Lost in the Wilderness Part 1: Hikers Gone Missing
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McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's. Hey, strangers. Here's the first part of a two-part classic episode. Lost in the Wilderness, Hikers Gone Missing, originally aired January 13th, 2022. Enjoy.

Do you like roughing it? Are you the adventurous type? Do you have a preferred shopper's card at REI? Do you enjoy testing your wit and instincts by stepping out of the comfort of your home and into the inhospitable wilderness? Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm a writer and an actor who wishes they could disappear, but only for like a week at a time. And my loved ones would know where I was, so they wouldn't worry. I'm a writer and an actor who wishes they could disappear, but only for like a week at a time.

They just wouldn't be able to reach me. What's that? That's called a vacation? I don't know what that is. At any rate, one of the things about a vacation is you come back at the end of it. This week, I'll bring you two stories of people who went for a walk and seemingly popped right out of existence. My 79-year-old father recently went on a solo hiking-slash-camping trip in the Adirondacks.

My dad had been a fairly experienced hiker and camper in his younger years. We went on several treks together, and these weren't casual walks in the woods. These were week-long treks over miles of mountains, carrying all our gear on our backs, sometimes hauling an entire canoe. On this particular trip a few months ago, my father lost the trail. As the sun began to dip below the trees, my nearly 80-year-old father was like, uh, this could get really bad.

So he called the Rangers for help. The only reason they were able to find him was because my stepmother, in all her type A personality wisdom, insisted he bring a GPS. Otherwise, I might be stomping around the woods near Lake Placid, New York, yelling my father's name and muttering, he couldn't be content taking a morning constitutional around the damn mall like all the other senior citizens, could he? Shout out to my badass dad.

It seems like every other day there's news of someone disappearing into the wilderness. Actually, it could be even more frequent than that. According to journalist John Billman, there are an estimated 1,600 people missing in the wild lands of the United States.

But Billman acknowledges that this is an estimated number that he guesses is probably much lower than the actual number. Billman came to this estimate through his own research for his book, The Cold Vanish, published in 2020. Because here's a fact that might make a giant cartoon question mark appear over your head like it did mine.

The Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service, the two agencies that would have such statistics, don't keep track. I'm going to say that again. The two agencies in charge of the wild places in this country don't keep track of how many people are missing in the wild places in this country.

I mean, I guess it might be tough to track who comes and goes from every hill, dale, and mountain, considering that not every trail has a logbook, and also logbooks aren't, like, a requirement for hiking. You can sign in if you want. It's a good idea, just in case. But anyone can come and go into the wilderness whenever they please, generally speaking. Still, you'd think they might have some idea of how many people walk into the woods and never come out.

Aren't these people's families and friends reporting them missing? Aren't local law enforcement agencies getting missing persons reports where the missing person went camping or hiking or whatever? It's almost as if the relevant government agencies and law enforcement are not communicating or sharing information at all. Anyway.

One of the possibly 1600/probably way more people who went bloop off the face of the earth in the wild lands of the United States was 47-year-old Kenny Veach. Kenny was a solo hiker and YouTuber with an affinity for desert country. And look, it takes all kinds, but I do not understand the appeal of the desert. It's just various shades of tan. Like, what exactly are you looking to see out there?

For me, I like the woods. Just not at night. And also not alone. And in a cabin. With a glass of wine. Anyway. Kenny was into the desert. He also loved spelunking, which, along with being the funniest word in the English language, is also the word for cave exploring.

In 2014, Kenny commented on a video on YouTube of an interview with the son of a man who possibly worked at Area 51 in Nevada. The interview was achingly boring. The video is a nap-inducing 16 minutes long. I made it 8 minutes and 12 seconds in before giving up. I don't need any help napping, and I had this whole episode to write, so I moved on.

And anyway, what's in the video doesn't matter. It was Kenny's comment, later apparently deleted, that kicked off a flurry of activity and possibly led to his very own disappearance. Kenny wrote...

Oh, that ain't nothing. I'm a long-distance hiker, and one time during one of my hikes out by Nellis Air Force Base, I found a hidden cave. The entrance to the cave was shaped like a perfect capital M. I always enter every cave I find, but as I began to enter this particular cave, my whole body began to vibrate. The closer I got to the cave entrance, the worse the vibrating became.

