Missing in Acadia

A lot of the stories we write about on Malevolent Maine are pretty dark, but this one is spooky for a lot of different reasons. So be warned, MMers, this one may disturb you.

Maine is a beautiful state with many scenic places to go visit. There are thirty-two state parks in Maine. There's only one National Park however: Acadia National Park. Our story starts there, but as we soon found out, it didn't end there. 

Acadia National Park, on Mount Desert Island

On June 12th, 2003, seven year old Nicholas Adams disappeared from his campsite. Nicholas was camping with his parents, Jim and Robin, and his aunt and uncle, Cathy and Sam Ferguson, and their two children, Billy, 6, and Amanda, 9. They were staying at the Blackwoods campground in Acadia National Park, hiking, swimming, and enjoying nature. 

Nicholas Adam, 2003

The kids were playing together while the parents relaxed around a small campfire. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon and they had recently come back from a hike. The kids were playing hide and seek with one another. Nicholas was the "seeker" and both of his cousins could hear him coming through the woods just behind the campsite.

Little Nicholas never found his cousins, and soon afterward, they both gave up and trudged back to the campsite, complaining about their cousin. Soon after the adults began to worry. They quickly searched the area around the campsite, shouting for Nicholas. They called 911 and Search and Rescue teams were soon dispatched. Over one hundred people searched for three days with no sign of Nicholas. Bloodhounds got two different scent trails but both of them led nowhere. Nicholas had vanished.

He remained missing until just last week. For eighteen years no trace of Nicholas Adams was ever discovered. There were no scraps of clothing, no bone fragments, nothing to indicate Nicholas had ever even been in the area. That changed last week when on July 19th hikers discovered some remains on Sargent Mountain, about six miles away from Blackwoods campground. The hikers found the remains in a rocky area, a stretch of the mountain that is quite steep and a moderately difficult climb.

They found one of Nicholas's sneakers partially hidden by a rock, the torn remains of his pants, and a single human tooth. Forensic scientists are still working to determine whether the tooth belongs to Nicholas Adams, but there is no denying the clothing is his: his initials had been written on both the tag of his pants and his sneaker. There were no traces of blood or DNA on the clothing. There is also very little wear and tear on the clothes. They do not look like they have been sitting on the side of a mountain for the past eighteen years.

The investigation remains ongoing and we'll update you as we learn more.

In our research for this blog post, we uncovered some interesting statistics. Every year in Maine about one hundred people go missing. California, on the other hand, leads the nation with over 2,000. The Adams disappearance isn't the first case of a missing person in Acadia National Park. There have been two other missing persons cases from Maine's only National Park and both of, though separated by over fifty years with Nicholas Adams' disappearance are strangely similar.

On August 20, 1983, three year old Bret Walker disappeared while hiking Cadillac Mountain with his parents. They were taking an easy trail, not taking the hike too seriously, just going as far as they thought they could with little Bret. At one point, both parents took their eyes off their son, just for a minute or two. They soon realized Brett was gone. Again, a search was conducted, no trace of Brett Walker was found. His parents were considered prime suspects but were later cleared by police. Bloodhounds were called in and led rescuers to a certain section of Cadillac Mountain, but then would go no further. According to reports, both hounds laid down on the ground and whimpered. They had to be dragged off the mountain. No trace of Bret Walker was ever found.

Anthony Stearns, right, 1956

Again, in July of 1956, five year old Anthony Stearns went missing while fishing with his grandfather near Bubble Pond. As with the other cases, Anthony simple disappeared. A fisherman several yards from where Anthony and his grandfather, Michael Stearns were fishing, told police that he saw the boy right around the time he disappeared. He didn't have any fishing gear and he asked the man if there were any bears in these woods before walking off in the opposite direction from where he had come from. That man was the last known person to see Anthony alive. An extensive search and rescue operation was undertaken, with over fifty volunteers combing the area where the boy was last seen. Nine months later, Anthony's body was discovered two miles from the shore where he had been fishing, in an area that would have proven difficult for a five year old to climb to, but one that had been searched multiple times by the rescuers. There was no apparent cause of death - Anthony had sustained no injuries of any kind. The National Parks Service deemed his death an attack by a mountain lion, though there was never any strong evidence of this.

