On September 24th, 2010, 24year-old Rebecca Ellis left her car near a trail in Joshua Tree National Park and disappeared without a trace among the rocks.

Investigators found only footprints that abruptly ended near boulders and suspended the search.

But two years later, not a young woman, but a living ghost appeared on the trail.

a barefoot emaciated figure wrapped in dirty burlap.

Her head was unevenly shaved and covered with cuts.

And between her eyebrows, on her inflamed skin, a crude black cross was tattooed.

Looking at her in the hospital, her own mother whispered in horror, “That’s not my daughter.” You will find out where Rebecca was for those 750 days and who turned her life into a religious nightmare in this video.

The events in this story are presented as a narrative interpretation.

Some elements have been altered or recreated for storytelling purposes.

On Friday, September 24th, 2010, Joshua Tree National Park greeted visitors with the usual dry heat and cloudless skies for this season.

At about 8:15 in the morning, CCTV cameras at the northern entrance captured a silver Toyota Rav 4.

The car was driven by 24year-old Rebecca Ellis, a resident of Los Angeles, who decided to spend the weekend alone with nature.

According to subsequent police reports, her trip looked completely spontaneous, but wellorganized.

In the trunk, they would later find water supplies that she hadn’t taken with her for some reason, and a gas station receipt dated the same morning.

Rebecca parked the car at the trail head of the Boy Scout Trail, a popular but treacherous trail that passes through the famous Wonderland of Rocks area, a real maze of thousands of granite boulders.

Her name was not in the RERS log book where hikers are required to sign in before going on difficult routes.

This indicated that the girl was planning a short walk and expected to return to the car in a few hours before the midday heat.

The alarm was raised only on the evening of Sunday, September 26th.

Rebecca’s parents, who were accustomed to their daughter’s obligatory calls every Sunday, were unable to reach her.

Her phone was out of range, which is not uncommon in the desert.

But when she did not show up for work on Monday morning, the family officially contacted the San Bernardino County Police Department.

Patrol officers quickly found her car in the same parking lot.

The car was locked with a wallet, documents, and a phone charger inside.

It looked like the owner had just stepped out for 5 minutes to take a photo and disappeared into thin air.

A large-scale search operation was launched on Monday morning.

Professional groups from the Desert Search Alliance organization, which specializes in searching for people in the extreme conditions of the Mojave Desert, were involved.

The situation was complicated by the terrain.

The Wonderland of Rocks area is a chaotic jumble of rocks, crevices, and caves where a person can disappear from sight after moving only 10 m away from the trail.

No witnesses to Rebecca’s disappearance could be found on Friday, despite interviewing dozens of hikers who were in the park that day.

On Tuesday, aircraft were involved in the search.

Helicopters patrolled square by square, but technology proved powerless against nature.

Operators of thermal imagers reported that scanning the surface yielded no results.

During the day, the granite boulders heat up so much in the sun that they glow as brightly as the human body in the infrared spectrum.

At night, the stones give off heat for a long time, creating thousands of false targets.

The searchers had to rely only on their own eyes and the work of dog handlers.

It was the dogs who gave the first and only serious clue in this case, which would later become the subject of much controversy among investigators.

The dogs picked up the trail from the car door and confidently led the group deep into the desert, avoiding the official trail.

They walked about 2 mi northeast, delving deeper into the stone chaos until they stopped at a group of massive boulders that local climbers call skull because of the specific form of erosion.

At this point, according to the dog handlers, Rebecca Ellis’s trail broke off instantly.

The dog circled the spot, not realizing where the scent had gone, as if the object of their pursuit had simply evaporated or been lifted into the air.

The forensic experts carefully examined the area around the skull.

It was a dead end surrounded by high cliffs.

No signs of a struggle, dragging of the body, or drops of blood were found on the sand and rocks.

There were no scraps of clothing, no lost items, no tire marks, or foreign shoes.

The only thing that was found were clear prints of Rebecca’s own boots, which led to the boulder and ended there.

The version of a fall from a height was immediately rejected.

The foot of the rocks was clean, and there were no signs of slipping or attempts to catch on the boulders themselves.

The eerie impression was that the girl had reached this point of her own free will, and that her existence in the physical world had ceased there.

Over the next 10 days, hundreds of volunteers combed every square meter of a fivemile radius from where the trail disappeared.

They looked into every crevice, descended into old mine pits, which are numerous in the region, and checked abandoned parking lots.

But the desert was silent.

No new information was obtained.

The head of the search operation noted in his report that the probability of finding Rebecca alive in such conditions without water and equipment was approaching zero after the third day.

On October 7th, the active phase of the search was officially curtailed.

Rebecca Ellis’s case was reclassified as a missing person and her file was sent to the archive where it was to gather dust alongside dozens of other unsolved national park mysteries.

None of the members of the search group even realized that this was only the beginning of the story and that the most terrible finds were waiting for them not in the past but in the future.

Exactly 2 years and 3 weeks of silence have passed.

The desert, which seemed to have swallowed the young woman forever, suddenly decided to return her.

But what emerged from the sands, bore little resemblance to the person who had disappeared.

On October 14th, 2012, at about 4:00 in the morning, a longhaul truck driver transiting the Mojave Desert on Highway 62 noticed strange activity on the side of the road.

This stretch of road located near the town of 29 Palms is usually completely empty at night, lit only by the sparse headlights of cars and moonlight.

In his testimony, the driver later said that at first he thought the figure was a large animal or coyotes scavenging for carrying, but when the headlights picked up the silhouette, he realized it was a person.

She was walking toward the city, moving with a strange, unnatural gate, as if every step caused her unbearable pain, but she couldn’t stop.

The driver immediately contacted the 911 dispatcher.

15 minutes later, a patrol car arrived at the specified kilometer.

What the police officer saw in the spotlight of the patrol car’s headlights, he would later describe in detail in his report as a scene from a horror movie come to life.

A woman was walking along the roadside barefoot on sharp gravel and asphalt.

She was not wearing normal clothes.

Her body was covered by a coarse, dirty burlap sewn with thick, probably woolen threads.

This strange robe resembled a medieval cassich or the rags of a hermit and it gave off a heavy cloying smell of stale sweat, earth, and something like incense.

The officer ordered her to stop and raise her hand several times using a loudspeaker, but the unknown woman did not respond to the commands at all.

She continued to walk forward, looking through the patrol car as if it did not exist.

When the policeman approached her following safety instructions, he noticed even more frightening details.

The woman was completely bald.

The hair on her head was not just shaved off with a clipper, but cut off unevenly, sometimes together with the skin, as if it had been done with a dull blade or knife in a hurry.

The entire skin of the skull was covered with small cuts, bruises, and crusts of baked blood.

However, what attracted the most attention was what was on her face.

Right on her forehead, between her eyebrows, was a tattoo.

A rough dark blue cross inked deep into her skin.

The skin around the drawing was severely inflamed and swollen.

The edges of the lines blurred, indicating an extremely crude, barbaric method of application, probably using a common needle and soot or lowquality ink.

It looked as if her head was being held down while someone methodically drove the ink into her flesh.

The woman did not resist arrest, but did not cooperate either.

She was in a state of deep stuper.

She did not answer questions about her name, date of birth, or place of residence.

The only sound she made during the entire transportation to the nearest hospital was a soft, rhythmic whisper.

These were not intelligible words, but rather a set of sounds that repeated with a monotonous frequency reminiscent of some kind of eerie prayer or mantra.

In the emergency room, doctors examined the patient who was registered as Jane Doe.

In addition to exhaustion and dehydration, the doctors noticed numerous scars on her feet which had turned into a continuous calloused crust, indicating that she had been walking barefoot on rocky terrain for a long time.

While the doctors were treating the wounds on her head, the police took her fingerprints and ran them through the missing person’s database.

The results stunned the detective on duty.

The system produced a 100% match.

The prince belonged to Rebecca Ellis, a girl whose search was officially suspended two years ago.

The news that Rebecca was found alive came as a shock to her family who had long since lost hope and mentally buried their daughter.

The parents arrived at the hospital a few hours after the identification.

The hospital corridors were silent.

The nurse who accompanied the Ellis couple to the intensive care unit later testified for the police report describing the moment of the meeting.

According to her, Rebecca’s father froze at the door, covering his face with his hands, unable to take a step inside.

The mother entered the room but stopped a few meters from the bed.

She stared at the creature sitting in front of her.

An emaciated woman with a blank glassy gaze, a cross embossed on her forehead, festering, her lips moving silently in an endless whisper.

In this broken person, there was nothing left of the cheerful girl who had gone to the park for a weekend 2 years ago.

The mother stared at her face for a long time, trying to find familiar features.

