In 2007, a school bus carrying 14 students vanished during a routine field trip. No crash, no bodies, no clues. 18 years later, one survivor finds a bracelet in a thrift store, and the truth comes crawling back. What if the bus never left? What if it never could? Before you watch, hit that subscribe

button and join the ride. This is the story of the bus that didn’t return.
Clareire hadn’t been back to Delpine, Vermont in almost 7 years. The town was exactly as she remembered, a single blinking street light at the four-way stop. Clapboard houses with paint that peeled each winter and tried again every spring, and a gas station that doubled as a diner in a bulletin

board for every lost cat, bake sale, and town hall warning.
Her father’s house smelled like old wood and lemon floor polish, the kind of smell you only get from a life lived quietly for too long. Clare dumped her duffel by the door and found her father asleep in his recliner. One slipper off, the TV murmuring through closed captions about highway

construction. He looked older, thinner, too. She pulled the blanket over him gently and went outside, needing air.
That’s when she saw the thrift store. It wasn’t there before. Just across the road from the town’s only post office was a squat building with a crooked sign. Second chances. The kind of place run by retirees and stocked by basement. Curious and with nothing better to do before sunset, Clare crossed

the street.
The bell above the door jingled with sharp cheer. Inside, dust hovered in lazy beams of fading light. A woman in her 60s stood behind the counter humming along with a cassette tape that warbled Hotel California. “New in town?” she asked, smiling without really looking. “Returning?” Clare replied,

her voice low. “I grew up here.” The woman squinted.
“Family?” “Ran,” her eyes widened. “You’re Dan Ren’s girl.” Clare nodded. “Cla.” Well, I’ll be, the woman said as if that explained everything. She returned to her humming. Clare wandered the aisles. Knitted sweaters, chipped mugs, vintage toys, all the memories nobody wanted anymore. And then she

saw it.
In the jewelry case, nestled between tangled chains and cracked plastic rings, was a silver charm bracelet. Small, delicate, with only three charms. a music note, a tiny dog, and the letter J. Clare’s breath stopped. She knew this bracelet. It belonged to Janie Delcore. Janie had been her best

friend in seventh grade.
She sat behind Clare in math, whispered during roll call, and always smelled faintly of cinnamon gum. She was funny, insecure about her teeth, and she never took that bracelet off. Except Janie hadn’t come back from the trip. Neither had 13 other kids. It had been a school bus trip to Bear Hollow

Preserve. One bright October morning in 2007, and the bus never returned.
No crash, no wreckage, no bodies. They’d called it a tragedy. Mechanical failure, possible misdirection. Search underway. But after 3 days, the headlines stopped. After a week, the school held a memorial with no photos, just a list of names. And then they never spoke of it again. Clare had been

sick that day. Fever, streped throat, a lucky illness.
She stared at the bracelet for a long time. “Where did this come from?” she asked the woman behind the counter. Hm. This bracelet, it belonged to someone I knew. It was lost. Where’d you get it? The woman blinked, then glanced at the case. Came in a donation box last week, maybe. Might have been

from the Parson’s estate. They’re cleaning out their attic. Clare opened her wallet.
I’ll take it. It’s $5. Clare handed her a 10. The woman gave her change with the same vague smile. Back outside, Clare stood under the early evening sky, the bracelet in her palm. It was worn but intact. The music note charm had a scratch across it. The J was a little bent. She turned it over and

froze. There, engraved in faint looping letters on the underside were the initials J D.
She sat in her car for nearly 20 minutes, the bracelet clutched in her fist, trying to remember everything she could about that week. About Janie, about the day the bus left and never came back. No one talked about it anymore. Not online, not at reunions. And the school board had retired the bus

number the following year.
She still had the newspaper clippings in a folder back in Boston, buried deep in a drawer labeled a void. But seeing this, holding it, it wasn’t avoidable anymore. This was proof. And proof meant someone had lied. Clare looked out across the road at her childhood home. Her father was probably still

asleep. The town hadn’t changed, but something inside her had.
She reached for her phone and opened a new note. Missing. October 2007. Bear hollow field trip. 14 students, one teacher. No return, no crash site. Clare ran absent due to illness. Janie Delcourt was one of them. Her bracelet just turned up in a thrift store. Clare closed the note and looked at the

