These five cases of people who vanished while on holiday don’t seem to have any plausible explanation. Photo / Getty Images
These five cases of people who have vanished off the face of the planet don’t seem to have any plausible explanation, writes Anna Sarjeant
Vanished into thin air
Seventy-one-year-old travel-loving mother Emma Tresp didn’t let her age stop her from travelling solo, and she had a particular penchant for road tripping across the US.
On August 31, 1998, Tresp left her daughter’s house in Stillwater, Oklahoma to make the eight-hour drive to a Benedictine monastery near Pecos for a spiritual retreat. By September 5, when her daughter, Lisa, didn’t receive a phone call from her mother to wish her a happy birthday, she rang the monastery. Only to discover Tresp had never arrived.
State police were alerted but it wasn’t until September 13 when a local Ribera resident saw a missing person flier and reported a suspicious abandoned car, that the mystery unravelled. It turned out to be Tresp’s 1997 white Honda Civic which was found locked but deserted near Glorieta Baldy Peak in Santa Fe National Forest, 14km off the main highway.
The car seemed to be lodged against a dirt embankment and a large rock but Tresp was nowhere to be seen.
Strangely, certain belongings that you would expect Tresp to have taken with her, should she have decided to leave the car and walk to find help, were still in the vehicle, such as her mobile phone, money and clothing.
At the time, state police said there was no sign anyone else had been in the car or that Tresp had been kidnapped, and while the belief is that she left on foot towards the nearest town or dwelling, the isolated road is rough, undulating and climbs steeply. It’s speculated that in the dwindling light, she lost her way.
Which was all very well until search parties discovered something they couldn’t explain.
While more than 200 searchers combed the area, along with cadaver dogs and an Army National Guard helicopter, Tresp was never found and the clues finished abruptly mere metres from her car.
In an eerie turn of events, Tresp’s footprints only circled her vehicle and didn’t head off in any direction. Search dogs could only pick up her scent beside the car, suggesting she never went any further.
Disappeared in a crowded place
While we might assume most disappearances occur in remote places, German native Lars Mittank vanished in one of the world’s busiest thoroughfares. An airport.
During the summer of 2014, The 28-year-old was holidaying in Bulgaria with friends. The trip was relatively uneventful until Mittank found himself in an argument at a bar with four unknown men, allegedly over opposing football teams. Mittank left the bar before his friends did, but they reconvened the following day at the Golden Sands Resort, with Mittank claiming he’d been in a bar fight the night before.
Days later, having suffered injuries to his jaw and eardrum, Mittank saw a local doctor who prescribed him 500mg of the antibiotic Cefprozil. Due to the severity of his injury, Mittank was instructed to stay behind in Bulgaria while his friends returned home.
This is where things start to get a little odd.
Now alone and his friends long gone, Mittank began acting strangely. Staying at an airport hotel, his behaviour became erratic, with hotel video footage capturing Mittank hiding in an elevator for hours on end, and his mum receiving phone calls in which her son claimed people were trying to rob or kill him. He also asked her to block his credit cards.
On July 8, 2014, Mittank arrived at Bulgaria’s Varna Airport.
Albeit out of sorts, Mittank’s actions were bizarrely rational. He checked in with the airport physician to ask about his injuries, but was also described as “nervous” and overheard saying, “I don’t want to die here. I have to get out of here.”
Not long after, Mittank got up and raced out of the airport, leaving all his luggage behind. His last known whereabouts are in the airport carpark, where he scaled a fence and disappeared into a nearby forest, never to be seen again.
OE gone awry
The 35-year-old mystery surrounding British-born Charles Horvath puzzles crime sleuths to this day.
In 1989, a then 20-year-old Horvath left England for an OE in Canada, his heart set on hitchhiking across the country; a practice not uncommon in the 80s. By May 11, Horvath had made it to a campground in Kelowna, a city in the south of British Columbia and became well known in the area.
Not long after arriving in Kelowna, Horvath sent a fax to his mother, Denise Allan, suggesting they meet up in Hong Kong for his 21st birthday a few months later in August.
Denise Allan never heard from her son again.
After becoming increasingly concerned and in a bid to locate him, Horvath’s mother travelled to British Columbia, where she faced mystery after mystery. Amid much publicity, Allan was told her son had left the campground quickly and unexpectedly, leaving behind his tent and possessions. It’s claimed he also attended an all-night party at the campground the day he disappeared.
