The CREEPIEST Cases of People Disappearing

Hello everyone and welcome to Scary Interesting. In this video, we're going to look at some incredibly creepy and unsolved disappearances. In particular, I think the final story will make your skin crawl. At least it makes mine crawl, and I read a lot of these. In any case, as always, viewer discretion is advised. [music] Before we get into today's video, I want to introduce you all to today's sponsor, Private Internet Access VPN. As you may or may not know, whenever you connect to the internet

on public Wi-Fi, your data is at risk of being stolen. This includes things like passwords and even pictures. This was something I wasn't really all that concerned about until I started working remotely with Scary Interesting. However, now that I'm on public Wi-Fi a lot more, and with a lot more at stake, a VPN like Private Internet Access is invaluable. I connect to a server, just like this, and then my IP address is hidden, and my connection is secure. And not only does it protect my privacy,

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ing. When they checked the caller ID, they saw it was their son, Brandon, who had been partying the evening before, celebrating having just finished a year in college. Right away, when the phone rang, Brian and Annette feared the worst, because why else does a partying teenager call in the middle of the night? Immediately, their minds went to the worst-case scenarios; maybe he was in jail or hurt himself. They knew their son was sensible, but they also knew he was a teenager. So a little bit wor

ried, Brian picked up the phone. It was Brandon, and he was in trouble, but as it turned out, thankfully, it wasn't as bad as they feared. Brandon told them that he had just lost control of his car and swerved into one of the ditches that lined either side of the highway, just outside the nearby town of Lynd. The car was even fine; it was just stuck in the middle of an embankment, and he needed a tow truck to get it unstuck, but more importantly, he was fine. And if the sound of his voice was an

ything to go on, he was sober. But the one thing that did seem a bit odd to his parents was that he was driving on a road known as Line Lincoln Rd. Brandon had decided to study to become a wind turbine engineer after graduating from high school the year before. This worked out well because not only did he like engineering, but he was environmentally-conscious, and it meant that he could stay living at home while in school. The college he went to was just a 30-mile drive from Marshall down Minnes

ota State Highway 68, and it really took him much longer than 45 minutes. His one-year course had ended the day before, and he told his parents he was going to stay out late and celebrate with some friends. So that night, he made his way from one party to another, but according to those with him, he knew he'd have to drive home that night and made sure not to drink too much. A little while later, he was getting tired and decided it was time to drive home. On the way home, he avoided the state hi

ghway and instead went in a direction that crisscrossed the area on much smaller roads, like the Lyon Lincoln Rd. It's possible he was worried that the few drinks he had would be enough to get him in trouble with the police, and he'd chosen that route because he was less likely to get pulled over. It's also possible that he just wanted to take his time getting home, still buzzing from the party and what he'd achieved over the last year. Going a scenic route wasn't really an issue for Brandon eit

her; he'd lived there all his life and knew the roads well. In any case, he told his parents that he thought he was about 10 minutes from home, and he could see the lights from the town of Lynd in the distance. So they decided that the plan was that when he saw a vehicle approaching him, he'd flash his headlights, and if it was his parents, they would flash back. So Brandon's parents hung up, got dressed, and then jumped into the pickup truck to go and get their son. They also told him to stay o

n the phone so they could keep in touch. Occasionally, the signal dropped out, and they had to wait or call back, but they did their best to keep in contact. Then once they got to Lyon Lincoln Rd, they drove down the road, looking out for his car, but they couldn't see anything. Either Brandon wasn't flashing, or they were somehow missing his car. They drove around the area a little longer, wondering if he was off on the side of the road, or if they had missed each other, but before long, they s

tarted to get worried. Eventually, they asked Brandon exactly where he was, because they were getting less confident that he was where he thought he was, and he told them again that he was sure he was close to Lynd. He could even see it, and it's not like he had never been out that way before. There was a nightclub in Lynd out that way that he knew pretty well. So when his parents told him they'd been looking thoroughly all around that area, Brandon was surprised they hadn't seen him; he was rig

ht there. It didn't make sense. They all started to wonder that maybe it was too dark to see anything on the side roads, and agreed to a change of plan. Because Brandon could see Lynd in the distance, he would just get out of his car and get to the nightclub's parking lot as quickly as he could. Brian and Annette would be waiting from there, and they'd stay on the phone just in case something happened, or if they managed to spot each other in the meantime. So Brandon locked up the car and set of