And suddenly I became very scared and I tailed it out of there. That was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. Well, you know the internet. One comment about a weird letter-shaped cave that made some guy's body vibrate and a national conspiracy is born. Other commenters encouraged Kenny to film himself going back to the cave and going inside. They were basically like, I triple dog dare ya! And Kenny responded...

Look, I solo hike across mountaintops that most people wouldn't dare go. I've been in more caves than I can count. I play with rattlesnakes for fun, but this one particular cave was beyond anything I have ever encountered.

I've been doing this sort of thing for over 20 years. I go where no one goes, and I never take anyone with me. I find skulls of all shapes and sizes, and occasionally I find really old animal traps. I hike over mountaintop after mountaintop and sleep on peaks under the stars. Sometimes I have to scale giant cliffs to get myself out of a jam, but I always make it back. I'm beat up and tired, and my pack is almost always heavier than when I left.

I had to be rescued only one time by a helicopter. I had blown out my left leg at the top of the mountain, and I only had a cup of water left to get me 20 miles back to my truck. It was also over 100 degrees out, so yeah, I have a very good safety record.

And listen, I recently went on a hike with some friends about a half hour north of LA, and by 10am it was about 6,000 degrees, and the vultures were circling overhead, and I was praying to a god I don't believe in to let me make it back to my car alive, and I promised I would believe in him forever and ever. Okay, there weren't any vultures, and clearly I did make it back alive, and I didn't live up to my promise to believe in God, but...

The desert is no joke. It's like, oh, you want to go for a little walk? Okay. McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's.

Egged on by his fellow YouTubers, Kenny was finally like, fine. And on October 17th, 2014, he made his own video in which he searched for the M-shaped cave. This time he brought a 9mm pistol because, lord knows, whatever was making his bones vibrate would surely not stand a chance against a puny little bullet. Whatever. Sometimes I walk with my keys between my fingers like a tiny baby wolverine.

So, strapped with a sidearm, Kenny headed out into the mountains of Nevada to find the so-called M-Cave. The result was a 21-minute video of him wandering through the desert. He found a bighorn sheep or goat or something, a turtle, and most importantly, in my opinion, wild pignoli nuts. He could have made an excellent meal if he had to.

What he did not find, however, was the object of his venture, the M-Cave. The original comments on the video are hard to find now because they're buried by literally 33,000 others, but apparently people were understandably unimpressed and I would guess annoyed that they watched a 21-minute video in which ultimately nothing happened. Like, why not just post a quick thing saying, I looked but I didn't find it?

It turns out videos of other people hiking are like a thing. Just a solo hiker with a GoPro, sometimes talking to the camera, sometimes just completely silent. People actually seek these videos out. Hundreds of thousands of people seek these videos out. This one guy, Craig Adams, has 652,000 subscribers.

Do you know how many subscribers I have on YouTube? Me neither, because I never check, but I'm pretty sure it's like five. And one of them is my dad. Anyway, Kenny posts this video not finding anything, and people apparently urge him to go back and keep looking. You gotta give the people what they want, right? So on November 10th of that year, 2014, he reportedly did just that.

or he just happened to go out for a hike in the same area. Eight days after he was due back from what was supposed to be a two-night trip, Kenny had still not returned home. His family alerted the police, and a search team went out looking for Kenny Veach. All they found was his cell phone on the ground near a very deep vertical mineshaft. It was the same mineshaft Kenny stood next to in his 21-minute video from the month before. Every other trace of Kenny was gone.

To this day, no one knows what happened to Kenny Veach. But theories abound, of course. Some think he fell down the mineshaft, which ultimately is too deep to search, I guess. And let me just ask, why are there just old, abandoned, open mineshafts littering the desert? Like, maybe they should be sealed up?

But also, why/how does a really experienced hiker fall down a mine shaft that he knows is right there? I highly doubt he was just suddenly like, "Let me check out this deep, dark hole in the ground."

