"Missing Family":
I'll share with you a haunting tale, inspired by real events, one that unfolded in the solitude of nature, where the only witness was the whispering wind through the trees.
It was the summer of 1982. I was a rookie cop in Clearwater, British Columbia, still adjusting to the rhythm of small-town policing. My partner, Jack, was a grizzled veteran, a man who had seen enough of life to know when something wasn’t right.
We were just wrapping up our shift when the call came in. The dispatcher’s voice, usually calm and measured, had an unmistakable tremor.
"Reports of a missing family at Johnson’s Bend. They were supposed to return two days ago. No contact."
Jack exchanged a glance with me, his brow furrowing. "That’s a long time to be missing out there."
I nodded, already feeling the unease creeping in. Wells Gray Provincial Park was vast—1.3 million acres of dense forest, mountains, and deep, glacial rivers. It was easy to get lost, but two days without contact? That was something else.
The drive up was eerie. The road twisted through endless miles of trees, the headlights carving tunnels of light through the looming darkness. As we neared the campsite, the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Something felt...off.
We pulled up to the site, expecting to find a simple case of a broken-down vehicle or a family that had lost track of time. Instead, we found an abandoned campsite frozen in time, as if its occupants had simply vanished into the night.
The fire pit was nothing more than a pile of cold ash, its embers long dead. A cooler sat open, its contents spoiled and buzzing with flies. The tent stood, partially collapsed, as if someone had clawed their way out in a desperate hurry. The most unsettling detail, though, was the torn fabric near the entrance—slashed, as though by a blade.
Jack exhaled sharply, crouching near the fire pit. "They left in a hurry."
I scanned the area. No vehicle. No sign of life. Just an unnatural silence pressing down on us.
On a nearby picnic table, we found a map, a red line tracing a planned hiking route. In the corner, written in neat handwriting, were six names:
- Bob
- Jackie
- Janet
- Karen
- George
- Edith
A family of six. Two parents, their two daughters, and the grandparents. What had started as a peaceful camping trip had clearly taken a sinister turn.
Jack reached for his radio. "Dispatch, we have an abandoned campsite. No sign of the Johnson-Bentley family. Requesting backup and search teams."
As he spoke, I noticed something. A set of footprints, half-obscured by the forest floor, leading away from the camp.
"Over here," I called. We followed the trail cautiously, the crunch of leaves under our boots the only sound in the oppressive silence.
Then, Jack froze. "Look at this."
Scattered along the path were spent bullet casings, glinting faintly in the dim light. I knelt down, examining them. ".303 caliber," I murmured. "Not a common rifle round for camping trips."
Jack’s jaw tightened. "This just turned into something worse."
The trail led us deeper into the woods. Shadows stretched and danced around us as the last light of day faded. The silence was suffocating.
Then, we found it.
A burnt-out Ford pickup truck, hidden off an old logging road. The metal was twisted and charred black, the air still thick with the acrid scent of burnt rubber, fuel... and something else. Something sickly sweet.
Jack stepped forward, peering inside. His face drained of color.
Inside were the remains. Bones, barely recognizable, fused with the melted interior.
"Jesus Christ," he whispered, stepping back, his hands shaking.
The horror of it sank into my gut like a stone. This was no accident. No wilderness mishap. This was murder.
The investigation that followed was slow and painful, like peeling back the layers of a nightmare. The evidence led us to a name: David William Shearing. A local man, known but never truly noticed. Someone who had spent his life in the shadows, watching.
In the courtroom, his confession was chilling in its detachment.
"I saw them setting up camp. I watched them for days. Waited until it was dark. I told the girls their parents had left to get help because of a biker gang nearby. They trusted me."
He had slaughtered the adults first—Bob, Jackie, George, and Edith—before taking his time with the two young girls, Janet and Karen. He kept them alive for days before finally ending their lives as well.
The families in Clearwater were shattered. A place once considered a paradise for campers had become a site of unspeakable horror. Shearing was sentenced to six concurrent life sentences. But no sentence could erase the grief, the terror that still lingered in those woods.
Years later, long after the case had faded from headlines, I returned to that campsite. The forest had reclaimed it, the grass growing tall, the trees whispering secrets to the wind. But the echoes of that night remained.
I stood there for a long time, remembering the laughter that had once filled the air, the innocence that had been stolen.
"This place..." I murmured, my voice lost in the rustling leaves. "It’ll never be the same."
And with that, I turned away, leaving the ghosts of Wells Gray to the wind.
"The Woods Remember":
I remember the day like it was yesterday, though more than a decade has passed since it happened. It was one of those cases that burrowed deep into my mind, refusing to let go, replaying itself in my dreams long after I turned in my badge.
