Hello everyone, and welcome . Today we’re gonna go over a case of person who completely vanished in a short period of time. And despite almost immediate and extensive searches, not a single trace of them has been found. Well, almost.
On Friday, September 25th, 1981, Thelma Pauline Melton was walking along the Deep Creek Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.
This was an area she had been coming to every summer for almost 20 years, and so it was a trail she was familiar with and had walked many times. At the time, Thelma was 58 and retired, and she was walking with two friends of hers who were part of a group that was staying in the campground together. At about 4 pm, as they walked along, her two friends teased her a little bit because she seemed to be walking slower than normal and was falling a bit behind. Then, as if to show them up, Thelma sped up and passed them.
They then commented on how fast she was now going, and Thelma looked back and laughed and kept going. When she was about 75 yards from them, she crested a small hill and then was out of sight. And strangely, this was the last time Thelma was ever seen. As they got to the hill a few seconds later, they expected to see her along the pathway, but there was no sign of her. It is a heavily forested trail with some twists and turns and small hills, so that wasn’t all that weird. Then, not thinking much of it,they figured she’d just return to the trail where her husband, Robert, was. So they continued on and reached the trailer less than 30 minutes later, only to find that she wasn’t there either, and Robert hadn’t seen her since they left. Getting slightly more alarmed by then, Robert made some calls to see if she’d gone to any of the trailers nearby. Meanwhile, the two friends told their husbands who left immediately, to retrace their steps along the trail. They quickly went the entire distance, and although there were lots of people, there was no trace of Thelma.They would even ask all the other people they saw on the way if they’d seen anyone matching Thelma’s description, but not a single person had seen her either. Finally, an hour and a half later, when it was clear this was serious, they called the police and officially reported her missing. Police arrived shortly afterward, and a thorough search was started, and over the course of four days, kept the trail closed and scoured the area. In total, this ended up being a hundred miles of trails, with over a hundred searchers and dog teams on the pathways and in the forest.
Unfortunately, after everything, there was nothing; no signs of struggle, no scent, and no sign of Thelma. Now, that day, she left the trail without her ID, wallet, and keys. The only thing she had with her was her cigarettes. In addition, she was on medication for high blood pressure and nausea, which she had also left in the trailer. Because she had none of her essential items and because she was a two-pack-a-day smoker who couldn’t walk very far or very fast, police initially suspected foul play.Maybe she had been abducted by someone along the trail. The problem with this idea though, as police quickly learned, was that Thelma was not a small woman. She was 5’10, 180 pounds; she wouldn’t have been an easy target, especially not in such a short period of time on a trail with a bunch of other people. She almost certainly would have yelled or something had she been attacked. So after realizing this, police began to explore the possibility that maybe Thelma had chosen to disappear. In this part of the investigation, there were some interesting findings but unfortunately, they only added to the mystery. The first thing was that Thelma had prepared a sauce for dinner earlier that day that she intended to have with Robert later. This seems to indicate that she expected to be back. The next weird thing is that in the four years prior to her disappearance, Thelma volunteered to hand out food to the elderly during the week. And she did this every day, without missing a day, for as long as Robert could remember. Except, on the day she disappeared, for some unknown reason, she decided not to go in. In addition to that, in those four years, she had never once used the phone there. On the day before she disappeared, she had used the phone and made a call to someone unknown, and what they talked about is also unknown. The only other piece of information about her case that seems notable is that her pastor, who she confided in, said that Thelma had been struggling with the loss of her mother earlier that year. He would also claim that he believed she was having an affair.
Now, to be clear, this has never been substantiated and there is no evidence to support this, but either way, it’s led to speculation. People have suggested that Thelma may have been unhappy with her life, married to a man who was 20 years older than her. Because of the age difference, her husband, Robert, was far less mobile and active than she was. So operating on this theory, it’s been suggested that the call was to this partner to plan her escape the following day. At the same time, this seems farfetched and the moments leading up to her disappearance seem far too organic. This would mean that Thelma had to act completely normal, then decide to go on that hike at exactly the right time, then speed up at exactly the right time, and have someone waiting to pick her up. You’d think there would be some sort of nervousness or apprehension detected by either her friends or her husband that day. So that leaves us with three possibilities. The first is that she was truly lost in the woods. This trail is on the edge of the mountains, filled with dense forests and creeks and rivers.
The second is that she was maybe abducted in broad daylight in broad daylight on a trail with lots of other people. And the third is that she chose to disappear, and it was carefully planned to make it seem as though she was lost. To this day, there is no trace of Thelma. Captain Penny Assman was a guard commander in the medevac helicopter unit of the National Guard. She liked to challenge, and one of the biggest challenges she knew of was the Mountain Marathon Race in Seward near Anchorage, Alaska.The race is only about 3 miles long, but the first mile and a half or so is spent ascending the 3,000-foot peak of the mountain. The rest is treacherous scrambling back down the steep cliffs you just came up. It’s one of the toughest races in the world, and it’s open to anyone.
According to legend, the race began when two miners argued about whether getting up and down the mountain in less than an hour was possible. The two decided that the only way to settle the bet was to run the route with the loser promising to pay for drinks with anyone who came to watch.Then, to make that round of drinks as big as possible, they decided to run on the 4th of July, drawing a large independent state crowd. The miner who believed it to be possible would miss the one-hour target by two minutes and ultimately lost the bet, but he turned out to be correct anyway. Since the race’s official start in 1915, quite a few people have managed it in less than an hour, and today, the course record is 41 minutes and 26 seconds.
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