The Strange Case of Sara Fisher
March 10th, 2022
The body of Sara Fisher was found by a group of boys exploring the bank of the Mousam River on the morning of February 5th, 2022. A body found in the river usually meant drowning, but it was apparent to everyone who laid eyes on the corpse that this wasn’t the case.
Concerned friends had reported her missing six days prior. Sara, age nineteen, had been at a party on Saturday night, just outside the small town of Hopedale, Maine, when she had heard someone calling her name in the nearby woods. Her boyfriend, Jason Rittner, whom I managed to track down, tried his best to follow her but soon lost sight. To him, she seemed to vanish so quickly. It was as though, “she fell into a hole in the Earth.”
Instead of a waterlogged corpse, the body looked as though it had been laid out in the sun for weeks. It was a dehydrated husk and looked like it couldn’t have been in the water longer than a couple of minutes when the boys found her. Her blue eyes were missing, with traces of bloody streaks from where they had been extracted. The coroner thought it may have been achieved surgically.
The finding of the body was only the beginning. There had been sightings in the days before Sara disappeared of several cloaked figures stalking the woods outside of Hopedale. No one ever saw the figures moving. They were simply standing in the woods, facing those who spotted them, though no one ever saw their faces. Six people came forward after this, understanding that it may be helpful in solving the case, as all the incidents took place near where Sara was found. A janitor named Michael Worten was out walking his dog the morning Sara’s remains were discovered. He said his dog, Molly, not only refused to go anywhere near the cloaked figure, which seemed too tall to be a human, but turned and bolted, nearly pulling Michael to the ground.
Everyone who claimed to have seen the figures came down with what seemed like mild radiation sickness days after the sightings. This was as minor as mild nausea and skin irritation. Once the boys found Sara’s body, no one had seen any signs of the cloaked figures.
The most detailed finding of the case came from that of nine-year-old Iesha Thomaston, who still remains in a medically induced coma after the strange effects of her confrontation with one of the figures left her body ravaged by some unseen force. She had managed to give an explanation as to what she experienced right before her body had begun to shut down. Despite the seriousness of her condition, she’s expected to recover.
She had been playing in the woods alone that day, as she usually did, when she saw Sara standing amongst the trees, near the river where the boys would eventually find her body hours later. This Sara wasn’t a dehydrated corpse, but fully formed, though Iesha said her eyes were missing. She was jabbering, whimpering in some language or gibberish that Iesha couldn’t understand, before she began levitating and screaming. Several flashes of light exploded all around the woods surrounding Sara, and that was when Iesha had turned to run. She brushed right past one of the cloaked figures as if it had somehow snuck up behind her. Iesha said she stole the briefest look at the face of someone who was unimaginably tall and silent. She saw a face, but it wasn’t human. A long, hooked protrusion she took as a nose fell below a gaping maw full of sharp teeth. The skin was gray and filmy. She didn’t see any eyes, but instead saw glowing orbs in the shadow of the hood where the eyes should have been. A scaley, clawed hand snatched for her, but she managed to get away and run back to her home unharmed. The paramedic on the scene found that her jacket, which the creature had snagged a hold of only for a moment, had three claw marks from where the nails had sliced through. The slices were edged with scorch marks, as if the nails were tipped with fire.
The final and most distressing fact of all of this, I’ve discovered, is that the body of Sara Fisher underwent a full autopsy, stored in one of the refrigerated vaults awaiting a series of toxicology tests, was awaiting another examination from a mysterious specialist from the FBI. Before they arrived, however, the body went missing. CCTV cameras were analyzed and what they found has been disclosed only to very few people.
The door to the vault swung open on its own, and the body of Sara Fisher climbed out. The movements were jerky, reminiscent of stop motion animation. The dehydrated corpse crept out of the morgue through a fire escape and vanished into the night. No one has been able to find the body. So, it seems for the time being, whatever strange event has happened in this small town has ended.
I have one more piece of information to add to this story. It is something that, though it is on record and overwhelmingly like the case of Sara Fisher, has been covered up somehow.
Back in June of 1958, there was another disappearance. The circumstances were the same, though documentation on this case has been discovered via journal entries from long dead doctors and detectives. One detective in particular, Tom Hanscom, delved into this cold case until his own eventual disappearance in November of 1963. He was never found, and the body of the victim, twenty-three-year-old Harmony Bishop, vanished from the morgue after her body was found six miles away from the spot where Sara’s body would eventually be found.
Sara never left behind a journal, just a series of social media posts, the last one simply being a photo of her and her boyfriend at a nearby restaurant. Harmony, however, left behind a journal that I managed to find, and the last few entries sounded like something out of a Lovecraftian horror story.
She had awoken on several occasions outside in the woods behind her home, her nightgown torn, and she was bleeding from several cuts and abrasions. This was a week before her disappearance. Harmony said from that day on she was experiencing seeing “some other side of the world,” revealing that her eyesight would become gray-scale like an old black and white motion picture and she’d see something writhing in the sky, reminding her of “ground hamburger with tentacles and claws.” It would only come in brief flashes, but she could make out a great mouth full of jagged yellow teeth, and see many tall, cloaked figures standing in the woods. Some bore jagged horns, some did not. She never saw their faces and the flashes would be just that—there one instant, and gone the next, the world righting itself back into full color and vibrancy. Her last entry revealed that she had awoken from a terrible nightmare where these creatures were standing over her, offering her to the entity in the sky, seeing the tentacles drawing down to receive her from a stone plinth on a mountain. Flashes of light and horrible screams filled the smoke choked air as they lifted her toward the floating monstrosity.
Could Sara have had the same nightmares? If she did, she kept them to herself.
This story, unfortunately, has no conclusion, much as many cold cases, but it is one that I found just as interesting as it is terrifying. Where could the body of Sara Fisher be now? Who was this mysterious specialist from the FBI? So many questions and no answers. I must remember to keep this case at arm’s length, for I find this story endlessly fascinating. The fate of Detective Hanscom, who went utterly mad before vanishing into the woods all those years ago, is something I can’t ignore. Perhaps one day we’ll have answers, but a part of me fears what those answers mean, not only for a small town in Maine, but for the fate of the entire world.
From the notes of Darren Colthorn
Investigative Journalist for the Liminal Enquirer
Missing since April 30th, 2022