Mile Higher

Lisa Dorrian was a bright, beloved young woman spending her early 20s in her hometown of Bangor, Northern Ireland. However, in early 2005, her family noticed a shift in their daughter once she began hanging out with a new friend group, and her weekend activities changed from light partying to heavy drug use. Following a strange party in a caravan park, Lisa reportedly ran off into the night, never to be seen again. Now, over 20 years later, the theories range from drug debts to paramilitary organizations, and the question remains: what happened to Lisa Dorrian?

On the surface, Victoria Cillier’s life seemed to be picturesque. She had just given birth to her second child with her husband, Emile, and the couple had planned a skydiving excursion for Victoria. However, little did she know that her husband had been marred by debt and affairs, and that he could see only one way out. When Victoria’s parachute malfunctioned, she plummeted 4,000 feet to the ground. Upon inspection, it quickly became clear that this was no freak accident; this was an attempted murder. And even worse, it was the second attempt that week.

By 2015, Peter Madsen had become an eccentric celebrity, known as a mad scientist who had not only built the world’s largest civilian submarine, but was working on a rocket that could bring him into space. This attracted the attention of numerous journalists, including Kim Wall, whose work focused on the extreme and eccentric across the world. However, for all his fanfare, Peter was harboring a deep secret: an obsession with violence, torture, and a hatred towards women. He would enact those fantasies on Kim while they were underwater in his submarine, with no one around to know the truth. In the years, since, Peter has changed his story numerous times, tried to assign blame to others, and even attempted a daring jail escape. Yet, the question still remains: what happened to Kim Wall aboard the Nautilus Submarine?

Following the publication of the book Sybil, the general public became fascinated with Dissociative Identity Disorder (then known as Multiple Personalities). However, nothing would capture this attention more than the case of Billy Milligan, who, after raping several women on the campus of Ohio State University, became the first person to plead insanity due to DID successfully. What followed was public scrutiny and attention, asking if he was simply faking the whole thing to avoid consequences, or if he truly had to contend with 24 distinct, unique personalities. But the story didn’t end there: there were novels published, movies in talk, and even a cross-country escape, all pointing to the question: what's the truth behind the many identities of Billy Milligan?

The American landscape is littered with ghost towns. One of the earliest settlements in the United States was abandoned without a trace of the settlers, sparking perhaps the first mystery in American history: what happened to the Roanoke colony? Among other places with roaring underground fires, abandoned school buses, and locations wiped from memory entirely. Today, we’re going to talk about all this and more and try to answer the question: what makes a place vanish?