“But what really happened to Nadia?” I’d asked. “Was she ever found?”
The sheriff had shaken his head, looked down at the ground. “No. She hasn’t shown up yet. Do I think the Pig Man took her into the woods to be his secret wife and raise little piggy babies, like the kids say? No. Nadia ran away, plain and simple.”
I told Nadia Hill’s story on my podcast and blog about the Pig Man. The comments blew up: Was there really a monster in Upstate New York who took a girl? Blog visitors left comments sharing rumors they’d heard about other people, mostly children and teens, who’d been taken by various monsters around the country: a boy in Maine who’d been carried off in the jaws of a giant catlike creature; a girl who disappeared after she followed a silver lady only she could see into a cave in Kentucky.
Most of the stories were just that: stories. But some weren’t. These were the ones that got my attention, sank their teeth in, and wouldn’t let go.
And then the email came. From a user who called herself MNSTRGRL.
Took you long enough to catch on, sister. Nadia Hill wasn’t the first. And she won’t be the last. Come find me, Monster Hunter. I dare you.
I wrote back immediately: Is it really you?
The email bounced back as undeliverable. No such address.
I dove into new research, spending hours online, and soon discovered a pattern of teenage girls who had gone missing on full moons, all from towns with reports of a local monster.
The earliest match I could find was thirteen-year-old Jennifer Rothchild, back in 1988. She’d disappeared from a little town in Washington State with a lot of bigfoot sightings. And Jennifer had told her friends she’d met a creature in the woods, a creature who spoke to her. She’d vanished on the night of the full moon in September. The woods were searched by police, dogs, and teams of volunteers. Signs were put up around town. The police questioned her friends, her teachers, members of her family. No trace was ever found. No one ever heard from her again.
In 1991, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Morales disappeared from Farmington, New Mexico, after telling people she’d seen the Dogman and was going out to look for him on the full moon.
In 1993, Sandra Novotny in Flatwoods, West Virginia, showed her friends a blurry photo she’d taken of the Flatwoods monster. She went into the woods to get a better picture and was never seen again.
Sixteen-year-old Anna Larson vanished from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in September of 1998 after telling her little brother that she’d met the Beast of Bray Road, that the Beast had told her she was special.
Each girl disappeared on a full moon after claiming to have met some sort of legendary creature.
Nadia Hill in New York State was the fifth to fit the pattern.
In addition to my online research, I’d visited the towns where the girls had disappeared, talked to locals, friends, and family, always under the guise of monster research for my podcast. I’d walked the woods and fields where the girls had gone missing. But over and over, I found nothing.
The monster, my monster, was too clever to leave behind clues.
I held out hope that one of the missing girls would surface one day and tell her story. But none of them ever did. And no bodies or personal effects were ever found. The girls vanished without a trace.
I didn’t go to the authorities. I was sure they’d look at what I had and say just what the local police always did: These girls were runaways.
And why would they listen to the crazy theories of a woman who hunted monsters for a living? Besides, once they found out who I really was and where I’d come from—well, that was a road I didn’t want to go down with law enforcement of any sort.
So I investigated on my own. Crisscrossed the country, searching, hunting.
And occasionally, I’d get another email from the same user, MNSTRGRL, at a different address. Always, the notes were cryptic, teasing, sometimes quoting lines from our childhood Book of Monsters: They can pass as human. They hide in plain sight.