And then without taking her eyes off the horrific tattoo, she barely heard the phrase that the nurse had written down verbatim in the observation log.

That’s not my daughter.

These words were not just an expression of shock, but a statement of the fact that the Rebecca Ellis they knew was left out there in the desert and someone else had come home.

The first days of Rebecca Ellis’s stay in the closed intensive care unit turned into a continuous stream of medical examinations, the results of which shocked even experienced doctors.

The woman’s physical condition was a map of prolonged and systematic torture.

X-rays of her hands showed that almost every failen of her fingers on both hands had been broken in the past.

These fractures had not healed properly, forming ugly bone calluses and deformities, indicating that she had never received medical care.

Her fingers looked crooked, and the mobility of her joints was severely limited.

Even more telling were the marks on her body.

Around both ankles, the skin had been scarred to scar tissue, forming deep, dark furrows.

The forensic experts in their report unequivocally stated that such marks are characteristic of prolonged wearing of heavy metal shackles or chains.

This confirmed the worst guess of the investigation.

Rebecca had not been wandering in the desert for 2 years.

She was held by force.

The doctors classified the victim’s mental state as severe dissociative fugue, a rare disorder in which a person completely loses memory of his or her personality and past life, creating a new, often fragmented identity.

Instead, a toxicological blood test shed light on the reasons for this profound change in consciousness.

The laboratory found a high concentration of tropane alkyoids in her system including scopalamine and hyioyamine.

These substances are the main components of datura a plant that is widespread in the Mojave Desert.

Experts have noted that such doses when consumed regularly cause severe hallucinations, loss of will, amnesia, and complete submission.

It seems that the woman was methodically poisoned with decoctions of this poisonous plant to keep her mind in a constant fog and suppress any ability to resist or escape.

Detective Derek Dalton, a specialist in the major crimes unit, began working with the witness.

Attempts to conduct a standardized interrogation encountered an impenetrable wall of silence and delusion.

According to the interrogation protocols, Rebecca never used the pronoun I.

She did not speak of herself as a separate person at all.

Instead, answering simple questions, she began to rock monotonously in her chair and quote passages from strange unknown religious texts.

Her speech was full of metaphors about purification by sand, the great thirst, and the father who hides from the sun.

She spoke of the world as a place of sin that must be burned and mentioned that the flesh is only a temporary garment for the soul which must be worn to tears.

Psycho linguists who analyzed the recordings of her speech concluded that this was not just the ravings of a madwoman but the result of deep ideological coding typical of totalitarian sex.

The hospital staff’s special attention was drawn to the patients reaction to the conditions of detention.

Nurses reported the woman’s panic in front of the electric light.

When the ceiling lamps were first turned on in the ward, Rebecca threw herself screaming to the floor and crawled into the farthest corner under the bed, covering her head with her hands and shaking her whole body.

She refused to come out until the light was turned off, calling it the eye of the demon.

This behavior along with the power of her skin led investigators to believe that her place of detention was in complete darkness or underground with no access to daylight or artificial light.

She was used to living in darkness and the light caused her physical pain.

While doctors were trying to stabilize the victim’s condition, forensic experts focused on the only piece of evidence she had with her, the same rough burlap that served as her clothing.

This piece of cloth was sent to the geology and soil science laboratory.

Experts carefully shook out every seam, every fold of the dirty fabric, collecting microscopic samples of dust and dirt.

The result of the analysis was a breakthrough in the investigation.

Under the microscope, particles of a specific mineral, pinkish quartz monzanite, were found among the ordinary sand.

Geologists explained to investigators that although this mineral is found in Joshua Tree Park, its unique crystal structure and red dust impurities point to a very specific location.

This rock composition is characteristic of deep, inaccessible areas of the park where rock outcrops are in contact with iron ore deposits.

This significantly narrowed the search radius for the place where Rebecca Ellis had been held for 2 years.

Now the police knew not just the park, but a specific sector on the map where ordinary tourists rarely set foot.

While doctors fought for Rebecca’s sanity, detectives from the Unsolved Crimes Department began painstakingly working in the archives, trying to find at least some clues that would explain the origin of the eerie symbol on her forehead.

Intuition told the investigators that such a specific mark could not be an isolated case of a lone satist’s work.

It looked like a signature, like a brand of ownership with a history.

And they were right.

Diving into old paper files that had not yet been digitized, the police came across reports that gave them chills.

It turned out that Rebecca Ellis was not the first victim to be marked by this sign in the desert, but she was the first to return alive.

In 1998, a group of amateur geologists found the body of an unknown man in a remote attit.

The corpse was mummified by dry air, but a roughly carved dark blue cross was clearly visible on the skin of his forehead.

At the time, the case was classified as a ritual suicide of a religious fanatic or vagrant, as there were no signs of violence, and the cause of death remained unidentified due to the passage of time.

6 years later, in 2004, history repeated itself.

Tourists found the body of a young woman half buried in a narrow gorge with stones.

She had the same cross on her face.

Once again, the investigation reached a dead end, attributing the death to an accident among marginalized elements who often choose the desert to live outside the law.

Both cases gathered dust in the archive under the label accident, and no one connected them until now.

Now with Rebecca alive, the detectives realized that a serial mechanism of kidnapping and branding had been operating in the desert for decades.

The key to unraveling the identity of the kidnapper was the same incoherent prayers that Rebecca had muttered in the hospital room.

Detective Dalton brought in a consultant on religious cults, a professor of religious history at a local university.

After listening to hours of audio recordings of the victim’s delusions, the expert identified specific phrases that did not belong to any of the canonical religious texts.

The phrases about the father who hides from the sun and stone flesh that is eternal were direct quotes from the sermons of an almost forgotten figure in local folklore, Marcus Lester.

Marcus Lester was a former miner who worked in the mines in the 70s.

After a rock cave-in in which he was the only survivor, spending 4 days underground, Lester emerged a changed man.

He began to preach that the true God does not live in heaven, but in the depths of the underground, and that sunlight is a poison that burns the soul.

In the 80s, he founded a small commune called the Children of the Stone.

The sect was based in abandoned trailers on the outskirts of the desert.

The authorities paid attention to them only after a series of complaints from local farmers about the disappearance of livestock and reports from social services about the abuse of children by members of the commune.

The police raided the settlement, dispersed the commune, but Lester himself managed to escape.

Since then, he has become a ghost.

Officially, Marcus Lester has been considered dead since 2005 when his personal belongings and burnt remains of his clothes were found in one of the caves, although his body was never found.

The trail seemed to end at the dead man.

However, the detectives decided to test the theory that the prophet could have faked his death or that his work was continued by one of his fanatical followers.

The investigation focused on the Eagle Mountain area, a giant abandoned quarry and ghost town that once prospered from iron ore mining.

It was the perfect area for someone who wanted to hide from the world.

Kilometers of intricate tunnels, a fencedin area, and a complete lack of people.

It was impossible to get permission to physically search such a huge area without solid evidence.

So, the investigators turned to the technical intelligence department.

Analysts downloaded archived and recent satellite images of the region using algorithms to search for changes in the landscape.

For several days, computers compared thousands of pixels of images of the desert surface.

Finally, the system detected an anomaly in one of the most remote sectors of the quarry, where according to the mine closure plans, all ventilation holes were supposed to be sealed tightly in the ’90s.

The program noticed a strange discrepancy.

One of the ventilation shafts looked blurry on the images.

A closer look and spectral analysis revealed that the hole was not filled in.

Someone had deliberately cleared the entrance and carefully disguised it with a structure made of dry shrubbery and rusty mesh that looked like a natural garbage pile from a height.

What’s more, a satellite’s thermal imagers flying over the site at night detected a subtle plume of warm air rising from the ground.

This could only mean one thing.

The ventilation system was working, and deep under the tons of rock, someone was living, breathing, and probably continuing their horrific mission to save souls.

The police got a point on the map that was supposed to be the end of this tangled story.

On October 18, 2012, at 4:00 in the morning, a combined team of SWAT and detectives from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department set out to execute a search warrant.

This operation was not like a typical suburban raid.

A convoy of 10 heavy, specially trained off-road vehicles with reinforced suspension slowly made its way deep into the desert, heading for the abandoned Eagle Mountain mines.

The terrain there is so rugged that even army vehicles took more than an hour to cover the last 5 miles.

There was no road as such, just old service roads washed away by heavy rains and covered with sediment from decades of neglect.

The tension among the operatives grew with each kilometer.

They realized that they were going to the territory where the enemy knew every crevice and they were blind kittens.

Arriving at the coordinates determined by the analysts, the group found an entrance that looked like a pile of garbage from the satellite.

In fact, it was a skillful engineering camouflage structure, a frame of rusty rebar intertwined with dry shrubbery and covered with sand blended perfectly with the landscape.