f to the nightclub. Knowing the area, he figured that if he crossed the fields and headed straight toward the lights rather than walk the long way down the road, he'd get there quicker. Shortly after he set off, his parents pulled into the parking lot, and while they waited, they talked about how his night had been and what they were going to do about his car. Then, 47 minutes into the conversation, Brandon's tone suddenly changed. He paused, shouted, "Oh shit!" and then went quiet. His parents

immediately asked what was wrong, but there was no response. Then they asked again and again, frantically trying to get a response, and eventually, they hung up and tried calling his phone again in case they had been cut off and hadn't realized, but Brandon didn't pick up. Once again, they tried over and over, but the phone just rang and rang until it went to his voicemail. At 6:30 AM, when he still hadn't shown up to the parking lot, they decided it was time to call the police. Usually, when a

19-year-old disappears, especially on a night that they've been partying, they'd turn up. The police assured Brian and Annette that this was probably the case, and told them not to worry and to be patient; he'd probably turn up on his own. One officer even told him that Brandon had the right to be missing, but unfortunately, when it became apparent that Brandon wasn't going to turn up on his own, they finally started an investigation. The first thing they did was search around Lynd, but when he

wasn't found in the town or anywhere nearby, Lynd police asked the Sheriff's Office of Lyon County if they could help. They began by trying to call Brandon's cell, which was still working, but it went to voicemail every time. Then they pulled his phone records to find out where he'd been calling from, suspecting that he wasn't near Lynd, and they were right. During the conversation with his parents, Brandon's phone signal had been pinging off a cell tower near the town of Minneota, putting him 2

5 miles from where he thought he was. Then when they headed out that way, they found Brandon's car down a gravel road just off State Highway 68; 5 miles from Porter and just north of the city of Taunton. The car was found exactly as Brandon had described it to his parents. Caught on an incline at the edge of a ditch and locked up safely. No keys were found nearby, and it's likely Brandon had brought them with him. Forensics then checked around the car and found no evidence of a struggle, or that

any harm had come to Brandon, but they also couldn't work out where Brandon had gone because there were no clear tracks. It was just a car parked by the side of the road after getting stuck, exactly as Brandon described. Weirdly though, and another thing that struck his parents as odd, was that Brandon's glasses were still in the car. Soon, the police started a more extensive search. They knew that when he stopped speaking with his parents over his cell phone, he couldn't have been much further

than five miles from the last cell tower his phone had routed through. This meant that he could have been in an area known as the Yellow Medicine County District. Investigators then brought in hundreds of volunteers and air support who fanned out across the area, but couldn't find anything. During the search, Brian remembered that his son had mentioned hearing water nearby as he passed some fencing, and the rescue team wondered if he might have fallen into the Yellow Medicine River, and drowned

. So next, the team brought in boats, searched the banks on horseback and all-terrain vehicles, and installed gates in the river to catch anything floating downstream. They even dredged part of the river to see if they could find any sign of him, and they were still sifting through river dirt in 2021 with no luck, not so much as a single scrap of DNA. They also used search dogs trained to follow scent and find cadavers. These bloodhounds even found a scent and followed it to an abandoned farm th

ree miles from the car. From there, the trail led them to the Yellow Medicine River, eventually crossing it as they headed north along the riverbank. This suggests that Brandon might have been in the river at some point. Unfortunately, as they reached the border of the next county, the scent disappeared. In 2015, dogs picked up another scent of human remains in Mud Creek, which is a tributary of the Yellow Medicine River, but nothing definitive has been found there. The dogs also picked up Brand

on's scent on farm equipment, but unfortunately, searching on farmland in the area was and is a touchy subject. There are a lot of difficult legal battles going on around landowner permissions. Many farm owners also don't want people on their land without probable cause, and that's not necessarily because the farmers have anything to hide; they have good reasons. Like, for example, young cattle graze in many fields at that time of the year, and farmers don't want dogs anywhere near them. They al

so don't like the idea of hundreds of people walking across their land, potentially damaging crops, getting in the way during harvest, or at any other time when untrained people can make farming difficult and dangerous. It's an issue that even continues to plague investigators to this day. They do their best to work around farmers planting and harvest schedules whenever possible, but it's far from perfect. And even if they could take dogs in the farmland now, it's hard to justify using that reso

