Replay: Isaac Seidel Part 1 - A Simple Life
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Of all the people I ever met in my life, hands down, like Isaac is one of the best, closest friends I've ever made. He had like a huge zest for life and he wanted to get the most out of it. He just was all for doing neat things to get as much as he could out of life. You can't predict Isaac. Just when you think you figure him out, like he comes off with something new and it's like, what?

36-year-old Isaac Seidel disappeared from Blaine, Pennsylvania on September 12, 2021.

By the time Isaac's loved ones realized that anything was amiss, Isaac had already missed a couple of days of work. When they went to his home where Isaac lived alone, there was an eerie scene left behind. Isaac's bicycle, backpack, and phone were missing, but everything else seemed to be there except Isaac. He even left chicken thawing in the sink, like he had decided to go for a bike ride and would be back later to cook some chicken for dinner.

Isaac's family thought that perhaps he had been in a tragic accident. So they began searching the roadways near Isaac's house, looking in ditches and ravines. But there was no trace of Isaac anywhere. And nearly nine months later, they're still searching for answers. I'm Marissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 348 of The Vanished, part one of Isaac Seidel's story.

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Isaac grew up in rural central Pennsylvania. When Isaac went missing, he was living in the small town of Blaine, which has a population of just about 230 people, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Blaine is part of Sherman's Valley, which is nestled between the Appalachian Mountains. It's a beautiful, lush area that is perfect for farming and hiking. All of the things Isaac loved to do.

At the time of Isaac's disappearance, he was living alone and working at a local organic farm that specializes in growing unusual fruits. It wasn't out of the ordinary for Isaac to go a couple of days without talking to his family, but he kept in touch often. Isaac was reported missing by an ex-girlfriend and her sister. Isaac's family learned that he was missing when the police showed up on their doorstep. Isaac's mom, Brenda, was immediately concerned and contacted her sister, Carol.

We spoke to Isaac's Aunt Carol, and she explained how this all unfolded. It wasn't unusual for him and his mom not to see each other for several days because everybody works. She worked, he worked, and my brother-in-law worked. It was Thursday morning. Brenda calls me first thing in the morning, and she said, Isaac's missing. I said, whoa, wait a minute. What do you mean Isaac's missing? I was the first person she called.

Because we talked almost every day, a couple times a day sometimes we talked. And she said, oh, Isaac's missing. And I'm like, really? Okay, let's back up. Tell me what's going on. And it was the night before that the police had showed up at her doorstep and said, we understand your son's missing. And then apparently this girlfriend or this ex-girlfriend, apparently she and her sister are the one that reported him missing to the police.

It was Wednesday, September 15th, 2021, when the police showed up to the Seidel household and broke the news to Isaac's parents. They had last seen Isaac the weekend before, when he stopped over on Sunday the 12th.

When looking over Isaac's home and property, they noticed that not much was missing. It didn't look like Isaac had packed up a bunch of stuff and gone on vacation without telling anyone. Only a few things appeared to be missing, including Isaac's bicycle, backpack, and phone. Other things that were left behind made it seem like maybe Isaac went out for a quick bike ride and planned to come back later and cook dinner.

He didn't take any driver's license with him, no ID, nothing. We don't really know what he had on his body when he left. We just knew he had taken off with his bicycle, and that's all we knew.

We didn't know what direction he went because it was weird. When he left the house, he left chicken falling in his sink, which Brenda said he always did his chicken Sunday night for the week. Whatever he was making that week, he would make it Sunday night, and then he would make different things with it during the week. So the chicken was left falling in the sink. He left his pig behind in the barn. He only had one pig.

And he just disappeared. Isaac's younger sister, Megan, was living in New York when her brother disappeared. But she rushed back home to Pennsylvania as soon as she could when she heard that no one could find Isaac. Considering the circumstances with the missing bicycle, Megan began searching every place that she thought he might go out riding, stopping to get out and look in ditches and down hills. She thought maybe this was just a tragic accident.

The cops came and, you know, Isaac's nowhere to be found. His vehicle is there. He has one truck and he has one motorcycle. They were both there at his house.

but his bicycle was gone. And so they, like I said, they went over to my parents' house and they also, you know, had no idea. They called me. They're like, have you spoken to Isaac? I hadn't spoken to him since the Friday before. So I didn't know anything. So the next day we drove there cause I'm in Brooklyn. So we drove to Pennsylvania and

I was there for like a week and we just started, my aunt had posted on Facebook. And so people started seeing, you know, like possible sightings, you know, anybody on a bike pretty much. People would call us or message us on Facebook and we would like rush there and look for this person. But it never turned out to be Isaac, of course. We were thinking about any possibility, calling any friends, you know, any family and just running out on any possible sightings.

is what we did. So we were thinking, what if he went out on a quick bike ride and something happened, like he had an accident, you know, something like that.

