Today, I'll be covering 3 very bizarre missing person stories. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please replace the liquid in the like button's hand sanitizer dispenser with clear glue. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay.

Let's get into today's stories. In December of 2014, a 24 year old man named Aaron Frazier sat in the driver's seat of an excavator in the backyard of his childhood home in Jacksonville, Florida. He pushed the lever forward and he watched as the metal bucket dipped down and cut into this big slab of concrete and debris went flying everywhere and Aaron loved it. He smiled with satisfaction watching this destruction taking place and he pressed the lever again and ripped off another piece of concrete. Today, Aaron was ripping out the backyard swimming pool of his old home, a home which his father had recently given him the deed to.

But this property was not a nostalgic place for Aaron. In fact, he hadn't lived here since he was 3 years old and the handful of memories he had from being in this place were basically all bad. His parents fought all the time, and then 1 day in 1993, his mom just decided to leave, and then after she was gone, his dad wasn't able to care for him, and so before long Aaron was shipped off to foster care. So now he was kind of enjoying demolishing the property. He had some big renovations planned starting with the backyard.

By early afternoon, the pool was all gone. And so Aaron swung his bucket over to the outdoor shower that was located next to where the pool had been, and he dug the bucket into the concrete and as soon as he did, immediately this geyser of water shot into the sky. And so Aaron knew he must have hit a water line. And so Aaron jumped out of the excavator, he turned off the water, and then he grabbed a shovel and headed over to the outdoor shower to inspect the damage. He basically needed to dig where the excavator bucket had just begun digging to see what exactly had been struck.

And so with the shovel, he starts kind of moving away the mud and concrete. And at some point, the head of his shovel, the blade, it hits something sort of rigid and plastic. And he moved the shovel out of the way and he looked, and at first, it looked like a plastic bag, but it was too rigid to be a plastic bag. And so he took a shovel and kind of moved the dirt out of the way, and he saw it was definitely not a plastic bag. It was thick plastic sheeting like you would use in major construction projects.

Curious why the sheeting would be underneath this outdoor shower, Aaron used a shovel and basically pierced the plastic sheeting, and then he got down and peeled away the plastic with his bare hands. And as he did that, he began to notice that the sheeting was wrapped tightly around some sort of bulky object. It's pulling it away, and finally, he reveals the object and it's this old coconut. And so he actually reached down and pulled the coconut out and just stared at it. Like, why is this under here?

Aaron was really confused by this. Like, why would somebody take the time to wrap a coconut in waterproof industrial sheeting and then bury it? And so as Aaron just sort of stood there wondering what this could be, he began rotating this coconut around in his hands. And when he saw the back of this coconut, he screamed. It would turn out Aaron's mother did not just suddenly abandon the family.

On the night of January 6, 1993, the day that she vanished, while Aaron's mom and father got into this huge fight, it got out of hand, and Aaron's father shot and killed Aaron's mother with a 22 caliber rifle. Aaron's father then staged the murder to look like Aaron's mother simply stormed out and never looked back. Now when the police investigated her absence, they did not believe Aaron's father's story. They thought there was something off about it, but there wasn't enough hard evidence to actually connect him to the crime. And so nobody ever caught him.

But that all changed in 2014 when a court ordered that the deed of Aaron's childhood home be transferred from his father to him. The coconut that Aaron found in the backyard of his home was his mother's skull. He just didn't realize it until he rotated it and saw her eye sockets. 5 years later in 2019, Aaron's father was convicted of second degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. In case you didn't know, we just dropped our very first holiday collection to help keep you warm and strange this holiday season.

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Happy holidays and back to the stories. Around lunchtime on August 25th, 2012, a young woman named Grace was standing in a public restroom in front of the mirror in southern Iceland applying makeup. Someone knocked on the door, and Grace quickly shouted an apology, but then made no move to finish up. Grace was in the middle of a solo bus trip across Iceland, and she was feeling kind of gross from all the travel. Every day around noon, the tour bus she was on would make a pit stop for lunch at whatever touristy location was nearby.

