Two young people disappear in a huge forest.

For 5 years, no one hears from them.

Then they are found lying in a perfect clearing without a single drop of blood.

But the most terrifying thing is that there is nothing inside their bodies.

Emptiness.

And the only clue left behind only adds to the madness of the case.

This is the story of Mark and Emily and what happened to them in the forests of Wisconsin.

Our story begins in the fall of 1996.

September in Wisconsin is a time when the summer heat has subsided and nature is preparing for a long winter.

The air becomes cool and clear and the leaves on the trees begin to change color.

It’s the perfect time for a hike.

22-year-old Mark Henderson and his girlfriend, 20-year-old Emily Richards, decided to spend their weekend doing just that.

They were students from Chicago, tired of the noise of the big city and dreaming of a couple of days of peace and quiet.

Mark was a fairly experienced hiker.

He had been hiking with his father since childhood and knew how to behave in the wild.

Emily was a novice at this, but her enthusiasm and trust in Mark outweighed any uncertainty.

They planned their trip carefully.

Their choice fell on the Czechu Nicolet National Forest.

It is a huge area, almost 600,000 hectares of wild, untouched nature.

Dense forests, hundreds of lakes and rivers, hills and swamps.

The place is beautiful, but also dangerous.

It is easy to get lost here if you don’t know the route, but Mark had a map, a compass, and a clear plan.

They planned to follow one of the popular routes designed to take exactly 2 days.

On Friday afternoon, September 13th, they arrived at the trail head in Mark’s old blue Ford Escort.

They left the car in a special parking lot, slung their heavy backpacks over their shoulders, and disappeared into the trees.

They told their parents and friends that they would be back on Sunday evening or Monday morning at the latest.

Those were the last people to see them alive.

Sunday passed.

Mark and Emily did not return.

Their phones were, of course, out of range.

In those days, coverage in such remote areas was almost non-existent.

Their parents began to worry, but decided to wait until Monday morning.

Perhaps they had simply been delayed, decided to walk an extra kilometer, or were enjoying nature and lost track of time.

But when Monday morning, September 16th, brought no news, it became clear that something had happened.

Emily’s parents called the county sheriff’s office.

A missing person’s report was filed immediately.

The deputy sheriff’s first order was to go to the parking lot at the trail head.

The blue Ford Escort was still there.

That was a bad sign.

It meant they hadn’t even left the forest.

From that moment on, a full-scale search operation began.

Dozens of people were involved, police officers, national park rangers, and volunteers.

Local residents who knew these woods well.

The search was very intense for the first few days.

People were divided into groups, each assigned a square to comb through.

A helicopter circled above the forest trying to spot any sign from the air.

A bright patch of clothing, smoke from a fire.

But the Czechwamagon Nicolay forest is not a park for walking.

It is a dense wall of trees where almost nothing can be seen from a height of several dozen meters.

The search teams on the ground moved slowly.

They shouted Mark and Emily’s names, but all they heard in response was an echo and the sound of the wind in the treetops.

The weather began to deteriorate and rain began to fall, making the search even more difficult.

Any traces, if there were any, were washed away by the water.

On the third day of the search on Wednesday, one of the groups stumbled upon their camp.

It was located about 10 km from the parking lot off the main trail in a small, cozy clearing by a stream.

At first glance, everything seemed normal.

Their orange tent was standing there.

Next to it lay a neatly folded hatchet and several logs for a fire.

But when the searchers got closer, they realized that this place was not just abandoned.

It was strange.

The first thing that caught their eye was the entrance to the tent.

It was not unzipped, but cut open.

Someone had made a long, straight cut with a knife from top to bottom.

It didn’t look like the work of a bear or other animal.

claws would have left torn holes, but here there was a neat cut.

Inside the tent were two sleeping bags, neatly spread out.

Next to them were two backpacks.

The rescuers examined them.