It's possible he was attacked by a large prey animal and dragged off, though one would think there would be some other evidence of this, like his pack or a shoe or something. It's hard to imagine a cougar dragging him off and nothing being left behind. Besides, it would take a really hungry cougar to attack a grown man. The largest animals cougars usually hunt are deer. They prefer somewhat smaller prey that don't take so much work to bring down.

And I know you're expecting a joke here about older women preying on younger men, but every time I tried to write one, I fell asleep because that trope is boring. The other theory is that the government disappeared Kenny before he had the chance to uncover their super secret M-Cave project. The area of the desert he was in was very near known government secret testing sites.

Maybe there was some top secret government shit going on in that cave and Kenny found out. In fact, in a follow-up video made by a Kenny Veach slash M Cave superfan, the guy claims to have found the cave, but that it's obviously been covered up by rocks.

He shows how the rocks loosely form an M shape and explains how there's no way those rocks could have gotten there by themselves. And he claims there's a white substance in between the rocks that he thinks is some kind of sealant, like caulk. And, okay, I'm no geologist, and all I have to go on is this one dude's video footage, but, like,

Rocks are fucking crazy, man. They do all kinds of weird shit. They jut out at impossible angles and form things that can be said to vaguely look like faces or hands or letters or whatever. Take one trip to the Garden of the Gods in Utah and your mind will be permanently blown.

I did reach out to some professionals for their opinions, but they were all like, A, I'm not going on the record because I'm not interested in being pulled into some wackadoodle conspiracy theory, and B, it's hard to say just from this video, but if I had to say, I'd say they look like regular old rocks and sediment and etc.

According to the dude in the video, it's clear that the government knew Kenny was on to them, so they whisked him away, and then with all their super-secret government technology, they covered the cave up, but didn't do a good enough job because you can still see an M in the rocks if you look close enough, and they used caulk you can get at your local Home Depot to attach the rocks together. So... Or something.

Not for nothing, but the video is two hours long. Two hours! You can bet I didn't sit there and watch some dude walk around the desert for two hours. But I did skip around and learned he rambles a lot about nothing, sings really off-key Aretha Franklin songs, then claims to have gotten really sick walking away from the cave, then throws up and hocks loogies for a while.

And I'm pretty sure he ends the video while sitting on the toilet, quoting the Sandlot? Has half a million views. Kenny's girlfriend, Cherianne Pilgrim, posted a long comment on Kenny's 21 minute video saying she thought he killed himself. She wrote, "I want you to know that I do not think Kenny had an accident. I believe he committed suicide. He battled depression for many years and would not take medication or see a doctor.

He quit his job a little more than a year before he disappeared. He wanted to see if he could sell his inventions and do what he called "cowboy interior design" for homes. He bought his first home five years ago and had an amazing ability of decorating in this style. He was not successful in getting a business going and was running out of money after a year of not working.

He no longer wanted to work in a job for someone else, and as his money decreased, he became more and more depressed. He really did not look for another job. In early October, with seeing his depression increase, I said to him, "You aren't going to pull a Robin Williams on me, are you?" This is when he opened up more about his depression and his thoughts much of his life about suicide. His father committed suicide when Kenny was in his early 20s.

She goes on to say they had a couple conversations in which Kenny alluded to killing himself. He also said if he decided to do it, no one will ever find me. It would be easy to do something like this in our desert with a number of natural caves and mines. He could hike many miles in a day, so there's no telling where or how far he could have hiked during his three-day, two-night solo hike.

Some people think he may have disappeared on purpose. It's possible he died of thirst somewhere. Maybe he ran out of water and he knew he wouldn't make it back, so he found a deep, dark cave in which to die. Or maybe he went into a cave looking for water.

It is remarkably easy to die of dehydration in the desert. It seems like every other week they find people who are only a mile from the end of the trail or where they parked or whatever just laying there dead from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

So let's leave the perils of the dry, hot desert and elusive alphabet-shaped caves and venture all the way across the country to the freezing, dense, dark, forested mountains of Vermont. I'm sure we'll be much safer out there. McCrispy's strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history.