So we decided to look. There's a state forest right by his house that he spends a lot of time in. So we thought, let's look there. Let's do a search of the whole park. And so I posted it on Facebook and I posted it the day before. And the next day we had 50 or 60 people show up to search for him. It was pretty amazing. And the DCNR was there to help us and they like organized everything.

And they said we searched every single trail of the park. They were very confident that we hit every trail. Then we thought, okay, what if he was out biking and got hit by a car or fell off the edge of the road or something like that? So then the following Saturday, we had another search.

And we asked people to walk along the edge of the road. So we did, I think, every road in the whole within 20 mile radius, this house, or I think it was even more and ended up being more because we had so many people show up. And you go through like waves of being hopeful and then thinking, OK, something's going to come up. So then I think after that, we were like, OK, something's going to come if we just, you know, wait.

Megan was sure they would find some trace of Isaac during one of these searches. Or perhaps someone would come forward who remembered seeing him out biking the day he disappeared, and that would narrow their search area down further. But that didn't happen. To this day, Isaac's bicycle still hasn't been located. A dark green Cannondale bike.

By all accounts, Isaac wasn't known to have any enemies. While some may have described him as quirky or different, he was well-liked by coworkers and friends. None of the family's search efforts were paying off, leaving Isaac's loved ones unsure of where to begin looking. So we're going to go back to the beginning and start by looking at Isaac's life and who he was as a person. Megan told us about growing up with her brother.

I'd say it's a happy childhood. Like we would play outside and, you know, my mom always cooks us dinner and makes cookies and, you know, it's pretty, pretty good childhood, I would say. We grew up in rural Pennsylvania, so out in the country.

playing in the woods, you know, playing in the streams, that kind of stuff. We always got along. We get along still, you know, to this day. But I, after high school, I moved to New York, where I'm still in now. I live in Brooklyn now. So I've been away for the last 15 years. Obviously, we still talk, we still text, not every day, but every time I go home, it's always a good relationship. Isaac's Aunt Carol explained to us that she has nothing but fond memories of her nephew's childhood.

He loved to explore things, take things apart. He was just a good, all-around good kid. I mean, he played with my... My kids and him grew up together because they're close. And my sister and I lived close together, so we were together all the time. He was a smart kid. I mean, he excelled in anything he did. He loved making things. And as he got older...

He became a mechanical engineer and read books. He had gotten so many books and read and just to learn as much as he could about things. And I mean, he could do anything. He'd pick up a book and read it or put things together and build things. And it's just amazing the talent that he had.

Megan told us that Isaac always seemed to march to the beat of his own drum. He wasn't always into the same things that other people his age were into, and that was just fine by Isaac.

He's a very interesting person, though. He doesn't watch TV. He doesn't have the Internet. All he has is like his phone, which he has Internet on his phone, of course, but not like a computer. He's not on social media, even on his phone. It's not like he sits there on his phone all day. Never. You know, that's not him. He's like extremely outdoorsy. He's always hiking and kayaking and biking. He loves to bike. He loves to like.

Contra dance, which is something that I had never heard of before. It's like square dancing mixed with line dancing. So it's usually people much older than him at these Contra dances. It's actually really fun. But anyway, he goes and he loves all the people and he loves dancing. And he likes, oh, he taught himself to play the guitar and he taught himself to play the piano. He spends his time reading and he's into gardening. Like he has a big garden, orchards, fruit trees, and everything.

He spends all his time outdoors or doing productive things. He doesn't like to waste a lot of time watching TV, sitting on his phone. To him, that's a waste of time. And he also doesn't drink. So I think because of that, he has friends, but I think it's hard for him to connect to people in that kind of way because most people our age sit around and watch TV. I do the same thing. I sit around and watch Netflix and listen to podcasts. He's very into health.

He stopped drinking coffee for a while because he was like, I don't want to be dependent on coffee. In high school, he was actually... I mean, he had friends, but he wasn't into sports. He wasn't into clubs or a lot of things. And then later, he really became like a social butterfly. He could go and literally talk to anybody, anywhere. And he's just so interested in talking to people. Like at my wedding to...

two years ago now. He was the officiant. He did an awesome job. He went around, like, before the wedding, he was talking to everybody, introduced himself to everybody. I don't know what happened. He just became very outgoing and very social. He's, like, a very moral person. There's this book that he lives by. It's all about this utopian society where, like, everybody trusts one another and you don't have to lock your doors and everybody barters and stuff. He is so unusual for this day

After graduating from college, Isaac was able to secure a good job working for the government.