And today, they were at Elkow, which is the largest volcanic canyon in the world. Now, usually, Grace would use these pit stops not just to get lunch, but also to walk around and see the sights. But today, she was using this break just to freshen up. So Grace finished putting on her eyeliner and put her hair up in a high ponytail and then she changed her shirt stuffing her old 1 back into her backpack. Then she stepped out of the bathroom into a large parking lot and she saw her tour bus on the other side, and she saw other tour members making their way on board.

Grace hustled across the lot, got onto the bus, and settled back into her seat. Only a few minutes later, the driver stood up and announced to the bus that it was time to leave. But before they left, he did what he did at every single stop. He did a head count just to make sure nobody got left behind. Now typically, Grace did not pay much attention to the driver when he did this head count.

It was a very administrative thing. She would just sit there looking out the window waiting for the bus to start. But on this day, at some point, as Grace was sitting there, she realized the head count was taking a really long time. And when she noticed that, she looked up at the driver and he looked visibly upset, and he was clearly doing the head count over and over again like he was really trying to make sure he was doing it right. And then finally, the driver just announced to Grace and all the other people on the bus that they couldn't go anywhere because somebody from their tour group was missing.

Now the first thing they did is they just sat there and waited for about an hour, just hoping that this missing person would turn up. But when they didn't, the driver called the police. So this area, Elbkow, is a sprawling canyon that was formed more than a 1000 years earlier during a volcanic eruption. The canyon itself is very deep and it has steep walls on either side, and at the bottom is all this volcanic debris. So it's beautiful to look at, but it's pretty difficult to navigate.

And so if somebody was exploring this area on their own and somehow got lost in the process, this could become a very dangerous place for them very quickly. So when the bus driver called the police to report a missing tour group member in this particular area, the police immediately sent out a search and rescue party. And when they arrived, the first thing they did was interview the remaining tour group members to try to figure out who the missing person actually was because it wasn't clear yet. Pretty quickly, some of the tour group members recalled seeing this young woman of Asian descent who was wearing dark clothes and was carrying a light colored bag, who had left the bus at the beginning of lunch and had not returned. Now Grace had not personally seen this young woman, and she told police as much when she was interviewed, but she, like basically everybody else on the tour, immediately volunteered to help with the search.

So for the entire rest of the day, that is what Grace and the others all did. They searched for this missing person. Grace was teamed up with another member of the tour as well as a trained rescuer, and they walked out into the canyon searching along a grid pattern with the rest of the team. After a few hours with no luck, officials sent in more rescuers and a helicopter. And by the time the night fell, the entire canyon was lit up by search lights and you could barely hear anything over the sound of the helicopter making repeated passes overhead.

But despite this enormous effort, there still was no sign of the missing tourist. Finally, at around 3 AM, Grace broke off from the search and returned to the bus to get some sleep. But before settling into her seat, Grace opened up her backpack to pull out some makeup wipes. And as she did that, something inside of her bag caught her eye. And when she saw it, she froze.

She stared at this object, and as she did, she felt herself break out in a cold sweat because suddenly she knew exactly where this missing woman was. It would turn out that over the course of the previous day, the people on board the bus made a series of small mistakes, but together they snowballed and turned into 1 huge mistake. First, the bus driver had made a mistake with his head count. Not the head count he had done that afternoon, but the 1 he had done earlier that day before they drove to Elkhau. That morning, he had accidentally counted 1 too many people on board the bus and not realized it.

Then that afternoon, when he had counted again and actually had the right number of people on board, he thought there was a missing person. Next, the description of the woman who had gotten off the bus and didn't come back, the so called missing person, that description had only been half correct. So yes, there had been a young woman of Asian descent wearing a dark sweatshirt, carrying a light colored bag. She'd gotten off the bus, but she did get back on. Except that when she did, she looked different, and so nobody recognized her.

And this was because this woman had gotten off the bus to go to the restroom to freshen up. She had put on makeup, she had put her hair up in a ponytail, and she had taken off her dark colored sweatshirt. The object that Grace found in her backpack that made her realize that she knew exactly where this missing woman was, was her dark colored sweatshirt inside of her light colored backpack. And it was at that exact moment that Grace knew. The person that she had spent the last 15 hours searching for was herself.

