SUPER RARE event occurs at sea | The Hannah Upp story

if you were to stop this video right now and just google the name hannah up who is the focus of today's story it would bring up a list of articles about her very strange disappearance and all of them would start with the partial explanation for what caused all of this craziness to happen but what i'm going to do is basically the opposite i'm going to tell you the craziness of what occurred from 2008 all the way up until today 2020 and then i'm going to reveal the partial explanation that many people believe is behind the disappearance not only does that make for a more compelling story just purely from an entertainment perspective but it also allows you the viewer to have an unbiased view of the events that happen so that when i do make this reveal you can be the judge if that is sufficient to explain away what ultimately happened to hannah up but before we get into today's story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you come to the right channel because that's all i do and i upload three four even five times every week so if that's something you'd be interested in i would encourage you to steal the like button's favorite bar of soap cover it in clear nail varnish and then put it back and laugh at the like button when their soap doesn't lather also subscribe to my channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly uploads alright let's get into today's story [Music] around midday on september 16 2008 the captain of the staten island ferry in new york city was looking out at the water just south of manhattan and he noticed something bobbing in the water and he said that it just didn't look right he was drawn to it it was pretty far away but he knew that there was just something off about it couldn't tell if it was a person or debris but either way he sent two of his deck hands over to have a look so they hopped in a skiff they drove over and very quickly they saw that it was actually a woman and her face was in the water so as soon as they pulled up alongside her the first thing they did is grabbed her head and kind of pulled it out of the water and to their surprise she gasped for air they pulled her up into the skiff she had on just running shorts and a sports bra she had a very bad sunburn on one side of her body she was hypothermic she was dehydrated and she looked like she had been in the water for a very long time they bring her back to the ferry they wrap her up in a blanket and they call 9-1-1 and an ambulance is immediately sent out to go get her as they're waiting for the ambulance she starts to speak i was just out for a run i went running just a couple hours ago why am i here they chalked it up to her being in shock and based on her attire you know she had running shorts and a sports bra and they're thinking okay you know i don't know how she wound up in the water but it seems like she went running fell in the water somehow and thank goodness we found her she gets in the ambulance they bring her to the hospital and after the initial treatment is done and she's stable and laying in bed and being treated for hypothermia and for this bad sunburn she starts saying to nurses and doctors she had just gone running like a couple hours ago how did i get here why was i in the water and they didn't know either finally when she was able to confirm that she was in fact hannah up and they got in touch with her family who also confirmed that this girl sitting in the hospital bed is in fact hannah up investigators were baffled because hannah up had been missing for three weeks not one day when they said this to hannah she couldn't believe it at first everyone was okay with hannah not being able to remember because she just went through something dramatic we'll give her a couple of days and then we'll reapproach the subject but as time went on it became clear that hannah had absolutely no clue what happened over a three week period that she had been missing three weeks before she was found she had left her apartment in new york city to go for a run this was the day before she was set to start a new school year at her school in harlem when hannah did not return to her apartment that night her roommates actually didn't think much of it from what i can tell the roommates were not particularly close and it wasn't unusual for them to kind of have limited interaction four days would go by before hannah's roommates would notice that she still hasn't come back so the first thing they did is they went into her bedroom inside of the apartment and they quickly were able to find that her passport was in there her wallet with her cash bank cards her id basically all of the most important items that you would carry with you anywhere you went were sitting in her room at this point they called the police and a massive massive search is ignited for this woman hannah was beloved not only by her family but everywhere she went her her students loved her all of her friends would say that hannah was their best friend everybody she was around loved her she was the center of attention life of the party and so when she became a missing person people came out of the woodwork to go look for this woman they looked everywhere and after a week the family and friends were starting to lose hope and the police would admit that at that point they were just looking for a body they assumed that she had been the victim of some horrible crime her case her missing person case had made national headlines because it didn't really make any sense there was absolutely no trace of her she'd just gone running and then vanished despite living in new york city where there's cameras everywhere and witnesses everywhere they couldn't find any footage of her they had no leads no one came forward the new york times would say it was as if the city had opened wide and swallowed her hole then there was this huge break in the case because there was an apple store in midtown manhattan that spotted her clearly entering their store and