Well, he went to college. He went to MIT and graduated there with a degree in mechanical engineering. And then he worked for the government and they sent him all over the world. He's been to Japan. He's been to Russia. I mean, he did jobs all over the world. They would send him.

It was at this job that Isaac met some guys who would become lifelong friends. We were able to connect with a couple of these friends. Here's Josh, one of Isaac's work friends that he was particularly close to. All right, well, I met Isaac summer of 2009. I met him working at the Navy base there in Mechanicsburg, and I was actually a welding student.

They had me do a couple projects in the machine shop, which is a shop that Isaac worked in. He helped me get set up with doing a welding project, and we've pretty much been friends ever since. Isaac definitely had this amazing zest for life.

He had a very unique way of taking any situation, like no matter what it was, and he was able to find the most positivity in that situation. He was always willing to go off on a whim on an adventure, provided it fit his schedule. He had a unique way of looking at problems in personal life. Like I could always come up to him and say, Isaac, I got this financial thing going on or, hey, Isaac,

My girlfriend dumped me or whatever, and he would always have such a unique perspective for me to look at. And through hard times, I came up with this question that I would ask myself, what would Isaac do? And it would always bring me peace or bring me to a resolution.

Anything that most people would get anxious about, it didn't seem to faze Isaac. And that's definitely what I admire most about him and his willingness, of course, to go out and help people and pretty much expect nothing in return. He was definitely an extrovert in that he liked to go out and do things with people like

We would go hiking together. I mean, we went camping together. Heck, we even went to a music festival. And he was kind of an introvert in other ways because...

He would be very recluse about his innermost feelings, especially about how he felt about girls. He never really opened up a lot about his personal deep feelings about certain things. I don't know how to put that in a context. I guess how he feels about certain individuals, if he had a dislike, he wouldn't really let you know much about that kind of thing. But I will say...

When he came over to my house and got to know my wife, whatever that bond was between those two, he was able to open up to her and like unload all these things, which I was pretty surprised. But he would only like show that part of himself under special circumstances or to special people.

We also spoke to Dan, who told us that he considers Isaac to be his best friend. Dan and Isaac also met at work. Isaac, Josh, and Dan spent a lot of time together over the years, both on the job and outside of work. Isaac was a fellow co-worker, so I have known Isaac since as long as he's worked at the Navy Dept. of Air Force.

since he first started at the Navy Depot, probably 13 years ago. I worked right beside Isaac. So I'm a machinist and he was a machinist. We worked in a shop together and we just became friends. I would probably have to say for myself, he's probably my best friend.

We got to the point where Isaac and I could talk just about anything where there wasn't much that we didn't talk about. And it was always neat because he had, Isaac has the personality that, you know, he was open to discussion. We would talk about just about anything and always like to see his side of it.

Isaac's 30-some. I'm 54. So there's an age difference, but I looked at him as a, I guess as a best friend, but also as almost like an older son, you know? He's got that natural nature thing. He loves growing plants and doing that kind of neat stuff. So it was always neat to see him enjoy growing things, you know? And Isaac always told me that

He always was looking for a girlfriend, you know, or looking for a girl. And he always said that they're either way too young or they're old enough to be his grandmother. So it was always comical in that aspect. And he had a, I don't know, he has, I don't want to say had, he has that personality that's

I don't know. To me, it was really neat because he looked at things simply. It was simple. He didn't make things... It wasn't all about stuff. Isaac didn't have to think that he had to have everything. He always thought differently than most people do, way differently than most people. It was always encouraging. It was interesting to me to try and understand how he thought and how I thought and

Isaac is the type of person, you know, he didn't cost, he didn't swear. He didn't need to use those words. Very respectable and honored him in that, you know, honor him in that because he didn't, you know, when the guys hung out, we all hung out. It was, it was clean, clean living and fun. He didn't need to drink alcohol or to do that stuff to have fun or enjoy himself.

Isaac and his group of buddies from work had a great relationship. Dan explained that they were always there for one another when someone needed help or advice.

Me and him and multiple guys, there's a couple of us at work. We just did things together. So like one guy needed a roof on his house. So we all got together and we went to his house and we made a project of it. And we all fixed the guy's house and nobody expected money or anything in return. We were just helping each other out. So he would actually let me come to his house and me and my boys and come over and hunt. His only thing was this, we could come hunt.