Using hydraulic scissors, the special forces soldiers cut the padlock on the massive metal grate that blocked the entrance to the ventilation shaft.

A reconnaissance drone was the first to go into the darkness, but the signal quickly disappeared through the thickness of the rock, saturated with iron ore.

Then the assault team moved forward.

What the police saw down there silenced even the veterans who had seen it all.

It was not just a hole or a temporary shelter for a A complex multi-level system of tunnels stretched out before them, transformed into a functional underground settlement.

The walls of the old workings were reinforced with fresh wooden beams, probably stolen from neighboring construction sites.

Handmade electrical cables stretched along the ceiling, leading to a remote room where powerful diesel generators hummed.

The investigators immediately noticed one detail.

The generator engines were hot and the air was still filled with gray exhaust smoke.

This meant that the inhabitants of this dungeon had left it just an hour and a half before the police arrived.

They probably had observers at the entrances to the quarry or heard the rumble of heavy engines in the night silence.

As the operatives moved through the maze, they found rooms that would later be called cells in the reports.

These were small niches hollowed out right in the rock.

In each of them, there was nothing but straw mats covered with coarse rags and a bucket of water.

No personal belongings, photos, or comfort items.

The most terrifying discovery in these cells were massive iron rings with chains embedded in the wall.

These were the shackle marks the doctors saw on Rebecca’s legs.

The atmosphere in this place was oppressive.

Sterile, dead silence rained here, broken only by the dripping of condensed water from the ceiling.

This place did not resemble a maniac’s lair, but a harsh medieval monastery where pain and deprivation were elevated to a cult.

In the central part of the bunker, where several tunnels converged, the police found a large room that apparently served as a place for meetings or rituals.

In the middle of the room was an altar made of pieces of rusty rails and stones.

On it were strange, primitive tools, the sight of which was eerie.

Forensic experts seized a set of needles carved from the bones of small animals, probably rodents or birds.

Nearby were cans with a black viscous substance.

Rapid analysis showed that it was a mixture of soot, ash, and industrial oil.

It was this infernal cocktail and these unststerile bones that were used to tattoo the victim’s faces which explained the terrible inflammation and scars on Rebecca’s skin.

However, the main piece of evidence was waiting for the detectives at the far wall of the room.

It was a smooth, polished surface of granite, which the investigators called the wall of remorse.

It was covered with small inscriptions scratched by something sharp, perhaps a nail or a piece of stone.

These were names, dozens of names.

The detectives began to photograph the inscriptions, looking for familiar letters, and soon the flashlight beam caught what they were looking for.

The name Rebecca was unevenly scrolled almost near the floor, but it was boldly crossed out with a deep horizontal line, apparently symbolizing the death of her former self.

Next to it, in a fresher handwriting, was a new name, Mara.

This discovery was irrefutable proof that Rebecca Ellis was indeed held here.

Moreover, it confirmed the hypothesis that the kidnapper was not just torturing his victims, but was trying to reborn them by erasing their memories and giving them new names from some of his distorted scriptures.

The inspection of the premises also revealed huge stocks of canned food, water, and plastic barrels, and medicines that had long since expired.

It was obvious that this underground base had existed for years, perhaps decades, without being noticed.

It had a ventilation system with filters made from car parts and even a groundwater collection system.

The man who built it was not just a madman.

He was a talented engineer and a fanatic, ready to live underground for the rest of his life.

But now the bunker was empty.

The shadows on the walls danced from the light of the special forces flashlights, but the owners of this underground kingdom had disappeared, dissolving into the labyrinths of old mines that stretched for miles around.

The police had won the battle for information, but the main target, the one who called himself the father, had once again escaped justice.

The work of forensic experts in the underground city lasted for several days without a break.

In the light of powerful spotlights mounted on generators, experts methodically treated every inch of the surface of walls, furniture, and tools with a special black powder.

The bunker, which yesterday was home to unknown fanatics, had turned into a sterile evidence collection area.

Thousands of fingerprints were taken from door handles, dishes, book pages, and even from the stone ledges that the residents held on to as they moved through the tunnels.

When the first samples were digitized and uploaded to an automated identification system, the computer produced a result that made detectives doubt the reality of what was happening.

Most of the prints found on the old objects and walls belonged to a man who had been officially dead for 7 years.

It was Marcus Lester, the founder of the Children of the Stone Cult, whose burnt clothes were found in 2005.

It turned out that the old preacher did not die in the fire, but simply went deeper underground, faking his death to finally break ties with the world on the surface.

However, this was not the most important discovery.

On objects that had been used more recently, a toothbrush, a homemade knife handle, fresh diary pages, and tattoo tools, the experts found a completely different set of papillary patterns.

These prints were clearer, belonged to a younger man, and did not appear in any police database in the United States.

Investigators removed biological samples from these items for urgent DNA analysis.

The result, which came back from a laboratory in Sacramento, was the key to understanding the pattern of this madness.

The genetic profile of the unknown man showed a direct relationship to Marcus Lester.

The probability of paternity was 99.98%.

The son of the prophet lived in the dungeon.

But who was he? Old police reports about the dispersal of the commune in the 80s mentioned children, but their names were lost in the bureaucratic chaos.

The answer was found by operatives who were sorting through the debris in a room that probably served as the leader’s bedroom.

In an elaborate hiding place under a rough wooden bed, detectives found an old tin cookie box.

Inside, wrapped in oily paper, was a yellowed birth certificate issued in San Bernardino County in 1967.

The newborn’s name was Caleb Lester.

It was a document from another life, issued before his father finally lost his mind and took the family to the desert.

Caleb was 45 years old.

According to the dates, he had spent almost his entire adult life in isolation.

He grew up among the rocks listening to sermons about the poisonous sun and the sinful world.

And for him, these tunnels were the only normal reality.

Along with the document, the box contained a thick leatherbound notebook, Caleb’s personal diary.

Its contents became a window for the investigation into the sick mind of the man who kidnapped Rebecca.

The handwriting was small, angular, and in some places turned into illeible scribbles.

Caleb wrote about himself as a shepherd to whom his father bequeathed a great mission to save lost souls from the fire of heaven, that is from sunlight and civilization.

For him, kidnapping tourists was not a crime.

In his distorted reality, it was an act of supreme mercy.

He took people to purify them with pain, erase their memory, and give them eternal life in stone.

The detective’s special attention was drawn to the last pages dated October 2012.

In them, Caleb described in detail his relationship with a captive whom he called Mara.

It was Rebecca.

These records turned the police’s understanding of how the girl ended up at large upside down.

Until that moment, the main version was an escape.

It was believed that Rebecca seized the moment and broke out of captivity.

But the truth, written down by the hand of her tormentor, was much more terrible and cynical.

Caleb called Mara his most difficult student and at the same time his greatest disappointment.

He wrote, “I have been breaking her bones to release the demons of pride, but they are too deep.

She is silent.

She endures, but her eyes do not change.

She looks at me not as a savior but as an enemy.

Her spirit is rotten.

In the recordings, he complained that even after 2 years of torture, starvation, and drugs, Rebecca did not undergo the so-called initiation of submission.

She physically broke down but mentally continued to resist, refusing to accept his faith.

For Caleb, this was a sign of a dangerous disease.

He began to fear that her disobedience was contagious and could poison the sanctity of his underground church.

The entry of October 13th put an end to this story.

The rotten fruit must be cut off before it spoils the whole tree.

I took her to the edge of the world and left her there.

Let the sun which she loves so much burn her.

Rebecca Ellis did not escape heroically from the bunker.

She was simply thrown away like a spoiled instrument, like garbage that cannot be recycled.

Caleb Lester, this fanatical hermit, believed in his holiness so much that the very presence of a person who did not completely submit to him disgusted him.

He drove her out to the highway at night and left her to her fate.

Convinced that she would die or go completely insane, this discovery added a special tragedy to the case.

It was not physical strength that saved Rebecca’s life, but her unbreakable inner will, which proved stronger than any torture or drugs.

Now, the police knew the name of the monster, knew his motives, and understood one thing.

He was still out there in his stone world, and he was probably looking for new students.

On October 20th, 2012, 2 days after the discovery of the empty bunker, the situation in the investigation changed thanks to the vigilance of an ordinary tourist.

The climber, who was hiking in a remote sector of the park known as Rattlesnake Canyon, contacted the ranger on duty and reported strange activity.

In an area where fires are strictly forbidden, he noticed a thin column of gray smoke rising from behind a pile of rocks.

It was a place rarely visited by ordinary visitors due to the difficult terrain and the high probability of encountering rattlesnakes.

The police realized that Caleb Lester had not fled to Mexico and did not disappear into the metropolis.

He stayed in the park.

