Some mysterious unsolved vanishings are remarkable in just how little evidence and how few clues they have left behind. On some occasions people just seem to walk off, and keep on walking off the face of the earth, leaving little rhyme or reason behind. One notable case of this comes to us from 1971, when a young boy took a walk just a short distance, and seems to have just evaporated off of the face of the earth.
In 1971, 8-year-old Douglas Legg went on a family trip to a place called the Santanoni Estate, now called the Santanoni Prseserve, near the town of Newcomb, in the Adirondack Mountains of Essex, New York. Also commonly called the “Great Camps,” the sprawling, 12,500-acre estate was a popular summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers at the time, and featured forty buildings and a 24-room main lodge. The owners of the estate, the wealthy Melvin Family, were relatives of the Leggs, and so they often made family trips there to enjoy the remote wilderness and serene vistas of forests and lakes. On this particular occasion, it was to be the extended family’s last trip there before the estate was due to be sold, but it would also be the last time anyone would ever see little Douglas again.
Douglas Legg
On July 10, 1971, Douglas went on a hike with his uncle on a clear summer day for what was meant to bean easy, short hike. As they walked along, at around 3:30 p.m. Douglas’ uncle realized that they were probably going to encounter some poison ivy along the way. In fact, he had spotted patches of it as they walked, and noticing that Douglas was wearing short pants, his uncle told him to run back to camp and change into longs pants. Although he was only 8 years old, the camp was just a short distance away, just a stone’s throw, in fact, only around a half a mile along a straight path, and despite his young age he was very experienced being in the outdoors and had been to the camp many times before. As he ran off to go change his clothes it would not have seemed like a particularly abnormal thing, so it was with some surprise that the uncle waited and waited but Douglas never came back.
After some time waiting, Douglas’ uncle went back to camp, where he learned that the boy’s older brother had seen him near the main lodge building but had thought nothing of it. One of the boy’s cousins also claimed that he had seen Douglas near a nearby ridge, but again it hadn’t seemed particularly strange. Indeed, everyone seemed to have thought that the boy was still with the uncle. When the uncle told them what had happened, they immediately fanned out to look for Douglas, calling out his name and sweeping the entire area but there was no sign of him. As the evening approached and the temperature dropped, authorities were notified and an official search was launched.
The ensuing search would be one of the largest the state of New York had ever seen, using helicopters, planes equipped with heat-detecting infrared FLIR, search dogs, rangers, a mountain rescue team who flew in from Sierra Madre, California, and 1,000 volunteers, although it was described as not being particularly well-organized and hampered by bad weather and treacherous terrain. Even psychics were brought in. At one point a bloodhound picked up the boy’s scent and followed it for around 30 miles over difficult terrain choked with brush and trees, which would have been nearly impossible for such a young child to have navigated on their own, where the trail ended at a pond, which was subsequently dragged and even drained but no body was found. After that the scent trail ended, as if he had just evaporated from the face of the earth. The search would go on for 6 weeks, searching every bush and crevice, even in areas that no 8-year-old would have been able to pass through, and dragging streams and lakes, but no further traces of the boy were found, not a single clue as to where he had gone or what had happened to him. He had seemingly just ceased to exist. It was at the time assumed that the boy had simply gotten lost in the wilderness and succumbed to the many bogs and swamps in the area, but in later years some eerie clues would seem to refute this.
In 1993, a woman came forward claiming that a relative of hers had killed Douglas Legg and dumped his body in a lake in Lewis County. She even showed authorities which specific lake it was, but there was no sign of any body found, and it was discovered that the woman was a psychiatric patient with false memory syndrome. That very same year a Montana man would come forward to claim that he had been hunting in the area back in 1973 and had stumbled across some skeletal remains that could have been those of a child, but he had shied away from coming forward with the discovery at the time because he had been on Navy leave and not supposed to be hunting there at the time. Despite all of the time that had passed, the area was thoroughly searched to no avail. It is unknown just what he actually found or what connection it has to Douglas Legg’s disappearance. Even more recently was a lead that came in 2020, when members of the New York State Police Troop B Underwater Recovery Team were doing training at a lake in front of the Santanoni Estate and come across an unidentified skull fragment. It was seen as an exciting new lead until it was analyzed and determined to be non-human.
In the end, there have been no other possible leads, no new clues, and although the case is officially still open there has been no sign of the missing Douglas Legg, the tragic vanishing still frustratingly unsolved. What happened to him out there? How could he go so completely missing in such a short amount of time practically right under everyone’s noses? Did he just get lost, despite the fact that he was within eyeshot of camp? Did he get distracted and roam off into the unknown? Was this all foul play? Or was it something else? It seems like only the trees know the answers to these various questions, and the mysterious vanishing of Douglas Legg remains unsolved, perhaps forevermore.
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