But we needed to come for a day and work at his house. So, you know, we would go to his house and me and my three sons and we'd go over there and help him for the whole day, you know, cut firewood or whatever he needed. And then he would let the boys hunt there for the season. It was really neat that, you know, it was a great opportunity for the boys to do that. Isaac lived there. As long as I've known him, he's lived at that residence in Blaine on his farm.

I think I remember the first time I got there when I came to his farm, it was all grown up and he was cutting brush down and bulldozing stuff so he could clear the area because he said he couldn't even see the house. It was that thick. You know, he was just a great hardworking guy. You know, he loved to work in the outside. Isaac's the guy that built his own bee boxes, left his front door unlocked. When he went to work, he left his keys in the

in the car we would pick on him in the mall because he would go to the movie theater and i'd see his car in the parking lot we knew he was going to the movies and we'd go to his car and mess with his car because he was he'd leave his keys in the car and it was unlocked so he just turned the windshield wipers on or something crazy put a candy bar on a seat

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When he worked at the depot, he couldn't wait until his farm was paid off so he could just quit, not have to go to the work. He didn't like the idea of the politics that went on with working for the government. I think his hopes and dreams were when he got his farm paid off, he was going to, he was told, being my other friend, Paul, he was going to leave before Paul retired. And he did. He ended up quitting and resigning before Paul could retire.

meet his retirement age. He was very goal-oriented. I think he was. When he set things, he would set goals in his life, his own personal goals, and he would strive to do that. He would do things just to see if he could do without it. I know at one point he decided to get rid of things just to prove to himself. He told me that he proved to himself that he didn't need that thing, that that thing wasn't, he had more power over it than it had over him.

You know, he went to classes in California. He wanted to be a self-sustaining farm, so he wanted to be able to live off of his own farm. And Isaac decided that he was going to do, you know, come to his house and he was cutting the brush down and he was piling it up. He was making compost. Isaac had also confided in Josh about his plans to drop his nine to five job. This was something he worked hard to do so that he could live the life he always dreamed of.

Our job is a job where you work for the government and it's different from being on the outside of the government. Basically, he wanted to feel free.

And what Isaac did was when he bought his house, he was able to live so below his means that he had that house paid off in like 10 years or less. And he worked a lot of overtime. And I think there was like 33 acres there. Once he got his house paid off, he did not want to work with us in the government anymore because he wanted to be

quote unquote, free man, if that makes sense. And so what he would do is he would pick up side jobs. He would work with his cousin sometimes doing carpentry. He would volunteer with the Red Cross occasionally. And he did have a part time job.

at a small farm right around Carlisle. And that was pretty much his latest engagement up until he had gone missing, a constant job. And he did house flipping as a hobby, too. Megan told us how Isaac explained leaving his job to her, that there were things he valued more in life than money. He felt like, you know, time was more valuable than money. And he

He was just doing his farming and doing odd jobs and going where he wanted to go. He volunteered for the Red Cross and just spent his time doing what he wanted to do. I mean, I think he was, in my eyes, kind of living it. He has his own place. It's completely his. He calls it on top of his mailbox, there's a sign that says, what does he call it? White Pines Ecosphere. He's very into sustainable farming and permaculture.

It's all just like vegetables and like flowers. He has bees and he's just a very unique person, I would say. So in my eyes, he was living it. When Isaac quit his job, his lifestyle shifted. He was living on his own terms and doing the things he wanted to do. Here's Carol again.

He was doing odd jobs and things. And that's kind of where his life changed. His lifestyle became very simple. He was very frugal.

He built an orchard. He bought all these trees and put an orchard in. And then he learned how to work with bees. And he learned he had pigs. He bought this special breed of pigs and he would breed these pigs. And actually, I helped him birth some pigs one time. It was so much fun.

Isaac was very interested in farming and sustainable living. He wanted to do more with his own large property in Blaine. He thought the best way to learn how to do this would be to get a job working on a farm. So in the summer of 2021, that's exactly what Isaac did.

He applied for a job working at an organic fruit farm called Threefold Farm in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. We spoke to Isaac's boss, Tim, who spent a lot of time with Isaac that summer, in those last few months before he ultimately disappeared.

He applied to our farm here, and he worked here from June of 2021 through just the beginning of September. We only got to know him for those kind of two and a half, three months. He did go to the same high school as I did growing up. He was a couple of years behind me.

And he's from the county that I'm originally from in Pennsylvania here. So we're about two hours west of Philadelphia. We are a certified organic farm that specializes in unusual fruits. We have really great soils around here. And so...

