The missing 411 - Unraveling the Mysterious Disappearances at Olympic National Park

Like I said , something strange has occurred in America's National Parks . Welcome to the Missing 411 Spooky Island Radio Case Files , because I feel alone in our home . Okay , welcome back everyone to yet another episode of the Missing 411 Case Files .

As always , I've got some great stories coming your way in the next half an hour or so , as well as some really chilling tales , or a really chilling tale and some strange experiences that will chill you to the bone , cause you know it's spooky season , isn't it ? So I've got to chill you to the bone .

Hopefully the sound quality is just as good as it usually is . I am recording in a different room in my flat and it's a bit noisier and stuff like that , but hopefully that shouldn't affect the listener experience this week .

But yeah , so again , this is episode 7 of the Missing 411 Case Files and yeah , the National Park that I'm talking about today is not as big or well known and , to be honest with you . This is the first time I've ever heard of it , but today I've been researching the Olympic National Park in the state of Washington .

But before we jump into that , I just want to say hello to any new listeners who have come over . From Odin and Told , the episode of mine and Jason's has just blown up and I really noticed some listeners coming over , so welcome . And if you're new to our little spooky island club , then you have other 50 episodes to binge .

So , yeah , perfect for spooky season . But yeah , I hope you guys really enjoyed the episode of Jason . That I can't get my words out at the Odin and Told . It's quite a mouthful , the Odin and Told podcast . We had a great time recording it and , yeah , glad you guys liked it .

And yeah , I hope you've all gone and given him a follow and given him a listen . But yeah , all that jibber jibber out the way , hope you're having a great October . What have you guys got planned ? I don't know , I've got so much that I wanted to , but it's like actually having time to do it . So this Friday I am going to a ghost hunt .

It's going to be very , very scary . Mark is coming with me for the first time and I think he's going to shoot himself . It's like an old nuclear bunker in the UK . It's going to be so good . But obviously you'll hear more about that in future episodes .

And like I wanted to do like pumpkin carving and the pumpkin head photo shoot and stuff with Shauna , but it's not quite work to help . But maybe we can try and fit it in later in the month . But yeah , I'm going to try and get out weekly episodes and I'm going to try , given it's October , and I'm going to treat you all .

So yeah , we'll see what will go . Hopefully the movie should be enough . Full episode of spooky on radio out next week . But yeah , that's jump straight into the case files episode and let's find out some history of the Olympic National Park , shall we so ? The Olympic National Park is situated on the remote Olympic Peninsula in northwest of Washington .

The Olympic National Park is a land of deep wilderness and incredible diversity . So people say Over 95% of the park is backcountry , with habitats ranging from coastlines to dense forests to alpine grasslines and glaciers .

Otters swim in the undersea kelp forest just off the coast , roosevelt Elk roam free in the temperate rainforests and yeah , it's about 570 square miles of park . It's all old growth forests , so home to towering western hemlocks , red cedars and coast Douglas firs . I'm sure they're all beautiful , but as wild as it is , the park is also incredibly accessible .

Almost 3 million people visit it each year , and while many take advantage of the park's unique hiking opportunities , such as treks along the pacific coast , lots of folks choose to tour it by car .

When the first american hostages arrive on the olympic peninsula , many thought that it is fertile soil , abundant rainfall and lush beauty , with attract rows of settlers for long . Fortunately , they were wrong .

Today , olympic national parks , natural richness is preserved for all to enjoy , so there are ambitious new restoration projects geared towards recovering lost ecosystems and leading the cause of conservationist future . Northern and eastern sections of the park are home to lush valleys covered in lowland forest .

This much visited section of the park is home to the Elchwa River , the subject to one of the largest wilderness rehabilitation projects in national park history . The Salmon Cascades overlook the Solduke valley and it is a great place to watch a co-host salmon jump during the spawning season . I bet it probably attracts a lot of bears as well .

I reckon it doesn't say that , but I bet it does . Yeah , god , that sounds incredible and there is a rich history and past with people at the olympic national park . Hundreds of years ago it was thought that around 10 native tribes living on this land would continue and maintain strong relationships to the land and waters now within the park .

So yeah , this is sort of a theme that has been spoken about in previous episodes . If you go back to my first ever misinformed one case files episode , it was on the Grand Canyon and it is a very spiritual place , lots of history with native tribes , different cultures , that sort of thing .

I think there was a story from the Grand Canyon of what they called like a ranger camping overnight and she awoke at 2-3 in the morning to see the ghost of a native leader guiding these people through the woods and through the canyons to a specific point in the water where they disappeared and when she did her research it was all .