Allan Dwight (middle) in 1995 with cousins after his rescue

There was one other case we found while doing our research and this is the one that began to turn us onto this really being a Malevolent Maine story our readers would want to know about. This one is pretty similar to the other three. In 1994, Allan Dwight went missing while hiking with his parents on Pemetic Mountain. Fairly similar to Bret Walker, in '83, his parents' attention drifted away for a moment or two and they realized that Allan was no longer behind them. They began a frantic search involving the park service and local authorities. Thirty hours later he was discovered, alive, tired and hungry, a mile and a half from where he had first gone missing in difficult terrain that would have proved all but impossible to a child. Again, this was a place rescuers had scoured earlier.

When asked what happened, Allan Dwight told police that he had seen someone who looked like his grandfather who had told the boy to follow him. They hiked off the path for what felt likes miles tot he boy until they came to a cave or a room of some kind, Allan wasn't quite sure. The boy claimed there were machines all over the floor that looked to him like, "broken spaceships or robots" and he saw weapons on the walls, though when pressed for more information about these weapons or what they were, he could provide no other information. 

He claimed that inside the cave or room the person he thought was his grandfather turned to him, and now his eyes began to glow, "like there was a lightbulb inside his head." The boy realized the person wasn't his grandfather and started to get scared. He claims the man told him not to worry, that he had been chosen, and that "though he had grown in his mother's womb, he was not destined for this world." Those are exact words that five year old Allen Dwight told investigators, not the typical fare for five year old boys in the 90s. 

Furthermore, Allan told police that the man had placed his hands on Allan's shoulders and squeezed really hard. That was the last thing Allan remembered and when he woke up he was alone in the woods just before he was discovered by the rescuers. Allan did have scratches of some kind on his shoulders, but investigators believe it was from a tree or a branch or perhaps something that Allan climbed beneath.

Police determined that Allan's grandfather, who was along on the trip but had remained back in the campsite, could be ruled out as a potential suspect. The grandfather had been in the camp the entire time, talking with someone in the neighboring campsite. Though he did tell investigators that the night before Allan went missing he had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. He said he felt a man's hand clamp down on his neck and whisper something in his ear, though he couldn't understand the words. Then he was gone. The grandfather assumed it was just someone who had too much to drink, but he did have a bruise on the back of his neck.

So what is stalking young children in Acadia National Park? Could it be a coincidence? Over active imagination and wild animals? Could it be purely human predators? Perhaps, but here's where things get even darker.

It turns out that hundreds of people, most of them young children, go inexplicably missing from National Parks each year. In fact, there are over 10,000 unsolved missing persons cases just from National Parks all over the country, places that many consider to be safe, family-friendly places, maintained by the U.S. government. Many of the stories are similar to the ones we uncovered from Acadia. Some eerily so. Researcher David Paulides, in his book series, Missing 411 (of which at least documentaries have also been made), details many of these cases. In fact, the disappearance of Bret Walker is documented in his book, Missing 411: Eastern United States. These books are a little hard to come by, but any intrepid researchers can find them on Amazon, though be prepared to pay a hefty price.

In many of these cases, including the ones here in Maine, the police seem cagey, almost flippant about their investigations. They seem to latch on to the simplest theory and run with it, despite lack of evidence to corroborate said theories. Often times in these cases the FBI or the military is called in to help with an investigation. These are duties regularly scheduled for National Guardsmen, but in plenty of these cases armed active Green Berets have been called in. What might these authorities know that they're not saying?

As Paulides alludes to in his books, it appears that something paranormal may be preying upon children in our National Parks. Could it be that something has been here, maybe has always been here and that it or they roam our National Parks, occasionally taking children for some nefarious purpose? Perhaps - and this is pure speculation on our parts, here - perhaps that is why the National Parks were first established, as a way to contain and track whatever it is that is taking the children.

What is taking children at our National Parks?

Sobering thoughts, MMers. To date, the National Parks Service does not maintain a list of missing persons, something repeatedly called for by the families of the missing. Perhaps if the data were readily available, people might reconsider their next family vacation.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Rapid Fire - April 2021

It’s time for some more Rapid Fire, MMers!

