Why So Many People Go Missing In These Mountains... (From An Appalachian Local)

A man rode up a hill he had known since he was a boy, on a Saturday morning, to mow a field. He waved at his neighbors on the way past. Nobody ever saw him again. They found his four-wheeler a mile from the house, parked on a slope he had no reason to be on, the key still turned to on. His wallet, his phone, his cash and his gun were all still sitting in his truck at the bottom of the road. Sixteen years later, that mountain has never given back one piece of him. Most of the people these mountains take, I can explain. There are three things that do it, and I will walk you through all three, from the wall of green we call a laurel hell, to what the cold does to a person's mind in their last hour, to the ground that opens up underneath them. But there are a handful of cases those three things do not cover. For years I called those the ones with no answer. I do not call them that anymore, because I have come to think most of them do have an answer, and it is a great deal worse than no answer at all. We will get to the woman who lay two miles from a busy trail for two years while hundreds of searchers walked past her. We will get to five people who disappeared off one mountain in Vermont in five years, and what actually happened to the one of them who was ever found. And I will tell you about an evening I spent on a porch across from a man who has never told a tall tale in his life. Appalachian folklore, old mountain rules, and the history nobody teaches. New stories every week. Hollis Holler