and seek with neighborhood friends and family. After a while the other kids stopped the game and all went home thinking their friend had gotten bored and went home too.

An Amber Alert was created and they searched everywhere… about 3 days later they found him dead stuck in a chimney. He apparently climbed in to hide during the hide and seek game and suffocated.