• Speaking of Rapid Fire, there was a report out of Lebanon of a small lizard engulfed in flames. It was reported by local Bobby Newark that the old house on Mill Road was burned down by this “tiny fire dragon.” While this theory was quickly dismissed by the Lebanon Fire Department, Bobby swears up and down that it’s the truth. After all, he saw it with his own eyes.

• You know the paper mill up in Old Town? Well, when the wind is blowing just right, you can smell it from the University of Maine campus. Joseph Lundgren, a freshman residing in Cumberland Hall, reached out to us. “Yesterday the smell from the paper mill was so strong. Normally, it just smells like rotten eggs or sour milk. But today, it smelled like something else rotting. Like a corpse decomposing or something…” What is rotting at the paper mill, MMers? Is it just the paper, or is it something more...grotesque?

What's that smell?

• “Crinkle crinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” Today we had another report of a potential Crinkle Face in Maine. James Rideout, a Newfield resident, wrote this to us: “The other night I was looking through my telescope at some constellations. When I was looking at Orion’s Belt, I could have sworn that I saw the stars aligned in the shape of Crinkle Face. I only know about it from your blog, and I really hope that it’s just in my head.” We here at Malevolent Maine take Crinkle Face very seriously, and we want to warn you again of the dangers of Crinkle Face. While we hope that it was just James’ imagination at work, we can’t be 100% sure. God, we hope.

• Last, but certainly not least, MMers, we had a report lost in the mail way up from Presque Isle. The letter was supposed to be delivered in March, but we just received it this week. Harry Bordeau reported an interesting phenomenon he experienced while tapping his maple trees, as he does every year around this time. Here is part of Harry’s letter, “I tapped the tree as I always do, but that wasn’t sap. It was a gooey substance, kind of like that Nickelodeon slime, but it wasn’t green. It was an orange-yellow color, and it smelled like hand sanitizer or some cleaning solution.” While we don’t know what infiltrated Harry’s tree, we do know that there was a reported UFO sighting up in Presque Isle back in January. And while we don’t know what this unidentified “slime” is, we would be willing to bet it’s not from this world…

Is there sap in that tree?

Well, that's it for today, MMers. As always, feel free to send us any strange happenings from around the state. Stay safe out there, Maine!

Letter from the Future

Just a quick one for you this week, MMers. Meagan from Falmouth wrote in with story about a former co-worker of hers. Meagan works at an insurance office and tells us that the guy who worked in the cubicle next to hers claimed to be from the future.

"Brandon was always a weird guy," Meagan told us. "Kept to himself a lot. Maybe because no one really believed him when he talked."

As Meagan tells it, Brandon claimed to be from the year 2076. He was born in the year 2040 and had traveled back through time in an experimental procedure at his job at Jackson Laboratories. When he first started at Meagan's work he would always talk about all the things he knew. This would have been somewhere around 2008 or 2009. 

"He would tell us stuff like, did the plane crash happen yet? Did Tom Brady win his seventh Super Bowl? What about Trump? We thought he was just weird, ya know?"

Brandon kept trying to tell people what he knew of the future, to warn them of things that were coming. No one took him too seriously, and after three years, he simply disappeared one day. "He didn't show up to work. No one really knew much about him socially, but eventually HR had the police go to his house. They didn't find him, but his walls were covered with weird math equations. You know, like in Good Will Hunting or whatever? And there was a big scorch mark on the floor and wall in one corner, like something had exploded."

That was the end of the story, except that a few weeks later, Meagan received a letter in the mail, from Brendan. "It was postmarked from right before he disappeared," she told us. "Maybe it got lost at the post office or something, but when I got it gave me a shock. I hardly ever talked to him even though we worked right next to each other. He was nice enough, but not so much that I figured he'd write me a letter."

The letter explained that Brandon had finally figured out how to go back to his own time. He was going to conduct the experiment the night he disappeared. "Before he left he wanted to warn me or some things coming," Megan said. "He told me to invest in Bitcoin. This was back right before it boomed in 2010. He mentioned the pandemic. A lot of what he wrote has come true, so it's got me a little worried about the stuff that is still to come."

Brandon's letter to Meagan,
reprinted with her permission

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Unanswered Questions - December 2020

 

Welcome back to some more unanswered questions, MMers!

• Who is at the bottom of the old well on the abandoned farm in Chesterville? More importantly, why have they kept screaming "Tenon?" for the past twenty years?

