Don't Leave the Trail

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Today's podcast features three stories that will make you think twice before leaving the trail.

The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.

The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Red Hair, and it's about how one hiker's photograph revealed a chilling discovery.

The second story you'll hear is called When You Find My Body, and it's about a woman who got lost hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

And the third and final story you'll hear is called SOS, and it's about a distress signal that was found deep inside of a deadly valley in Japan.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the Write podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So, if that's of interest to you, please cut all the Waldos out of a Where's Waldo book and give that to the Amazon Music Follow button for their birthday.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Red Hair.

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In March of 2015, 22-year-old Sailor Gilliams and her good friend Brendan Vega, who was also 22, decided they wanted to go hiking.

Now, they were both highly inexperienced hikers, so when they were looking in the area for places to go hiking, they were looking for novice trails, things that they would be able to manage.

And they thought they had found one in Santa Barbara, California.

And so they headed off in that direction and they took off on this particular trail.

A little ways into their hike, and they started to feel like, man, the terrain here is pretty treacherous.

This is way more difficult than than we were expecting when we looked at the map.

And as they continued and they're climbing over these huge boulders and it just seems totally like an advanced trail, they start to wonder, you know, did we veer off the trail?

Worried they might be lost, they turned around and began backtracking, hoping to find the trail and find some landmark that would allow them to confirm they were on the right trail.

As they're backtracking, not only do they not find the trail, but they don't find any trail.

They've managed to go completely off the path and are now in this kind of random boulder field that they have no idea where it is on the map.

Navigating this terrain in the daytime with light would have been difficult even for an experienced hiker.

But now it's nighttime, they don't have flashlights, and they're jumping boulder to boulder and Sailor at some point loses her footing and falls and fractures her leg.

Brendan rushes over and tries to help Sailor stand up but she can't move.

And so Brendan tries to put her on his shoulders and starts walking with her.

And that works for a little while until they're passing by this waterfall and they fall off of it and they come careening down, they smash onto the ground, they survive the fall, but Brendan now has a broken elbow and Sailor now has a broken ankle on top of her broken leg.

Sailor's in excruciating pain and because of this fall, there's just no way Brandon's going to be able to lift her back up and keep walking.

And so the decision was made that Brendan was going to go try to find help on his own and that she would stay here and continue to yell for help in hopes that someone might hear her before Brendan got back.

He takes off and as soon as he's around the corner and gone, Sailor begins screaming for help and she would continue screaming for help all through the night well into the next day.

About 24 hours after Brendan had left, he still had not returned and at this point Sailor is in and out of consciousness.

She knows that she's going downhill quickly unless someone finds her.

By the following afternoon, Brendan is still not back yet.

So laying face down in the mud with flies buzzing all over her head, she was helpless and trapped, and there was nothing she could do but wait until either a miracle occurred and someone found her, or most likely, she just dies.

So at the same time that Sailor and Brendan are going through this horrible ordeal, Three totally unconnected people decide they want to blow off work and school and just go escape into nature.

And so they settle on a hike that would bring them to a waterfall in Santa Barbara, California.

Even though this waterfall was a popular tourist attraction, it was very difficult to get to it.

It basically required 45 minutes of almost uphill climbing across boulder fields.

Very dangerous, and it's not something for a novice hiker to be doing.

So they reach the parking lot, they take off on this hike, and when they're just at the base of the waterfall, instead of taking the main trail up to the top, the three hikers decide, let's actually go around off the trail to this pocket of boulders over here where there's a couple freshwater pools that have formed underneath the base of the waterfall.

So they leave the main trail and they're climbing over these huge boulders.

It's very dangerous.

And at some point one of the hikers starts taking pictures as they're kind of going across these boulders.

Through the viewfinder, as they're taking pictures, they notice something out of the corner of their eye that's in frame.

It was like this red flash of something.

And so the hiker puts their camera down and she looks down where she sees this red and she can tell right away that it's someone's hair.

It's a girl's dyed red hair and it was Sailor.

The hikers went down to Sailor and they called 911 and they came in, they airlifted her out of there and Sailor would actually make a full recovery.