We also live close to a really huge apple and peach growing area, maybe one of the top five in the nation in that county south of us. That's the county that holds Gettysburg. And so we knew we couldn't compete with 100-plus acre farms. So we differentiate ourselves by growing unusual fruits, and we are certified organic as well. And it's somewhat rare to find a certified organic orchard.

In Pennsylvania. I think he was interested in some of the fruits that we grew because there's some of the few fruits that you can grow in this area without the use of synthetic pesticides. We're organic, so we can't use that stuff. So he was interested in that.

He was, I think, interested somewhat in our scale. In my understanding, he has a maybe similarly sized property, I think maybe a little bit bigger. And so he was trying to figure out exactly what he wanted to do there.

And so I think he was just trying to gain experience anywhere he could with sort of like-minded people of the same sort of philosophy around food production. And that just seemed to be one of his interests. And so he reached out to us in the spring when we posted the job and we hired him on. I forget exactly when he started, I think June, but he's such a good worker. Really one of the best that we had.

It's great to have people that are kind of passionate about the work, too. And that's what we noticed about Isaac was, you know, he had all the dreams of kind of starting his own farm. He was getting ready to clear his land and wasn't sure what to plant and what kind of mix of things to do. And so it was a really great fit for the time that we had him here. Tim explained what a typical workday looked like for Isaac at the farm.

We allow our folks to be somewhat flexible in the summer because a large portion of the job is harvest in the summer, maybe about half-ish of your day. So if people want to get started early and beat the heat, it still gets warm here. And it's humid. So yeah, we allow our workers to get started kind of almost as early as they want in the morning. And he was always like five minutes to seven or ten minutes to seven really every day.

And so just reliable, had a good attitude, didn't complain about, you know, the work. It's hot. It's thankless. Kind of some days, you know, you just it can get a little bit monotonous. But I mean, we try to make as fun as, you know, as we can. But it is what it is. And we had a really pretty warm summer for us. But yeah, he was he was at it every day.

very friendly. We always do kind of a daily check-in with our employees when everyone's here for the day and ask everyone kind of to rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 10. And he was pretty reliably 7, 8, some days 9. 9, you were having a really good day. 8 was kind of par for the course.

Some people would say that Isaac had it all. He had gotten himself to a place in life where he was financially secure and could do whatever he wanted to do. But there was one aspect of Isaac's life where he struggled, and that was finding a partner. Dan told us more. He always told me that his weakness was women. He never had a very good relationship with women. He always thought it was one of the hardest things he strived in in life to make work.

to succeed in was a relationship with a female companion. Isaac had the idea what he wanted in a person, and it always seemed like most of the people that he met weren't like that. I mean, they just didn't have those personalities, and he wasn't interested in settling for less. It was during the late spring or early summer of 2021 that Isaac met someone special, and he told Dan all about her.

It was in the summer, Isaac came over and he helped me cut some trees and he helped me with my son-in-law and he was very excited about, he had a date with a girl, Emily, and he was ecstatic about going and he had to be done at two o'clock because he was at a date with her. Yeah, he was just crazy about her and told me, you know, he was just smiling from ear to ear. Isaac was super happy about Emily and then

So I think May was whenever he told me they were dating or he'd come to help me cut trees. You know, he told me all about her. He told me, you know, she ran and he showed me pictures. I said to him, I said, show me a picture of this girl. And he showed me a picture of her. And we were building a homemade wooden canoe in his parents' basement. And she was there, you know, helping him do that.

Josh had actually bumped into Isaac and Emily while he was out on a hike with a friend. Josh was thrilled to see how happy Isaac was. He told me a little bit about her through text, but one time a friend and I, and this was actually the last time I saw him, we went up on a hike together and bumped into Isaac and Emily was there and

She seemed like a nice person. I don't know a lot about her because I only met her one time. I just know that Isaac was always looking to settle down with a girl. And I think she seemed to be the girl that matched his dreams, if you will. I would definitely consider her a very nice person, a caring person, artistic person.

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Isaac felt like he had met his dream girl. She was everything he had been looking for for so long. But unfortunately, the relationship didn't last. The breakup was amicable, and Emily explained that things were just moving too fast for her. The way I understand it is...

is that Isaac more or less told Emily, his then-girlfriend, that I guess he wanted to settle down with her. And I know personally Isaac, because he confided in me, he wanted to settle down with a girl and he wanted to have a family of his own. He never knew it was going to happen, but I knew deep down it meant a lot to him.

I guess more or less, he said, hey, I want to settle down with you and have a family with you someday. That's my impression I'm left with. I don't know that word for word. But Emily told me that she was pretty much like, whoa, that's a little fast for me.

