Missing persons cases, though disturbing and sad, are pretty common, with people disappearing
around the planet every day.
But the true tale of Hannah Upp is much more than your average missing person’s case,
and it’s a strange and mysterious anomaly that no-one seems able to solve.
Bizarrely, she’s been missing a total of three times.
On the first two occasions, she was found.
But after going missing a third time in 2017, no-one has been able to locate her—and at
the time of writing this video, she’s still missing.
But the whole tale is even weirder than it first seems.
All of her disappearances seem to be the result of dissociative fugue, a condition in which
sufferers forget what their name is and who they are, while developing a strange urge
to wander elsewhere.
It’s one of the weirdest modern-day mysteries we’ve covered.
This case features a missing woman, many missing memories, and a medical condition which might
never be fully understood.
This is the story of the woman who went missing three times.
In August 2008, 23-year-old Hannah Upp left her New York apartment to go for a jog.
She was just beginning her second year of middle-school teaching, she seemed happy and
well, and as far as anyone knows, there was nothing abnormal or unusual occurring in her life.
But she didn’t return from her run, sparking a lengthy hunt with few clues.
In her apartment, she had left behind all of her belongings, including her cash, purse and credit cards.
At first, detectives thought she was murdered.
But nine days later, an old acquaintance spotted Hannah in a Manhattan Apple Store, where she’d
logged into her Gmail account.
She was wearing a sports bra and shorts, and her hair was pulled back tight into a ponytail.
It looked like she’d just gone out for a run, when in reality, she’d done that very
same thing 9 days before.
Confused by Hannah’s appearance, the acquaintance asked her, 'are you the Hannah that everyone
is looking for?'
Hannah answered no, and wandered away, leaving her acquaintance even more confused and alarmed.
There’s no evidence that Hannah sent or read any emails during her fugue state Gmail
session, and no-one, including herself, knows why she was in the Apple Store.
Hannah was also spotted in a Starbucks, and in five New York sports clubs, which she was
allegedly entering to shower.
It seemed the whole time Hannah was missing, she was frequently moving around New York
city, but family, friends and police couldn’t pin her down.
On September 16th, having been missing for 20 days, Hannah was finally found.
A Staten Island ferry driver saw a body floating in the water near Robbins Reef, just south
of the Statue of Liberty.
The body was fished out of the water, but the person was inexplicably alive.
She was confused and distressed, and she was confirmed to be Hannah Upp.
She was dehydrated and sunburned, and was diagnosed with hypothermia.
But what came next made things much more confusing and bizarre.
When her friends and mother came to visit Hannah in hospital, she didn’t understand
what had happened, or where she’d been.
The first thing she asked her mother was, “why am I wet?”, and she didn’t appear
to realize that almost three weeks had passed.
She was interviewed by police, who failed to extract any information.
The last thing Hannah remembered was running near her apartment on the day she went missing.
In a media interview, after this first disappearance, she claimed
After extensive tests, Hannah was diagnosed with a condition known as dissociative fugue,
a terrifying disorder in which sufferers temporarily forget who they are.
During moments of disassociation, sufferers forget all of their memories and personal information.
Usually, these moments of disassociation are caused by some form of trauma, physical assault,
sexual assault, natural disasters, profound sadness or PTSD.
But Hannah couldn't think of any trauma she’d suffered, either
recently or historically. Nor her family or friends.
When people enter these fugue states, they’re usually completely functional, so they can
talk, communicate, work and do whatever else they might want to do.
But they can’t remember who they are, they develop a strange desire to wander, and they
often make unusual and questionable decisions.
Hannah felt psychologically altered by the whole process, telling an interviewer, “How
do you feel guilty for something you didn’t even know you did?
It’s not your fault, but it’s still somehow you.
So it’s definitely made me reconsider everything.
Who was I before?
Who was I then?
Is that part of me?
Who am I now?”
In September 2013, a few years after her first disappearance, Hannah Upp was living in Maryland,
around 200 miles from her previous home in New York.
Again, she was just in the process of starting a new teaching job.
But things went awry once more, as police called Hannah’s mother with news that her
daughter’s purse and cell phone had been found on a wooded trail.
She hadn’t slept in her own apartment the night before.
This time, it only took two days to find her.
But on this occasion, Hannah found herself, seemingly able to break out independently
from her fugue state.
Hannah’s mother received a call from an unknown number.
She picked up the phone, and the person on the other end of the line muttered “Mom?”.
Hannah had been walking for more than two days before she realized who she was after
jolting to consciousness while sitting in a dirty creek.
Again, she had no memory of where she’d been, or how she’d made her way to the murky
waters of a residential creek.
Despite now having disappeared twice, Hannah was determined to keep living her life as normal.
Police offered to fit her with an ankle bracelet, but she refused.
But that was a decision which led to a much longer, much stranger, and much more worrying disappearance.
This third and final disappearance occurred seven years after the first
And it’s a mystery that still hasn’t been solved.
In September 2017, Hannah Upp was 32 years old, and she’d started another new teaching job.
This time, she was working on St. Thomas, a Carribean island east of Cuba, where she’d
been living for around three years.
A week after she’d started teaching again, Hurricane Irma damaged Hannah’s new home,
in its intense assaults on the island.
185 mile per hour winds battered St. Thomas, its homes and the people upon it, completely
devastating large parts of the island.
News broke that a second hurricane was on the way, so many people decided to flee the
island in fear.
But Hannah chose to remain, claming “I’m staying—that’s where my heart is”.
