My grandfather was a small town detective from the time he was 26 in 1974 until he retired at 61 due to medical complications from being shot in 2002. I asked him if he had a crazy unsolved case, and he said that he did, and it was a whopper. A few months ago, I recorded him telling me the story, and then I transcribed it, but then I realized, you know, it needed some work to be readable, so I cleaned up when I had time. So I’ll tell you the case, but then I’ll tell you something that changes everything about it.
“In 1986, Manita Bluff was experiencing a heat wave so severe that the mayor of the town ordered that all municipal jobs occurring in the outdoors be completed between the hours of 7pm and midnight. The town’s strict and historical noise ordinance was lifted, allowing residents to perform outdoor chores late into the night. Many businesses adjusted to the evening hours, and it was not unusual for residents to hike, walk, ride bicycles, or even swim in the dark hours. Nighttime calls for police presence had increased, and most officers were working overtime to help combat a wave of petty crime that seemed to erupt each night in the hour or so before dawn.
Steve Polson was patrolling the streets in an older car that didn’t have air conditioning, and he remembered using a cheap spray bottle to occasionally mist himself for relief from the relentless weather. Ice water from an insulated thermos helped take the edge off, but it also caused him to pull over at the small town’s airport to use the restroom, where he found a strangely dressed woman. Despite the intense heat, she was dressed in long underwear and a wool ski sweater. She was alive, but hypothermic. Steve Polson called for an ambulance, and while the woman would live, what she told the detective would kick off a strange and explainable series of events.
Jessamine Grayling had gone missing in early January. According to her husband, she had sighted coyote behind the airport and had taken her camera and a small day pack in hopes of capturing photographs she could sell to local publications. She had not returned by dark, and a search party had spent days combing the area for any sign of her. Bloodhounds indicated she’d exited her car, parked behind the flight school hangar, which reported to the police that she had used their restroom, but then, they lost her scent in the bathroom itself, as if she hadn’t left. Jessamine’s childhood best friend owned the flight school with her husband, and they agreed to all police requests, going so far as allowing the bathroom to be dismantled to prove there were no secret places to hide Jessmine’s body, and allowing their training planes to be impounded for nearly six months. The case had gone cold.
Jessamine reported to police that she had, in fact, left the flight school restroom, and found the flight school completely empty. This was not entirely unusual; students took the planes to go flying and Jessamine had stopped in around lunch time. She assumed the front desk cashier, one of the student pilots working off their lessons, had stepped out to the cafe for lunch, a theory that was confirmed by the student, who said they had been leaving when Jessamine arrived. Jessamine had locked the door behind her, as was the custom when no one was present. She’d then hiked up the foothills to the north of the aiport and set up her camera.
The next thing she knew, Officer Steve Polson was standing above her, shaking her and trying to wake her up. The heat was so intense that she thought she was experiencing late stage hypothermia, which surprisingly, the hospital confirmed she was. She could not account for her long absence. Decective Daniel McRay (my grandfather) harbored many suspicions. The next day, he hiked to where she claimed she’d set up her camera. It was an easy half mile from the airport, and he found her camera in good condition. Confoundingly, it wasn’t sun-bleached as it should have been, nor had the cheap plastic tripod deformed in the blazing sun. Detective McRay knew that one of the searchers had carried a camcorder during the events, and he retrieved the tape. To his delight but confusion, the searcher had recorded videotape of several locations that the police had deemed likely locations for a photographer, and the perch Jessamine had chosen was included. No camera was present at the time of the search.
Though Jessamine’s husband, Roman, had been cleared of any wrongdoing in her disappearance, McRay suspected that he was involved as he was one of the few people in town who had access to a refrigerator large enough to contain a human and trigger hypothermia. Specifically, he provided delivery service for Schwann’s frozen foods. He could have trapped Jessamine in his truck, but McRay couldn’t explain her long memory gap and complete lack of fear of her husband, who had rushed to the hospital when told of her reappearance. McRay’s theories crumbled when Roman Grayling provided a rock-solid alibi for both himself, and the truck. His truck’s refrigerator system had failed several days earlier, and he’d driven it to a mechanic nearly 100 miles away to be fixed. In the meantime, his home chest freezer had been filled with the contents of his truck. Careful examination revealed that none of the packages of food had been thawed and refrozen, as would be expected had he used the freezer on his wife. The only clue in the mystery were two large puncture wounds on Jessamine’s neck that had healed, but scarred, wounds that had not been present before she vanished.