In his fanatical mind, he considered this desert his property, his temple, which he had no right to leave.

He decided to fight on the territory he knew better than anyone.

A large-scale raid began.

The command of the operation divided the search area into sectors, sending tactical groups of special forces and trackers.

But it soon became clear that modern combat tactics were powerless against a man who had become part of the landscape.

Caleb used techniques known since the Wild West, including what the old gold miners called dry gulching, luring pursuers into dry, blind ravines.

The Bravo group became the first victim of this tactic.

Following the marking pyramids of stones, the so-called Kairens that indicate the safe path in parks, the special forces entered a narrow gorge.

They were sure they were on the right track because the stones looked like they had been there for years.

In fact, Caleb had moved these markers at night, changing their navigation.

He led the team into a box canyon, a dead-end canyon with steep walls where radio communication was completely lost due to granite shielding, and the air temperature was reaching critical levels due to the lack of wind.

The group lost precious hours trying to find a way out and regain their bearings while the fugitive watched them from above.

Caleb didn’t have a firearm, but he turned the environment itself into a weapon.

He didn’t set trip wires with explosives.

He used gravity and the precarious balance of the rocks.

Around noon, an incident report came in from the alpha group.

One of the officers, an experienced veteran, was descending a narrow path and stepped on a scree that looked stable.

In fact, it was a trap.

Several large stones were propped up by smaller ones so that the slightest pressure would trigger an avalanche.

The officer slipped and fell from a height of 3 m, suffering a compound fracture of his leg.

His cry of pain echoed off the rocks, demoralizing the other searchers.

Evacuating the wounded man in such a terrain took the rest of the daylight hours, effectively halting the group’s progress.

Caleb himself moved like a ghost.

The rangers found his footprints, and it was impressive.

He walked barefoot on hot, sharp stones and thorns.

Over decades of living in the wild, his feet became as hard as the soles of his boots.

This allowed him to move absolutely silently, leaving no characteristic treadmarks.

Moreover, his knowledge of geology allowed him to hide in such narrow crevices and holes where an ordinary person would be afraid to climb due to a claustrophobic attack.

He could sit motionless for hours in a crevice only 40 cm wide, blending into the shadows.

The operation’s leadership realized that a foot chase on the ground would only endanger the personnel.

The decision was made to launch a police helicopter equipped with the latest night vision system and a fleer thermal imager.

This was a turning point.

Caleb Lester was a master of survival in the 19th century, but he had absolutely no understanding of 21st century technology.

As the sun set and the desert plunged into darkness, the helicopter pilot began to methodically scan square by square.

Caleb, hearing the hum of the propellers, did what had always saved him from human eyes.

He dove under a dense creassote bush and froze, curled up.

He was convinced that the darkness of the night was his reliable shield.

He did not know that for the infrared camera, his warm body against the cooling sand glowed bright white like a lighthouse in the sea.

The thermal imager operator clearly saw the silhouette of a man hiding under a bush in the southern part of the canyon.

The coordinates were instantly transmitted to the ground capture team.

Special forces using night vision devices silently surrounded the perimeter.

Caleb did not even realized that the trap had closed until the night silence was broken by the roar of a helicopter hovering right over his head.

At the same second, a powerful search light beam hit him in the face, blinding and disorienting him.

The reaction of the child of stone was telling.

He did not try to fight, did not look for a weapon, and did not run.

Deafened by the noise of the turbines and blinded by what he considered devil’s fire, Caleb fell to his knees and covered his head with his hands, shaking with animal terror.

To him, it looked not like a police operation, but like the arrival of the apocalypse he had been so afraid of.

The special forces soldiers threw him to the ground and snapped his handcuffs.

He offered no resistance.

His body was emaciated, covered with scars and dirt, and his eyes, when he was lifted to his feet, showed a complete lack of understanding of how the demons could see him through the darkness.

The hunt was over.

The man who had kept the desert in fear for years was now blinking helplessly in the light of electric lights, returning to the civilization he hated so much.

The trial of Caleb Lester, which began in March of 2013, did not become the sensation that journalists had hoped for.

There were no emotional confessions, no cries of remorse, and no attempts to justify themselves in the courtroom.

The defendant, who had been shaved for the first time in 45 years and dressed in a clean prison jumpsuit, was present at the hearings only physically.

His gaze was directed through the judge, through the jury, and through the walls, focusing on something only he could see.

During the entire trial, Caleb did not say a single word.

He did not respond to his lawyer’s appeals and did not show any emotion when the prosecutor showed photos of underground cells and torture tools.

The forensic psychiatric examination which lasted several months came to an unequivocal conclusion.

The suspect suffers from a deep form of paranoid schizophrenia complicated by complete social maladjustment and the consequences of being raised in a totalitarian cult.

The jury agreed with the doctor’s conclusions.

Caleb Lester was found insane due to a severe mental disorder.

Instead of life imprisonment in a regular prison, the court decided to send him to the Patent State Hospital, a closed psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period.

In their reports, the staff of the institution notes that Lester is a model patient, but completely unreachable.

He spends his days sitting on the floor of his room and staring at a single point on the wall.

Sometimes he runs his finger along the soft upholstery of the walls as if drawing invisible dungeon maps and continues to live in his cave where no one else has access.

Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away from the hospital at her parents’ home in Los Angeles, Rebecca Ellis was trying to return to a reality that had become alien to her.

Physically, she was safe.

The wounds on her legs had healed.

Her hair was growing back, and her weight was gradually returning to normal.

But mentally, she was still trapped in a stone sack.

Rebecca’s parents, who had dreamed of this moment so much, faced a terrible truth.

Returning home was not the end of the nightmare, but only the beginning of a new struggle.

The family’s everyday life turned into a minefield.

Rebecca categorically refused to sleep on the bed.

A soft mattress caused her panic attacks because for 2 years, her body had become accustomed to hard stone.

Every night, her parents found their daughter sleeping on the bare floor in the corner of the room, curled up in a fetal position without a pillow or blanket.

Nutrition became an even bigger problem.

Rebecca could not eat hot food.

The steam coming from soup or tea triggered her vomiting reflex.

She would only accept cold canned food, crackers, and water, pouring it only into a metal mug.

Psychologists explained this as deeply rooted in the habits imposed by the kidnapper.

In the bunker, hot food was an unattainable luxury, and any comfort was considered a sin.

But the dark blue cross on her forehead remained the most terrifying reminder of her experience.

In the first months after her release, doctors offered to perform a laser tattoo removal procedure at the expense of charitable foundations.

Rebecca’s reaction was immediate and aggressive.

She covered her forehead with her hands and started screaming, begging them not to touch the mark.

Medical records record her words during one of the therapy sessions.

Without it, he won’t find me.

If you wash this off, I will be lost in the dark and my father will not come for me.

It was a classic manifestation of Stockholm syndrome intertwined with mystical fear.

Caleb had so deeply integrated into her mind the idea that light is death and he is the only salvation that even after her release, she subconsciously waited for his return, considering the tattoo her only protection and a pass to eternal life.

For the parents, these words sounded like a sentence, but the doctors insisted on patience.

Forced removal of the brand could have completely destroyed her fragile psyche.

The rehabilitation process lasted for four long years.

It was a titanic work of a team of psychiatrists, rehabilitation therapists, and a loving family.

Step by step, using the methods of cognitive behavioral therapy, and soft hypnosis, the specialists destroyed the mental walls that Caleb had built in her head.

The turning point came one summer morning when Rebecca went to the mirror herself, ran her finger over the rough scar on her forehead, and for the first time ever told her mother, “It’s ugly.

I want it removed.” The tattoo removal procedure was painful and lengthy.

It took more than 12 sessions to break up the deeply embedded pigment.

The skin resisted, but with each visit to the clinic, the cross became paler until it turned into a barely noticeable white scar that could be hidden by makeup.

Today, Rebecca Ellis leads a life that looks quite normal from the outside.

She works in a small library, sorts books, and avoids publicity.

She has reconnected with her friends and even started traveling, although she never goes near deserts or mountainous areas again.

She eats a hot dinner with her parents and sleeps on the bed.

However, the shadow of the past hasn’t disappeared.

It has just changed shape.

If you walk into her room at night, you can see a detail that reveals the truth about the price of her survival.

Rebecca Ellis, who spent 2 years underground in complete darkness, is now terrified of the dark.

She sleeps only with a bright light on.

She has powerful lamps in every room of her apartment.

And even on sunny days, she never closes the windows.

For her, darkness is no longer a time for rest.

It is now the monster’s territory, and light is the only thing that keeps its ghost at bay.

The story of the girl from Joshua Tree Park is over.

But for her, every night is a new reminder that some mazes are impossible to escape from completely.

