It's hard to imagine losing a loved one, a wife, a husband, a child.

For many, it's their biggest fear.

Amarissa Jones, host of The Vanished.

A podcast that tells the stories of often overlooked and unsolved missing persons' cases

in an effort to uncover the truth.

Follow The Vanished on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised.

I think one of the big themes for me is obsession.

Great theme.

It's the characters are obsessed.

I become obsessed.

There's a whole culture of obsession around this far-form place,

Picare and Island.

And you start finding this insane cause and effect of actions 200 years ago

and how they've impacted a group of individuals today.

So another big theme is trauma.

Little trauma is everywhere, essentially.

And it's a civilization on the edge of the world

and it's sort of death by a thousand cuts.

I'm Kate Linkler Dawson,

a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

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