From speaking to different people who knew Isaac, not everyone had the same impression of the breakup and how Isaac felt about it. His sister Megan said that she could see he was clearly upset. We didn't know anything that they had broken up until...

September 4th when I saw him right before his birthday on September 5th. And that's when he told us that they had broken up and that, yeah, she wasn't like talking to him or anything. And that he was, he was extremely upset about. I guess they broke up sometime mid August. She broke up with him. He doesn't really find that many people and girls, especially women, especially that share his interests like that want to be outside hiking and camping and, you

She's very into painting and making crafts and playing music and stuff like that. She had a lot of the same interests. So to him, it was like a jackpot. To him, it was very upsetting. She had come out of a marriage last year, like a 10-year marriage. And then she said that it was just happening too fast, I think, and that she needed time to process things, I guess. Yeah.

is how she put it to us. I don't know what she told him exactly. It seemed like he was very confused. It seemed like he thought he could win her back. It seemed like he wasn't sure why exactly she said it had to stop. You know, it seemed like something was unclear, but I don't know how it could be unclear. It seems clear to me, but I don't know what happened between them, you know? Josh said that he could tell from Isaac's messages that he seemed pretty broken up about his relationship with Emily coming to an end.

The only thing that I can say is through a text message because I wanted to do something with Isaac. Him and I were into antique tractors, and once in a while we'd go to a tractor show, a local tractor show.

My family has an antique steam tractor and he got a lot of joy of being around that. I was going to take him to a show down in Maryland in September. Isaac is typically the kind of guy, like sometimes he texts you back and sometimes he kind of wouldn't. But if you were waiting for a definitive answer, Isaac usually would never leave you hanging. But he kind of left the answer to that question sort of vague.

And before I had asked him about joining me to go to this tractor show, I had asked him how his girlfriend was doing. Going from memory, he goes, well, not so good. We broke up. She got out of a 10-year relationship.

And he goes, maybe we'll get back together. Maybe we never know. I don't really know, but it sucks. It really sucks. He said, and,

For him to talk negative like that, I could tell she broke his heart. But like I said, I did not know at the time the intimacies of the relationship consisted of. I didn't know what they did. I know they both liked hiking and stuff like that. But I only knew it from the surface because I wasn't working with him daily and talking to him daily at the time.

Not long before Isaac disappeared, he spent time with Dan and his wife. They were painting together, and Isaac told Dan about the breakup. Dan could see that Isaac was bothered, but he seemed hopeful that Emily would come around if he gave her the time and space she needed. You know, when we were painting, he had told me that they had broke up.

I didn't think anything of Isaac. He told me that, you know, they broke up and that he was going to give her some time and he was going to wait and hopefully they could work things out. Because I talked it over multiple times with my wife that I didn't think he was like overly distraught about his marriage.

relationship from his girlfriend that that was something that was a major issue. I mean, not that it wasn't a major issue. It was a major issue, I think, in his life, but it was, I don't know, something that would cause him to go way off the grid.

Isaac's boss Tim had mentioned that he asks his employees to rate how they're feeling each day, on a scale from 1 to 10, as a way to keep track of how everyone is doing. It was around the time of the breakup that Tim noticed a slight change in Isaac.

There was one day that I remember that he came to work and on a one to 10, I think he rated around like a four or something like that. And he didn't talk about the breakup directly. We didn't pry into why in particular he was a four that day. I figured if it would, you know, it would

probably eventually come out if he continued to stay, you know, at that level. And we would ask and stuff. But after that, he was kind of back at his normal, kind of his normal self. Nothing stands out in terms of his behavior before or after. There weren't really any indications that it was something that it was weighing heavily. But you don't know people's minds, you know, you don't know what they're processing internally.

In hindsight, Isaac's Aunt Carol sees this breakup as a turning point in his life. And since it happened not long before he went missing, she wonders if it could have something to do with his disappearance.

I mean, she was a very nice girl. I had been around her and I mean, they just seemed to really hit it off and she broke it off. And then that's when things started to go downhill for him. I mean, she had not been out of her marriage that long and she was married for 10 years and had a child. So she was busy with her own life and with her child. And if Isaac was maybe wanting to...

further that relationship and she wasn't ready

then I can understand that. I really feel that he fell in love with her and she wasn't ready for any further commitment. That's when he started pulling away a little bit more and not being involved as much. And, you know, even with family, I mean, he was very secretive as far as even saying if he's going on a date or anything, very secretive.