On September 24th, 2010, 24year-old Rebecca Ellis left her car near a trail in Joshua Tree National Park and disappeared without a trace among the rocks.

Investigators found only footprints that abruptly ended near boulders and suspended the search.

But two years later, not a young woman, but a living ghost appeared on the trail.

a barefoot emaciated figure wrapped in dirty burlap.

Her head was unevenly shaved and covered with cuts.

And between her eyebrows, on her inflamed skin, a crude black cross was tattooed.

Looking at her in the hospital, her own mother whispered in horror, “That’s not my daughter.” You will find out where Rebecca was for those 750 days and who turned her life into a religious nightmare in this video.

The events in this story are presented as a narrative interpretation.

Some elements have been altered or recreated for storytelling purposes.

On Friday, September 24th, 2010, Joshua Tree National Park greeted visitors with the usual dry heat and cloudless skies for this season.

At about 8:15 in the morning, CCTV cameras at the northern entrance captured a silver Toyota Rav 4.

The car was driven by 24year-old Rebecca Ellis, a resident of Los Angeles, who decided to spend the weekend alone with nature.

According to subsequent police reports, her trip looked completely spontaneous, but wellorganized.

In the trunk, they would later find water supplies that she hadn’t taken with her for some reason, and a gas station receipt dated the same morning.

Rebecca parked the car at the trail head of the Boy Scout Trail, a popular but treacherous trail that passes through the famous Wonderland of Rocks area, a real maze of thousands of granite boulders.

Her name was not in the RERS log book where hikers are required to sign in before going on difficult routes.

This indicated that the girl was planning a short walk and expected to return to the car in a few hours before the midday heat.

The alarm was raised only on the evening of Sunday, September 26th.

Rebecca’s parents, who were accustomed to their daughter’s obligatory calls every Sunday, were unable to reach her.

Her phone was out of range, which is not uncommon in the desert.

But when she did not show up for work on Monday morning, the family officially contacted the San Bernardino County Police Department.

Patrol officers quickly found her car in the same parking lot.

The car was locked with a wallet, documents, and a phone charger inside.

It looked like the owner had just stepped out for 5 minutes to take a photo and disappeared into thin air.

A large-scale search operation was launched on Monday morning.

Professional groups from the Desert Search Alliance organization, which specializes in searching for people in the extreme conditions of the Mojave Desert, were involved.

The situation was complicated by the terrain.

The Wonderland of Rocks area is a chaotic jumble of rocks, crevices, and caves where a person can disappear from sight after moving only 10 m away from the trail.

No witnesses to Rebecca’s disappearance could be found on Friday, despite interviewing dozens of hikers who were in the park that day.

On Tuesday, aircraft were involved in the search.

Helicopters patrolled square by square, but technology proved powerless against nature.

Operators of thermal imagers reported that scanning the surface yielded no results.

During the day, the granite boulders heat up so much in the sun that they glow as brightly as the human body in the infrared spectrum.

At night, the stones give off heat for a long time, creating thousands of false targets.

The searchers had to rely only on their own eyes and the work of dog handlers.

It was the dogs who gave the first and only serious clue in this case, which would later become the subject of much controversy among investigators.

The dogs picked up the trail from the car door and confidently led the group deep into the desert, avoiding the official trail.

They walked about 2 mi northeast, delving deeper into the stone chaos until they stopped at a group of massive boulders that local climbers call skull because of the specific form of erosion.

At this point, according to the dog handlers, Rebecca Ellis’s trail broke off instantly.

The dog circled the spot, not realizing where the scent had gone, as if the object of their pursuit had simply evaporated or been lifted into the air.

The forensic experts carefully examined the area around the skull.

It was a dead end surrounded by high cliffs.

No signs of a struggle, dragging of the body, or drops of blood were found on the sand and rocks.

There were no scraps of clothing, no lost items, no tire marks, or foreign shoes.

The only thing that was found were clear prints of Rebecca’s own boots, which led to the boulder and ended there.

The version of a fall from a height was immediately rejected.

The foot of the rocks was clean, and there were no signs of slipping or attempts to catch on the boulders themselves.

The eerie impression was that the girl had reached this point of her own free will, and that her existence in the physical world had ceased there.

Over the next 10 days, hundreds of volunteers combed every square meter of a fivemile radius from where the trail disappeared.

They looked into every crevice, descended into old mine pits, which are numerous in the region, and checked abandoned parking lots.

But the desert was silent.

No new information was obtained.

The head of the search operation noted in his report that the probability of finding Rebecca alive in such conditions without water and equipment was approaching zero after the third day.

On October 7th, the active phase of the search was officially curtailed.

Rebecca Ellis’s case was reclassified as a missing person and her file was sent to the archive where it was to gather dust alongside dozens of other unsolved national park mysteries.

None of the members of the search group even realized that this was only the beginning of the story and that the most terrible finds were waiting for them not in the past but in the future.

Exactly 2 years and 3 weeks of silence have passed.

The desert, which seemed to have swallowed the young woman forever, suddenly decided to return her.

But what emerged from the sands, bore little resemblance to the person who had disappeared.

On October 14th, 2012, at about 4:00 in the morning, a longhaul truck driver transiting the Mojave Desert on Highway 62 noticed strange activity on the side of the road.

This stretch of road located near the town of 29 Palms is usually completely empty at night, lit only by the sparse headlights of cars and moonlight.

In his testimony, the driver later said that at first he thought the figure was a large animal or coyotes scavenging for carrying, but when the headlights picked up the silhouette, he realized it was a person.

She was walking toward the city, moving with a strange, unnatural gate, as if every step caused her unbearable pain, but she couldn’t stop.

The driver immediately contacted the 911 dispatcher.

15 minutes later, a patrol car arrived at the specified kilometer.

What the police officer saw in the spotlight of the patrol car’s headlights, he would later describe in detail in his report as a scene from a horror movie come to life.

A woman was walking along the roadside barefoot on sharp gravel and asphalt.

She was not wearing normal clothes.

Her body was covered by a coarse, dirty burlap sewn with thick, probably woolen threads.

This strange robe resembled a medieval cassich or the rags of a hermit and it gave off a heavy cloying smell of stale sweat, earth, and something like incense.

The officer ordered her to stop and raise her hand several times using a loudspeaker, but the unknown woman did not respond to the commands at all.

She continued to walk forward, looking through the patrol car as if it did not exist.

When the policeman approached her following safety instructions, he noticed even more frightening details.

The woman was completely bald.

The hair on her head was not just shaved off with a clipper, but cut off unevenly, sometimes together with the skin, as if it had been done with a dull blade or knife in a hurry.

The entire skin of the skull was covered with small cuts, bruises, and crusts of baked blood.

However, what attracted the most attention was what was on her face.

Right on her forehead, between her eyebrows, was a tattoo.

A rough dark blue cross inked deep into her skin.

The skin around the drawing was severely inflamed and swollen.

The edges of the lines blurred, indicating an extremely crude, barbaric method of application, probably using a common needle and soot or lowquality ink.

It looked as if her head was being held down while someone methodically drove the ink into her flesh.

The woman did not resist arrest, but did not cooperate either.

She was in a state of deep stuper.

She did not answer questions about her name, date of birth, or place of residence.

The only sound she made during the entire transportation to the nearest hospital was a soft, rhythmic whisper.

These were not intelligible words, but rather a set of sounds that repeated with a monotonous frequency reminiscent of some kind of eerie prayer or mantra.

In the emergency room, doctors examined the patient who was registered as Jane Doe.

In addition to exhaustion and dehydration, the doctors noticed numerous scars on her feet which had turned into a continuous calloused crust, indicating that she had been walking barefoot on rocky terrain for a long time.

While the doctors were treating the wounds on her head, the police took her fingerprints and ran them through the missing person’s database.

The results stunned the detective on duty.

The system produced a 100% match.

The prince belonged to Rebecca Ellis, a girl whose search was officially suspended two years ago.

The news that Rebecca was found alive came as a shock to her family who had long since lost hope and mentally buried their daughter.

The parents arrived at the hospital a few hours after the identification.

The hospital corridors were silent.

The nurse who accompanied the Ellis couple to the intensive care unit later testified for the police report describing the moment of the meeting.

According to her, Rebecca’s father froze at the door, covering his face with his hands, unable to take a step inside.

The mother entered the room but stopped a few meters from the bed.

She stared at the creature sitting in front of her.

An emaciated woman with a blank glassy gaze, a cross embossed on her forehead, festering, her lips moving silently in an endless whisper.

In this broken person, there was nothing left of the cheerful girl who had gone to the park for a weekend 2 years ago.

The mother stared at her face for a long time, trying to find familiar features.