urce this many years after Brandon went missing. Only a few of these dogs are available in the area at any one time, and not all of them have the skill and training to track an aged scent. In the aftermath of the event, Brandon's parents are confident their son didn't die in the river as has been suggested, but they also don't think he simply ran away. Some people believe Brandon might have fallen into a cistern, which is a large underground tank to hold water. There are many of these in that ar

ea, and because he'd forgotten his glasses and it was night time, it would have been easy to fall into one of them and then drown in the dark, which would obviously be horrifying. Other suggestions are that he died of hypothermia in the cold. However, the lack of physical evidence from him anywhere and the way he suddenly broke off the call makes this unlikely. Then there's also the phone call itself. What was it that made Brandon call out and then stop responding? If there was some sort of stru

ggle, why wouldn't his parents have heard some commotion on the other end? There was also the fact that he was so far from where he thought he was, but he was so sure about where he was. He could even apparently see the town nearby, which by the way is also puzzling. The towns near where he actually was were much smaller than the one he thought he was near. It's weird that he would have seen much light in the distance from a town of only 100 people at 2 AM. It's all just very strange. In any cas

e, after the initial searches ended, Brandon's parents set about changing the law. His mother was appalled by the way police had assumed he'd just gone off on his own and the idea that Brandon had the right to be missing. Brian and Annette began to lobby the State House of Representatives for a change in the law, obliging law enforcement to start searching the moment a missing person is reported. At the time, this only applied to children. They want to have the wording changed to "person" instea

d of "child". And in 2009, Brandon's Law was finally passed by the Minnesota State Senate. To this day, Brian and Annette leave their porcelain on at night, hoping their son will return. Cynthia, better known as Cindy Anderson, was a devout Christian girl. She'd been raised in a strict, fundamentalist, evangelical family in the '60s and '70s. And her parents, Margaret and Michael, raised Cindy, her sister, and two brothers in the church, keeping them to strict curfews and controlling who they we

re allowed to associate with. This made Cindy kind of a quiet girl, but it didn't stop her from having a lot of friends. When she was 20 years old, she still lived at the family home in Michigan, and she had a great job as a legal secretary that was only 10 minutes away at a law office in Toledo. And since taking on the job, she started to find a little bit of independence. Her father sometimes got upset when she skipped breakfast to do her makeup, because he didn't like that his little girl was

growing up or trying to make herself attractive to men. But the good news was that it was all for one man - her steady boyfriend, Jeff, who she'd met at church. And thankfully, Cindy's parents really liked him. Part of what made her relationship with Jeff exciting was that he was going to Bible college, and Cindy planned to go with him. That meant moving 70 miles away, which was not so far that her parents had to worry about her all the time, but far enough that she could have a little bit more

freedom. And anyway, some things had been happening where she worked that were making her extremely uncomfortable. Toledo was a bit of a scary place to work in the early '80s. At the time, there were two active serial killers in the area, and more than half a dozen people had been abducted. Some of which were murdered, and others only survived after being shot and left for dead. In '80 and '81, the police even worked on another four murders linked to the mall where Cindy actually worked. And if

that wasn't bad enough, in February of 1981, someone spraypainted "I love you Cindy -GW" on a window across the mall from her desk. And of course, she was the only Cindy on that side of the mall, so she was sure the message was for her. She obviously had no idea who GW was, and definitely didn't want to know. Finally, six months later, the message was cleaned off, but it only took a couple of weeks before it came back, and this time it was bigger, so there was no way Cindy could possibly miss i

t. Then more graffiti appeared in other places around the mall, saying things like, "GW loves CJ", and Cindy's middle name was Jane. Around that time as well, Cindy started getting harassing phone calls. Sometimes, she'd answer and hang up immediately, only for the phone to ring again and again. Over time, this began to escalate. Then one night, while she was working alone, she heard a knock at the door. She glanced through the viewfinder first to make sure she knew who it was, but when she open

ed the door, a man started to chase her. She started to run away, but he was too fast, and within a few steps, he had a hold of her and was dragging her out of the office. Then she didn't know where she was, but wherever it was, the man had her tied up and was tormenting her. Cindy was terrified for her life, and then all of a sudden, she woke up screaming just as the man was about to kill her. Given what was going on, it wasn't surprising she was having nightmares. Some people have speculated t

