Patrick Bennet 10. Portland
Located in Oregon, the city of Portland is the largest in the state and also a place where hundreds of people are reported missing every year. Actually, the entire state is sort of known for unidentified bodies. In 2015, more than 100 unidentified bodies could be found in the morgues of Oregon.
Portland is mostly known for its hipsters, LGBT population, music, and breweries. It should be known for cold cases; as of 2016, there were 225 on the books of the Portland Police Department.
The wilderness outside of Portland is just as suspicious. As mentioned above, hundreds of people—many of whom are children—visit the state’s parks and forests and don’t leave alive.
An ex-cop who studies the region claims there are roughly 400 people who wandered into the wilderness, only to never be seen again.
11. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Containing the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is known for being the most visited United States national park as well as its beautiful streams, forests, and mountains. A number of towns surround the park, and those towns survive largely due to the tourism that results due to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
There are a number of historical attractions in the park that makes it famous, but Great Smokey Mountains National Park is also famous for bizarre disappearances that have yet to be solved. Three people over the course of 12 years have disappeared. The most recent disappearance was that of Thelma Pauline Melton; she disappeared in 1981 at the age of 58.
12. Eastern California
In Eastern California, there is an area known as Death Valley. The name alone and the fact it is one of the hottest areas on Earth should discourage one from visiting the region. Still, people do—maybe because it has been featured in a number of fills—and many of those visitors die. Recently, in 2014, a young man was found with all of his organs missing. He was far from the first death, though. In 1958, an army pilot mysteriously vanished; while his personal effects were found, he never was.
In 1996, four German tourists decided to tour Death Valley. They stopped off to buy a book and a map at a visitor’s center; like the aforementioned army pilot, they were never seen again.
13. Aruba
Almost everyone is familiar with—or has at least heard of—the case of Natalee Holloway, who visited the picturesque Caribbean Dutch island of Aruba, which is located off of the coast of Venezuela. Holloway, who was 18 years of age, visited the island on a high school graduation trip and disappeared, failing to show up for her return flight to the United States. Last seen outside of a nightclub in a car with three men, Holloway is still missing. She was declared legally dead in 2012 despite any firm evidence of her death. Human remains thought to belong to Holloway were found in 2017, but they did not belong to her, meaning that there is the slim chance she is still alive.
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