Back then, I was a rookie cop—fresh out of the academy, full of energy, my head packed with protocol and procedure but lacking the instincts that only time and experience could carve into a person. My partner, Sam, had been on the force for nearly twenty years. He had the kind of face that told stories without words, the deep lines around his eyes and mouth carved from years of chasing shadows and dealing with the worst humanity had to offer.
The call came in just after dawn, crackling over the radio as we sat in the station, sipping burnt coffee. A campsite near Wells Gray Park had been found abandoned. Normally, that wouldn't be cause for alarm—people leave campsites in a hurry all the time. But this was different. The reporting party, a local hiker, had noticed signs of a struggle—gear strewn around, a tent collapsed, and something more disturbing: blood. Not a lot, but enough to raise questions.
Wells Gray Park was known for its untouched beauty, a wilderness that stretched for miles. But it also carried a darker history, one that locals didn’t like to talk about. Back in 1982, a family of six had been brutally murdered there, their burnt-out car found before their bodies were eventually discovered. It was the kind of crime that left a permanent scar on a place, one that never truly faded.
As we drove toward the site, the road narrowed, the towering trees closing in around us. Even with the sun rising, the forest felt unnaturally dim, the kind of place where light struggled to settle. The air smelled damp, heavy with the scent of pine and earth, but as we neared the campsite, something else crept in—a faint, sour stench beneath it all.
“Keep your eyes open,” Sam muttered, pulling the cruiser to a stop. He stepped out first, stretching his back with a grunt before reaching for his flashlight and service weapon. “This place has seen too much blood for comfort.”
I nodded, adjusting my belt as I followed him toward the campsite. The first thing I noticed was the silence. The usual forest sounds—the rustling of leaves, the chirping of birds—were gone. It was as if the trees themselves were holding their breath. Then came the smell. It hit like a wall. Not the crisp, clean scent of the wilderness, but something foul, something rotten.
The campsite was a mess. A tent lay crumpled, its poles snapped like broken bones. A small camping stove sat on its side near the fire pit, the contents of a pot spilled onto the dirt, long since gone cold. Scattered nearby were personal belongings—a backpack, half-zipped, its contents spilling out; a single hiking boot, its laces still tied; and a flashlight lying a few feet away, its batteries missing, as if they’d been knocked loose in a hurry.
Sam crouched near the fire pit, his fingers tracing the edge of a fallen log. Dark stains marred the bark. “Blood,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
I swallowed hard, my stomach tightening. “Maybe an animal attack?” I suggested, though even as I said it, I didn’t believe it.
Sam didn’t answer right away. He scanned the area, his experienced eyes picking up details I had yet to notice. “Maybe,” he said finally. “But if it was, where’s the body?”
A trail of disturbed earth led away from the site—trampled grass, broken twigs, and more personal items dropped along the way. A half-mile in, we found something that made my breath hitch.
More blood. This time, in a larger pool, dark and soaked into the earth. And beside it, a wallet, half-open, an ID card peeking out. The face on it was young, mid-twenties, a guy with an easy smile frozen forever in plastic.
Sam lifted his radio. “Dispatch, this is Unit 4. We’ve got evidence of a possible violent crime at the Wells Gray site. Requesting backup and forensic team.”
The response came through garbled, the signal barely pushing through the thick canopy. Sam cursed under his breath. We weren’t just deep in the woods—we were isolated.
I took a few steps further, scanning the ground, when something metallic caught my eye beneath a layer of damp leaves. I crouched, brushing them aside, and felt my stomach turn. A knife. The blade was dark, crusted with dried blood.
“Sam.” My voice was quieter than I intended. I held up the knife carefully.
His jaw tightened. He pulled out his phone and snapped a few photos before nodding toward an evidence bag. “Bag it. Carefully.”
The air around us seemed to thicken as we worked, as if the forest itself was watching. Sam, never one for small talk, started speaking. Maybe to distract himself, or maybe to prepare me for the weight of what we’d stumbled into.
“I was here back in ’82,” he said, his voice low. “When they found the Johnson family.”
I looked at him, my grip tightening on the evidence bag. “The murders?”
He nodded. “Same forest, different spot, but the feeling? It’s the same. Like the woods remember.”
I shivered, despite the warm summer morning. “What happened?”
“They were camping. Just like this. One day, they’re gone. We found their car first—burnt out, bones inside. Later, we found the rest.” He exhaled, rubbing his jaw. “David Shearing confessed to it, but there were things that didn’t add up. Things I never stopped thinking about.”
I wanted to ask what he meant, but just then, the distant sound of engines cut through the silence. Backup had arrived. The forensic team moved in, their cameras flashing, their gloved hands careful as they collected evidence.
Over the next few weeks, the investigation unfolded, but it never reached the conclusion we’d hoped for. The blood matched the IDs in the wallet—two missing campers. No bodies were found. No witnesses. No suspects.
Some whispered that it was a repeat of 1982, that maybe something still lurked in these woods, waiting.