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Vermont, the home of Ben and Jerry's, skiing, and an overwhelmingly white population. But there's one destination you won't find in any official tourist guide to Vermont. In 1992, author Joseph A. Citro coined the term the Bennington Triangle, named for a region in southwestern Vermont where many people seemed to go missing in a five-year period, beginning in 1945.

But the area's mysterious and ominous reputation started years earlier. According to Citro, "It is considered a haunted place, a place with a reputation."

Since pre-colonial times, Glastonbury's remote and sometimes inaccessible slopes have given birth to strange tales of mysterious lights, untraceable sounds, and unidentifiable odors. Even the Indians shunned this place because winds from all four directions met on the mountain. They believed the area was cursed. They refused to live there and saw the land as suitable only for burying their dead.

I don't know about you, but unidentifiable odors are a sure way to drive me mad, so that tracks.

It is said that a murderer returned to Glastonbury Mountain in the Bennington Triangle after escaping an insane asylum and still haunts its slopes today. And it is at Glastonbury Mountain where our next story takes place. On December 1st, 1945, Bennington College student Paula Weldon returned to her dorm room from working two shifts at the dining hall.

She told her roommate, Elizabeth Johnson, she was done with her homework and that she was going for a long walk. Ah, the boundless energy that is youth. Paula left her room around 2.45 p.m. and never returned. A townie, Louis Knapp, said that he picked up a hitchhiker just outside the college entrance who matched Paula's description just before 3 p.m. and definitely didn't kill her.

He dropped her off on Route 9 near the entrance to the Long Trail. About 45 minutes later, a few others said they saw a woman matching Paula's description heading onto the trail. One of those witnesses, a man named Ernie Banner, who also definitely didn't kill her, said he warned her not to head into the mountain at such a late hour, especially given what she was wearing.

Paula was about to venture up a long trail, literally named the Long Trail, in the mountains of Vermont at nearly 4 p.m. on a winter's day, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a red coat. Sure, the coat had a fur collar, but that's the clothing equivalent of bringing a Band-Aid to a sword fight. The next morning, when Paula had not returned home to her dorm, her roommate informed the college authorities.

College President Louis Webster Jones called Paula's parents in Stanford, Connecticut, more than 160 miles south, to ask if she had perhaps gone home. Her mother collapsed, and her father hopped in the car and raced more than three hours up to Bennington.

As soon as he got there, he was like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. What I want out of each and every one of you is a hard target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, or doghouse in that area. He organized local residents and students and staff from both Bennington and nearby Williams College, and the search began.

Why would the young woman's father need to have organized the search? You ready for this? Vermont didn't have its own state police in 1945, which frankly sounds like a utopian dream to me, but they had to at least have had, I don't know, a volunteer fire department, right? I guess not, because by that evening, people began complaining that the search was a mess, lacking in organization and resources, because of course it was.

Paula's father used his clout and influence as a successful engineer to call in state police from New York and Connecticut. At this point, Vermont was like, "Oh, wait, we don't have a police force, but we do have a state investigator." And Almo Franzoni, who was Vermont's state investigator and definitely not a character in a Martin Scorsese film, along with the state police of New York and Connecticut, were put in charge of the search.

Meanwhile, the original volunteer search party raised $5,000 for reward money. The search ended on December 16th, a little over two weeks after Paula had gone missing, with no success. Paula's father went back home to Stanford, but not before railing on the official search efforts and decrying Vermont's lack of proper law enforcement personnel.

Less than a year later, the Vermont legislature approved a new police force. I suppose some would call that good news to come from bad. But what the hell happened to Paula Weldon? Where could she have possibly gotten to that in a 15-day search, no one could find even a trace of her? No errant sneaker, no telltale red coat, nothing.

As we've learned again and again with these stories, where there are no answers, theories abound. And the theories surrounding Paula Weldon's disappearance are really something. McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history.

♪♪♪♪

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Before the break, Bennington College student Paula Weldon walked into the Vermont woods on a late afternoon in the dead of winter in 1945 and was never seen again. Fifteen days of searching produced no hints. It couldn't have been a bear. Bears hibernate in the winter. To this day, no one knows what happened to her. But that doesn't stop anyone from speculating.

