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It also defies logic: lost children tend to travel downhill, because that being the path of least resistance, and if they’re old enough they also realize civilization is in that direction. Obviously, it would be difficult if not impossible for a two-year-old or whatever to walk for miles and climb thousands of feet up steep mountainsides in rugged wilderness areas. If they were alive they were often in remarkably good shape for the time they’d been missing and either couldn’t remember any of it, or told some very strange stories. If they were dead the cause of death was generally given as exposure, dehydration etc. The children were often naked or semi-naked when found (but none of their missing clothes were ever located) and sometimes they were covered in scratches but sometimes they didn’t have a scratch on them. Many adults could not have walked that far over that kind of terrain in that amount of time. In one case, a kid turned up twelve miles away, nineteen hours after he disappeared, with numerous fences and creeks and two mountains between him and the place he’d disappeared from. Mind you, many of the adult disappearances were creepy too, but it was the children that struck me: small children and toddlers vanishing from campsites, etc., and turning up far outside the search grid, miles away and thousands of feet uphill. What was creepy about the book was not so much the stories about people who disappeared forever - after all, I read and write about missing people every day - but about people, mostly children, who disappeared and then were found in places where they should not, could not, be. and Canada and nothing terrible happened, but.dang. I mean, I’ve gone on hiking trips in national parks in both the U.S. Many of his stories were remarkably creepy and made me want to never go anywhere near a national park again. Some of those people are not listed with law enforcement or on missing persons databases anywhere. David Paulides recorded many cases I had never heard of, some of them going back a century or more.