Inside was everything they needed for a hike, a change of clothes, flashlights, a first aid kit, a map, and a compass.

Emily’s camera was in her backpack.

The last pictures had been taken right there in this clearing.

Happy faces, beautiful forest landscapes.

Nothing indicated any danger.

The most frightening detail was related to food.

All the provisions they had taken with them, canned food, packets of freeze-dried meals, energy bars, were still there.

They were in a separate bag, hung from a tree branch, as they should be to avoid attracting wild animals.

The bag was untouched.

The cooking pot stood clean next to the extinguished campfire.

It was completely baffling.

If they had gotten lost and left the camp in search of the road, they would have taken the food with them.

If they had been attacked by an animal, the camp would have been ransacked and the food eaten or scattered.

If they had been robbed, their valuables would have been taken.

The camera, maybe some of their equipment, but everything was still there.

Everything except Mark and Emily.

There were no signs of a struggle, not a drop of blood, not a shred of torn clothing.

There were no footprints around the camp except for those of the tourists and searchers themselves.

The young man and woman had simply vanished, leaving behind a perfectly preserved scene of their last rest.

The sheriff and his team were at a dead end.

They questioned everyone they could, friends, relatives, classmates, no leads.

Mark and Emily had no enemies and weren’t involved in any shady business.

They were just a normal young couple.

The theory that they had decided to run away and start a new life, didn’t hold up either.

Why would they go into the woods and leave all their belongings, including money and documents, in their backpacks? The search continued for several more weeks, but to no avail.

The forest remained silent.

Gradually, the operation was wound down.

Mark and Emily’s parents spent all their savings hiring private investigators, but even they couldn’t find anything.

The case of the disappearance of Mark Henderson and Emily Richards was shelved, becoming one of the many unsolved mysteries of the vast forest.

For the families, it was the beginning of a nightmare that would last for many years.

Living without knowing what happened to your child is torture.

They couldn’t bury them or mourn them properly.

There was only emptiness and oppressive uncertainty.

5 years, five long years passed without incident.

It seemed that the forest had swallowed their secret forever.

5 years passed.

In the police archives, the file on Mark and Emily was covered with a thin layer of dust.

For everyone except their families, the story became a local horror story told around the campfire to new tourists so they wouldn’t stray from the trails.

The search had long since ended.

Hope had faded, leaving only a dull, aching pain in the hearts of the parents.

5 years of silence and uncertainty.

During that time, nothing changed in the Czechwagon Nicolay forest.

It stood as before, huge and silent, keeping its secrets.

But in the spring of 2001, nature decided to intervene.

The winter was unusually snowy and spring came abruptly and warmly.

Huge masses of snow began to melt at an incredible rate.

At the same time, torrential rains began which lasted for a week without stopping.

The rivers and streams that crisscrossed the entire national park burst their banks.

A severe flood began, the likes of which the locals had not seen in decades.

The water rushed through the forest in muddy, turbulent streams, knocking down small trees, washing away the soil and changing the landscape.

When the water finally receded, the forest looked different.

Where there had been trails, there were now fallen tree trunks.

Where there had been low-lying areas, a new swamp had formed.

The water had cut through the soil, exposing what had been hidden for years.

In early May, two forest rangers, Dave and Carl, were making their rounds on ATVs.

Their job was to assess the damage caused by the flood and check the condition of remote areas of the forest.

They were driving through an area that was rarely visited by people.

It was in the middle of nowhere, several kilometers from all known roots.

The water had done a lot of damage here, washing away all the undergrowth and bushes.

And then they saw it.

Ahead, among the fallen trees and wet ground, was an area that looked completely out of place.

A small, perfectly round clearing about 10 m in diameter.

The grass on it was not trampled by water, nor was it covered with silt and debris.

It was clean and green, as if the flood had bypassed this place.

And something was lying in this clearing.

Two dark figures.

The rangers silenced the engines of their ATVs.