And then without taking her eyes off the horrific tattoo, she barely heard the phrase that the nurse had written down verbatim in the observation log.

That’s not my daughter.

These words were not just an expression of shock, but a statement of the fact that the Rebecca Ellis they knew was left out there in the desert and someone else had come home.

The first days of Rebecca Ellis’s stay in the closed intensive care unit turned into a continuous stream of medical examinations, the results of which shocked even experienced doctors.

The woman’s physical condition was a map of prolonged and systematic torture.

X-rays of her hands showed that almost every failen of her fingers on both hands had been broken in the past.

These fractures had not healed properly, forming ugly bone calluses and deformities, indicating that she had never received medical care.

Her fingers looked crooked, and the mobility of her joints was severely limited.

Even more telling were the marks on her body.

Around both ankles, the skin had been scarred to scar tissue, forming deep, dark furrows.

The forensic experts in their report unequivocally stated that such marks are characteristic of prolonged wearing of heavy metal shackles or chains.

This confirmed the worst guess of the investigation.

Rebecca had not been wandering in the desert for 2 years.

She was held by force.

The doctors classified the victim’s mental state as severe dissociative fugue, a rare disorder in which a person completely loses memory of his or her personality and past life, creating a new, often fragmented identity.

Instead, a toxicological blood test shed light on the reasons for this profound change in consciousness.

The laboratory found a high concentration of tropane alkyoids in her system including scopalamine and hyioyamine.

These substances are the main components of datura a plant that is widespread in the Mojave Desert.

Experts have noted that such doses when consumed regularly cause severe hallucinations, loss of will, amnesia, and complete submission.

It seems that the woman was methodically poisoned with decoctions of this poisonous plant to keep her mind in a constant fog and suppress any ability to resist or escape.

Detective Derek Dalton, a specialist in the major crimes unit, began working with the witness.

Attempts to conduct a standardized interrogation encountered an impenetrable wall of silence and delusion.

According to the interrogation protocols, Rebecca never used the pronoun I.

She did not speak of herself as a separate person at all.

Instead, answering simple questions, she began to rock monotonously in her chair and quote passages from strange unknown religious texts.

Her speech was full of metaphors about purification by sand, the great thirst, and the father who hides from the sun.

She spoke of the world as a place of sin that must be burned and mentioned that the flesh is only a temporary garment for the soul which must be worn to tears.

Psycho linguists who analyzed the recordings of her speech concluded that this was not just the ravings of a madwoman but the result of deep ideological coding typical of totalitarian sex.

The hospital staff’s special attention was drawn to the patients reaction to the conditions of detention.

Nurses reported the woman’s panic in front of the electric light.

When the ceiling lamps were first turned on in the ward, Rebecca threw herself screaming to the floor and crawled into the farthest corner under the bed, covering her head with her hands and shaking her whole body.

She refused to come out until the light was turned off, calling it the eye of the demon.

This behavior along with the power of her skin led investigators to believe that her place of detention was in complete darkness or underground with no access to daylight or artificial light.

She was used to living in darkness and the light caused her physical pain.

While doctors were trying to stabilize the victim’s condition, forensic experts focused on the only piece of evidence she had with her, the same rough burlap that served as her clothing.

This piece of cloth was sent to the geology and soil science laboratory.

Experts carefully shook out every seam, every fold of the dirty fabric, collecting microscopic samples of dust and dirt.

The result of the analysis was a breakthrough in the investigation.

Under the microscope, particles of a specific mineral, pinkish quartz monzanite, were found among the ordinary sand.

Geologists explained to investigators that although this mineral is found in Joshua Tree Park, its unique crystal structure and red dust impurities point to a very specific location.

This rock composition is characteristic of deep, inaccessible areas of the park where rock outcrops are in contact with iron ore deposits.

This significantly narrowed the search radius for the place where Rebecca Ellis had been held for 2 years.

Now the police knew not just the park, but a specific sector on the map where ordinary tourists rarely set foot.

While doctors fought for Rebecca’s sanity, detectives from the Unsolved Crimes Department began painstakingly working in the archives, trying to find at least some clues that would explain the origin of the eerie symbol on her forehead.

Intuition told the investigators that such a specific mark could not be an isolated case of a lone satist’s work.

It looked like a signature, like a brand of ownership with a history.

And they were right.

Diving into old paper files that had not yet been digitized, the police came across reports that gave them chills.

It turned out that Rebecca Ellis was not the first victim to be marked by this sign in the desert, but she was the first to return alive.

In 1998, a group of amateur geologists found the body of an unknown man in a remote attit.

The corpse was mummified by dry air, but a roughly carved dark blue cross was clearly visible on the skin of his forehead.

At the time, the case was classified as a ritual suicide of a religious fanatic or vagrant, as there were no signs of violence, and the cause of death remained unidentified due to the passage of time.

6 years later, in 2004, history repeated itself.

Tourists found the body of a young woman half buried in a narrow gorge with stones.

She had the same cross on her face.

Once again, the investigation reached a dead end, attributing the death to an accident among marginalized elements who often choose the desert to live outside the law.

Both cases gathered dust in the archive under the label accident, and no one connected them until now.

Now with Rebecca alive, the detectives realized that a serial mechanism of kidnapping and branding had been operating in the desert for decades.

The key to unraveling the identity of the kidnapper was the same incoherent prayers that Rebecca had muttered in the hospital room.

Detective Dalton brought in a consultant on religious cults, a professor of religious history at a local university.

After listening to hours of audio recordings of the victim’s delusions, the expert identified specific phrases that did not belong to any of the canonical religious texts.

The phrases about the father who hides from the sun and stone flesh that is eternal were direct quotes from the sermons of an almost forgotten figure in local folklore, Marcus Lester.

Marcus Lester was a former miner who worked in the mines in the 70s.

After a rock cave-in in which he was the only survivor, spending 4 days underground, Lester emerged a changed man.

He began to preach that the true God does not live in heaven, but in the depths of the underground, and that sunlight is a poison that burns the soul.

In the 80s, he founded a small commune called the Children of the Stone.

The sect was based in abandoned trailers on the outskirts of the desert.

The authorities paid attention to them only after a series of complaints from local farmers about the disappearance of livestock and reports from social services about the abuse of children by members of the commune.

The police raided the settlement, dispersed the commune, but Lester himself managed to escape.

Since then, he has become a ghost.

Officially, Marcus Lester has been considered dead since 2005 when his personal belongings and burnt remains of his clothes were found in one of the caves, although his body was never found.

The trail seemed to end at the dead man.

However, the detectives decided to test the theory that the prophet could have faked his death or that his work was continued by one of his fanatical followers.

The investigation focused on the Eagle Mountain area, a giant abandoned quarry and ghost town that once prospered from iron ore mining.

It was the perfect area for someone who wanted to hide from the world.

Kilometers of intricate tunnels, a fencedin area, and a complete lack of people.

It was impossible to get permission to physically search such a huge area without solid evidence.

So, the investigators turned to the technical intelligence department.

Analysts downloaded archived and recent satellite images of the region using algorithms to search for changes in the landscape.

For several days, computers compared thousands of pixels of images of the desert surface.

Finally, the system detected an anomaly in one of the most remote sectors of the quarry, where according to the mine closure plans, all ventilation holes were supposed to be sealed tightly in the ’90s.

The program noticed a strange discrepancy.

One of the ventilation shafts looked blurry on the images.

A closer look and spectral analysis revealed that the hole was not filled in.

Someone had deliberately cleared the entrance and carefully disguised it with a structure made of dry shrubbery and rusty mesh that looked like a natural garbage pile from a height.

What’s more, a satellite’s thermal imagers flying over the site at night detected a subtle plume of warm air rising from the ground.

This could only mean one thing.

The ventilation system was working, and deep under the tons of rock, someone was living, breathing, and probably continuing their horrific mission to save souls.

The police got a point on the map that was supposed to be the end of this tangled story.

On October 18, 2012, at 4:00 in the morning, a combined team of SWAT and detectives from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department set out to execute a search warrant.

This operation was not like a typical suburban raid.

A convoy of 10 heavy, specially trained off-road vehicles with reinforced suspension slowly made its way deep into the desert, heading for the abandoned Eagle Mountain mines.

The terrain there is so rugged that even army vehicles took more than an hour to cover the last 5 miles.

There was no road as such, just old service roads washed away by heavy rains and covered with sediment from decades of neglect.

The tension among the operatives grew with each kilometer.

They realized that they were going to the territory where the enemy knew every crevice and they were blind kittens.

Arriving at the coordinates determined by the analysts, the group found an entrance that looked like a pile of garbage from the satellite.

In fact, it was a skillful engineering camouflage structure, a frame of rusty rebar intertwined with dry shrubbery and covered with sand blended perfectly with the landscape.