I’ve worked a lot of cases since then, seen my fair share of horror, but that one sticks with me. Maybe it was the way the forest swallowed the evidence, leaving us with only questions. Maybe it was the way Sam’s voice had carried that undercurrent of something unsaid, something unfinished.
Or maybe it was the way, years later, when I went hiking through those woods as a civilian, I stumbled upon a rusted knife—half-buried in the dirt, not far from where we’d once stood.
And I swear, for just a moment, I felt the trees watching.
"Vanished in the Woods":
The late summer air was warm, but a creeping chill ran down my spine as we stepped onto the dusty ground of the remote campsite. The sun, now dipping low behind the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, cast long, eerie shadows over the area. Pine trees stood tall around us, their branches swaying gently in the fading light, but beneath the fresh, earthy scent of the forest was something else—something foul, something wrong.
I was part of a special task force handling missing persons cases, and we had been called out after a family of four—parents and their two young children—vanished without a trace while on a weekend camping trip. The call had come in from a concerned relative who had expected them home days ago. No contact. No sightings. Just... gone.
As I scanned the campsite, my first impression was unsettling. Everything seemed frozen in time. A large tent stood upright, its front flap yawning open, revealing a mess of sleeping bags, clothes, and personal items scattered as if abandoned in haste. A cooler had been knocked over, its contents spilled—crushed beer cans, unopened food wrappers, a half-eaten sandwich now swarmed by ants.
“Looks like they just stepped away for a minute,” I muttered.
“Except they’ve been missing for three days,” Detective Harris replied grimly.
We spread out, searching for anything out of place. The silence was unnatural, heavy, as if the forest itself was holding its breath. No birds, no rustling leaves—just the sound of our boots crunching against the dry earth.
Then, a call from Officer Jenkins: “Over here.”
I moved quickly to where he stood near the picnic table. A collection of items lay in the dirt—a child’s toy, a dog-eared paperback book, a hairbrush. And then there was the blood.
Not a lot, but enough to twist my stomach into knots. A small splatter near the tent, another near the table. Not fresh, but recent enough.
“We need to secure this area,” Harris said, already calling it in.
Forensics arrived within the hour. Laura, one of the lead technicians, knelt by the bloodstains, snapping on latex gloves.
“This isn’t accidental,” she murmured, her trained eye assessing the scene. “Whatever happened here was deliberate.”
That thought sent a cold wave through me. There were no obvious signs of a struggle, no torn fabric, no overturned chairs—just an eerie sense that something had unfolded in calculated silence. That meant one of two things: either the family knew their attacker, or they had been taken by complete surprise.
While the forensic team combed through the site, I took a slow walk around the perimeter. That’s when I found the tracks. Several sets of footprints leading away from the campsite, pressing deep into the earth. The pattern was erratic—some normal, others heavier, as if someone had been carrying something.
I radioed back. “Tracks heading west. Multiple people.”
Harris joined me, and together we followed the trail. The deeper we went, the denser the forest became. The fading sunlight barely pierced through the canopy, and every step felt like an intrusion into something ancient, something watching.
Half a mile in, the tracks stopped abruptly in a small clearing. In the center, a torn shirt, smeared with mud and blood.
“This isn’t good,” Harris murmured. “We need to widen the search.”
Back at the campsite, the forensic team had uncovered more.
“We pulled fingerprints from the cooler,” Laura reported. “Some belong to the family, but we found others—ones that don’t match.”
Hope flickered. A lead.
Over the next few days, we interviewed locals, combed through surveillance footage from nearby gas stations, and tracked known individuals with criminal histories in the area. That’s when we heard about Tom.
A drifter. Mid-40s. History of minor offenses—trespassing, petty theft, nothing violent. But he’d been seen near the campsite around the time the family disappeared.
It took us another day to locate him. He was holed up in an abandoned shack deep in the woods. When we entered, my breath hitched. Scattered around the small, musty room were items unmistakably linked to the missing family—a child’s backpack, a woman’s scarf, a half-used roll of film.
“Tom,” I said, keeping my voice measured, “we need to talk.”
His eyes darted, lips pressed into a thin line. “I didn’t do nothin’.”
“Then why do you have their belongings?” Harris pressed.
Tom swallowed, his fingers twitching. “I—I found them. That’s all.”
In the interrogation room, under the weight of evidence, Tom cracked.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he stammered, tears streaking his dirt-covered face. “I just—I was hungry. Thought I’d take some food. But they saw me. The dad, he grabbed me, and I panicked.”
His story came out in fragments, the details sickening. He’d tied them up, scared they’d turn him in. He left them in the woods, convinced they’d find their way back.
They never did.
Despite an exhaustive search, despite combing through every inch of the forest for weeks, the family was never found.
The case haunted me. Still haunts me.
