On this day in 1934, 20-year-old artist Everett Ruess was last seen heading into what is now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. No trace of him has ever been found.
Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts!
Missing persons are a particularly distressing problem for the human mind. We don’t like ambiguity. We don’t like to think of a bewildered family. We don’t like to conceive of circumstances that could allow a person to just vanish. No wonder we’re fascinated with adding to Wikipedia’s Solved Missing Persons Cases.
Unfortunately, the question of Everett Ruess will likely never be answered. For one, it’s been 90 years since Ruess disappeared, and for two, he did it in a particularly difficult place to search: isolated rocky desert, beautiful and barren.
No one raised the alarm for a few months, because Ruess was often out of touch for long periods. But when his parents started receiving their son’s uncollected mail in February of 1935, a frantic search began. Soon after, Ruess’s campsite was found near Davis Gulch, with two donkeys in a corral he’d built. But no further concrete sign of him was ever discovered. Somewhere out there, amid starry skies and stark canyons, something went very wrong for Everett Ruess. And we have no idea what it was.
Keep reading
One of the writing prompts:
Back to reality. Disappearances are traumatic events, and as such, they aid in the telling of literary stories which examine the effects of trauma on a group of people. The novel Jaws (not so much the movie) did the same thing. So how would a family deal with such a loss, with no answers ever forthcoming? Or a team of searchers, college campus, or a group of internet sleuths? In a literary take, the focus is not so much on what happened to the missing person, but to the people left behind.
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