October 8th, 1976. Knoxville, Tennessee.

16-year-old trainee Gibbs and leaves on a high school field trip alongside nearly 40 students

and travels to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The students spend the day hiking on a trail

throughout the park, but after trainee is last seen turning off the trail at around 3 pm,

she vanishes without explanation. During a search of the park, dogs would track

trainees sent to a spot next to the road, creating speculation that she was abducted,

but no trace of trainee is ever found. After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the trail went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warner and today we're going to be examining a missing persons case

from the Great Smoky Mountains, the 1976 disappearance of trainee Gibson. This is a special

request from a listener named Laura who runs a blog devoted to trainee at CanadianGirl77.com.

Laura has personally spoken to the victim's family and many of trainee's former classmates,

so she has an extensive knowledge of this case. Since I don't think it's ever been featured on

a podcast before, I thought it would be an ideal time to cover it on the trail and cold.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which rests on the Tennessee and North Carolina border,

is the most visited national park in the United States, and a number of unsolved disappearances

have taken place there. For this reason, you'll often see trainee's story lumped together with the

1969 disappearance of 6-year-old Dennis Martin, which was covered on an episode of True Crime Garage

a few months ago, and the 1981 disappearance of 58-year-old Thelma Pauline Melton.

There are a number of different theories about what happened in these stories. Some people

believe these victims simply got lost and died of exposure in the park, but God help us.

There are others who attempt to link these disappearances to the supernatural,

...