Well, Paula was a woman, so naturally she must have run off with her boyfriend. Why else do women do anything? The theory was that there was a secret boyfriend somewhere far away, and so desperate was she to be with him, she left inappropriately dressed for a Vermont winter with literally no belongings. Despite zero evidence of this, people speculated...

Indeed, the only evidence they could point to was the rumor that Paula had been depressed. So, obviously she was depressed over a boy. Why else would a woman be depressed?

According to an article in the Bennington Banner in 2006, the rumor that Paula had been depressed came from her roommate Elizabeth. According to Elizabeth, Paula had canceled her plans to go home for Thanksgiving break because of a falling out with her father. At first, Elizabeth said Paula had been, quote, not distraught over the falling out with her father, but later changed her story to say Paula had been depressed.

There's no other information in the article about when or why Elizabeth changed her story, or if her father ever said anything at all about this alleged falling out. But to think that both of the hikers we're talking about in today's episode disappeared because they were depressed is, well, depressing. But this info, along with what people decided was suspicious behavior on Paula's father's part, fueled a new rumor.

In the early days of the search for Paula, a waitress in Fall River, Massachusetts, home of Lizzie Borden fame, claimed a woman fitting Paula's description came into the restaurant and was agitated. After hearing about this, Paula's father went to Fall River and returned to Bennington about 36 hours later with no leads. To some people, this was proof that Paula's father was involved in Paula's disappearance and had gone to Fall River to cover his tracks. But

I'm going to go out on a limb and say maybe Paula's father went to the place where there was a possible sighting of his missing child in order to look for his missing child? I know, I know. Crazy. In 1955, a lumberjack, let's call him Bob, confessed to a friend that he followed Paula into the woods and killed her. He said he even knew where she was buried.

So, of course, the case opened back up. And then, under questioning, Bob was like, actually, I was kidding. I have no idea what happened to her or where she is. Cool joke, bro. Okay, so if she didn't run away, her father didn't do it, and she wasn't killed by a lumberjack, what happened to Paula Weldon? Why, Bigfoot, of course! Poor Bigfoot, she gets all the blame.

Actually, in the Bennington Triangle, Bigfoot is called the Bennington Monster, so maybe not points for originality, but, you know, it gets to the point. In his book, Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries, Joseph Citro tells the story he says is the most famous and most responsible for creating the cult of personality that is the Bennington Monster.

In the book, Citro says sometime in the 19th century, a stagecoach driver riding in the Glastonbury Mountains saw massive tracks in the snow. Exploring with his lantern, he saw how the imprints formed a line of tracks as if something gigantic had passed by.

Not only were they fresh, they were widely spaced and deep. The frightened driver concluded that if they were made by an animal, it must be tremendous in size, very different from anything he had ever encountered. Just then the horses reared and screamed. As cold rain pelted them, they stared up at two large glowing eyes, watching them from the nearby wood. The huge beast, parched

partly obscured by tree branches and darkness, roared again and tramped off into the night. That's it. Nothing else happened. A bear got startled and went away. The legend of the Bennington Monster comes from a story from sometime in the 100-year span that was the 19th century, in which essentially nothing happened. And then, in the mid-20th century, a woman goes missing, and it was definitely the Bennington Monster.

Just goes to show how easy it is to create an urban legend. To be fair, stories of bad luck and weird shit happening have thrived in that area for generations. Then again, those stories tend to thrive in uninhabitable places that people still insist on inhabiting.

For me, it makes no difference who is warning me to stay away, whether it's the government claiming the area is forbidden because of weird super secret government shit, or the locals claiming there's a monster in them there parts. Give me any excuse to stay home, I'll take it. And please don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to victim blame. By all means, do your exploring. Make all the YouTube videos you can for the rest of us who prefer to live vicariously through you.

I'll be watching them while taking my morning constitutional around the mall. Just please, please bring enough water and pack a GPS.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained, part two of this classic episode, Lost in the Wilderness, Hikers Found Dead. This episode was originally produced by Becca DiGregorio and Natalie Grillo, with research by Jess McKillop, editing by Eve Kerrigan, sound engineering by Jennifer Swatek. Our voice actors for this episode were Lauren Hooper, Luther Creek, and Ryan Garcia.