18 People Who Vanished While On Vacation

No one who embarks on a travel adventure thinks they're going to end up disappeared, but it does happen. Sometimes lost travelers turn up unharmed, sometimes they're found injured or dead, and sometimes those poor unfortunate souls join that unenviable "disappeared forever" club, having gone without a trace. While this might sound like a potential hazard associated with exploring remote regions, such as mountains and jungles — and it is — vacationers have also gone missing from more unlikely locations, such as packed cruise liners, a resort bench, and even a busy airport.

Despite the best and sustained efforts of the authorities, the media, and the missing people's families, decades later, many of these disappearances have still yet to be solved. Many are likely to remain unsolved, too, with only scraps of often confusing and unhelpful clues left behind. Here are some of modern history's creepiest and most puzzling vacation disappearances.

If you're planning a vacation, maybe don't go to Aruba. Just don't. Aruba sounds all tropical, beachy, and relaxing, but VisitAruba.com has an entire page dedicated to missing persons, so vanishing is a thing on that island.

The most famous of all of Aruba's missing persons is Natalee Holloway, who was on a senior class trip when she vanished in 2005. There were actual chaperones on the trip, but they missed the fact that Holloway left a nightclub at around 1:30 in the morning with a trio of local men. She was never seen again.

The prime suspect in her disappearance is Joran van der Sloot, who was convicted of murdering a woman in Peru exactly five years after Holloway's disappearance and is now serving a 28-year sentence. That seems pretty damning on a number of levels, but there's also the part where one of his friends said van der Sloot paid him $1,500 to dig up Holloway's remains and cremate them with a bunch of animal bones. In October 2023, van der Sloot confessed to Holloway's murder as part of a plea bargain, also admitting to pushing her body out to sea after beating her to death. 

In 2014, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon were Dutch tourists on the adventure of a lifetime in Boquete, Panama. On April 1, they left on a hike into the Talamanca Cordillera and were never seen again. Two months later, Froon's backpack and some of their clothing were found in the forest, then five bone fragments that were identified through DNA testing.

The official government opinion is that the two women fell into the river and got "dragged" by the current, and that scavengers scattered their remains. However, the bones were found at 2,300 feet above sea level in an area with few large animals, and decomposition happens slowly. At least one investigator believes the remains were treated with lime, which suggests they were murder victims, not victims of a tragic accident.

And because this story isn't eerie enough already, the backpack (which was found downstream from the women's remains, casting further doubt on the "dragged by the river" theory) contained both women's phones and a camera, still in working condition. And on the camera were 90 consecutive images, all taken at night within two hours of each other. Perhaps the two were using the camera's flash to light their way. Even more sinister, one of the photos appears to show Kremers with a head wound. After that, the trail is cold. No one knows how the pair died, or who, if anyone, killed them.

Leo Widicker, 86, was with his wife at a resort in Costa Rica when he disappeared in 2001. Widicker sat down on a bench while his wife went to the resort's hot springs. Witnesses say he seemed fine, but he may have nodded off while sitting there, and when he woke up, he became confused and disoriented. When his wife returned 30 minutes after leaving him, he was gone.

Hotel workers remember him asking if anyone knew where his wife was. He approached the resort guards a few minutes later and asked to be let out, and he was last seen wandering down the road in the rain. Friends and family say the behavior was wildly out of character — Widicker wasn't the type of guy who would go off for a walk, and he wouldn't have walked off the road, either. The family believes someone might have picked him up, though it's interesting to note that one side of the road where he was last seen was a "steep volcanic hillside," so a fall doesn't seem totally out of the question.

Fifteen minutes after he left the resort, friends drove out to look for him and found nothing. The Red Cross searched for four or five days, also without results. Local police searched, too. But Widicker was never seen again.

Ryan Singleton didn't stay missing, but his body was found in extremely bizarre circumstances after he vanished while traveling to Las Vegas in 2013. Singleton left Atlanta in July of that year, hoping to land an acting job in Hollywood. His mother said he traveled by rental car to Los Angeles, then to New Mexico, Arizona, and Las Vegas. His rental car was eventually found in Death Valley. Joggers located his decomposing corpse in the desert on September 21.

Singleton's disappearance and reappearance is especially bizarre not just because the coroner couldn't find a cause of death, but also because Singleton's body was mostly decomposed and his organs were missing. "There were no eyes, there was no heart, there were no lungs, there was no liver, there were no kidneys," Singleton's mother told Fox News in Atlanta (via Atlanta Daily World). And although the coroner speculated that the missing organs might have had something to do with scavengers, Singleton's mother wasn't so sure. "I don't know of an animal that comes to a body and just picks out certain parts of the body," she said. "I don't think it was animal activity at all."

No one has ever been able to figure out what happened to Ryan Singleton, but at least his remains were returned to his family. That's a small comfort, but it's something, considering so many other missing persons are never found at all.