Using hydraulic scissors, the special forces soldiers cut the padlock on the massive metal grate that blocked the entrance to the ventilation shaft.

A reconnaissance drone was the first to go into the darkness, but the signal quickly disappeared through the thickness of the rock, saturated with iron ore.

Then the assault team moved forward.

What the police saw down there silenced even the veterans who had seen it all.

It was not just a hole or a temporary shelter for a A complex multi-level system of tunnels stretched out before them, transformed into a functional underground settlement.

The walls of the old workings were reinforced with fresh wooden beams, probably stolen from neighboring construction sites.

Handmade electrical cables stretched along the ceiling, leading to a remote room where powerful diesel generators hummed.

The investigators immediately noticed one detail.

The generator engines were hot and the air was still filled with gray exhaust smoke.

This meant that the inhabitants of this dungeon had left it just an hour and a half before the police arrived.

They probably had observers at the entrances to the quarry or heard the rumble of heavy engines in the night silence.

As the operatives moved through the maze, they found rooms that would later be called cells in the reports.

These were small niches hollowed out right in the rock.

In each of them, there was nothing but straw mats covered with coarse rags and a bucket of water.

No personal belongings, photos, or comfort items.

The most terrifying discovery in these cells were massive iron rings with chains embedded in the wall.

These were the shackle marks the doctors saw on Rebecca’s legs.

The atmosphere in this place was oppressive.

Sterile, dead silence rained here, broken only by the dripping of condensed water from the ceiling.

This place did not resemble a maniac’s lair, but a harsh medieval monastery where pain and deprivation were elevated to a cult.

In the central part of the bunker, where several tunnels converged, the police found a large room that apparently served as a place for meetings or rituals.

In the middle of the room was an altar made of pieces of rusty rails and stones.

On it were strange, primitive tools, the sight of which was eerie.

Forensic experts seized a set of needles carved from the bones of small animals, probably rodents or birds.

Nearby were cans with a black viscous substance.

Rapid analysis showed that it was a mixture of soot, ash, and industrial oil.

It was this infernal cocktail and these unststerile bones that were used to tattoo the victim’s faces which explained the terrible inflammation and scars on Rebecca’s skin.

However, the main piece of evidence was waiting for the detectives at the far wall of the room.

It was a smooth, polished surface of granite, which the investigators called the wall of remorse.

It was covered with small inscriptions scratched by something sharp, perhaps a nail or a piece of stone.

These were names, dozens of names.

The detectives began to photograph the inscriptions, looking for familiar letters, and soon the flashlight beam caught what they were looking for.

The name Rebecca was unevenly scrolled almost near the floor, but it was boldly crossed out with a deep horizontal line, apparently symbolizing the death of her former self.

Next to it, in a fresher handwriting, was a new name, Mara.

This discovery was irrefutable proof that Rebecca Ellis was indeed held here.

Moreover, it confirmed the hypothesis that the kidnapper was not just torturing his victims, but was trying to reborn them by erasing their memories and giving them new names from some of his distorted scriptures.

The inspection of the premises also revealed huge stocks of canned food, water, and plastic barrels, and medicines that had long since expired.

It was obvious that this underground base had existed for years, perhaps decades, without being noticed.

It had a ventilation system with filters made from car parts and even a groundwater collection system.

The man who built it was not just a madman.

He was a talented engineer and a fanatic, ready to live underground for the rest of his life.

But now the bunker was empty.

The shadows on the walls danced from the light of the special forces flashlights, but the owners of this underground kingdom had disappeared, dissolving into the labyrinths of old mines that stretched for miles around.

The police had won the battle for information, but the main target, the one who called himself the father, had once again escaped justice.

The work of forensic experts in the underground city lasted for several days without a break.

In the light of powerful spotlights mounted on generators, experts methodically treated every inch of the surface of walls, furniture, and tools with a special black powder.

The bunker, which yesterday was home to unknown fanatics, had turned into a sterile evidence collection area.

Thousands of fingerprints were taken from door handles, dishes, book pages, and even from the stone ledges that the residents held on to as they moved through the tunnels.

When the first samples were digitized and uploaded to an automated identification system, the computer produced a result that made detectives doubt the reality of what was happening.

Most of the prints found on the old objects and walls belonged to a man who had been officially dead for 7 years.

It was Marcus Lester, the founder of the Children of the Stone Cult, whose burnt clothes were found in 2005.

It turned out that the old preacher did not die in the fire, but simply went deeper underground, faking his death to finally break ties with the world on the surface.

However, this was not the most important discovery.

On objects that had been used more recently, a toothbrush, a homemade knife handle, fresh diary pages, and tattoo tools, the experts found a completely different set of papillary patterns.

These prints were clearer, belonged to a younger man, and did not appear in any police database in the United States.

Investigators removed biological samples from these items for urgent DNA analysis.

The result, which came back from a laboratory in Sacramento, was the key to understanding the pattern of this madness.

The genetic profile of the unknown man showed a direct relationship to Marcus Lester.

The probability of paternity was 99.98%.

The son of the prophet lived in the dungeon.

But who was he? Old police reports about the dispersal of the commune in the 80s mentioned children, but their names were lost in the bureaucratic chaos.

The answer was found by operatives who were sorting through the debris in a room that probably served as the leader’s bedroom.

In an elaborate hiding place under a rough wooden bed, detectives found an old tin cookie box.

Inside, wrapped in oily paper, was a yellowed birth certificate issued in San Bernardino County in 1967.

The newborn’s name was Caleb Lester.

It was a document from another life, issued before his father finally lost his mind and took the family to the desert.

Caleb was 45 years old.

According to the dates, he had spent almost his entire adult life in isolation.

He grew up among the rocks listening to sermons about the poisonous sun and the sinful world.

And for him, these tunnels were the only normal reality.

Along with the document, the box contained a thick leatherbound notebook, Caleb’s personal diary.

Its contents became a window for the investigation into the sick mind of the man who kidnapped Rebecca.

The handwriting was small, angular, and in some places turned into illeible scribbles.

Caleb wrote about himself as a shepherd to whom his father bequeathed a great mission to save lost souls from the fire of heaven, that is from sunlight and civilization.

For him, kidnapping tourists was not a crime.

In his distorted reality, it was an act of supreme mercy.

He took people to purify them with pain, erase their memory, and give them eternal life in stone.

The detective’s special attention was drawn to the last pages dated October 2012.

In them, Caleb described in detail his relationship with a captive whom he called Mara.

It was Rebecca.

These records turned the police’s understanding of how the girl ended up at large upside down.

Until that moment, the main version was an escape.

It was believed that Rebecca seized the moment and broke out of captivity.

But the truth, written down by the hand of her tormentor, was much more terrible and cynical.

Caleb called Mara his most difficult student and at the same time his greatest disappointment.

He wrote, “I have been breaking her bones to release the demons of pride, but they are too deep.

She is silent.

She endures, but her eyes do not change.

She looks at me not as a savior but as an enemy.

Her spirit is rotten.

In the recordings, he complained that even after 2 years of torture, starvation, and drugs, Rebecca did not undergo the so-called initiation of submission.

She physically broke down but mentally continued to resist, refusing to accept his faith.

For Caleb, this was a sign of a dangerous disease.

He began to fear that her disobedience was contagious and could poison the sanctity of his underground church.

The entry of October 13th put an end to this story.

The rotten fruit must be cut off before it spoils the whole tree.

I took her to the edge of the world and left her there.

Let the sun which she loves so much burn her.

Rebecca Ellis did not escape heroically from the bunker.

She was simply thrown away like a spoiled instrument, like garbage that cannot be recycled.

Caleb Lester, this fanatical hermit, believed in his holiness so much that the very presence of a person who did not completely submit to him disgusted him.

He drove her out to the highway at night and left her to her fate.

Convinced that she would die or go completely insane, this discovery added a special tragedy to the case.

It was not physical strength that saved Rebecca’s life, but her unbreakable inner will, which proved stronger than any torture or drugs.

Now, the police knew the name of the monster, knew his motives, and understood one thing.

He was still out there in his stone world, and he was probably looking for new students.

On October 20th, 2012, 2 days after the discovery of the empty bunker, the situation in the investigation changed thanks to the vigilance of an ordinary tourist.

The climber, who was hiking in a remote sector of the park known as Rattlesnake Canyon, contacted the ranger on duty and reported strange activity.

In an area where fires are strictly forbidden, he noticed a thin column of gray smoke rising from behind a pile of rocks.

It was a place rarely visited by ordinary visitors due to the difficult terrain and the high probability of encountering rattlesnakes.

The police realized that Caleb Lester had not fled to Mexico and did not disappear into the metropolis.