Some nights, I dream of that abandoned campsite, the stillness, the unnatural quiet. Of footprints vanishing into the woods. Of the blood-stained shirt in the clearing.
And of the unanswered question that lingers even now:
Where did they go?
"Camp Scott":
I remember the air was crisp that morning, the kind that makes you feel alive when you breathe it in. It carried the scent of damp earth and pine, a reminder that summer had only just begun. I was a deputy with the local sheriff's department in Oklahoma, and we were called out to investigate the disappearance of three Girl Scouts from Camp Scott. It was June 1977, just before dawn, and the world was still cloaked in darkness when we arrived at the campsite.
As we pulled up, the camp was eerily silent. Too silent. A place meant to be filled with laughter and the shuffling of little feet now felt hollow, as if the life had been sucked out of it. The only sounds were the distant hoots of an owl and the crunch of gravel beneath our boots as we made our way toward the Kiowa sub-camp. Flashlights cut through the inky blackness, casting long, distorted shadows against the trees.
"Over here!" a deputy’s voice rang out, sharp and urgent.
We rushed toward tent number 8, dread tightening in my gut. The tent flap hung askew, and as I stepped inside, my stomach twisted. The small space was in disarray—blankets thrown aside, gear strewn across the floor. But the most chilling sight was the blood. It wasn’t just a few drops; there was enough to make it clear something horrific had happened. And the girls—Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Michele Guse, 9, and Denise Milner, 10—were gone.
The next few minutes were a blur of movement. We secured the area, marked the evidence, and tried to piece together what had happened. Drag marks led away from the tent, faint trails in the dirt, barely visible in the dim light of our flashlights. A broken flashlight lay nearby, its lens shattered, and torn bits of fabric clung to the underbrush.
"Jesus," one of the older deputies muttered under his breath. "This wasn't just a kidnapping."
Sheriff Pete Weaver arrived soon after, his face grim as he took in the scene. "Search every inch of this camp," he ordered. "Nobody leaves until we find those girls."
It didn’t take long. About 150 yards from the tent, near the edge of the woods, we found them. Their small bodies lay together, lifeless, partially covered by sleeping bags. The silence around us grew heavier, suffocating. I turned away for a moment, trying to gather myself, but nothing could prepare us for this. The innocence of those three young lives had been snuffed out in a place meant for adventure and joy.
As the sun finally crept over the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold, it cast an eerie contrast to the horror that had unfolded. Evidence collection began in earnest. We found rope, duct tape, and even a footprint that later matched a distinctive tennis shoe. The pieces were there, but they weren’t enough to form the full picture.
Then, another discovery.
"I've got something!" a voice called from deeper in the woods.
We pushed through the thick brush and came upon a small cave. Inside, we found items that had clearly been taken from the camp—eyeglasses, food wrappers, and duct tape identical to what we’d found at the crime scene. Whoever had done this had likely been watching the camp for days, maybe even longer.
The case gained national attention almost immediately. Reporters swarmed the area, their cameras flashing as they tried to piece together the story just as we were. Fear gripped the town, parents pulled their children from camps, and the sense of safety in our small Oklahoma community evaporated overnight.
Suspicion soon fell on Gene Leroy Hart, a local man who had escaped from prison four years earlier. Hart was no stranger to the law—he had been convicted of burglary, kidnapping, and rape. He knew these woods like the back of his hand, and many believed he had been hiding out there for years.
Catching him, however, was another story.
For months, we searched. Tips came in from locals, hunters, even psychics, but Hart remained elusive. He had connections, people willing to hide him, and he seemed to vanish into the wilderness whenever we got too close. But in April 1978, nearly a year after the murders, our persistence paid off. A tip led us to an isolated shack deep in the Cookson Hills.
We raided it at dawn. My heart pounded as we kicked in the door, weapons drawn, expecting a fight. But Hart was there, and this time, he had nowhere to run.
His trial was one of the most controversial in Oklahoma history. Though the evidence against him was compelling—the distinctive shoe print, DNA testing that indicated a match (though primitive by today’s standards), and his history of violent crime—it wasn’t enough for a conviction. The jury found him not guilty of the murders, though he was sent back to prison for his prior crimes.
Hart died in 1979 of a heart attack while in custody. He never confessed, never gave any indication of his guilt or innocence.
Decades later, the case still lingers in the minds of those who worked it. Advances in forensic science have provided more clarity, with DNA analysis in 2022 strongly indicating Hart was the likely perpetrator. But official justice was never served.
I went back to Camp Scott once, years later. The place had been abandoned, reclaimed by nature. The cabins stood empty, the trails overgrown. The wind rustled through the trees, and for a brief moment, I could almost hear the voices of children—laughing, singing, unaware of the tragedy that would change this place forever.
The case may be closed, but for those of us who lived it, the shadows of that night still linger. Some wounds never heal, and some memories refuse to fade.