If you hear, "Tenon!" coming from the bottom of a well... run!

• Why will Cobbie, the sea monster living in Cobbosseecontee Lake, only show itself at dusk?

• When is it okay to call the feds about aliens invaders? After the first visit? The second? The third? The Herrins out of Patten are on visit #4!

Fifth time's the charm?

• What lived under the bed in Caleb Clover's room? And why did it move to Lucas Cruz's? Has anyone seen Caleb lately?

• Where exactly is that fountain of youth in the Bethel area? Asking for a friend.

• How do you drive a vampire off your property after you accidentally let him in? Lots of garlic, crosses, holy water, and a blessing or two from the local priest doesn't hurt, according to Norman Reed of Brighton.

No visitors or vampires!

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Flight 129

Hello and Happy Fourth of July Weekend, MMers! We got thinking about the brave men and women who fought for our independence and it got us thinking about that growing collection of military-related oddities we've accumulated. So today, we thought we'd share the story of missing Flight 129.

Happy 4th of July!

This story takes place in 1976 (the year of our nation's Bicentennial, by the way) and it involves a plane full of military personnel and their families flying from Boston to Loring Air Force Base, in Limestone, Maine. The military had chartered Flying Eyes Flight 129 to take sixty-eight passengers (27 soliders and their families), along with ten crew members, from Logan airport to Loring Air Force Base where they would be stationed for the next several years. It was a routine flight, one taken multiple times by the Flying Eyes crew, who were often used to transport troops.

A propliner plane, similar to Flight 129

The pilot, Captain Stephen Gregory, noted that the night was clear, visibility was great, and there was no turbulence. The flight itself was just over sixty minutes and Flight 129 should have touched down somewhere around 11:30 PM. Instead, it was never seen again.

The last radio transmission from Gregory was brief, but ominous. To this day no one knows exactly what it means. Here's his final transmission, in full:

"We're at 35K. Clear skies. Moon looks amazing. We're over... what is that, Jim [Coogans, the co-pilot] Moosehead Lake on our left. We should be - hey, what is that? What the hell is that? I've never seen colors like that before. My mind. It's inside my mind. And it's so small. And so big. I can see it all. I can see forever. The beginning. The end. It's al right here. I think... I think we're going. Tell June... tell her I lo-"

This was at 10:59 PM. It was the last known transmission from Flight 129.

The plane never landed in Limestone. No wreckage or remains of the plane were ever found anywhere along its flight path, somewhere just northeast of Willimantic. For years both professional and amateur sleuths have scoured the entire state looking for any trace of the missing plane. No trace of the seventy-eight people about Flight 129 has ever been discovered.

The official story is that Gregory must have gotten turned around somehow. Perhaps a faulty meter indicated they were higher than they believed. They most likely crashed into one of the mountains, including Maine's tallest, Mt. Katahdin. This has never been confirmed, of course, and no evidence to support this has ever been discovered.

Where is Flight 129?

So what did Stephen Gregory and Jim Coogans see that night? What were those colors that defied words? And where did the passengers go? Did aliens attack the plane? Did they somehow crossover between realities? It has been almost forty-five years since Flight 129 disappeared and the families of the missing still have no answers.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

---

Update: We wanted to give you a quick update of a story we've been investigating regarding what we're calling the "Black Tarot" deck. You can read our first two entries here: Part I and Part II. We wanted to inform you that one of the people we spoke to, Larry Gilbert from York has gone missing. He has not been seen in three days. Friends say he didn't show up to work, hasn't taken any calls, and appears to have simply disappeared. If anyone has any information about Larry Gilbert, please contact the Maine State Police.

Larry Gilbert, last seen 6/29/2020

Alien Research Facility

Welcome back MMers! We were recently approached by a freelance journalist who said she had a scoop on something big going on up in Calais. This journalist who wanted to go by Nadia, said that she had been undercover at this secret government facility right on the border between Maine and Canada. She said that one of the things being investigated at this facility was alien life. 

Nadia recounted her experience to us, “Before I became a journalist I got my bachelors in Biomedical Engineering, sadly some family issues brought be back home to Calais, and I started working on my blog to pay the bills. I had heard rumors of this strange top secret government facility from the old timers in town. And after a few weeks of investigation I managed to get myself a position their based on my history in biomedical engineering.” 

