In the fall of 2019, 32-year-old Alex Carter, a system administrator from Sacramento, California, disappeared in the forests of Redwood National Park.

A large-scale search operation involving dozens of people yielded no results.

His car was found in a parking lot, but there was no sign of Alex or his gear.

The case was filed as an accident, just another tourist swallowed up by the wilderness.

But three years later, a group of cavers would make a chance discovery that would turn this mundane missing person case into one of the most terrifying and inexplicable mysteries in the park’s history.

A discovery that would present investigators with an unsolvable puzzle.

How could a living person have been walled up inside a solid tree 5 m underground? Alex Carter was a man who could easily be described as inconspicuous.

He led a quiet, measured life, working in an office and setting up computer networks.

He had no extreme hobbies or risky relationships.

His only outlet and true passion were landscape photography and drone photography.

This hobby required solitude and long trips into nature, which perfectly suited his introverted nature.

He could wander through the woods for hours in search of the perfect light or a unique angle.

Redwood National Park with its ancient giant sequoas had long been on his list of places to visit.

He meticulously planned this trip over several months, studying maps, selecting trails, and testing his equipment.

For him, it was not entertainment, but a serious project.

In the middle of the week, he took a vacation, said goodbye to his colleagues, and headed north to California.

He checked into a modest motel near the park’s borders.

The staff later described him as a polite but quiet guest who made it clear that he had come to work not to relax.

The next morning, he drove off in his car toward one of the less crowded routes.

His goal was clear to find a spot from which he could launch his drone and capture a panoramic view of the giant tree crowns at sunrise.

Before venturing deeper into the forest, he made his usual call to his sister Sarah.

it was their unspoken safety agreement.

The conversation recorded in detail was brief.

He confirmed that he was on site, that the weather was perfect for shooting, and that he was starting his route.

Everything was going according to plan.

However, about 2 hours later, he called again.

This time, his voice sounded different.

Not just cheerful, but excited.

The signal was feeble, and the connection kept dropping.

Sarah struggled to make out his words.

He talked about the incredible size of the trees, saying that the photos didn’t convey even a tenth of their power.

And then in a stream of fragmented phrases, he uttered the key words that would become the central piece of evidence in this case.

I found something here.

It has an interesting hollow at the base, like a funnel.

I’ll go check it out.

Maybe I can launch the drone from there.

The view will be At that moment, the connection was lost for good.

Sarah, accustomed to communication problems in remote areas, did not immediately raise the alarm.

She expected her brother to call back as soon as he emerged from the dead zone or returned to the motel.

But there was no call that evening or the next morning.

His cell phone was unavailable.

In the afternoon, she first contacted the motel and then the park administration.

The protocol in such cases is clear.

Rangers immediately drove to the specified trail.

They found Alex’s car in the parking lot.

This was official confirmation that he was somewhere in the park.

A search and rescue operation was launched immediately.

The first 72 hours are critical and rescuers worked at the limit of their capabilities.

Dozens of rangers and specially trained volunteers systematically combed the area.

Dog teams were brought in to assist with the operation.

The dogs picked up the scent from the car and confidently followed the trail for about a mile.

But then something strange happened.

At the same point, in a small open area, all the dogs lost the trail.

They became confused, began to circle around, and could no longer determine Alex’s direction of travel.

It looked as if he had turned off the trail right there, but where he had gone was completely unclear.

A helicopter equipped with a thermal imager was working in parallel with the ground team.

Still, the thick, tall forest canopy made it virtually useless.

The crowns of the sequoia trees closing together at a height of tens of meters formed a solid green dome that concealed everything happening on the ground.

Rescuers searched every inch around the spot where the trail ended.

They checked ravines, thicket, and crevices in the rocks, but they found absolutely nothing.

No traces, no abandoned items, no bulky backpack with camera equipment, no drone.

The lack of clues was frightening.

If he had fallen and injured himself, he would have stayed somewhere nearby.

If he had been attacked by a predator, there would have been traces of a struggle and blood.

But there was nothing.

The man had simply vanished.

A few days later, the weather turned unfavorable, and heavy rains began, washing away any remaining traces.

A week later, the active search was called off.

In the months that followed, rangers and volunteer groups returned to the route several times.

Still, it was more out of respect for the family than a genuine attempt to find anything.

The official conclusion was dry and ruthless.

Alex Carter was considered missing, presumed dead as a result of an accident.

For the police and rescuers, it was just another closed case.

For the family, it was an open wound and years of complete uncertainty.

Sarah Carter was convinced that the official version did not reflect reality.

Her brother was not a reckless novice, and his last words about a hollow funnel haunted her.

She felt that the key to the mystery lay in those words, but no one could understand what he meant.

Three years passed.

The story of Alex Carter became a local legend, a horror story for tourists.

But the truth waited silently all this time, hidden from view in a dark vertical grave that no one seemed able to penetrate.

3 years is a long time.

For the Carter family, it was 3 years of emptiness, unanswered questions, and slowly fading hope.

For the Park Service, Alex’s case became a statistic.

