- One of the scariest things that can happen to a loved one
is to find out that they've disappeared.
But what's even scarier is to discover
that someone has actually taken them.
A staggering amount of people go missing every year,
taken and held captive by a deranged individual.
The following stories are about to make you uneasy,
because you will realize that it could happen to you.
Here are 10 missing people found under creepy circumstances.
Number 10 is Steven Stayner.
During 1972, a seven-year-old Californian boy
named Steven Stayner was abducted.
At the time, he was on his way home after school.
A predator named Kenneth Parnell snatched young Steven
before he could reach the safety of his family home.
He drove the boy 322 kilometers to a remote cabin
where Parnell was living at the time.
After harming Steven for eight years,
in 1980, Parnell decided to snatch another young boy.
This time it was five-year-old Timothy White.
Steven was so horrified by this,
not wanting such a young child to go through what he had,
he managed to escape Parnell's clutches,
taking Timothy White with him.
They managed to finally reach a police station.
Eight years after Steven Stayner
had been abducted and presumed dead,
he was finally reunited with his family as a hero.
Number nine is Timothy Carney.
On September 20th, 2004,
Timothy Carney was last seen by his roommate
in the apartment that they shared.
After that, Timothy disappeared without a trace.
At first, police and other investigators
suspected that foul play was a possibility.
His family were understandably grief-stricken
by Timothy's disappearance.
However, in 2011,
almost seven years to the day since he had vanished,
he was found alive and well.
It appears that Timothy had joined a cult
who had encouraged him to cut all ties with his past life.
Because of privacy laws, the police were not allowed
to make his whereabouts public,
nor even let his family know
exactly where he was unless Timothy agreed.
Unfortunately, he did not.
All that they could say was that they had found him,
verified that he was alive,
and the he was, physically at least, still healthy.
Number eight is Nguyen Thi Van.
16-year-old Nguyen Thi Van lived in Vietnam.
In 1992, she arrived home late one day.
Her mother decided to punish her and lock her outside.
Angry, Nguyen did not wait around.
She decided to go out with some friends
and spend some time at a karaoke bar.
At some point during the night she encountered a woman
who managed to trick Nguyen and her friends
into accompanying her to a different location.
There, the girls discovered the horrible truth.
The had, in fact, been abducted.
Soon after, they discovered that they were to become slaves.
They were transported against their will to China.
There, the girls were forced to marry men
aged between 70 and 80 years old.
Nguyen lived in this state of slavery for 21 years
until she finally escaped and made it back to her mother.
Number seven is Gabriel Nagy.
In January of 1987, Gabriel Nagy vanished without a trace.
He phoned his wife to let her know
that he would be coming home for lunch,
but he never appeared.
His wife and two children became anxious about his safety.
The very next day, Gabriel's car was found burnt
on the side of a road with no sign of a body.
More than 20 years passed before anyone found out
what had happened to Gabriel.
As it turns out, he had suffered
a terrible head injury in a car crash
and wandered away leaving his memories behind.
He had no knowledge of who he was
until he was contacted by a police officer
who believed him to be a missing person.
Gabriel was eventually reunited with his family,
though many of his memories remain to this day a blur.
Number six is Shawn Hornbeck.
Shawn Hornbeck disappeared on October 6th, 2002.
He had been riding his bike at the time,
near his home in Richwoods, Missouri.
He was abducted by a man named Michael Devlin,
who tied him up at his apartment
and threatened Shawn that if he tried to escape,
or even tell anyone, Devlin would harm Shawn's family.
It wasn't until five years later
that Shawn was finally found.
The F.B.I. approached Michael Devlin's apartment
to serve an unrelated arrest warrant.
However, when they saw a white pickup truck
outside the apartment building
which matched a vehicle associated
with another recent kidnapping,
they broke in to his apartment.
The agents and police officers were shocked
to find Shawn held prisoner there,
along with Devlin's most recent hostage.
The police soon learned that Devlin
had passed Shawn off as his son.
Number five are the Ariel Castro kidnappings.
Between 2002 and 2004,
Ariel Castro kidnapped three young women
and held them captive in his Cleveland, Ohio, home.
The three young women were Michelle Knight,
Amanda Berry, and Georgina DeJesus.
They lived as prisoners in Castro's house until May of 2013.
One of the women, Amanda Berry,
managed to get to a bolted door which led outside
with her six-year-old daughter who was also Castro's,
though he had encouraged the child
to call Amanda grandmother instead of mother.
When a neighbor heard Amanda Berry's screams for help,
he bashed a hole in the door and Amanda fled.
The police were then alerted
to both Michelle and Georgina's whereabouts
where they were rescued.
Ariel Castro was arrested and sentenced to life in prison.
He subsequently took his own life.
Number four is Carlina White.
Carlina White was a 23-year-old woman from Atlanta.
She had a normal upbringing,
but there was something about her family
which seemed off to her.
Something just didn't add up about her birth.
When Carlina was a teenager,
she fell pregnant and asked her mother
for her own birth certificate for her records.
When her mother couldn't produce one,
she told Carlina that she had bought her
from a drug addict when she was a baby.
However, this still didn't ring true.
After some research into missing children,
Carlina realized that she had been abducted.
A DNA test confirmed that she had been snatched
from a hospital by her fake mother,
who had dressed up as a nurse
and walked out of the hospital with her.
The kidnapper spent 12 years in prison,
and Carlina was finally reunited
with her biological family 23 years after being taken.
Number three is Tanya Kach.
Tanya Kach was born in 1981 in Pennsylvania.
Just 15 years later,
she was abducted and held captive for 10 years.
Tanya had been manipulated into thinking
that she was running towards a new life.
A security guard named Thomas Hose had befriended her.
He began an inappropriate relationship with her,
taking her out and encouraging her to run away with him
so that they could be together.
In February of 1996,
Thomas Hose used his age and manipulative ways
to finally get what he wanted.
But it was far from what Tanya had imagined.
She was confined to a bedroom
and had to use a bucket to go to the toilet.
Six years later, he had brainwashed her enough
that he would let her leave the house occasionally.
Back in the outside world,
and realizing the relationship was twisted,
Tanya fled and finally put Thomas Hose behind bars.
Number two is Marina Chapman.
In 1954, at the tender age of just four years old,
Marina Chapman was taken from her Colombian village.
No one is certain why she was taken or by who.
Not even Marina was sure,
although she suspects that her kidnappers
had intended to use her for ransom.
But for some reason, instead of killing her,
Marina's kidnappers released her into the jungle.
Marina survived in the jungle for the next 10 years
until she was finally found by hunters.
The only reason Marina survived in such a harsh environment
was that a troupe of capuchin monkeys had adopted her.
They taught her how to catch animals with her hands.
And after that, she was able to feed herself.
Her incredible story remains a potent reminder
that human beings are capable of surviving
even in the most difficult circumstances.
And number one is Elisabeth Fritzl.
On August 28th, 1984,
Austrian Josef Fritzl asked his daughter Elisabeth
to go down into the basement to help him carry a door.
The bitter irony is that the door was the last piece
of a prison room that Josef had built
to keep the 18-year-old Elisabeth captive.
For the next 24 years,
Josef Fritzl had seven children with his daughter.
One died, and another three were allowed to live upstairs
in the house with Josef and Elisabeth's mother,
who was unaware of Josef's hidden room.
Elisabeth's mother believed her daughter had
had the children and then abandoned them.
Elisabeth kept three of her children
in the dungeon her father had built.
But in April of 2008, Elisabeth was allowed
to accompany one child to the hospital.
The Fritzl's secret unraveled from there,
and Elisabeth and her children were finally freed
from the brutality of her father.