Apparently she thought it was the ghost of this . It was like a huge plane crash that killed like 200 people . So yeah , it goes back a long way and the idea of spirituality and all these old native tribes still keeping hold of the land spiritually at least , it just adds to the whole mystery and I love it .

Also , the topography and land could be keeping species like Bigfoot hidden because , yeah , it's just so wild . So a little bit more history put into the spooks and the stories .

It wasn't until 1889 that the first recorded trek across the Olympic range was sponsored by the Seattle Press , and the 80 mile distance between Port Angeles and Aberdeen took this group six months to complete .

20 years later , in 1909 , president Theodore Roosevelt set aside over half a million acres of the verdant rainforest areas surrounding Mount Olympus as a national monument . And there's only one Mount Olympus close to my heart and that is in Greece and Hercules and all that sort of shit .

So yeah , again , with America not coming up with original names , say with Aberdeen , aberdeen , mount Olympus , you know , take all of our names , you know , take a whole world's names . But yeah , rambling again . But remarkably , it took almost 30 more years to have these pristine areas declared a national park in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt .

Now , because the park sits on an isolated peninsula with a high mountain range dividing it from the land to the south , it developed many unique plants and species , like the Olympic Marmot are not found anywhere else in the world .

The southwestern coastline of the Olympic Peninsula is also the northernmost non-glaciated region of the Pacific North Coast of North America and , like previously stated , the park also provides habitat for many species that are only native to the Pacific Northwest coast .

Because of this , important scientists have declared it to be a biological reserve and study its unique species to better understand the process of plant and animal evolution . I mean , it's really crazy to read , and environment really make this in a super interesting place .

But the beaches to the coast , on one side , rainforests and a center Mount Olympus surrounded by glaciers I mean , no wonder they made it a national park . It sounds like an incredible place , but before going through some of the missing person reports , let's get the facts . It is an American national park , czech .

There is an abundance of water around , yeah , loads of rivers and glaciers , lots of thick foliage and rainforest for people to disappear in , and mostly there is human history for hundreds , even thousands of years , and I find that from previous episodes where there is all these factors misinform one , cases follow . So , yeah , let's jump straight in .

Okay , so in this first strange disappearance , we're going to talk about the missing case of John Devine . Now , I'm not gonna lie . This national park , for whatever research , seems to be different from others that I have , that I've covered in the series . So it's different in the fact that it's quite out of the way and still quite wild .

So there were not a lot of cases of young children going missing with their families . As they're a more central middle America sort of national parks are more family friendly , so yeah . So a lot of the evidence I found was sort of second hand evidence from people who last seen the victims and not someone who was directly with them when they weren't missing .

So it's a bit different like that . But hey , we're all here for a bit of diversity . So yeah , but right , john Devine was a 73-year-old hiker who headed to the Olympic National Park in Washington on Friday September 6th 1997 for camping and hiking .

He was said to be an experienced hiker and had intended to go climbing the 6,796 foot high Mount Baldi , which is a great name in the Olympic National Forest , using the extreme steep and rugged Maynard burn trail . He failed to show up after the hikers planned on September the 7th and his family reported him missing to the authorities .

So John was never found and the search was followed by a strange and fatal helicopter crash which Whilst looking for him . But more about that later . He was last seen on the afternoon of September the 7th while hiking on the Great Wolf Ridge on the parks northern side .

He had been camping since Friday night with a friend near the Mount Baldi area , just outside the park's boundary , in the bookhorn wilderness area of the National Forest . Devine was camping with his friend Greg Bolzer . They split up that day and Devine went missing . Bolzer went off to hunt while Devine took off on a day hike and never returned .

He was carrying snack bars but didn't really have any gear or food . After he'd been reported missing , dozens of searchers combed the Muller Creek area looking for John , but to no avail . Jason Berry , 23 in his second year as Park Service volunteer , said it's steep and rugged and the bushes are super thick and it's tough to walk down the drainages .

Sergeant Don Kelly of the Callum County Sheriff's office , who which who can coordinate the search with the National Park Service , said if he was walking around up there we would have found him by now and if he had fallen down hurt himself , he probably wouldn't be alive .

They searched by foot for a week until they decided to send up a helicopter to look for him . However , this was not a wise decision . It was said that the weather was really bad Snow and fog controlled in , and as the pilot and other seven members in the helicopter sat there on the launch pad , they decided to wait for the weather to clear .