logging into one of their computers they saw that she logged in with her email address but on that computer there was no record of her sending or receiving any messages but she did successfully log in and oddly enough one of the people that went to school with her approached her and was like hannah hannah is that you you know there's a huge search for you is is this really you hannah on camera looks at him and says no i'm not hannah and she ups and walks away police show up there's no sign of hannah she's gone police took the footage and showed it to hannah's mother and she recognized her a hundred percent that is hannah but no one could understand why would she deny being hannah is she being held hostage a day later she popped up on the security camera at a starbucks in manhattan but just like the apple store by the time the report got to the police and they went to the starbucks she was gone same thing happened at a number of manhattan gyms where she was apparently going and using their shower and then leaving and she somehow was able to get inside the gym but she didn't have her gym pass so they don't know how she got in and again every time police showed up she'd be gone and there's lots of other unanswered questions how are you able to do anything you don't have your license you don't have your wallet you don't have bank cards you don't have a passport we don't know where you're sleeping where you're staying how are you eating what are you doing where are you coming from what's wrong while police were never able to determine where she had been sleeping at night in those first couple of weeks they did determine that at some point towards the end of this three week period she decided to leave manhattan and so she jumped into a kayak off of chelsea pier and began paddling south and at some point we don't know when she jumped out of the kayak and began swimming south and after several hours of swimming she wound up at robin's reef which is this incredibly isolated lighthouse that sits on this tiny little rocky island she managed to pull herself up onto the island and then sat there on these rocks for almost 24 hours this is where police believe she got the really bad sunburn then some event led to her getting back in the water and kind of bobbing and drifting her way all the way back over to the south side of manhattan where she was ultimately spotted and then rescued by the fairy captain it took police and investigators quite a bit of time to put together this storyline of what happened to hannah over those three weeks and when they brought it to her and her family and said this is what we think happened to you she still had no idea how any of this had happened she thought she'd gone running and then the same day she wound up in the water and was being rescued while she was at the hospital she had undergone a series of brain imaging tests to try to see what they could find if there was some underlying neurological condition that might have caused her to forget this huge chunk of time but the tests revealed no neurological issues they concluded that the episode was psychological in nature because her case had made national headlines just when she had gone missing in the first place and then had been found under such baffling conditions not only physically where she was located but her inability to remember any of it it created even more buzz around the whole story and so people began to think she was lying or that she had staged the whole thing but she hadn't she just didn't understand why it had happened but as time went on people forgot about it people moved on and she was able to more or less go back to a normal life even though she herself was very unsettled at the idea that she had 20 days that she has no memory of fast forward almost exactly five years to september of 2013 and now hannah is living in maryland she is an assistant teacher at a montessori school and hannah goes missing again on the day she went missing co-workers claimed to have seen her just a couple miles away from the school and they assumed that she was walking to work but she didn't show up for work that day and when they tried calling her she didn't pick up they went to her apartment she wasn't there and so just like five years earlier they called the police and they launched a search for hannah up early on in the search police located hannah's phone and wallet sitting on a walking path relatively close to where she worked but they started searching the area and they could not find her two days after the search started hannah's mother received a phone call from a number she didn't recognize when she picked it up it was her daughter and she said i don't know where i am i don't know what's going on but i'm okay hannah had regained her memory while laying in a creek bed next to a turned over shopping cart in some random park in maryland not the one where her phone and wallet were found she had stood up had no idea how she got there and she flagged down a stranger and asked to use their phone and was able to call her mother her family her friends the police were all so relieved that she was found and unharmed that much like the last one she ultimately was released from the hospital because she wasn't hurt and was able to more or less move back into a normal life except hannah at this point felt really guilty she didn't understand why this was happening but she felt really bad about it and it was clear to her family and friends that she really wished she could somehow have a do-over to just start fresh and start a new life where no one knew her as this person who keeps disappearing a year after the maryland incident hannah would move to the u.s virgin islands a popular location for americans that want to start again or go off the grid she was able to land a job teaching at a montessori school teaching three to six-year-old children and the director of the program would say that whenever they brought a family on a tour of the different classrooms hannah's classroom was always the