A tense silence hung in the forest.

They moved forward slowly, feeling a chill run down their spines.

As they got closer, they realized that they were people, two bodies.

They were lying on their backs at a perfect distance from each other, almost a meter apart.

They were perfectly parallel, their heads facing north.

It was as if someone had laid them out with a ruler.

They were wearing the same clothes that had been described in the missing person’s reports 5 years ago.

They were damp, but surprisingly intact.

But that wasn’t the strangest or most disturbing thing.

Both of their faces were covered with something.

Looking closer, Dave realized that it was their own t-shirts.

Someone had taken their t-shirts off and carefully covered their faces with them.

The rangers immediately contacted the sheriff’s office by radio.

The news of the discovery of the bodies shook the small town.

The old case of Mark Henderson and Emily Richards was immediately taken out of the archives.

The sheriff, who had handled the case 5 years ago and was about to retire, arrived at the scene in person.

The clearing was about 8 km away from where their camp had once been found.

8 km of wild, impenetrable forest.

How did they end up here? Water could have carried the bodies, but then why were they lying so neatly? Why was the clearing so clean? There were more questions than answers.

Forensic experts worked for hours documenting every inch of this strange place.

The main mystery was plain for all to see.

There was not a single drop of blood on or around the bodies.

None at all.

The ground was clean.

It was impossible.

Even if they had died somewhere else and been carried here by the flood, the decomposition process should have left traces, but there were none.

The bodies looked as if they had been placed there very recently, but it was obvious that they had been lying in the forest for a very long time.

Their condition was unusual.

Their skin had darkened and hardened from time and exposure to the elements, but there were no visible injuries.

No gunshot wounds, no knife wounds, no animal bites.

Their skin was intact.

The bodies were taken to the morg for autopsy.

The pathologist, doctor Alan Carter was an experienced specialist, but what he encountered defied all logical explanation.

The external examination revealed nothing.

As the forensic experts had suspected, there were no penetrating wounds on the skin.

There were no broken bones.

The cause of death was completely unclear.

Then Dr.

Carter took a scalpel and made the first incision on Mark’s body from the sternum down, and he froze.

What he saw made him question his own sanity.

There was nothing inside.

The chest and abdominal cavities were completely empty.

There was no heart, no lungs, no liver, no kidneys, no stomach, no intestines, nothing.

All the internal organs had been removed completely.

But how? There was not a single incision on the body through which this could have been done.

The skin was intact.

It was like some kind of monstrous trick.

Dr.

Carter performed an autopsy on Emily’s body.

The result was the same.

a perfectly empty cavity inside.

He checked everything over and over again, looking for any hidden stitches, punctures, any opening through which such an operation could have been performed.

Nothing.

It was physically impossible.

Someone or something had somehow removed all the internal organs without damaging the outer shell.

But that wasn’t all.

There was no blood inside the bodies just as there was none outside.

The vascular system was empty.

It was as if every last drop of blood had been drained from them before the organs were removed.

Dr.

Carter had been a pathologist for over 30 years.

He had seen everything from accidents to the most brutal murders, but he had never seen anything like this.

He called an emergency meeting and invited other specialists.

None of them could offer a coherent explanation.

The official cause of death in the report was written with great reluctance.

Murder committed by an unknown person under unknown circumstances.

But in private conversations, everyone agreed that this was not the work of a human being.

No surgeon in the world, even with the most modern instruments, could have repeated such a feat.

The mystery of Mark and Emily’s disappearance turned into the mystery of their impossible deaths.

It seemed that the investigation had once again reached a dead end.

But there was one more detail.

The very t-shirt that had covered Mark’s face.

Forensic scientists sent it to the lab for thorough analysis with little hope of finding anything after 5 years in the forest and a recent flood.

The t-shirt had been lying in the forest for 5 years.

5 years in the rain, snow, and scorching sun.

and then it survived a flood.