Unfortunately, Sailor's friend Brendan did not make it.

They found his body about 100 meters away from where she had been laying.

After the ordeal, the woman who was taking those pictures and had spotted Sailor out of the corner of her eye, she went to her camera and was flicking through some of the pictures she had taken during the hike.

She had inadvertently taken a picture of Sailor before they had found her.

So, had it not been for these hikers being where they were and taking those pictures and noticing her red hair, this picture almost certainly would have become the last picture of Sailor Gilliams alive.

Our next story is called When You Find My Body.

66-year-old Geraldine Largay was nicknamed Inchworm by her friends for her hilariously slow hiking pace.

But her slow pace didn't stop her from doing the thing that she loved, which was to hike.

And in fact, on April 23rd, 2013, Geraldine, along with one of her close friends, Jane Lee, decided to embark on this nearly 1,000-mile-long hike through the Appalachian Trail.

Geraldine's husband, of 42 years, his name was George, he planned to drive ahead of the pair and meet them at prearranged spots along this thousand mile long journey to give them supplies and would occasionally bring them to a motel so they could shower and sleep in a bed.

By June 30th, so more than two months after they had started this journey, Jane finds out that she has a family emergency and she isn't able to continue this hike.

Geraldine decided she was going to finish what she started on her own, despite the fact that realistically she hated hiking alone.

She was very scared, frankly, of being out in the wilderness by herself, but she only had about 200 miles left.

And so she figured, what the heck, I'll finish this thing out on my own.

Later, Jane would tell investigators that when she left the trail to handle this family emergency, she felt like Geraldine was a little bit in over her head.

She was someone that just didn't do well hiking on her own, and she still had 200 miles to go.

But Jane just had too much going on in her life, and so she didn't stick around to try to convince Geraldine to come with her.

Instead, she said, best of luck, Geraldine, and I'll see you at the end.

So for the next three weeks, Geraldine carried on down the Appalachian Trail on her own.

And by all accounts, it was going really well.

She was checking in with her family and saying, this is the mile mark I'm at, and she was making all her rendezvous points with George to get resupplied and to go to the motel with him.

And so everything was going great.

Then on July 22nd, Geraldine would send a text message to her husband, George, saying that she thinks she's in some trouble and that she lost the trail and is now lost.

And she would ask him to call the Appalachian Mountain Club and see if they had a trail maintainer that could come out and look for her and kind of get her back on track.

The problem was Geraldine couldn't get these text messages to go through.

There was very bad service where she was.

So she begins to walk to higher ground to try to get a better cell phone signal.

And so she goes up this hill and she repeatedly tries to send these text messages out to George to say I'm lost and I need help, but none of them were going through.

She would spend the whole night trying to send text messages from this mountain before finally putting her sleeping bag down and sleeping for the night.

The next morning, she got up and she sent another text message, this one a little bit more urgent, to her husband.

She told him that she was lost since yesterday and was off the trail three or even four miles and that he should now call the police.

But that message also failed, and so none of her messages over the past 24 hours have been sent out, and so nobody knows that she's lost.

But at some point that day, she decides, I'm going to just put my phone away, save the battery life, and just wait, because I'm supposed to meet my husband today.

And when I don't show up, he's going to call authorities.

They're going to come looking for me and everything will be fine.

She leaves the mountain and finds this area underneath a couple of trees.

It had some pine needles on the ground.

It was relatively soft.

She set up her tent underneath these trees.

She hangs a silver reflective blanket up over one of the trees to try to signal to helicopters or anybody flying overhead.

She even began burning some bark to create a smoke signal and she proceeded to wait.

And sure enough, later that day, George, who's waiting waiting at the rendezvous point for his wife, she doesn't show up and he immediately contacts the authorities who launch a huge search to go find Geraldine.

Tragically, Geraldine was actually only about a mile, maybe two miles off of the trail.

So she was not far from where she needed to be.

But because it was so densely forested, she had no way of knowing that and sound didn't travel very well.

So over the course of the next two weeks, as this huge search with helicopters and planes and people on horseback and hunters and all these people in the area, they didn't find her.

They might have come very close to her without knowing it, but again, because it was so densely forested, they never linked up.