Mere days after Jessamine’s reappearance, Steve Polson would again encounter a missing person who had no memory of the months between their disappearance and reappearance, and presented no clues but puncture wounds on their neck. James Hackney was a 19 year old ne’er do well who had gone missing in the first half of May – his mother initially thought he might have hitchhiked to find work, but when he didn’t call home in the subsequent two weeks, she reported him missing. James would claim that he’d hitchhiked only as far as Tennett Rock, a town about 25 miles away from Manita Bluff, where his friend had offered him forty dollars to help with a fencing job. James said he’d caught a ride with a man who looked a little like Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were older, driving a blue Chevy Silverado. They’d stopped at the airport, and James had stepped out of the truck to pick up an unusual piece of glass he saw along the side of the road. As “Clint” and James headed out of town, James showed the unusual glass piece to the man, who told him it was bad luck, and he should get rid of it. James said he didn’t want to, and the man stopped the truck, demanding James get out. James did, and then remembered nothing else.
Detective McRay initially suspected that James was telling a tale that matched Jessamine’s for sympathy and to cover up one of his many flights of fancy and petty criminal undertakings, but the two puncture wounds on James’s neck were hard to ignore as Jessamine’s had not been reported, and she and James did not know each other. James could not explain the marks, and did not even realize they were present until they’d been pointed out to him.
But the most confusing reappearance was yet to come. On the last day of the heatwave, mere hours before storm clouds reached town and delivered a scouring rainstorm, Betty Warrens, a housewife who had gone missing nearly ten years prior reappeared right before Steve Polson’s eyes.
Betty’s disappearance in October of 1976 had been sensational news because of rare video footage. While video evidence is common in the current day and age, it is rare in older cases, and in fact, only the bank in Manita Bluff had a security camera. However, Betty’s neighbors, two doors down, had been filming in their front yard, and they caught her disappearance on tape. On the footage, her car can be seen departing the hamburger stand where she’d picked up dinner for her family, then it can be seen cutting through a grocery store parking lot. A few moments later, Betty and her spotless Chevrolet Malibu Wagon had simply disappeared from film footage, present in one frame, and gone in the next, as if removed by movie magic. But forensic investigation had revealed that the film had not been tampered with.
Her reappearance would be all the more sensational. Steve Polson lived in the house next door to Betty’s former home, and as he smoked a cigarette in his car before leaving for his shift, Betty’s car appeared out of nowhere and crashed into his brand new Nissan Senta. After determining she was uninjured, he smelled the burgers in her car and saw the bag from Duchess Burgers, the burger stand just a few blocks away from their homes. He found himself intrigued as he knew that Duchess Burgers has suffered an electrical fire several days before and weren’t due to reopen until the next week. A review of her license, registration, and insurance revealed each was a decade old, but the paper was unyellowed. Unaged. Betty, a life-long sun-worshipper and avid follower of fashion, was similarly frozen in time. Her outfit perfectly matched the description of the clothes provided by her daughter on the fateful day she disappeared. As with the other victims of what would later be referred to as the Summer Vortex, she had two neat, perfectly healed puncture wounds on her neck, no memory of the time she was missing, and in fact, no idea that any time had passed at all.
Steve Polson, at this time, shared with Detective McRay that he feared that he was somehow uniquly attached to these cases. He simply could not determine how. He did not know the victims, he was not related to the victims, and yet he seemed to be at the epicenter of the events. He sought to remove himself by transferring to the sheriff department of a nearby county. Even so, he’d be called back to work these cases time and again.
Betty would disappear again after leaving Manita Bluff. Again, her Chevy Malibu would be seen on camera, this time in front of a gas station about twelve miles from her destination. In one frame, she is clearly at the pump. In the next, the car is gone. Again, the tape was examined for tampering, and non tampering was found. However, the tape was determined to be old and the system unreliable. Still, the cashier at the time did not recall Betty or her car present on that night. Betty was declared dead in 1990 by her daughter.
But Betty’s story did not end there. In 1996, her Chevy Malibu was found abandoned at the same gas station where she’d vanished a second time. Two very small holes had been drilled in the radiator, draining it dry. Handwritten notes on how to find her husband’s home sat on the passenger seat, alongside a receipt for coffee from a long closed McDonald’s location. The coffee was still hot, in a cup design McDonald’s hadn’t used in years. But Betty was no where to be found. A later investigation by a private investigator revealed that in 1997, a woman matching Betty’s description had walked into the gas station, used the bathroom, and then gone outside. After a few moments, she’d stepped back in and asked the cashier if they’d seen someone drive away in her Malibu. When the cashier told her that, no, he’d not seen the car leave, she had told him that she would just walk the rest of the way, and left. Unfortunately, the security camera wasn’t working at the time, and the story cannot be corroborated by video evidence.