But while sat on the launch pad , before takeoff , the pilot used a hand signal Indicating that he was going to wait for five minutes for conditions to improve for attempting it . Yet a moment later the helicopter departed vertically Without warning and crashed into the side of the mountain , which killed the pilot to others , and the others were injured but survived .

So three deaths out of seven . And yeah , after this , after people have been searching for a while , the search was called off , finally on September 13th 1997 . Unfortunately , john Devine , like I said , was never found . Yet another strange disappearance in an in Olympic National Park .

So I mean , like I say , there's no sort of oh , we went vanishing someone's nose . There's none . This I don't believe . They had searched dogs and things like that out there , but an experienced hiker okay , he was elderly , but he was out , he was experienced suddenly just vanished .

They never found any trace of him , any trace of clothing , anything , and just like what it does have , though , is obviously the weather turning bad as they're attempting to search for someone . So there's a couple of bits that obviously sometimes you pick and choose what sort of fits . But how strange .

Sit with that helicopter , right like the pilot was literally just sat there , wasn't even going , but all of a sudden lost control of it . And yeah , very , very strange one .

So he moved on from the first case file to the second and a man called Gilbert Mark Gilman so he's 47 and he went on a short walk in the national park in Washington on Saturday June 24th 2006 and never to return .

He headed to the trailhead of the staircase rapid loop trail in the national park that day to take the opportunity to take some photos off the park now , rather than go for a serious hike . He was wearing light clothes and foot there footwear and was not to carry a pack .

Gilman packed his car at staircase ranger station and briefly spoke to a park ranger , sunny luster sanny luster , sorry and that was the last time he was ever seen . So a large 10 day search followed , failed to turn up any sign of Gil and in 15 years no evidence relating to his disappearance has appeared in the area .

Now he was a tough and intelligent guy apparently . Obviously I didn't know him personally , but he was an ex-US Army paratrooper and even served military time in Panama , east Africa and Israel . He had combat experience with the 82nd airborne and received two bronze stars dos bronze stars .

Gil had degrees from the London School of Economics , guneon College in New York and Solvei Business School in Brussels and , like previously stated , gil was spotted by park ranger carrying a camera but not a backpack , the day he went missing .

And yet in an interview with sanny they said I could actually hear the music playing in his car and went out to see what was going on , and I had a brief conversation with him and asked him to turn down the music . I got the sense he was going for a hike .

Now the staircase area of the Olympic National Park is located 30 minutes outside the town of Hood Sport in a lowland old growth forest . So it is the base to a seasonal range station , a campground and the trailhead for the North Fork Scot I can't say that word Skokomish River Trail , a beautiful spot for backpacking or for day hikers .

The staircase rapid loops trail is a 2.1 mile relatively flat loop , taking walkers under the canopy of 300 to 400 year old Douglas Ferts , western hemlocks and western red cedar trees . Now , gil was supposed to accompany Sandy Matheson to a meeting in Spokane , washington , on Sunday June 25th . So how many days is that ? So that's so that is where he went missing .

Oh , the next day . Yeah so , and when he failed to meet Sandy the next day , as originally planned , gilman was reported missing to the authorities . A few days after Gilbert Gilman was reported missing , his vehicle , a 2005 .

Forward , a thunderbird convertible , was located at the staircase ranger station where he was last seen by the park ranger , sanny lustig , just a day earlier .

Searchers spent 10 days looking for any clues of Gilbert on the staircase area and examined nearby trails and ridges also , which included steep rocky hills , dense forest and the north fork skluckamish river , and found no trace of him . They used tracking dogs , a helicopter and a plane equipped with heat seeking equipment , along with 62 searchers on the ground .

After 10 days of fruitless searching , he was declared lost by the US Forest Service and the official search was called off . So we've got a couple of things here . His mother was interviewed and said it's hard to imagine a person can just disappear . Nothing was ever found .

So yes , from my research there was a couple of theories , so some believe he's working with the US government and went missing to become like a spy or to become or was something happened to him because he knew something he shouldn't ?

And just like with the whole UFO thing in a minute , we know the US government , as well as any government , I suppose , has their secrets . So that's one theory . The other theory is he was murdered on the trail by a serial killer called Israel Keys . He was caught a few years later but never admitted to this murder of Gil .

And you sort of have to think to yourself he was military trained , like he'd seen combat . Is he really going to be taken by surprise by and this guy's serial killer is really skinny , like a strong gust of wind would blow him over . Like , do I really think he was a victim ? No , I think he was probably too strong and too , he'd been a military man .