“Security was tight, we couldn’t have personal phones, but I managed to sneak it in a few times. In order for it to seem less conspicuous I downloaded tiktok on it, and would do the popular dances in front of things I wanted to record. I felt like an idiot doing the renegade in front of tank full of weird tentacles, but I did it so that if they eventually caught me I could play it off as just being a dumb kid you know, someone who was a little airheaded and cared more about social media than keeping my job at a government lab.” 

What Nadia says the tanks looked like 

Nadia says that eventually her tiktoks were found out and she was forced to leave. “They took my phone, which sadly had all the evidence on it, because the lab is on a disconnected network and wouldn’t let me post to the internet from inside. They interrogated me for a week down there, kept me in a holding space until they were sure I wasn’t a foreign agent of some sort. They terminated me and then eventually let me go back to my home without my phone or any reasonable evidence.”

If we have a facility like this in our own backyard, I can’t imagine what other shady things the government is up to. We would like to thank Nadia for her dedication in discovering the truth. Watch out for big brother, and don’t let the aliens bite, stay safe out there, Maine!

Rapid Fire - May 2020

 Eyes open, MMers!

This week, we've got a ton of smaller, one-hit stories, we've gathered from our loyal readers. We're coming at you rapid fire! Let's dive right in.

• Tina up near Presque Isle spotted a UFO flying over the Walmart on Route 163. It was a cluster of three lights, moving in erratic motions in the sky. It moved too fast to be a plane or a helicopter, darting first left, then right, then up. She  watched the craft for about five minutes before it suddenly stopped moving completely. It stayed for just a second before flying off. "It moved so fast it practically disappeared," Tina writes.  Definitely fits the mold of a typical Tri-clipper. Any else spot this space craft? Let us know.

What did Tina see?

• Bruce spotted a large, hairy creature in the woods around his camp in Whitneyville. He was out hunting when he heard some strange grunting and growling sounds that he couldn't identify. He followed a trail that led to a stream. There he saw the remains of an animal he identified as a deer. It had been ripped apart, as if by an animal. He spotted the creature he believed had killed the deer. It was "large, bigger than a man, and up on two feet." Sure sounds like Bigfoot to us. Keep your eyes on the woods up in Whitneyville!

• Clara, who only wanted to be identified as living in Franklin Country, sent us the story of the grave of an unknown soldier from the War of 1812. The grave is in a small family plot on Clara's property and every spring she heads out to clear up the little cemetery. For the past five years, she's talked about some sort of stain on the stone that is spreading. No matter what she does, how she scrubs it away, it always comes back a little bigger. Well, this year she was finally able to make out what shape the strange shape was forming. Turns out it's a gentleman's hat. The strange part? Clara tells us that int he early part of the Nineteeth Century, there was a haberdasher (that's a hat maker for you laymen) located on the property where she now lives. Connections? We'd say yes.

  

  How about a close up next time, Clara?

  
  

• We had another sighting of Saco River Sara. That's the fifth one this year. Maybe someone should head up Fryburg and burn some sage. 

• Have you ever heard of a ghost bridge? We hadn't either. That is until Don from Turner sent us this curious story. He claims he was driving along a stretch of Route 4 one foggy evening. Don tells us he's driven that stretch dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but this night was different. All of a sudden, Don felt like he had no clue where he was. "Nothing look familiar," Don writes. "It was like I was in some stretch of road I'd never been to before." Suddenly, Don drove over a bridge - and not just any bridge! He said it was wooden, an old fashioned style, he remember growing up as a kid in the 1950s. Don said he slowed down, suddenly unsure if the bridge was safe for his truck. He soon crossed the bridge, and though quite freaked out, kept driving. Soon the fog parted a little and he recognized the road again. He was home in no time. The next day he went out to check for the bridge, but it was nowhere to be found. He swears he never left Route 4 and in the weeks since, he can't find that stretch of road or that wooden bridge anywhere! Eerie!

  

  Artist's interpretation. NOT the actual bridge!
  
  

As always, MMers, if you encounter something spooky, something unexplainable, something supernatural or otherworldly, send it to us. Who knows, your story might just make the blog?

Stay safe out there, Maine.