Before dawn on December 12, 1992, a 17 year old girl named Tracy Dion sat in the passenger seat of a little 2 door car that was swerving down a deserted road in the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Everybody in the car was drunk, including Tracy. Sitting next to Tracy in the middle front seat was her 19 year old cousin named Ruby, and Ruby's boyfriend, a 20 year old named Arnold, was driving the car. All 3 of them had been out partying all night, and so now, they were trying to make it home. The swerving was making Tracy feel sick to her stomach, but she didn't wanna say anything to Arnold in fear that she might distract him.

I mean, it was really dark outside. There was no street lights. There was ice on the road. I mean, for a sober driver, this would be a challenging drive, let alone a drunk driver. They were coming up on an intersection, and Arnold brought the car to a stop with a lurch.

Tracy watched as Arnold checked for cross traffic, and then pulled out onto highway 281. But halfway through this turn, as Arnold was accelerating, Tracy began to feel the car slide. And even in her drunken state, she could tell Arnold had hit a patch of black ice. And so as the car began to skid, she wanted to scream, but before she could, the car was already flipping over, and then everything went black. A short time later, Tracy came to.

The car was upside down and Tracy quickly realized she had fallen out of her seat and was now basically resting on the roof of the car, which was now on the ground. From what she could tell, after the car had finished rolling over, it had come to a stop just off the side of the highway, and so they were not in immediate danger from other cars striking them. But she couldn't really see outside because the windows were so badly cracked. Beside her, Tracy could hear her cousin Ruby pounding on the driver's side door trying to get it to open, and so Tracy tried to look around Ruby to see Arnold to see if he was okay. But when she did, she saw the driver's seat was empty.

Tracy tried to make sense of what she was seeing. The driver's side door was closed, but Arnold was gone. Just then, Tracy heard the sound of the driver's side door opening, and she turned to see her cousin Ruby forcing the door open just a few inches. And then a second later, Ruby was slithering out through that crack to the outside. To Tracy, everything felt like it was happening in slow motion.

She was too shocked and confused to make any sense of it. But if Ruby was getting out of the car, Tracy felt like she should too. And so Tracy turned and crawled across to the driver's side, and was about to make an exit the same way Ruby had when the door slammed shut violently right in Tracy's face. Tracy didn't understand why Ruby would do something like that. Why would she shut the door that aggressively when she knew her cousin was still inside?

Tracy tried to open the door again, but she was too weak to do it. She figured her cousin Ruby was okay, but she couldn't see outside because of how cracked the windows were. At this point, Tracy began to feel woozy. She laid her head down on the roof of the car, wondering to herself why Ruby and Arnold had left her behind. Tracy would stay trapped inside of the car alone for a few hours until finally a motorist saw the flipped over car and called 911.

Shortly after that, first responders arrived on the scene, they pulled Tracy out of the car, and shockingly, she actually didn't have really any serious injuries at all. She didn't even need to be hospitalized. But rescuers could not find Ruby or Arnold anywhere. They were gone. And once rescuers had scoured the entire area around the crash site, the sheriff who was in charge of the scene started to wonder if Arnold and Ruby were not just missing.

Maybe, he thought, they had fled. Arnold had been driving drunk and all 3 of them were underage, and so the sheriff thought maybe Arnold and Ruby were scared to get in trouble. Over the next few days, the police continued to search the surrounding area for Arnold and Ruby, hoping they were not badly injured and that they would just turn up on their own, but they never did. And as the days turned into weeks, hope began to wane for the young couple. Their family and friends kept searching the area along 281 where the car had flipped looking for any clue as to where these 2 had gone, but there was nothing.

There was no trace of them. It was like Arnold and Ruby had gotten out of the car and just vanished. But in January of 1993, so 3 weeks after the crash, strange and conflicting reports of sightings began to trickle in. First, a woman came forward claiming to have seen Arnold alive and well at a New Year's Eve party. Now, the police doubted this claim, but this woman was insistent that she had seen Arnold, and they actually hooked her up to a lie detector test, and she passed the test.