So yeah , it's strange , but , like in this case , you know , tracking dogs we used couldn't pick up a cent , and yeah , obviously around water and rivers and that sort of thing . So a couple of things again , a couple . Not everything fits and that's what I found strange about this national park .

It seems like there is some missing 411 similarities , but not like knocking them out of the park . Like everything , every tick box has meant this final case is a bit more missing 411 , if that's what you're here for , which I presume it is . But yeah , so now for the final case for today and the chilling disappearance of Bryce Herder .

And yeah , like I said , this is the most missing 411 case of the episode . So 6 year old Bryce Herder was out hiking with his family on Shishu Beach when he disappeared in the early evening of April 9th 1995 . The location is to the south west of the Makka Indian Reservation , close to the Olympic National Park , just west of Seattle apparently .

But at the time of his disappearance Bryce was about 4 feet tall , weighed 60lbs , with a medium build and brown eyes and light brown hair . He had a medium complexion and was up native American descent .

Bryce was last seen on the beach when his family left to walk up an adjacent trail and since he was unable to walk up the trail , they agreed they would meet him back at the beach . When they returned he was nowhere to be seen . The boys grandfather was chief of police and he weren't missing . So the boys grandfather was chief of police .

So when he weren't missing , resources were deployed quickly and in number . People began searching within 45 minutes for his disappearance , with some 30 searchers including coast guards , helicopters and the area where he was last seen .

The search lasted through the night , with increasing numbers of ground and water crews equipped with special equipment searching for any signs of the young boy . Dog teams and more crews joined the search the next day and within a week thousands of people , including US Air Force Personnel , rock Climbers and Divers , had been concentrated in the area .

Others searched the coastline and drove off roads . After a week of searching , agencies called off the search , but Bryce's family continued to look for the boy . Footsteps were discovered but were intermittent . The family believed that Bryce had been kidnapped , particularly since no trace of him or his clothing was ever found .

The nearby OZ trail led to a homeless community and the police believed he may have been washed out to sea , but his body was never recovered from the water . So a couple of theories there . I don't know why a homeless community would kidnap a child . It doesn't make any sense to me .

I think more likely something happened to him in the water and they just didn't find him . But yeah , the question is why ? Because he'd not have come from the rest of his family at the trail from the beach , and how long was he left on it before they returned ? Didn't abducts have time to whisper ?

I mean , first of all I don't want to rub it in , but like incredible parenting skills and decisions there guys . No wonder your kid went missing . You leave him on the beach at a 6 year old . What do you think is going to happen ? Regardless , I mean it could have been . I suppose they didn't find tracks .

I was about to say it could have been some sort of wildlife , but there's no tracks found , just some footsteps that were intermittent , so again by water . It's a strange one . I mean I did do a bit of research as well . There are quite a lot of UFO counters in the area .

I'm not sure if that is because there's not a lot of light pollution so you can see more in the sky at night , but yeah , I mean it was strange . This case files because I mean the first two missing persons are people who were alone , who vanished . So of course not traditionally will fit in with the missing 411 cases .

But there's something very strange going on . I mean the UFO encounters in the area which I might have to delve a bit deeper into in future episodes because there were more stories .

Obviously I just don't like these episodes to go on for too long , so maybe I'll come back , start looping back to some of these case files and some of these national parks in future episodes . But , yeah , why would you leave your kid on the beach ? It makes no sense . It's like they wanted him to go missing . But yeah , I don't know why he would .

But , yeah , maybe it's those pesky aliens up to no good again . But yeah , speaking of aliens , I recently watched a Netflix documentary series called Encounters and I would highly highly recommend it . Just 4 episodes and it just documents 4 different groups of people who've seen UFOs . Yeah , it's just really good , really interesting .

Like it doesn't drag on too long , just the right amount . You can just binge them in an evening . So yeah , so that was the Olympic National Park , guys . Hope you liked it . There's a bit of a different one . Like I say , in the next couple , obviously next week I'm going to try and get out a full episode of Spooky Alien Radio . I'm going to try .

I promise to avoid it against people . I'm going to try . And the week after that , obviously another Spooky Alien Radio missing 4-1-1 case . So yeah , I've not decided where I'm going to be researching for those 2 episodes , but stick around because the next weeks will be really spooky , really spooky . Next week in Film Club I am reviewing the new Exorcist film .

We're going to go watch that this weekend and yeah , and obviously I will be telling you all about my ghost hunt and if anything Spooky happened . But yeah , so tune in for that next week and in 2 weeks . Next time we'll be back with another missing 4-1-1 radio . Let the Spooky Alien Radio case files until then catch you on the flippity flip a bang .