bracelet again.
Janie didn’t give things away, and she sure as hell didn’t come home to return a bracelet no one else could have had. The past wasn’t gone. It had just been quiet, and Clare was about to make it loud. Clare stood outside the old middle school the next morning. her car idling as she stared at the

building like it was a puzzle she’d forgotten how to solve. It hadn’t changed much.
Same sagging roof, same front sign with letters missing. Welcome me to LPA My Deal School. The hedges were trimmed now, but the rusted bike rack still leaned at the same awkward angle, and the flag pole chain clinkedked faintly in the morning breeze. 14 kids had left this building in 2007 and never

come back.
Clare turned off the ignition and stepped out, the bracelet tucked in her coat pocket. She hadn’t slept much. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Janie’s face, or at least the way her memory had preserved it. Freckles, laughter, the wide grin with one crooked tooth. She had questions now, and

she needed answers that weren’t just rumors and archived obituaries.
The school’s front office was surprisingly modern inside. Fluorescent lights, fresh lenolium, and a digital check-in system. The receptionist looked up from her computer with a forced smile. Can I help you? I’m Claire Ran. I used to attend here, class of 2008. My dad’s Dan Ran. He taught shop

class. the woman perked up. “Oh, Mr.
Ren, yeah, he retired a few years back. How’s he doing?” “Slowing down,” Clare said. “I’m helping out while he recovers from surgery.” “Well, welcome back. What can we do for you?” Clare hesitated. “Actually, I was hoping to take a look at some old yearbooks. Maybe records from around 2007.” The

woman tilted her head. “What for?” “I’m writing something,” Clare lied. personal project. I was out sick during the field trip.
The one where, well, you know, the receptionist’s expression tightened. We don’t really keep that stuff anymore. There was an audit a few years ago. Cleared out a lot of old records. Claire raised an eyebrow. An audit? Yeah. The board had a compliance review, updated privacy protocols and all that.

She tapped her nails against the desk, then leaned in slightly.
You’re looking for someone specific? Clare paused. Janie del Cord. She was my best friend. The woman’s face fell. She glanced around then lowered her voice. Sweet girl. That whole thing. It was awful. We weren’t even allowed to hold a real memorial in here. The board didn’t want the younger kids

scared. I found something of hers.
Clare said, pulling the bracelet from her coat pocket in a thrift store. I think it was hers. I know it was. The woman stared at it. That’s Yeah, she used to wear that everyday. I remember the little music note. Clare nodded. How did it end up in a donation bin? The woman didn’t answer. Do you have

any files at all? Clare asked.
Anything from that year? I don’t need addresses or private data, just names, lists, photos. There’s a storage cabinet in the back, the woman said slowly. Mostly old yearbooks, a few boxes of past student directories. If you want to take a look, I can let you back there for a few minutes. Clare

tried not to look too eager. That’d be amazing. Thank you.
She followed the receptionist through a side door into a narrow hallway that smelled faintly of dry erase markers and cafeteria pizza. They passed a locked teachers lounge and came to a gray metal cabinet beside a fire extinguisher. Nothing’s in order, the woman warned, but you’re welcome to dig.

Clare opened the cabinet and crouched.
Inside were dusty binders, file boxes, and yearbooks wrapped in yellowed plastic. She found the 2006 to 2007 yearbook and pulled it out, flipping quickly to the seventh grade section. There she was, Janie Delcore, smiling, her hair in twin braids, her smile wide and unaware of what was coming.

Clare stared for a moment, then reached for the student directory, a typed list of home rooms and assigned bus numbers.
She flipped through the pages, eyes scanning for anything unusual. Bus 7, bus 14, bus 18, and there it was. Failed trip. October 12th, 2007. Bus 12. Teacher, Mr. Alan Bear, students. List redacted. The names had been blacked out. Every single one. Clare felt her throat tighten. There were faint

imprints beneath the redacted ink, signs the names had once been there.
Someone had gone through this file by hand and censored it. She reached for her phone and took a photo of the page. You find what you were looking for? The receptionist called from down the hall. Clare slid the yearbook back into place and stood. Sort of back outside. Clare sat in her car staring

at the photo on her phone. The redacted names, the teacher’s name, Alan Baird.
She didn’t remember him well. He’d only taught that year. She opened a browser and searched for his name. Nothing. No social media, no obituaries, no teaching credentials in Vermont’s online certification database. It was like he’d never existed. Clare felt her chest tighten. The bracelet hadn’t

been a fluke.
The redactions weren’t an accident. Someone had gone to great lengths to make sure there was no record of the students who boarded that bus. She opened her note again and added, “Bus 12 assigned to Mr. Alan Baird student list redacted. No public record of bear post 2007 Janie’s bracelet surfaced in