However, in the late fall of 2022, people who had no connection to the story became inadvertently involved.

It was a small group of cavers from a local university.

Two men, Dr.

Aerys Thorne, an experienced geologist, and his young assistant, Liam.

They weren’t interested in tourist trails, but in the hidden and unexplored cavities, sink holes, and unusual geological formations that abounded in the region.

That day they were exploring a remote area of the forest, consulting old topographical maps that marked potentially interesting sites.

Their goal was not to discover caves in the usual sense, but to study how the root systems of giant sequoas affect the soil and form underground cavities.

They had been making their way through the thick undergrowth for several hours when they stumbled upon something extraordinary.

It was one of the ancient sequoas, a true giant, possibly over a thousand years old.

The tree was so massive at its base that it resembled a rock formation covered with bark.

But it wasn’t the tree itself that caught the scientist’s attention, but what was at its foot.

Between the giant roots protruding from the ground, there was a dark hole.

It didn’t look like a standard hollow.

It was an almost perfectly round funnel descending vertically as if someone had drilled into the ground with a giant drill.

The edges of the funnel were smooth, as if melted, possibly from time or constant friction.

It was precisely what Thorne and Liam were looking for, a unique natural formation.

And it was the very place that Alex Carter had described three years ago in his last call as a hollow that looks like a funnel.

Dr.

Thorne was thrilled.

He suggested that it might be the result of underground water washing away the soil under the tree, creating a vertical well.

They decided to investigate.

They had their equipment with them, ropes, carabiners, harnesses, and powerful headlamps.

Liam, being younger and lighter, was to go down first.

They secured the rope to one of the massive roots, checked the safety equipment, and Liam began his descent.

The opening was narrow, about a meter in diameter, but immediately behind it, the cavity widened slightly.

The beams of his headlamp slid across the damp, dark brown walls.

It was not pure wood, but a compressed mass of earth, small roots, and bark polished smooth.

The air was heavy, smelling of damp earth, mushrooms, and decay.

Thorne’s muffled commands could be heard from outside, but here inside the tree, there was almost complete silence, broken only by the creaking of his equipment and his own breathing.

He descended about 3 m.

The cavity narrowed, turning into a narrow tube.

Liam moved slowly, examining the walls, and then he noticed the first thing that alarmed him.

On one of the walls at eye level, a small piece of blue fabric was literally pressed into the bark.

It looked foreign.

Liam touched it with his finger.

It was a thick synthetic fabric similar to the material of a jacket.

Strange.

He reported this to Thorne above, who suggested that it might be debris brought in by the water.

Liam continued his descent.

After another couple of meters, at a depth of approximately 5 m from the surface, the cavity narrowed slightly again.

And there, his flashlight beam caught something in the darkness that froze his heart.

Right below him, in the narrowest part of the well, something white and round was stuck.

At first, he thought it was a mushroom or a strange growth on the roots.

He shown the light more closely.

The white object had two dark hollow areas, eye sockets, and a row of teeth beneath them.

It was a human skull.

It was wedged upright, the top of the skull facing upward, staring straight into the darkness below.

Liam broke out in a cold sweat.

He froze, hanging from the rope.

His brain refused to accept what his eyes were seeing.

He took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself, and shouted up, “Aris, come down quick.

There’s There are bones.

Human bones.

His voice sounded hollow and strained.

A few minutes later, Dr.

Thorne was beside him.

Together, by the light of two flashlights, they examined the gruesome find in detail.

These weren’t just bones.

It was a skeleton, or rather the upper part of one.

The skull and several upper vertebrae were clearly visible.

The rest of the body disappeared deeper into the narrowing crevice covered with rotten leaves and earth.

The position of the body was completely unnatural.

It had been pulled in vertically, feet down, as if it had been thrown into a narrow pipe.

Around the bones were decayed shreds of clothing.

The same blue fabric of the jacket that Liam had noticed above was literally torn from the body and dented, imprinted into the walls of the well, as if by very rapid and violent friction.

They were scientists, not police officers, but both understood that they were at a crime scene, or at least the sight of a tragic death.

They had no right to touch anything.

But Dr.

Thorne noticed something else.

A small rectangular object was sticking out of the remains of what had once been a trouser pocket.

It was wedged between the thigh bone and the wall of the cavity.

Very carefully, using tweezers from his geological kit, Thorne extracted it.

It was an ordinary flash drive.

Its plastic casing was scratched but looked intact.

In this dark, damp crypt inside the tree, this small detail seemed like a greeting from another world.

A flash drive.

This meant that the deceased had electronics with him.

It was a clue.

They made the right decision.

Leaving everything as it was, they began to climb up.

Emerging from the dark funnel into the light, they both stood silent for several minutes, trying to comprehend what they had seen.

Then, Dr.

Thorne took out his satellite phone and dialed the emergency services.

The conversation was surreal.

We’ve found human remains.

Yes, in Redwood National Park.

No, not in a cave.

Inside a tree.

Yes, I’m sane.

About 5 m deep.

Come here.

We’ll show you the place.

