For this episode, I thought I'd go through some of the cases of really mysterious disappearances of children in the woods.

In 1856, in the Pennsylvania and Allegheny Mountains, two young boys went missing.

Nearly 200 people rapidly began searching for them through the dense hilltops and ravines,

but they could find no trace of the boys.

They wouldn't give up, though, and for ten days they searched.

Everyone got involved, closing their businesses and stopping work to help in the search,

knowing the unforgiving wilderness of the area they were lost in.

Many people stayed out at night, lighting fires on various spots across the mountains, hoping

to draw the children towards one of them.

While many sighters took a new route on the mountain each day, others would travel back

over the same ground they'd already covered, guessing that the children could have come back

to that part of the mountain in their wanderings.

As the days went by without a trace of them, speculation and rum began amongst the community they were killed by a wild beast they had been kidnapped their parents had murdered them

then a farmer named jacob dilbert who lived a few miles away began to have recurring nightmares for several nights in a row he dreamt that he was with the search

party when he became separated from them and discovered the boys. Unfamiliar with the forest area

himself, though he thought himself crazy, he described to his wife the detailed scene in his

nightmares and asked her if she knew of an area like that in the mountains.

She replied that there was such an area.

Upon telling his brother-in-law about the nightmares too, his brother-in-law thought it impossible

for the boys to have got that location in Jacob's dreams.

They would have had to have gone approximately six miles from their home and crossed a wide, fast-running

creek and climbed high. The two boys, George and Joseph Cox, were only five and seven years old.

...