In an unsettling plot twist, Horvath’s mother was later sent a mysterious note at her hotel, which read, “I seen him May 26. We were partying and two people knocked him out. But he died. His body is in a lake by the bridge.”
After divers searched the lake and found nothing, Allan received a second message claiming they were looking on the wrong side of the bridge. A body was later uncovered but it wasn’t Horvath and turned out to be unrelated.
In a last-ditch bid to find her son, in 2023 Allan set up a gofundme account to raise $2500 in order to update age-progression sketches, establish a tip line and fund volunteer investigators, but the case remains unsolved.
Lost in a chasm
Vortex Spring is a recreational diving park located near Ponce de Leon, Florida. It is also where 30-year-old Tennessean Ben McDaniel was last seen in August 2010.
Unlike most deaths related to Vortex’s challenging scuba conditions, McDaniel’s body has never been recovered, sparking several conspiracy theories.
Having arrived for a night dive at Vortex on August 18, McDaniel descended 35m into the upper chasm and decided to continue until he reached the dive park’s notorious locked gate.
Fronted by the message “Go no farther. There’s nothing in this cave worth dying for” and the picture of the Grim Reaper, McDaniel – like many divers before him – was undeterred; later found by fellow diver Eduardo Taran, pulling on the metal and attempting to squeeze in. In what might be a decision that Taran questions forever, the more experienced diver unlocked the gate for McDaniel and left him to it, the reasoning being it was less harmful to simply let Ben do as he wished.
The underwater terrain from here on in is quite simply, harrowing. Continuing another 488m to a depth of 94m, it’s a labyrinth of sidewinding passages as narrow as 25cm. Albeit mapped, many sections remain unexplored.
Oddly, staff at Vortex Spring’s dive shop didn’t notice McDaniel’s abandoned truck for an entire two days. Upon its discovery, various attempts to retrieve McDaniel’s body ensued.
However, even the most highly experienced divers failed to find McDaniel.
What disturbed rescuers most was the full air tanks discovered outside the cave’s entrance. Puzzling for two reasons. One, the tanks were filled with regular air, but cave diving requires a special gas mix, something they were confident McDaniel would know. Secondly, divers tend to leave their spare air tanks inside the cave, not outside.
For 36 consecutive days, 16 expert divers continued the rescue mission, including Edd Sorenson, an internationally recognised veteran cave diver. Having undertaken three separate dives, venturing 61m further than anything Ben had logged in his diving book, Sorenson surmised that a man of McDaniel’s size (over 1.8m tall and 95kg), simply couldn’t access such small spaces.
There was simply no trace of Ben and he remains unaccounted for to this day.
Mayday to nowhere
What started as a charming excursion to see Miami’s holiday lights during Christmas 1967 turned into one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of the 1960s.
On December 22, 1967, Dan Burack, and his friend, Father Patrick Horgan took out Burack’s boat, a nifty, 7m cabin cruiser called Witchcraft to get a better view of Miami’s dazzling Christmas lights.
It was a clear evening and the two men – in order to see the best of the lights - were not too far from shore. However, at 9pm Burack called the Coast Guard claiming he had hit something. Reports indicate there was no emergency; Burack was calm and insisted there was no considerable damage but he did require a tow back into the marina.
As little as 19 minutes later, the Coast Guard arrived at the nautical co-ordinates, but Witchcraft was nowhere to be seen.
In fact, the somewhat unsettling-named boat was never seen again, along with her passengers, Burrack and Horgan.
While shipwrecks are not uncommon, the vessel was modern and deemed “unsinkable” due to built-in floatation that effectively ensured some part of the hull would remain above water, even if the rest of the boat succumbed to the ocean.
Burack had also taken all on-board safety precautions and equipped the boat with lifesaving gear and distress flares, even telling the Coast Guard he would fire one off to highlight the boat’s exact location.
What troubled officials further is that if the boat had been hit worse than initially thought and started to sink, Burack still had time to fire off a flare.
Over the following days, the Coast Guard searched hundreds of square kilometres but nothing as much as a lifejacket was ever found. On December 28, 1967, all searches ceased.
Perhaps most troubling is that the area in which this incident took place is also considered part of the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
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