because, oh, he stopped in here one day. And that's when I knew he was dating someone because he had a vase of flowers in his truck. And I said, oh, aren't those flowers pretty? I said, who are they for? And he said, oh, I'm going on a date, which I was surprised he even told me that because he doesn't reveal too much that he, what he does. But I mean, he, he seemed very excited, but that was early in their relationship. You know, I didn't see him a whole lot either because

He worked and everything. So, you know, if I saw him, it was up at Brenda's most of the time. I would run into him up there. And I mean, and he always seemed happy. That's what really strange. But deep down inside, we don't know what was what was going on. Other than you knew that he was upset over the relationship breaking up. But he had broken off a relationship. So it wasn't like he didn't know anything.

how that felt because the girl that he was with prior to that he broke it off during our research into this case we did establish contact with Emily however she ultimately declined to interview for this story after the breakup with Emily Isaac had seen and spoken to several family members and friends Dan had asked Isaac if he wanted to come help them paint again the weekend he went missing

I called him on Saturday and asked him about coming back and helping us finish because there was more painting to do than what we expected. And he said he had things he had to do, so he couldn't, you know. Sorry. Dan didn't think anything of this conversation. That was until he received a call from Isaac's mom days later.

His mother called me and said, have you seen Isaac? And I was like, I just talked to him Saturday. I'm not sure why he's missing. You know, I didn't expect Isaac to be missing at all, but Isaac kind of likes to do things on his own and would go do things. So if he went on a bike ride, you didn't talk to him for a couple of days. It wouldn't be something uncommon. But usually he, I assumed that he told other people where he went. So whenever it

It was a couple days, then it was getting to be difficult. I guess I started to get worried about where he was or what was going on. I wasn't sure, you know, what was up. It was actually Emily and her twin sister who reported Isaac missing. Megan told us what she knows about how this all unfolded.

the ex-girlfriend. So she's the one who called the cops to do a wellness check on him. So his ex-girlfriend has a twin sister and the twin sister is very good friends with Isaac before he even started dating the ex-girlfriend. Apparently, Isaac had texted the sister Sunday night, the night of the 12th,

But she said she didn't respond that night and she responded the next day on Monday and he didn't respond. And then I guess he didn't respond Tuesday or Wednesday. And that's when they started to get worried. So she called the cops and asked them to do a wellness check. And when they showed up, he's not there. They didn't see anything. And so they came to my parents' house and they're like, where's Isaac? He's a grown man. He doesn't talk to my parents every single day. You know, it can go a couple of days without talking. I would say every week, but not every single day.

So that's how we found out. My parents had seen him on the 12th, that Sunday. And then so that was like, yeah, three days later that she called the police and asked them to do a wellness check. But even before Isaac was reported missing, his employer noticed that something wasn't right. We know Isaac's parents saw him on Sunday and he was due to work at the farm first thing Monday morning. Isaac's boss, Tim, was surprised when he didn't show up for work that day. That certainly wasn't like Isaac.

We were expecting him on a Monday. He didn't show up. And so I talked with my farm manager, Sarah, and he was so reliable that we were like, well, maybe we just had a miscommunication. Maybe he had talked about going on some kind of, I think it was like a canoeing type trip or water something trip.

And she thought maybe she got the dates wrong. But because we had been so reliable, we just chalked it up to miscommunication. But then Tuesday and Wednesday—

He didn't show up. We had called him even that first day, but his phone, it went straight to voicemail. But that wasn't, again, in retrospect, you wish you had thought more into it. But again, he had been so reliable that we didn't really think much of it. He wasn't like everybody else nowadays, addicted to his phone, seemingly.

So it wasn't unusual for him to either leave – I think he either left his phone in the truck or he would leave it off while he was here because it just wasn't something he seemed to be attached to. I mean, it was curious at the time. And in retrospect, we think, oh, why didn't we look into it further? But I guess we mistakenly explained it away and thought, oh, he's a reliable guy.

He's away on a boat somewhere, doesn't have his phone on because he wants to just get away and have his vacation time and maybe we messed up. So it wasn't until Wednesday then that my wife received a text or a call from his ex-girlfriend, I believe. I think that was who first reached out saying, hey, I haven't heard from Isaac in a few days. Just checking to see if he has come into work. Could

Could you please let me know? And then that's what everything started to click into place. And, you know, get that horrible feeling kind of in the pit of your stomach, like, oh, no, something's something's up. I got a call from the state police after that. When Isaac's mom, Brenda, called her sister, Carol, to tell her that Isaac was missing, Carol jumped into action and started looking for her nephew.