On September 14th, a few days after Hurricane Irma, and only a short while before the next
hurricane was expected to hit, Hannah left her home at around 8am.
And that’s the last time anyone saw her.
Desperate to find Hannah, friends rushed to her favorite beach, where she often snorkelled and swam.
On the stool of a hamburger bar, they found her sandals, dress and car keys, which workers
had previously spotted in the sand.
Her car was in the parking lot, and contained her passport, cell phone and wallet.
In a frantic hunt, friends, police and other investigators checked shores, seas, marinas,
hospitals, homeless shelters and the airport, but they could find no trace of Hannah, and
no-one claimed to have seen her.
They checked all of the unidentified bodies at the local morgue, but none of them were Hannah.
Hannah’s mother visited the island, keen to undertake investigations of her own.
She visited various beaches and hangout spots in addition to shelters and abandoned buildings
filled with addicts and outcasts.
Again, she didn’t find Hannah—or anyone with any memory of seeing her.
Some people think Hannah might be living in the untouched regions of St. Thomas.
Others speculate that she might have taken a boat to another nearby island, or that she sailed to Miami.
A small few believe she might still be wandering the island in a fugue state.
It’s a small place, but it has a population of around 50,000, and lots of wild, rarely visited areas.
Despite its small size, it could still be an easy place to get lost.
Many, who know that Hannah considered her life to be nothing but a constant journey,
think she’s decided to travel onwards, whether consciously or not, to some place else, with
new excitement and new adventures.
Others, sadly, think she might have simply committed suicide, whether in a fugue state
or not.
There’s still a Facebook group dedicated to trying to find her, but most people now
talk about Hannah in the past tense, certain they’ll never see her again.
It seems that the vast majority of people have accepted that Hannah is now either dead
or forever lost.
But her background might offer some clues to her possible whereabouts—and why she
was susceptible to fugue states. Let's dig a little deeper.
In many ways, Hannah was raised to be a wanderer.
Her father is a preacher who often visits faraway places in order to spread his word.
And most summers, when her whereabouts were still known, Hannah would go with him, venturing
to places in Africa and Asia in order to preach and teach.
Raised in Oregon by two Methodist ministers, Hannah was religious from birth, and some
claim that these beliefs caused Hannah some internal struggle.
She saw contradictions within herself; her strict religious father claimed “there is
no such human as a natural homosexual”, and yet Hannah herself had relationships with women.
This type of religious struggle and lack of identity, along with her father’s frequent travels and relocations,
might have had some type of dissociative effect on Hannah and her mind.
But even more telling is a story from her mother’s past.
Hannah’s mother claims that she herself once entered what might have been a fugue
state, in which she went into a trance, before snapping back to reality when she found herself
close to Oregon’s Willamette River.
Is it possible that fugue states are an inherited condition?
Researchers don’t yet know if this is the case.
There are lots of other things we don’t know about fugue states—and delving into
how they affect different people just makes things even more confusing.
Many people suffer—and have suffered—from the alarming mystery of dissociative fugues.
And here are just a few strange examples...
In 1926, novelist Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days before her husband found her 200
miles from her abandoned car.
She didn’t recognize her husband, and she had no idea who she was.
In February 2013, unconscious Michael Boatwright was found in a California motel room.
He didn’t remember his own identity, he didn’t know how he’d arrived in the motel
room, and he insisted upon referring to himself as “Johan Ek”.
Strangely, he was able to communicate only in Swedish, despite being a US native and resident.
One fugue-suffering professor went missing before being found three years later working
as a dishwasher.
In another case, a preacher left his home, traveled over 200 miles and opened a candy store.
In some of these cases, this isn’t just basic catatonia—it’s fully-functioning
humans accidentally adopting new names, new lives and new habits.
In order to explain this seeming contradiction, some psychologists who specialize in fugue
states point to the fact that we have two different types of memory—episodic memory,
in which we remember certain events and memories, and procedural memory, in which we remember
how to do things such as eating, typing, opening doors and walking.
There’s no evidence that Hannah has ever adopted new personalities in her fugue states,
but she might have done so without remembering.
So Hannah could perhaps still be anywhere on the planet, doing any number of things
under any number of assumed names.
And that leaves us with a whole host of unanswered questions.
The biggest question that Hannah has left us with is of course the puzzling riddle of—where
is she?
Also, why are Hannah and her things always found in or near water?
The first was by Robin’s Reef.
The second was by the dirty creek.
Although Hannah hasn’t been found since her third disappearance, it was during a hurricane.
Also, why did each disappearance occur just when she was beginning—or about to begin—a
new period of work?
According to some sources, before each occasion in which Hannah entered a fugue state, she
always seemed a little distant and withdrawn, and not quite as open and communicative as
her normal self.
Is this of any significance?
Could she have been much more stressed than she was allowing people to know?
Or is it perhaps possible that Hannah faked her fugue states?
How could she log in to her Gmail account if she couldn’t remember who she was?
How was she able to enter sports clubs, which would have required her to confirm her identity upon entry?
Some people believe that this is all one big hoax but I think that's unlikely.
Some scientists believe that up to 0.2% of the general population might be predisposed
to these states.
So for every 500 people that watch this video, one of you will likely one day experience
a fugue state of your own.
Etzel Cardeña, a professor of psychology, claims, “In our culture, we have a nice narrative that personality is stable.
That is a fiction.
When a person enters a fugue and becomes someone else—or isn’t there—it’s an exaggerated
version of the way we all are”
Creepy?
We know.
So, please, take care of yourself and each other.
Perhaps one day this mystery will be put to rest.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Thank you for watching, see you next time.