So on August 4th, about two weeks into this big search, they end up scaling it back and say, sorry, but we can't find her.

The whole time this is going on, Geraldine stays at her campsite.

She doesn't go anywhere.

She figures, this is my best chance to survive.

And she's staying very positive.

She has this journal that every day she would write inside of it a daily observation and she would also write letters to her family.

All of these messages were incredibly positive.

She was very much expecting to be rescued and would have this great story to tell.

But as days went on and on and no one was finding her, you could tell in her writing that she had come to terms with the reality that she was not going to make it out of here alive.

And so before she died, she wrote this beautiful message to her husband and to her daughter.

When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Carrie.

It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me.

No matter how many years from now, please find it in your heart to mail the contents of this bag to one of them.

Two years later, a forester would be in the area and would come across Geraldine's tent that was now crumpled and collapsed.

And inside, he would find Geraldine inside of her sleeping bag with the journal over her chest.

And inside the tent, she'd kept it neat and clean all the way to the very end.

This is someone that went out with absolute grace.

Back on July 22nd, 2013, the day Geraldine would go missing, she woke up and she was all smiles and motivated to start the day.

She heads off down the Appalachian Trail at about 6.30 in the morning and she passes by another hiker who stops Geraldine.

And apparently this hiker saw Geraldine's smile and said it was so infectious that she had to take a picture of her.

And so Geraldine laughed and posed for that picture.

After the picture was taken, the women laughed about it and then went went their separate ways.

And then by 11 a.m.

that morning, Geraldine was lost.

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The next and final story of today's episode is called SOS.

Japan is comprised of four major islands.

The northernmost island is called Hokkaido, and on Hokkaido there is this beautiful national park called Daisetsuzan that is nicknamed the Playground of the Gods, because the park is basically all these huge mountains that stretch up into the clouds.

The tallest mountain inside of this park is Mount Asahidake, which reaches an elevation over 7,500 feet, and it is a very popular hiking destination.

The trail that brings you to the summit of Mount Asahidake is considered relatively straightforward.

It's pretty much just a straight line.

But there is one very tricky spot.

On the way up, as you get closer and closer to the summit, the trees begin to disappear and you're left with this kind of open landscape where the trail becomes fairly ambiguous.

It's hard to know where you're going.

And so hikers are instructed to look for a landmark, which is this big square boulder that's known as Safe Rock.

And once you get to Safe Rock, apparently the rest of the trail is easy to identify and follow all the way up to the summit.

There's a catch though.

In the same area as Safe Rock is another large square boulder that looks exactly like Safe Rock, and this imposter is called False Safe Rock.

If a hiker confuses false Safe Rock for the real thing and then attempts to take the path leading away from the imposter, they will be led down a path that many people have gotten lost on.

At first, it will feel like you are making progress towards the summit of the mountain, But eventually, the trail begins to gradually go downhill.

Now, you would think that would be a fairly obvious red flag if the trail is going down and you're trying to go up to the summit, that probably something's gone wrong here, you've taken a wrong turn, but put yourself in the mind of someone who's made this mistake.

In their mind, they reached the landmark of Safe Rock, although it was the imposter, false Safe Rock, and so they think they're on the right path.

And if this is their first time being on this mountain, which a lot of people it is, they probably convince themselves that they've gone the right way and just keep on going.

And so if you just keep on going and you don't recognize this mistake, about a mile away from False Safe Rock, you enter into this valley that's completely overgrown with thick bamboo.

It's very swampy and there's lots of very steep cliff drop-offs.

And once you go inside of this area, you can't see anything because the bamboo is so tall and so thick.

And so it's very easy to get turned around and it's pretty easy to accidentally walk off of a cliff.

And so over the years, hikers who have accidentally taken the trail leading away from False Safe Rock have gotten lost in this treacherous area, and not all of them have come back.

In July of 1989, two men from Tokyo were hiking up the trail towards the summit of Mount Asadake when they reached what they believed was Safe Rock.

However, it was not, it was false safe rock.

And so when they followed the trail leading away from False Safe Rock, it was not long before they were lost in that valley overgrown with bamboo.