He stayed in the park.

In his fanatical mind, he considered this desert his property, his temple, which he had no right to leave.

He decided to fight on the territory he knew better than anyone.

A large-scale raid began.

The command of the operation divided the search area into sectors, sending tactical groups of special forces and trackers.

But it soon became clear that modern combat tactics were powerless against a man who had become part of the landscape.

Caleb used techniques known since the Wild West, including what the old gold miners called dry gulching, luring pursuers into dry, blind ravines.

The Bravo group became the first victim of this tactic.

Following the marking pyramids of stones, the so-called Kairens that indicate the safe path in parks, the special forces entered a narrow gorge.

They were sure they were on the right track because the stones looked like they had been there for years.

In fact, Caleb had moved these markers at night, changing their navigation.

He led the team into a box canyon, a dead-end canyon with steep walls where radio communication was completely lost due to granite shielding, and the air temperature was reaching critical levels due to the lack of wind.

The group lost precious hours trying to find a way out and regain their bearings while the fugitive watched them from above.

Caleb didn’t have a firearm, but he turned the environment itself into a weapon.

He didn’t set trip wires with explosives.

He used gravity and the precarious balance of the rocks.

Around noon, an incident report came in from the alpha group.

One of the officers, an experienced veteran, was descending a narrow path and stepped on a scree that looked stable.

In fact, it was a trap.

Several large stones were propped up by smaller ones so that the slightest pressure would trigger an avalanche.

The officer slipped and fell from a height of 3 m, suffering a compound fracture of his leg.

His cry of pain echoed off the rocks, demoralizing the other searchers.

Evacuating the wounded man in such a terrain took the rest of the daylight hours, effectively halting the group’s progress.

Caleb himself moved like a ghost.

The rangers found his footprints, and it was impressive.

He walked barefoot on hot, sharp stones and thorns.

Over decades of living in the wild, his feet became as hard as the soles of his boots.

This allowed him to move absolutely silently, leaving no characteristic treadmarks.

Moreover, his knowledge of geology allowed him to hide in such narrow crevices and holes where an ordinary person would be afraid to climb due to a claustrophobic attack.

He could sit motionless for hours in a crevice only 40 cm wide, blending into the shadows.

The operation’s leadership realized that a foot chase on the ground would only endanger the personnel.

The decision was made to launch a police helicopter equipped with the latest night vision system and a fleer thermal imager.

This was a turning point.

Caleb Lester was a master of survival in the 19th century, but he had absolutely no understanding of 21st century technology.

As the sun set and the desert plunged into darkness, the helicopter pilot began to methodically scan square by square.

Caleb, hearing the hum of the propellers, did what had always saved him from human eyes.

He dove under a dense creassote bush and froze, curled up.

He was convinced that the darkness of the night was his reliable shield.

He did not know that for the infrared camera, his warm body against the cooling sand glowed bright white like a lighthouse in the sea.

The thermal imager operator clearly saw the silhouette of a man hiding under a bush in the southern part of the canyon.

The coordinates were instantly transmitted to the ground capture team.

Special forces using night vision devices silently surrounded the perimeter.

Caleb did not even realized that the trap had closed until the night silence was broken by the roar of a helicopter hovering right over his head.

At the same second, a powerful search light beam hit him in the face, blinding and disorienting him.

The reaction of the child of stone was telling.

He did not try to fight, did not look for a weapon, and did not run.

Deafened by the noise of the turbines and blinded by what he considered devil’s fire, Caleb fell to his knees and covered his head with his hands, shaking with animal terror.

To him, it looked not like a police operation, but like the arrival of the apocalypse he had been so afraid of.

The special forces soldiers threw him to the ground and snapped his handcuffs.

He offered no resistance.

His body was emaciated, covered with scars and dirt, and his eyes, when he was lifted to his feet, showed a complete lack of understanding of how the demons could see him through the darkness.

The hunt was over.

The man who had kept the desert in fear for years was now blinking helplessly in the light of electric lights, returning to the civilization he hated so much.

The trial of Caleb Lester, which began in March of 2013, did not become the sensation that journalists had hoped for.

There were no emotional confessions, no cries of remorse, and no attempts to justify themselves in the courtroom.

The defendant, who had been shaved for the first time in 45 years and dressed in a clean prison jumpsuit, was present at the hearings only physically.

His gaze was directed through the judge, through the jury, and through the walls, focusing on something only he could see.

During the entire trial, Caleb did not say a single word.

He did not respond to his lawyer’s appeals and did not show any emotion when the prosecutor showed photos of underground cells and torture tools.

The forensic psychiatric examination which lasted several months came to an unequivocal conclusion.

The suspect suffers from a deep form of paranoid schizophrenia complicated by complete social maladjustment and the consequences of being raised in a totalitarian cult.

The jury agreed with the doctor’s conclusions.

Caleb Lester was found insane due to a severe mental disorder.

Instead of life imprisonment in a regular prison, the court decided to send him to the Patent State Hospital, a closed psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period.

In their reports, the staff of the institution notes that Lester is a model patient, but completely unreachable.

He spends his days sitting on the floor of his room and staring at a single point on the wall.

Sometimes he runs his finger along the soft upholstery of the walls as if drawing invisible dungeon maps and continues to live in his cave where no one else has access.

Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away from the hospital at her parents’ home in Los Angeles, Rebecca Ellis was trying to return to a reality that had become alien to her.

Physically, she was safe.

The wounds on her legs had healed.

Her hair was growing back, and her weight was gradually returning to normal.

But mentally, she was still trapped in a stone sack.

Rebecca’s parents, who had dreamed of this moment so much, faced a terrible truth.

Returning home was not the end of the nightmare, but only the beginning of a new struggle.

The family’s everyday life turned into a minefield.

Rebecca categorically refused to sleep on the bed.

A soft mattress caused her panic attacks because for 2 years, her body had become accustomed to hard stone.

Every night, her parents found their daughter sleeping on the bare floor in the corner of the room, curled up in a fetal position without a pillow or blanket.

Nutrition became an even bigger problem.

Rebecca could not eat hot food.

The steam coming from soup or tea triggered her vomiting reflex.

She would only accept cold canned food, crackers, and water, pouring it only into a metal mug.

Psychologists explained this as deeply rooted in the habits imposed by the kidnapper.

In the bunker, hot food was an unattainable luxury, and any comfort was considered a sin.

But the dark blue cross on her forehead remained the most terrifying reminder of her experience.

In the first months after her release, doctors offered to perform a laser tattoo removal procedure at the expense of charitable foundations.

Rebecca’s reaction was immediate and aggressive.

She covered her forehead with her hands and started screaming, begging them not to touch the mark.

Medical records record her words during one of the therapy sessions.

Without it, he won’t find me.

If you wash this off, I will be lost in the dark and my father will not come for me.

It was a classic manifestation of Stockholm syndrome intertwined with mystical fear.

Caleb had so deeply integrated into her mind the idea that light is death and he is the only salvation that even after her release, she subconsciously waited for his return, considering the tattoo her only protection and a pass to eternal life.

For the parents, these words sounded like a sentence, but the doctors insisted on patience.

Forced removal of the brand could have completely destroyed her fragile psyche.

The rehabilitation process lasted for four long years.

It was a titanic work of a team of psychiatrists, rehabilitation therapists, and a loving family.

Step by step, using the methods of cognitive behavioral therapy, and soft hypnosis, the specialists destroyed the mental walls that Caleb had built in her head.

The turning point came one summer morning when Rebecca went to the mirror herself, ran her finger over the rough scar on her forehead, and for the first time ever told her mother, “It’s ugly.

I want it removed.” The tattoo removal procedure was painful and lengthy.

It took more than 12 sessions to break up the deeply embedded pigment.

The skin resisted, but with each visit to the clinic, the cross became paler until it turned into a barely noticeable white scar that could be hidden by makeup.

Today, Rebecca Ellis leads a life that looks quite normal from the outside.

She works in a small library, sorts books, and avoids publicity.

She has reconnected with her friends and even started traveling, although she never goes near deserts or mountainous areas again.

She eats a hot dinner with her parents and sleeps on the bed.

However, the shadow of the past hasn’t disappeared.

It has just changed shape.

If you walk into her room at night, you can see a detail that reveals the truth about the price of her survival.

Rebecca Ellis, who spent 2 years underground in complete darkness, is now terrified of the dark.

She sleeps only with a bright light on.

She has powerful lamps in every room of her apartment.

And even on sunny days, she never closes the windows.

For her, darkness is no longer a time for rest.

It is now the monster’s territory, and light is the only thing that keeps its ghost at bay.

The story of the girl from Joshua Tree Park is over.

But for her, every night is a new reminder that some mazes are impossible to escape from completely.