In 2003, James Hackney vanished off security footage taken at the local jail. In the footage, he clutches his neck, leans forward off a chair, and then, in the next frame, he’s simply gone. He had been held for public intoxication, and was due to be released in about fifteen minutes. Law enforcement did not suspect that it was an escape attempt. In order to determine what might have happened to James, an attempt was made to find and contact Jessamine Grayling, who had left town in 1988.
Unfortunately, both she and her husband had passed away in a vehicular crash that only served to deepen the mystery. They had been found in 2001, clearly victims of a serious head on collision with a similarly sized vehicle. However, they were found alone on a remote stretch of Black Creek Rd. While there were tire tracks that indicated that they had swerved and applied the brakes of their own vehicle, there were no tire tracks, no parts, no evidence at all of another vehicle at the site of the crash. Forensic analysis has revealed that the car that crashed into them should have gone to their right, off the road, and deep into an adjacent ditch. But no tire tracks, and no vehicle capable of creating the damage observed and the scene could be found. Investigators were unable to find a vehicle damaged in a way consistent with the crash, nor any other victims. No hospital within reasonable distance reported any injuries consistent with a head on collision of sufficient force.
Steve Polson had left law enforcement in 2002, but he returned to briefly aid in this case. However, his investigation left him with only one theory; the Graylings were the cause of the crash and the real victims simply cannot be known, as the time and the date for the crash can only be known for one car. Detective Daniel McRay recalls that Polson, who had retired as a detective, felt no other answer fit the evidence they’d found within the Grayling’s car. While the Graylings had never been reported missing after Jessamine’s reappearance in 1986, the documents in their vehicle were dated 1995. No money was found on them or in their belongings that was from later than 1995, and Roman’s pill bottle for heart medication was also dated 1995. To Polson, it was clear that they’d vanished in 1995 to whatever time warp had taken Betty, James, and Jessamine. What wasn’t clear to him was when the accident had occurred – had it happened before they vanished? It seemed unlikely that it would have gone unreported, but Polson found now accidents occuring on that stretch of road during 1995. A man reported hitting a moose in 1996, but then the next accident on the road would be in 2000 between two trucks, clearly not Graylings. Polson could only conclude that the accident that killed the Graylings was caused by someone in the future who had not yet been injured.
Betty reappeared in 2006, waking up the residents of the people who then occupied the home that had belonged to her husband in 1986. They allowed her to use their phone, and she spoke to police. Daniel McRay and Steve Polson both spoke to her, and confirmed that they were quite sure it was her. Her husband, suffering from early onset dementia was unable to ID her, but her daughter provided DNA samples and picture which proved that Betty was who she said she was. Unfortunately, realizing that her life was simply gone, Betty walked away from her daughter’s home, this time seemingly vanishing of her own accord.
James Hackney reappeared in 2012. The puncture wounds on his neck spontaneously bled for months after the fact. No reason for this condition was found. He shared the ‘funny glass’ he’d found with the police, who feared it might be toxic or radioactive, but it proved to be nothing more than broken piece of the old airport lighting system.
Steve Polson died last year. He was found in the ditch on the side of Black Creek R, his car totaled by damage consistent with the accident that killed the Greylings. He had two puncture wounds on his neck, unhealed, still bleeding.”
But come back to the present day. As I was making dinner tonight, I noticed something, I have two puncture wounds on my neck. Neatly healed. Not bleeding. I’m usually a calm person, but my chest began to pound, my vision swam, and for some reason I felt like I needed to hide it from my grandfather. I pretended I’d gotten hot sauce in my face, and I finished up making our stir fry. I didn’t touch those buggers though I wanted to. I didn’t ask any questions, but you better believe I wanted to.
I sat through dinner with this gnawing feeling that something in my life really wasn’t right. And then after dinner, when my grandfather sat in front of the television, I reread what I wrote about the Summer Vortex, and tried to understand how I could have two puncture wounds and no missing time. I’ve never vanished, I’ve never reappeared. But then I looked at the date on my phone.
It’s not 2018, and it hasn’t been for a while.
I think my grandfather, Detective Daniel McRay, knows what happened to all of us, me included. The whopper isn’t the story, it’s the lie that it’s unsolved.
And I’m terrified I’m going to vanish forever if he finds out I suspect anything.
Which I’m pretty sure he already does.