10 Weird Stories Missing People Told When They Were Found

It is such a relief when a missing person is found alive, whether they have been gone a matter of hours, weeks, or even years. However, the explanations for why the person vanished to begin with or stories about experiences they had during their absence are sometimes very bizarre. From strange crimes to supernatural tales, these are 10 of the weirdest stories missing people told on their return.

Related: 10 Missing Persons Cases Solved by YouTube Divers

10 Brenda Heist

It’s always surprising to learn that a missing person has actually disappeared of their own free will, sometimes abandoning a family. This turned out to be the case with Pennsylvania wife and mother, Brenda Heist, who vanished after dropping her kids off at school on February 8, 2002. She later explained she left due to stress-related reasons. Adding to the strangeness of Heist’s story was her decision to go with a group of homeless people who were hitchhiking.

Heist ended up in Florida, where she mainly lived as a transient for the next decade, sometimes doing odd jobs to get by. Heist was getting a divorce and had just been denied public housing when the trio found her crying in a park. She accepted their invitation to join them. She went to a police station in 2013 and identified herself.^[1]

9 Nguyen Thi Van

When 16-year-old Vietnamese high school student Nguyen Thi Van returned home late one evening, she found herself locked out and decided to go to a karaoke bar. Her family would not see her again for 21 years. A frightened Thi Van awoke the next morning to find herself in China, along with three of her female friends, having been taken there by a woman named Thanh. According to Thi Van, she and her friends were tortured by Thanh, who also forced them to marry older Chinese men, and Thi Van eventually bore a child.

Following several failed attempts to escape, which resulted in beatings and confinement by her husband, Thi Van finally made her way back to Hanoi with the help of a truck driver. In a strange coincidence, a man she approached for directions while walking down the street just happened to be her uncle, who subsequently reunited Nguyen Thi Van with her family.^[2]

8 Amanda Eller

On May 8, 2019, physical therapist/yoga teacher Amanda Eller got lost in Maui’s Makawao Forest Reserve without her cell phone after getting off a trail while hiking. She later explained that a “voice” prompted her to leave her car that day. “My heart was telling me, ‘Walk down this path, go left,’ Great. ‘Go right.’ It was so strong…” she said.

It was difficult enough trying to find her way out of the reserve, but during most of the time she was missing, she was injured, having broken the tibia of her left leg when she fell 20 feet (6 meters) on day four. Eller slept in boars’ caves and didn’t have sneakers after they were washed away during a flash flood. She continually searched for food and listened for the sound of helicopters, like the one that ultimately arrived 17 days after she went missing.^[3]

7 Agatha Christie

In 1926, the 36-year-old bestselling whodunit author Agatha Christie became her own real-life mystery heroine. On December 3, shortly after learning that her husband, Archie Christie, was leaving her for another woman, she walked out of her house in England and aimlessly drove through the night, leaving her young daughter with servants. She contemplated suicide and sustained injuries to her head and chest when her car almost went over a cliff. After a dazed walk through the countryside, she boarded a train and later checked into a spa resort in Harrogate.

According to Christie, she suffered a loss of memory, and she took on an alter ego. In an interview after her return, Agatha Christie explained: “I had now become in my mind Mrs. Teresa Neele of South Africa.” Interestingly, her new identity had the same surname as Archie’s young mistress, Nancy Neele.

While Agatha Christie was relaxing and making new friends at the spa, the story of her disappearance was big news, and a massive search effort was underway. Christie herself was well aware of the story: “At “Harrogate,” she said, “I read every day about Mrs. Christie’s disappearance… I regarded her as having acted stupidly.”

Some of the other guests were beginning to recognize her, and police were alerted, leading Christie to be discovered at Harrogate 11 days after she had vanished.

There are several theories about what really happened, including one that she was trying to frame her husband for murder. However, there is significant evidence that she did experience some type of memory loss brought on by trauma or stress, such as dissociative fugue.^[4]

6 Steven Stayner and Timothy White

After seven-year-old Steven Stayner of Merced, CA, was lured into a vehicle while walking home from school on December 4,1972, along Highway 140, he endured over seven years of sexual abuse from his kidnapper, Kenneth Parnell. Though many abducted children are abused, Stayner’s tale has an unusual twist. When Stayer reached his teens, Parnell decided he wanted a younger boy who he could control more easily, so in 1980, he kidnapped five-year-old Timothy White.