That night, when these two men did not come home, their friends and family called the police and a search was launched for them.

Over the first couple of days, there was no luck.

They could not find these two guys.

They had no idea where they had gone.

They looked all over the swampy area, thinking that's where they might be, but they couldn't find them.

But then on July 24th, a helicopter was flying over the mountain over an area that had not really been thoroughly searched.

It was just to the east of that valley with all the bamboo where they expected them to be.

And this helicopter pilot, as he went around a corner, he got a view down to the midsection of the mountain and he saw this big wide open clearing.

And right in the middle of this clearing are three huge letters.

They are spelled using birch logs and the three letters are SOS.

SOS is an international code used to signal extreme distress.

People who go missing or who get stranded somewhere, they will try to spell the three letters, SOS, as big as they possibly can, and then they will camp out near their signal in hopes that someone will see it and then come and rescue them.

This helicopter pilot that's seen this distress signal immediately flew over the letters, expecting to look down and see the two missing hikers from Tokyo.

But when he was hovering over the SOS and he's looking down, there was no one there, despite the fact that this was a wide open area.

They are not in the bamboo valley anymore.

But either way, he signaled to the rest of the search party that he had found their SOS signal.

And before long, more helicopters and search teams were brought over to that area.

And then several hours later, a search team that was on the ground, who was walking about two miles north of this SOS signal, saw these two very haggard looking guys come out of the bamboo brush.

And they come walking up towards them.

And it turns out it was the missing men from Tokyo.

They were very ragged, they were dehydrated and famished, and they were kind of on the brink of death, but they were alive and they were extremely happy to have been found.

And so a helicopter was brought in, the two men were flown out to the nearest hospital, and then after receiving medical care, it was determined they would both make full recoveries.

Excited by this news, the pilot and some of the other rescuers went to the men's hospital room to pay them a visit.

And over the course of their conversation, the pilot brings up to the two men that they were really smart to build that SOS signal, that in fact, had they not built the SOS, it's unlikely anyone would have found them.

And as soon as the two men heard this, they kind of reacted to it.

They looked at each other and they looked at the pilot and they said, what SOS signal?

We didn't make an SOS signal.

After asking the men several questions to make sure they really didn't make this signal, the pilot and the rest of the searchers said, you know, we have to go back to the mountain.

We have to go back.

to the SOS signal because somebody else has made it and they need our help.

And so early the next morning, these searchers went back out to the mountain, back to the SOS signal, to scour the area all over again.

And shortly after they began this search, one of the searchers found this deep hole underneath the roots of a tree.

And in this hole was a backpack.

And in this backpack, amongst other things, was a driver's license and an audio recorder.

The license belonged to a 25-year-old Japanese man named Kenji Iwamura.

who five years earlier had been staying at a lodge near the mountain.

And one day he had left and on his way out, he had told the owner of this lodge that he was going for a hike to the summit of Mount Asadake.

A couple of days later when Kenji was supposed to check out of the lodge he didn't and so the owner went to his room, he knocked but there was no answer and so the owner used his master key, he opened the door and when he looked inside there was no Kenji but all of his belongings were still there.

And so the owner thought that was odd because the last time he saw him he was going out for this hike.

And so he put two and two together and thought, you know what, I think this guy's in trouble.

So he called the police and reported him missing.

A search is launched for Kenji, but Kenji was never found.

And so there was always this mystery about what happened to him.

Fast forward back to 1989, and these searchers are looking at this backpack.

They've just looked at this license.

And then one of the searchers reaches in and pulls out the audio recorder and hits the play button.

What they heard was very disturbing.

It was the sound of a young man, presumably, who is very distressed, who is calling out for help.

And it's believed this young man is Kenji.

In Japanese, he very slowly and deliberately says, I'm stuck on a cliff, I can't move, SOS, please help me.

I'm at the spot where I first saw the helicopter, but the bamboo is too thick, I can't move, please lift me up out of here.

SOS.

Here is a clip of the actual recording.

At this point, it seemed fairly obvious to police that based on the proximity of the backpack to the SOS letters and the fact that the recording, which was in the backpack, had Kenji literally saying SOS, he says this on the recording, that Kenji must have been the one who built this SOS sign.