hey were premonitions, and others have said they were just normal reactions to her stress. Her mom and sister tried to console her, letting her know it was a dream, but between the murder at the mall, the graffiti, and all the harassing phone calls, she was terrified. She couldn't wait to get out to the safety of the Bible college with Jeff, so she decided to hand in her notice at work. On August 3rd, one of the law firm's clients, Larry Mullins, came to the office to pay a bill. Cindy always lo

cked the door, so you had to knock or ring the buzzer to be let inside. She also made sure she knew who it was before opening the door at the best of times, but after the nightmares, she was extra cautious. On top of that, she even had an emergency buzzer fitted on her desk just in case. For whatever reason, it didn't alert the police or the mall security. Instead, it just buzzed the business next door. Either way, it was better than nothing. The employees there knew that if the buzzer went off,

they would drop everything and check to see that Cindy was safe. Thankfully, Larry was a regular, so she let him in, and he sat at the desk where they spent some time talking. Occasionally, the phone would ring, and Cindy would take a message or patch a call through, but on one occasion, she picked up the phone, glanced up at him in horror, and slammed it down. The phone rang again, and she picked it up and slammed it down again, this time without even checking who it was. This obviously unsett

led Larry. Cindy looked terrified. He asked if she was okay, and she smiled and reassured him, and that someone had just been pranking the office lately, which was getting frustrating. But despite this explanation, he couldn't shake the way she looked at him. As soon as he got home, he called the police and asked if they could check on Cindy, and ensure that nothing had happened to her. The next day, Cindy arrived at work at 8:30 AM as normal, and was usually there before everyone else, because

the morning was when the lawyers visited clients, fielded meetings, or attended court hearings. Shortly after she arrived, a maintenance man passed by at about 9:45 AM, and saw Cindy working at her desk through the window. Again, everything seemed normal. At noon that day, two associate lawyers who worked for the firm, James and Jay, returned to the office. They had to unlock the door to get inside, and opening it, they noticed a whiff of something sweet-smelling, a bit like nail polish remover.

They thought maybe Cindy was doing her nails, but there was no sign of her. The AC was also still on, and one of Cindy's trashy romance novels was face down on the desk. But something struck them as odd. Whenever Cindy left, she would leave a note telling them when she'd be back, and she had a habit of putting the phones on hold, but there was no note, and the phones were still actively taking calls. Still, they didn't worry too much and left and had lunch, assuming she'd just done the same thi

ng as usual and it had slipped her mind, maybe in all the excitement of going to college. When they got back though, there was still no sign of her, so they decided to start looking around. Weirdly though, there was no mess in the office, and they realized they'd seen her car as they came through the parking lot. She couldn't have gone far, but that was odd too. She never ate at the mall. If she were at lunch, her car would be gone. This definitely wasn't like Cindy, so next, they decided to cal

l her house to see if she was there. Maybe she'd gotten sick or something all of a sudden and her mom had picked her up and had driven her home. But when they called, no one at home had seen her either since she left for work that morning. But then the most unsettling thing of all was the book on her desk. When Jim picked it up, he realized it was open at a violent scene. And this was the only violent scene in the whole book. In it, it depicted a woman getting abducted at knife point. Even if th

is was a coincidence, it made the two men extremely uncomfortable, so it was officially time for them to call the police. When the police arrived, they couldn't find sign of a struggle or anything that might give them a clue about what happened. They did, however, manage to narrow down when Cindy might have been abducted. When they checked the phone records, they found that there were no calls answered after 10 AM. And because she was last seen at 9:45, there was only 15 minutes when she could h

ave disappeared. At first, they checked to see if she just ran away. Because many runaways come from strict backgrounds and need to disappear to feel free. But there are usually signs like money being drawn from their bank accounts, sightings, or the disappearance of their cars. Because no one had seen Cindy, her car was still at the mall, and she hadn't drawn any money from her account since the $5 she took on her way to work, this seemed unlikely. At the same time, they also knew that this was

a bad neighborhood, and the police started to worry that Cindy's disappearance was linked to the people who'd been murdered who worked in the mall. Maybe this was another serial killer who happened to be operating in and around the mall. Unfortunately, they checked the area connected with those two crimes but found nothing related to Cindy. They then also checked if Jeff, her boyfriend, might have had any motives or had seen her, but he was quickly ruled out. For a little while, this kind of le