Brenda called me. She was in tears. And she said, Isaac's missing. One, I had to get her calmed down to be able to talk. I mean, I took off in my car and drove the roads everywhere I thought he could be and drove and looked for him for hours every day. And, you know, I got my other sister to look and we got other people. And then we started putting it out on Facebook that Isaac's missing to get the word out.

As the days passed with no word from Isaac, information began to spread through his friend group that he was missing, and no one was quite sure what to make of it. Was he just off on a trip, or was this something more serious? Josh wasn't sure what to think of the information that he was hearing.

Well, I got a phone call from another very close friend of mine, Luke. Again, I work with Luke alongside of Dan. Luke called me and he said, Hey, have you heard anything from Isaac? And I said, no. And it sounded kind of concerning. I said, well, what's,

What's wrong? And he goes, well, his mom thinks he's missing and hasn't heard from him and she might call you. And then at this point, that's when I found out. I think this was could have been the week he went missing or the week after he went missing.

And whenever I found that out, I sort of had a bad gut feeling. But Isaac's also the kind of guy that he would just go off to places and not tell anyone. And then a week or two later, he would just show back up and you wouldn't have known he was even gone. Isaac's boss Tim turned to social media to find out more information about the search for Isaac. He wondered if they had uncovered any clues.

At some point, we started searching Facebook to see if there was any information from his family. We didn't really know his family. We didn't have any contact information. It wasn't until we started reading some posts on Facebook that I think his family or sister had put out there that we heard different pieces of the story.

a puzzle, which, and it's still puzzling to me. So it's only like conjecture really that I can make about what might have happened or what's likely to have happened. Like it sounded like, so he, he left work on Friday. You know, I remember looking back and I still may have the video saved of him, like leaving work just to see like, you know, was there anything weird about him pulling out or, or something like that?

It didn't seem like it. It was a beautiful day. I do remember that, his last day at work. Our kids happened to be home from school. We were getting over COVID. And so they were outside, he was outside. And he left work that day with, he often got wood chips from us. We would get wood chips from the tree service companies that we would use for composting purposes.

And he asked if he could load some up, and he would take a few loads every week for his own farm. And he left with a full load of wood chips, so it wasn't like he didn't have plans for the weekend. He's making work for himself when he got home. So it didn't make sense to me that he would just skip and leave. I think from what I've heard, there was chicken found thawing in his sink somewhere.

Whenever they went over and he was reported missing, they found chicken thawing in his sink. He was kind of a homesteadery type guy. And so he had preserved a bunch of tomatoes or tomato sauce just recently. So it didn't have the marks of someone who wanted to disappear in my mind.

Isaac's sudden disappearance puzzled everyone who knew him. Some assumed that this was an accident at the beginning. Isaac went out riding his bike and something happened. Could he have fallen or have been hit by a car? But those types of search efforts weren't uncovering any clues. People began to wonder if perhaps Isaac had planned to disappear.

They went back over those final days before Isaac went missing and began comparing notes. They went back to his farm and noticed a few strange things and wondered what it could all mean. Tomorrow, we're going to take a look at all of those aspects of this case and discuss what has happened in the months that have passed since Isaac was last seen.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Isaac Seidel, please contact the Pennsylvania State Police at 717-567-3110. Missing along with Isaac is his dark green Cannondale bike.

He didn't take his debit card that was laying on the desk. He didn't take his driver's license. So that's what made us think, oh, he just went for a joyride, you know, went for a bike ride and was planning on coming home. Was he planning on coming home? And he changed his mind. Or was he, did he leave them behind because he didn't want to have anybody know?

It's just speculation. We don't know what he planned. We don't know. He could have been planned to go and just didn't say anything to anybody. That's what is so crazy that we don't know what was in his brain at the time. You know, why would you go and put chicken in your sink if you were planning to take off? Was it a decoy?

Isaac is the type of person that could leave and go somewhere and people, he could make friends somewhere. He could work at a farm for two days and move on and take the cash that they gave him and just keep going. And he's a guy that could survive anywhere, I think.

That brings us to the end of episode 348. I'd like to thank everyone who spoke with us for this story. If you have a missing loved one that you'd like to have featured on the show, there's a case submission form at thevanishedpodcast.com. If you'd like to join in on the discussion, there's a page and discussion group on Facebook. I'm on Twitter at The Vanished Pod and also on Instagram.

If you enjoy this show, subscribe now and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. Do you want to help support the show? There are a couple things that you can do. One way to help The Vanished is by supporting our sponsors. You can find links and promo codes in the episode notes. Another way to support the show is by contributing on Patreon, where you can get early and ad-free episodes. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for part two of Isaac's story. Thanks for listening.

If you like The Vanished, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go.

This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy.

You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.