He must have built it back in 1984 when he got lost.

And so now that the police believed they had solved the mystery of who built the SOS sign, they now needed to figure out where this person went, where was Kenji.

And so over the next several hours, searchers continued to look around the immediate area of where this backpack was found, and soon they would discover something that, according to police, solved this five-year-old mystery.

They figured out what happened to Kenji.

Now, there is no official police narrative, at least not online, that explains step-by-step what happened to Kenji.

So what I'm about to share with you is what I was able to deduce from all of the official reporting that I could find online.

In 1984, Kenji left his lodge and headed for the summit of Mount Asahidake, and on the way up, he most likely mistook the false safe rock for the safe rock.

And just like the two men from Tokyo would do five years later, Kenji went down the wrong path and got lost in that valley covered in bamboo.

At some point, Kenji stopped trying to find his way back to the trail and instead tried to just go down the mountain any way he could.

And so as he's making his way through this very thick vegetation and this bamboo, he eventually gets to a point where he lowers himself down over this ledge and he lands on this cliff.

And as soon as he lands, he looks over the edge and he realizes he can't go any farther.

It's too steep, it's too dangerous.

But when he turns around to try to climb back up, it's also too steep.

So he was trapped on this ledge.

And so there on this cliff ledge, he sits and waits, hoping that someone has reported him missing and they will come and find him before he dies.

And at some point, as he's sitting there waiting, a helicopter flies overhead.

And Kenji most likely was elated.

He probably believed they saw him and he thought he was going to get rescued, but the helicopter would eventually just fly away, giving no indication of whether they had actually seen Kenji.

And so for what must have been at least a couple of days, Kenji sat sat on this ledge expecting this helicopter to come back.

But over time, he gradually came to the conclusion that that helicopter had probably not seen him and they were not coming back.

There was no rescue party inbound for him.

And so it was around that time as he's having this horrible realization that he pulls out that audio recorder and he records that very eerie and distressing message where he's calling out for help and saying that he's stuck on this ledge.

And then after he was done, at some point, Kenji came to the conclusion that his best chance at survival was not waiting for some helicopter to potentially come back, because at this point, that seemed really unlikely.

Instead, his best chance and perhaps only chance was to try to climb down this cliff right in front of him that he had already determined was way too dangerous.

And so Kenji lowered himself and began climbing down this cliff, and miraculously, he got all the way to the bottom where the ground leveled off without serious injury.

And so from that point, he just kept on walking down the mountain, trudging through all this bamboo, until he actually leaves the bamboo and enters this huge clearing on the side of the mountain, where basically it's devoid of any vegetation besides some birch trees off in the distance.

And it was in this clearing that Kenji would construct that SOS signal, believing that was his ticket out of there.

But unfortunately, it was not.

Five years later, after searchers had just located Kenji's backpack underneath the roots of that tree, they would go on to make that huge discovery that solved the five-year mystery.

And that discovery was a partial human skeleton laying nearby.

And eventually that skeleton would be determined to be Kenji's.

And at this point, the police said they were not suspecting foul play in Kenji's death.

However, they did not release his exact cause of death.

It's unclear if they just could not determine it, or if they didn't want to release it publicly, but either way, we don't know what it is.

And then after that, the police just closed the case and said, okay, we're done.

But to the people who had been closely following this story, because this was a big deal at the time in 1989, they thought the police were kind of missing something.

There was this obvious, huge discrepancy that they all figured the police were going to address at some point, and now it seemed like they weren't.

And a lot of people felt like, this is not a discrepancy you can just sweep under the rug.

This is a really big deal.

And that discrepancy was, how could Kenji have made that SOS signal?

As a reminder, the three letters, SOS, that was found in that clearing, they were made with 19 birch tree logs.

Each letter was 16 feet tall and 10 feet wide.

And each log, each birch tree log that made these letters up, they were all about the same length and appeared to have been expertly cut, indicating they had been chopped with an axe or some other cutting tool.

And where this SOS was actually located in that clearing, it was several hundred feet away from the other birch trees.