The person on the other end of the line was obviously confused, but the information was too serious to ignore.

A couple of hours later, the first rangers arrived, followed by investigators and forensic experts.

The quiet spot in the forest became the center of a complex and grim operation.

The area was cordoned off.

The slow and painstaking process of extracting the remains from their wooden grave began.

And every new fact that the investigators uncovered made the story even more bizarre and impossible.

The operation to recover Alex Carter’s remains was difficult and took almost an entire day.

The team of forensic experts worked with the utmost care.

They had to use special climbing equipment to descend into the narrow well without damaging the evidence.

Every step was documented.

They worked in silence, broken only by commands and the click of a camera.

The first thing they established at the scene was the complete absence of any equipment.

No backpack, no camera, no expensive drone, which was the reason Alex had come to this park.

His phone was also missing.

All that was left of him in this vertical grave was his decaying clothes and the flash drive that the cabers had already taken.

This was the first significant discrepancy.

Alex was obsessed with his equipment.

He would never have left it behind.

If he had fallen accidentally, his backpack would most likely have fallen with him or remained at the entrance to the crevice.

But there was nothing up there either.

The remains were carefully excavated and transported to the laboratory.

Identification did not take long.

The dental records matched Alex Carter’s perfectly.

For his sister Sarah, it was both a shock and a relief.

After 3 years of uncertainty, she finally knew what had happened to her brother.

But her relief was short-lived.

The forensic report, which was ready a few weeks later, raised far more questions than it answered.

This document turned the tragic story into a real puzzle.

The expert’s first and foremost conclusion was shocking.

Alex Carter was alive when he fell into the tree.

Numerous injuries were found on the bones, including scratches, chips, and cracks characteristic of a fall or being dragged through a very narrow space.

In other words, he was not killed somewhere else, and his body was then hidden in the tree.

He died right there inside that dark cavity.

The official cause of death was listed as positional asphixia.

In simple terms, he was stuck in a position where he couldn’t breathe and slowly suffocated, squeezed from all sides.

This explained his death, but not how he got there.

There’s more.

Experts carefully examined the remains for signs of a struggle.

There were no defensive fractures on the bones of his hands, no signs of blows.

No DNA from other people was found on his decayed clothing.

This cast doubt on the theory that someone had forced him there.

But the animal attack theory also fell apart.

There was not a single trace of teeth or claws on the bones.

Neither a bear nor a cougar would leave such clean remains.

They would have torn the body apart and gnawed on the bones.

Here, however, the skeleton was almost intact except for the damage caused by the fall itself.

So, what do we have? A man alive without outside help and without a struggle somehow falls into a vertical well five meters deep and less than a meter wide where he dies.

How? Without ropes or a ladder, it is impossible to get out of there.

But even voluntarily climbing down there feet first without equipment is practically impossible.

It would have been suicide, but Alex had no reason to do so.

He was full of plans and enthusiasm as his last phone call confirmed.

All hopes rested on the flash drive.

It was sent to the best data recovery lab.

Specialists worked on it for several weeks.

3 years in damp conditions had taken their toll and the media were severely damaged, but they still managed to recover a few files.

They were photographs.

However, when the investigators arrived, they were met with further disappointment.

Most of the images were just a jumble of digital noise, colored stripes, and spots.

Only three frames were recognizable.

They were blurry, chaotic images, obviously taken in motion.

They showed the blurred textures of bark and earth shot from very close range.

The camera probably went off accidentally as he fell or was being dragged inside.

They contained no helpful information.

They were simply a silent testimony to his last terrible moments.

And just when it seemed that the story had reached a dead end, the forensic experts discovered the last most bizarre detail.

During a second, more thorough examination of the bones, a cut was found on Alex’s right shoulder blade.

It was not a scratch or a crack from an impact.

It was a thin, perfectly even, and smooth incision about 2 cm long.

The expert who conducted the examination said he had never seen anything like it.

It did not resemble a knife mark or a bite from an animal.

Its precision and cleanliness made it look more like a cut made with a surgical instrument, possibly a laser or something similar.

But what could a surgical instrument be doing in the middle of a remote forest? And how was this cut related to Alex falling into the tree? This detail did not fit into any of the theories.

It was completely irrational.

Ultimately, the official investigation was concluded.

The conclusion was death by accident.

It was assumed that Alex Carter, acting carelessly, had gotten too close to a dangerous hole, slipped, and fallen in.

This version was convenient.

It allowed the case to be closed.

But none of the investigators working on the case truly believed it.

It didn’t explain anything.

Not the missing equipment, not the lack of traces at the top, not the unnatural vertical position of the body, not the strange surgical incision on the shoulder, and the main question remained unanswered.

The Alex Carter case is closed, but his story lives on in the reports of criminologists and the legends of this park.

The story of a man who called his sister to share his joy at his discovery and a few minutes later was swallowed up by the forest.

Officially, he fell, but the facts tell a different story.

They suggest that something pulled him in into the darkness, and no one can say what that something was.

The mystery of Alex Carter turned out to be deeper and darker than the wooden grave in which his bones were