first one they went to because she was such a great example of what children would expect if they came to this montessori school because hannah was not just a great teacher she was a passionate teacher she loved teaching she loved her students and she loved her new life in the virgin islands but in september 2017 nine years after her disappearance in new york and four years after her disappearance in maryland hannah would go missing for a third time now the lead-up to this disappearance is a little bit unique relative to the other two right before she disappeared there was a category 5 hurricane barreling down on the virgin islands and all of hannah's friends colleagues everyone she knew was scrambling to leave the islands before it hit but hannah was not prepared to abandon the island and abandon her house and her school and so she decides to stay behind in the final few days before all of her friends and colleagues left the island they described hannah as being in some sort of a trance she was hard to get through to hard to speak to but she seemed rather sing-songy like she was in a really good mood but very difficult to communicate with on september 15th just a few days before the hurricane would actually make landfall the few staff members at the montessori school who had stayed behind on the island to weather the storm called a meeting and hannah was not present she was last seen preparing her montessori classroom for the imminent impact of the hurricane when they went to her apartment she wasn't there and so they went out looking for her one of her friends knew that a favorite location of hannah's was sapphire beach and when she got there sure enough there was hannah's car parked in the parking lot with her purse passport and hundreds of dollars inside of her car hannah's clothes were found down on the beach on a chair neatly folded but there was no sign of hannah anywhere a desperate search for hannah was launched led by the coast guard but it had to be abandoned after only a couple of days because the hurricane was barreling down on them and to this day she has never been seen or heard from again there's a huge part of the story that i've intentionally left out until right now after hannah was scooped up by the fairy captain and brought to the hospital after that first disappearance in 2008 they ran all those brain tests and they discovered that there was nothing wrong with her from a neurological standpoint however they did run a series of psychological tests and they discovered that she had an extremely rare form of amnesia called disassociative fugue for those that suffer it there are no symptoms leading up to it and then all of a sudden you forget all of your autobiographical information but you don't forget how to live someone in a fugue state could very easily leave their apartment go to a store interact with other people they just don't understand who they are they don't know their name they don't know their history they don't know why they are located where they are this can last for a couple of hours all the way to years the most famous example of disassociative fugue is jason bourne from the big blockbuster movies about the cia operative who wakes up and has no idea who he is or why he is where he is he doesn't know the people around him but he recalls all of his training and is able to be this like ninja who can fight off bad guys left and right but doesn't know who he is now when hannah disappeared in 2008 almost certainly she was in a fugue state and then was located again and thankfully she was alive five years later same thing happens in maryland she goes into a fugue state and then two days later she's found again has no idea how she got where she got but there she was now the tricky part is in 2017 when she went missing it would be very easy to say that she was in a fugue state because it had already happened two times before however other people believe that she just wanted to start her life over again she hated being known only for her two disappearances she wanted to be known as a happy loving person a great teacher a great friend and none of that was possible with her history and so some say that she staged the last disappearance because she knew with the hurricane coming in that she would be able to kind of disappear without a trace and people would assume that she was probably dead so i'd love to get your take on what happened to hannah up specifically what happened the third time she disappeared was this just another example of her being in a fugue state and disappearing and will we hear from her again or did she stage all of this to run away from hannah up and start all over again with a brand new identity not tethered to the history that she really would like to forget let me know what you think in the comments and i'll do my best to get back to as many of you as i possibly can if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more like it then i would encourage you to steal the like button's favorite bar of soap cover it in clear nail varnish and then replace it and laugh at the like button when their soap doesn't lather also please subscribe to my channel and turn on all post notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly three to four even five video uploads that sound an awful lot like what you just listened to today if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram my handle is john ballen416 i also post quite a bit over on tick tock where my handle is mr ballen so whether i see you on tick tock instagram youtube or some combination i'm just very thankful for your support and until next time see you guys

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,686,185

Rating: 4.9436707 out of 5

Keywords: mystery, ocean, unsolved, scary, story, storytime, scary story, sea, unexplained, unidentified, paranormal, amnesia, NYC, fear, scary symptoms, no memory, found at sea, ferry boat, new york city, manhattan, crazy

Id: endyy_4jqnA

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020