ft them with nothing, until a few days later, the phone of Detective William Adams rang at the local police station. He'd been put in charge of Cindy's case, so his number was shared on leaflets and in the papers. A woman on the end of the phone spoke in a low whisper, and kept telling William that she had to go soon because she was afraid of getting caught. She wouldn't give her name, but she whispered that she knew where Cindy was. She claimed she was being held in the basement of a white hous

e, one of two owned by the same family that stood side by side, and a young man was holding her there while her parents were away. William begged the woman on the line to stay on the phone and give him more details, but whenever he pressed her, she hung up. Today, the police could have checked the housing records to find two white houses owned by the same people in no time. In 1981, the only thing they could do was drive around looking for two white homes that were next to each other. But there

were just so many that her call, although horrifying, wasn't much use. Until the whisperer could give more information, the best lead the police had to go on was whoever wrote the graffiti. They eventually found a man in the mall whose initials were GW, who also had keys to the building, and who Cynthia probably recognized. It was one of the mall's maintenance people. Whether it was the same guy that said he saw her at 9:45, the police have never clarified, but he was certainly someone who could

have seen her every day through the window, and slowly built up an infatuation with her. So eventually, they called him in for questioning. And incredibly, the man admitted that he was the one who wrote the graffiti, but it wasn't for her. It was for another Cindy, his girlfriend. The fact that the most visible graffiti was visible from a desk with Cindy sitting at it was just a coincidence. The police even checked out the man's story which turned out to be true. There was another Cynthia that

he was involved with, so they let him go, and didn't charge him with anything. The next lead came later that year when two brothers, Anthony and Nathaniel Cook, were arrested. They were the men responsible for many of the crimes committed in Toledo, including the murder of a 12-year-old girl. The police wondered if the brothers had been responsible for anything else, including Cindy's disappearance, so they decided to offer one of the brothers a deal. They didn't think he'd killed anyone himself

, and instead, he was just going along with his brother. So they told him that if he confessed to any other crimes they'd committed and gave them proof he was involved, he could get out of prison in 20 years rather than being stuck there for life. He ended up taking this deal and admitted to several crimes, including the murder of a woman named Vicki Small in 1973. But during these confessions, he never mentioned Cindy. At the same time, this wasn't proof they weren't involved, and there was at

least one murder that Nathaniel never admitted to, and the brothers were later proven to have committed using DNA. This was a woman who was the niece of a police detective, and it's thought that the reason he didn't confess to this, is that if he admitted to killing the relative of a cop, then the guards would have made his life a living hell in prison. But in Cindy's case, there was no similar reason to leave her out. But again, without any physical evidence or a body, there was no way to find

out if the brothers had anything to do with her abduction. So for the longest time, there was just nothing. No leads, no tips, no clues. But then, in 1995, it turned out that Cindy's boss, Richard, was part of a big drug distribution network in Toledo. Richard's close friend, Jose, was the ringleader and a frequent visitor of the law firm. During Jose's trial, one of the witnesses claimed that in the early '80s, Jose was unhappy because he'd done time for Richard to keep the network secret. The

witness then claimed he had been told to abduct and kill Cindy to send Richard a message. But unfortunately, again, there's no evidence to corroborate the witness' claim. Most experts even think that he was just making things up, because the drug ring kept operating for over a decade after Cindy's abduction, with Jose and Richard working together almost all that time. Another possible theory is that Richard might have killed Cindy after she'd overheard him talking about potential criminal acts,

but again, there's no solid evidence for that either beyond guesswork. So, that kind of leaves us with nothing, and unfortunately, it seems like that will continue to be the case unless she's found, which makes it even more tragic, considering the circumstances leading up to her disappearance and the creepy phone call received by detectives. If that was a legitimate phone call, it's clear that she was in some terrifying situation. So I'd be curious to hear what all of you think happened. Let us

know down in the comments. Just a reminder: we now have a Scary Interesting podcast with new episodes released every Friday at 11 AM Eastern. It features brand-new Scary Interesting content similar to what you see here on YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find links in the description and more details in the community post about it. Thank you all so much for watching, and make sure to check out our sponsor, Private Internet Access, using the links in the description.