So on top of the enormous effort that would go into cutting down 19 trees with an axe, and I can assure you that cutting down a tree with an axe or a hatchet is way harder than you think it is, Kenji would have also had to expend a lot of additional energy just dragging the felled logs over to the area where he actually built the signal.

Basically, this was a gargantuan task that even for someone who was fit and healthy and strong in the best of conditions, they would still struggle with this.

And so the idea that Kenji, after being missing in the wild for several days, he's probably dehydrated, he's famished, he's tired, he's sore, he's scared, he's in the worst possible shape you can be in, the idea that he pulled this off is kind of unbelievable.

And in fact, the person who did Kenji's autopsy would say that Kenji was not physically capable of putting together that SOS signal.

He was just too weak.

And there's another complication to factor in.

There was no axe or any other cutting tool found anywhere near the SOS signal, near the skeleton, near the backpack, nowhere.

There was no cutting tool.

So either Kenji did have an axe and somehow mustered the superhuman strength necessary to chop down 19 trees and then he built this SOS signal, in which case, why didn't the authorities find the axe?

Or Kenji did not have an axe?

In which case, why were there 19 perfectly cut birch logs just laying around in an area that virtually no one went intentionally.

When the police just would not answer these simple questions about the axe, people began coming up with their own theories as to what happened.

The most prominent theory was that Kenji was not actually alone.

This would explain how he went about building that SOS signal, he had help.

And it would also explain why Kenji's family, when they heard that audio recording for the first time, they said, that doesn't sound like our son.

And so according to this additional person person theory, that recording wasn't of Kenji.

It was of this other person, this additional person.

People who subscribe to this theory also point out that originally, the skeleton was not classified as belonging to Kenji.

It was classified as belonging to some unknown female with type O blood.

The media and the public went crazy at this revelation, and very quickly the police were being hit with lots of questions about this development, which they had no idea what to say about it.

And so they looked kind of bad in the media.

They didn't have very many answers.

They didn't have any leads.

The pressure was building.

And then all of the sudden the police say, oh, we looked at the bones again.

And it turns out they were not type O blood female.

They were actually type A blood male, which conveniently is the same sex and blood type as Kenji.

Some say this was a pure fabrication by police to very conveniently tie up all the loose ends of a case they were doing a very bad job job solving, that in reality, those were not Kenji's bones.

Kenji's still somewhere out there.

We haven't found him yet.

And those bones belong to some unknown female with type O blood.

And she was the additional person.

But the reality is, even if this additional person theory is plausible, it's highly unlikely it will ever be looked at seriously by authorities because at this point, the case is considered closed.

So as of now, the only thing we can all say with certainty is that an SOS sign on the side of this mountain saved the lives of two men from Tokyo in 1989.

But exactly who the sign builder or builders were and then what happened to them still remains a mystery for many people.

Thank you for listening to the Mr.

Ballin podcast.

If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already, please cut all the Waldos out of a Where is Waldo book book and then give that to the Amazon music follow button for their birthday.

This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning, but in the meantime, you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our main YouTube channel, which is just called Mr.

Ballin.

Consider donating to our charity.

It's called the Mr.

Ballin Foundation, and it provides support to victims of violent crime as well as their families.

Monthly donors to the Mr.

Ballin Foundation Honor Them Society will receive free gifts and exclusive invites to special live events.

Go to mrballin.foundation and click get involved to join the Honor Them Society today.

If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform and then send me a direct message.

My username is just at MrBallin, and I really do read the majority of my DMs.

To check out our merchandise, to join our Discord server, or see what announcements are coming out of our studio, head on over to our brand new website, BallinStudios.com.

So that's going to do it.

I really appreciate your support.

Until next time, see ya.

Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr.

Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today.

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Hey listeners, big news for true crime lovers.

You can now enjoy this podcast ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.

Listen to all episodes of my podcasts, Mr.

Ballin's Medical Mysteries and Mr.

Ballin's Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, along with a huge collection of top true crime podcasts completely ad-free.

No more wading through cliffhangers or dealing with ads, because because let's be honest, ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime.

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That's amazon.com/slash B-A-L-L-E-N.

Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.