And so officials brought in guests from this party who this woman claimed were with Arnold, and they asked them, were you with Arnold? And they said, no. But they failed their lie detector tests. Now of course this was suspicious, but police really didn't know what to do with this information. Assuming this woman's story was true, that she really did see Arnold, well according to the details of her story, Arnold did not appear to be in any kind of distress.

And even if he was in distress, the police still had no idea where he was, so how could they help him? Other locals came forward claiming to have spotted Arnold around town as well. But nothing came of those reports either. Neither Arnold nor Ruby turned up. Months went by and the case went cold.

Until March 10th, when a driver was going down highway 281 and they noticed a strange object in the drainage ditch next to the road. By now, the weather was much warmer than it had been on the day of the crash. So instead of snow and ice inside of this drainage ditch, it was run off water, and the strange object was floating in it. The driver stopped his car, got out, and walked up to see what this thing was, and as soon as he saw it, he turned, ran back to his car, and called the police. Because what the driver had just found was a dead body.

And when the police arrived and searched the area, they found another body not far away. The bodies belonged to Ruby and Arnold. But this discovery did not solve the mystery of what happened to Ruby and Arnold. Instead, it made it much more bizarre. Because first of all, the bodies were found 75 feet away from the original crash site, and the exact spots where the 2 bodies were found had been searched many many times on the day of the crash, days after the crash.

They were searched by police. They were searched by friends and family of Ruby and Arnold. The idea that this is where the bodies had been the whole time was impossible. They would have been found. And then there was the condition of the bodies.

Ruby's body was extremely decomposed, which made sense given the fact that the crash was 3 months earlier. But Arnold's body was barely decomposed at all. And in the pocket of Arnold's jeans, police found a mysterious set of 3 keys. 1 was a vehicle key, and 2 were house keys. But none of them opened any vehicle or building that Arnold was known to frequent, and nobody recognized them.

Finally, the police found a tuft of hair lying near where the bodies had been found. It was Ruby's hair, but it didn't look like the hair had been there for very long, certainly not 3 months. Instead of being dirty and matted like you would expect given how long she must have been there, the hair was perfectly clean. The official coroner's report on Ruby and Arnold's deaths were that they died of exposure, and then their bodies were just overlooked by searchers for months. But to a lot of people, including the sheriff who was in charge of the original crash site, this made no sense.

Despite the coroner's findings, law enforcement officials believed that Ruby and Arnold's deaths were the result of foul play. Under the foul play theory, somebody pulled Ruby and Arnold out of the crash site while they were still alive, and then killed them later. And then perhaps they killed them at different times, which would account for the differences in decomposition of their bodies. The FBI ultimately came in and took over this case, but they eventually closed it down citing a lack of evidence to support the foul play theory. However, with or without foul play being involved here, nobody has a good explanation for all those sightings of Arnold after the crash.

And also, nobody can explain why the door was slammed in Tracy's face in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Maybe it was Ruby or Arnold who slammed the door, or maybe it was their killer. To this day, what actually happened on December 12, 1992 on the side of highway 281 remains a mystery. And now, here is a clip from the latest episode of Redacted. Enjoy.

Her heart skipped a beat. She knew that he meant the CIA agents, which meant he knew what she'd been up to and why she was here now. Marita struggled to find words as tears filled her eyes. And to her horror, Fidel drew his gun out of his holster. But he didn't point it at her like she'd expected.

Instead, he handed her the gun, handle first. Go ahead and kill me, he said. But Marina stayed frozen to the spot. The CIA could never have dreamed of a perfect scenario. Here was Fidel Castro completely unprotected, vulnerable, an open target.

And here was Morita being offered a murder weapon, and yet, she couldn't do it. And Fidel seemed to know it, he smiled at her. And then he said, no 1 can kill me. No 1.

So that's gonna do it. If you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious content, don't forget we have a whole slate of podcasts under the Balin Studios umbrella. They are the mister Balin Podcast, mister Balin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, Wartime Stories, Run Fool, and Redacted. You can find them by searching for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform, and boom you have hundreds of hours of strange, dark, and mysterious content to binge. Thank you so much.

Until next time. See you.