Two weeks later, Stayner, who wanted to help White escape his own fate, was compelled to take action. He left the house with White, and they hitchhiked to Ukiah. Stayer took White to a police station, where he explained what had happened to both of them. According to his high school girlfriend, Stayner later said: ‘I was not going to let that child go through what I had already been through. And if I didn’t take care of it now, it would just get worse.”^[5]

5 Duffy

Following the release of her sophomore album, Endlessly, internationally successful Welsh-born singer Duffy inexplicably dropped off the radar, working very little over the next ten years. Much later, she claimed to have been drugged in her own home and held against her will for four weeks, during which time she was taken to a foreign country and raped while staying at a hotel. “I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days; I did feel the presence of something that helped me stay alive.” Duffy was afraid to escape or call the police. After the month-long ordeal, she returned with him on a plane to the UK.

A decade later, she still refused to publicly identify the culprit but said that at one point, she told a female police officer about the rape after someone tried to blackmail her and another female officer when three men attempted to break into her home. The emotional turmoil Duffy experienced following the alleged crime led her to retreat from the world for weeks at a time. She feared what would happen to her life if she went public with the story but finally realized that keeping it a secret was doing her more harm than good and recounted the details in 2020.^[6]

4 Travis Walton

There have been many people over the years who have claimed to have been abducted by aliens, but Travis Walton’s story is among the most famous and convincing on record. In 1975, Walton, a 22-year-old Arizona logger, reportedly got out of a truck and was catapulted by a blue ray that came from a craft overhead, as witnessed by his six crew members who fled the scene.

When some co-workers returned a short time later, Walton was gone. After turning up seven days later, Walton said that he had been abducted by aliens who did experiments on him. “I became conscious inside the craft. And I believed I was in the hospital. I was in a lot of pain. And as I became more conscious, I looked around, and I saw alien beings, and I just panicked.”

His story has since become the subject of books, documentaries, and the 2015 movie Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton.^[7]

3 Jan Broberg

Between the ages of 12 and 14, future actress Jan Broberg was kidnapped twice by Robert Berchtold, a close family friend who she considered a father figure. The first abduction occurred on October 17, 1974, when he was supposedly taking her horseback riding. He actually drugged her and, according to a People article featuring her account, he “held her captive in this RV, convincing her that aliens had given them a mission: to have a child together and save the planet.”

He proceeded to sexually assault her and took her to Mexico, where they got married. Even after Berchtold was charged with kidnapping, Broberg believed the alien story, and Berchtold again kidnapped her in 1976. The backstory is almost as bizarre as the abductions. Apparently, he had spent years implementing a calculated plan to abuse Broberg, which included entering into separate affairs with each of her parents to remain close to the young girl. Jan Broberg’s story was adapted for the 2017 Netflix series Abducted in Plain Sight.^[8]

2 Elizabeth Smart

There were many weird things surrounding the disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart at knife-point on June 5, 2002. She was taken from her bedroom in the family’s Salt Lake City home by preacher and self-proclaimed prophet Brian David Mitchell, who wanted Smart to be the second of five wives he was planning to take. He brought Smart to a makeshift camp where she stayed with him and his wife, Wanda Barzee. According to Smart, they both mistreated her. Barzee expected Smart to be her slave, but the most abusive treatment came from Mitchell, who would rape her daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

Smart later recalled times when she might have escaped, including one incident when a helicopter hovered above the camp and another time when she was present while Mitchell was being questioned by police at a library. She didn’t take advantage of these opportunities because she feared for the safety of her family since Mitchell had threatened to kill them if she left.

However, it was Smart herself who did eventually lay the groundwork for her own rescue when she convinced Mitchell that it was God’s plan for him to return to Salt Lake City from the San Diego homeless camp where they were staying. After their arrival, the three were quickly approached by police, who suspected Smart’s identity despite her disguise of a gray wig and dark glasses.^[9]

1 Colleen Stan

Following her escape from kidnappers who imprisoned her for seven years, Colleen Stan would come to be known by a chilling moniker: “The Girl in the Box.” Stan was a 20-year-old woman in 1977 who was hitchhiking from her home in Eugene OR, to Northern California, when she was picked up by Cameron and Janice Hooker, a young married couple with a baby.

Cameron threatened her life, putting a knife to Colleen’s throat. She was bound and gagged, and a wooden box was placed over her head. However, things were about to get much worse. She was pressured to sign a slave contract, and for 23 hours a day, Colleen was confined to a box that was kept underneath the couple’s bed. She was tortured and repeatedly raped.

Cameron was able to control her with fear, telling Colleen that she would be killed if she tried to get away. Surprisingly, she was permitted to visit her family at one point but was too afraid to break away from Cameron during this period. She was eventually allowed to get a job, “helping him build bigger accommodations—like an underground dungeon—for more slaves,” according to Daily News. Janice finally helped Colleen escape in 1984.^[10]