There was almost no chance of finding anything useful on it, especially fragile evidence such as fingerprints.

But it was the only chance, and the forensic experts clung to it.

The fabric was carefully dried in a special chamber and then processed.

Hour after hour, centimeter by centimeter, experts studied the material under microscopes, treated it with chemical reagents, and shown different spectrums of light through it.

Most of the surface was hopelessly damaged.

But in one area, where the fabric had probably been closest to the face, a special compound revealed a faint, barely visible trace.

These were fragments of fingerprints, several smudged, incomplete patterns of papillary lines.

The prints were very pale, on the verge of disappearing.

They were not enough for a complete identification, but it was something.

Forensic experts spent several days working on digital images of these fragments.

They used the latest software to enhance contrast, remove noise, and try to assemble a single, more or less legible fingerprint from several fragments.

And they succeeded.

They were able to reconstruct a partial, but fairly clear fingerprint.

It was a breakthrough.

For the first time in 5 years, there was real evidence that could lead to the killer.

The fingerprint was immediately run through all available databases.

First in the Wisconsin State database, then in the FBI’s national database, millions of fingerprints of criminals, military personnel, government employees.

The investigators waited with baited breath.

They were sure that someone capable of such a thing must have left traces somewhere before.

Hours passed, then days.

The response from the lab was short and disappointing.

No matches found.

The print did not belong to anyone in the databases.

This meant that the killer had either never been charged with a crime or served in the military or he was not from the United States.

It was a blow, but the investigation did not stop.

The lead forensic scientist, a man named Frank, who was working on reconstructing the print, decided to take another look at the image.

Something about it bothered him.

He enlarged the image on a large monitor, scrutinizing every line, every curve of the pattern, and then he noticed something he hadn’t seen before.

At first, it looked like an artifact or a result of poor print quality.

But the longer he looked, the more he realized that this was no mistake.

The structure of the print was wrong, anatomically impossible.

He called his colleague.

Together, they stared at the screen in complete bewilderment.

Every human fingerprint has certain boundaries.

The papillary lines that create a unique pattern cover the pad of the finger, but they stop at the nail bed and the nail itself.

This is basic anatomy.

But on this print, everything was different.

The papillary lines did not break off.

They flowed smoothly without a single break from the pad to the top of the finger, curving and covering the place where any human being should have had a nail.

There was no nail on this finger.

And judging by the continuous pattern of skin, there never had been.

It was not an injury or amputation.

It was a completely different structure of the fingertip, alien to humans.

Frank has been working in forensics for 40 years.

He has seen thousands, tens of thousands of fingerprints.

He has seen fingers with congenital defects, scars, and rare skin diseases.

But he had never seen anything like this before.

He consulted with biologists and anthropologists.

They all confirmed that this was not possible in humans.

The nail is an integral part of the structure of a primate’s finger.

The absence of a nail in combination with this skin structure is not a mutation or congenital defect known to science.

This information was the final nail in the coffin of this investigation.

The case, which began with a mysterious disappearance, went through a gruesome discovery of empty bodies and now had run into a completely unimaginable paranormal clue.

What should the police do? put out a warrant for a creature with fingerprints without fingernails.

It sounded like the ravings of a madman.

They had the killer’s fingerprint, but it pointed to someone who, biologically speaking, couldn’t exist.

The case of Mark Henderson and Emily Richards remains unsolved.

It sits in the archives marked open, but investigation suspended.

Their families were able to bury what was left of their children, but they never got an answer to the main question.

who did it and why? The official version is murder.

But no one can explain how it was done.

No one can explain how all the organs could have been removed from the body without leaving a single cut.

And no one can explain who the strange fingerprint left on the t-shirt belonged to.

The story of Mark and Emily has become a dark legend of the Wisconsin woods, a reminder that there are things beyond our understanding.

And sometimes the forest doesn’t just hold secrets.

Sometimes it is the secret itself.