Twenty-year-old Charles Horvath was on a backpacking trip from Quebec to British Columbia when he suddenly stopped calling his mom back in the U.K. "I knew something terrible had happened to him," Denise Horvath-Allan told CBC News. She and her son were close, and she was sure he wouldn't have let her worry.

Horvath-Allan flew to British Columbia a year after her son disappeared to find answers. She placed ads and posted flyers, and eventually learned that some of her son's clothing had been found at a local campsite, but other than that, the trail was cold. When she spoke to the campground manager, she was told that her son had departed the site quickly, leaving his tent and belongings behind.

But the most sinister clue came in the form of a note left at her hotel, which read, "I seen [your son] May 26. We were partying and two people knocked him out. But he died. His body is in the lake by the bridge." When divers searched the lake, though, they were unable to locate Horvath's remains. According to Unsolved Mysteries, there is a chance that Horvath might be alive — police said they spoke to his relatives in eastern Canada, who told them he'd visited and relayed his intentions to "disappear off the face of the Earth" where "his mother would never find him." Ouch.

In 1997, NBA player Brian Williams won a championship with the Chicago Bulls. In 1998, as a nod to his Cherokee background, Williams changed his name to Bison Dele. And in 1999, he retired and then traveled extensively, spending time in Lebanon, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia, where he bought a boat and learned how to sail it.

On July 4, 2002, Dele, along with his girlfriend Serena Karlan and boat captain Bertrand Saldo, departed Tahiti on the ex-athlete's catamaran, setting sail for Hawaii, traveling through the South Pacific's Marquesas Islands and Tuamotu Islands. Relatives of Dele and Karlan lost contact on July 8. In early September 2002, their boat washed up in a Tahitian harbor, bearing a new name, a fresh paint job, and no trace of Dele, Karlan, or Saldo. Their bodies were never recovered.

The FBI filed an arrest warrant for Miles Dabord, Dele's brother, who had briefly joined the excursion before returning to the U.S., where he was arrested on forgery charges after trying to use Dele's checks and credit cards. However, he was released through lack of evidence. On Sept. 14, officials near the U.S.-Mexico border found a naked, unresponsive Dabord on a beach. Less than two weeks later, Dabord was taken off life support and died. Officials believe Dabord had something to do with the death of his brother, but no one will ever know for sure.

The Beilhartz family of Denver, two parents and 12 kids, decided to spend the long Independence Day weekend in July 1938 in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park.Along to enjoy nature activities like camping and hiking was four-year-old Alfred Beilhartz. On the morning of July 3, Beilhartz was seen near the shores of the Fall and Roaring Rivers. The child moved on to another spot along the water, and then after his father lost sight of him, he never reappeared. Also reportedly noticed on a nearby peak, park rangers didn't think it possible for a small child to climb to that height, and dismissed the notion.

Believing Beilhartz to be somewhere in the forest or river areas, authorities launched a massive search mission, calling in National Park Service workers, employees of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and bloodhounds from the state prison system. For three days, a search party numbering in the hundreds scoured Rocky Mountain National Park, but were unable to locate Beilhartz, nor find any evidence that he had traversed the area. Even the construction of a makeshift dam to reroute the flow of the Fall River to uncover what may lay beneath the water didn't reveal the whereabouts of Alfred Beilhartz.

Comic book artist Norman Lee worked for DC Comics and Marvel, contributing to "Supergirl" for the former and "X-Men" for the latter. In early 2015, the 47-year-old Lee and his wife took a vacation to the Cayman Islands, and, during a March 5 snorkeling jaunt off the east coast of Grand Cayman Island, Lee disappeared. His spouse lost track of Lee, last seeing him at a marker delineating relaxed inner waters from the more treacherous outer waters. "The inner waters are quite calm because the reef adds protection," Cayman Islands reporter Joe Avery told CBS News. "It isn't uncommon for snorkelers to encounter trouble in the water."

Royal Caribbean Police Services authorities feared that Lee had been hopelessly pulled out into the sea by a powerful current. After a three-day search of the area that involved expert divers, rescue boats, and helicopters that yielded no leads or evidence of Lee or his fate, authorities closed down the mission. At that point, Lee was presumed to have died at sea.

In the spring of 2011, John Halford's marriage of 25 years was coming to an end. Just before he moved out of the home he shared with his wife in Milton Keynes, England, the 63-year-old Halford abruptly booked a solo vacation — a week-long Thomson cruise around Egypt. It's been established that Halford consumed two mixed drinks in a bar-and-casino room on the ship on the evening of April 6. When the cruise ended and the ship docked in Sharm El Sheikh the next day, Halford was gone, and he'd left his wallet and passport in his stateroom. According to a police investigation, sometime overnight, Halford either accidentally fell off the ship or died by suicide.

Over the next seven years, Halford was never seen alive again, nor were any remains ever recovered. In June 2018, a U.K. High Court judge allowed for the issuance of a death certificate, marking Halford's demise official but never quite solved.

If you or anyone you know may be the victim of sexual assault, or is struggling or in crisis, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

• Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org