2025.
Someone is hiding something. Clare looked back at the school. It wasn’t just silence. It was erasure and someone had pulled the black marker over the past on purpose. The old bus route wasn’t on any modern maps. Clare discovered that the hard way after two hours of scrolling through archived town

council PDFs and long-forgotten newsletters in the library’s microfich room.
But persistence paid off and eventually she found a scanned flyer for the 2007 Bear Hollow Field Trip itinerary emailed to parents on October 10th. Departure 7:45 a.m. Delpine Middle School. Estimated arrival 8:30 a.m. Bear Hollow Preserve via Route 6 say to Deer Path Trail. The school had said the

bus likely veered off the main road. Authorities blamed poor signage and unreliable GPS in the mountains.
But if that were true, Clare thought someone should have found something. A crash site, a tire tread, something. She printed the flyer and drove to the edge of town where Route 6A began. a winding two-lane road that cut through dense forest. The sky had grayed by the time she reached the junction

with Deer Path Trail.
The sign was still there, though half rotted and nearly swallowed by ivy. She parked the car off the road, engine idling in the cold, and stared at the trail. It was barely a trail now, just a gravel ribbon vanishing into the trees. No recent tire marks, no maintenance, no welcome sign for Bear

Hollow. Clare checked her phone. No signal.
She hesitated for a beat, then grabbed her coat and flashlight. There was no clear destination, but she needed to walk the path herself. Needed to feel it. Retraced the ride Janie and the others had taken. The woods were quiet, too quiet. She followed the path for 20 minutes, stepping over fallen

branches and leaves half mulched by spring rain.
Eventually, the trail forked. One path was marked private. No trespassing. The other was unmarked and overgrown. Clare picked the unmarked one. After another 10 minutes, she reached a clearing, wide and flat, ringed by pine. The grass here was brittle, like it hadn’t grown properly in years.

There were no benches, no welcome signs, no evidence of a preserve, just a metal pole sticking out of the ground like the neck of a broken street lamp and something else. A concrete slab sunken and cracked. It looked like the foundation of a building long removed. Moss grew around the edges, and

something dark had stained one corner. Clare knelt.
Near the base of the slab, barely visible beneath the dirt and grime, was a number carved into the concrete. BHP27 Bear Hollow Preserve. Installation 27. She stood and took several photos, then backed away. Something about the place felt wrong. Hollow, like the air itself remembered something no

one else did. She turned to head back and saw the man watching her.
He stood at the edge of the clearing, half hidden by a tree, middle-aged, wearing a heavy coat, a shovel in one hand. They locked eyes, and Clare froze. “Are you lost?” the man called out. Clare kept her voice steady. “Just hiking.” “Trails closed.” His voice was gruff, but not aggressive. “I

didn’t see a sign,” he stepped forward.
“Nobody’s supposed to be back here. It’s dangerous.” Clare nodded slowly. I’m Clareire. I used to live here. I’m looking into the bare hollow disappearance. The man stopped cold. I was sick that day, she continued. I should have been on that bus. A long silence passed. The man’s expression softened

slightly.
My name’s Tom Granger, he said. I was a volunteer on the search team back then. Clare’s pulse quickened. Did you find anything? He shook his head. Not officially, but but what? Tom looked around, then jerked his chin toward the trees. You want to talk? Not here. They walked in silence for 10

minutes until they reached a rusted pickup truck parked near a collapsed fence.
Tom unlocked the passenger door and gestured for her to sit. He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. “They told us to stop,” he said finally. After the third day, the state pulled resources. The Fed said it was a lost cause. Clare leaned in. “Did you see the bus?” “No,” he said. “But we saw

tracks, just one set, going off the main path.
” And the next morning they were gone, washed out like someone hosed them down. We were told not to mention it. Clare stared at him. “Why?” Tom looked tired. Because Bear Hollow wasn’t just a preserve. Not in the 80s. It was a decommissioned testing site. Chemical, psychological, maybe both.

They shut it down officially in ’89, but I don’t think they ever stopped using it. Claire thought of the concrete slab. BHP27. That mean anything to you? He flinched. Yeah. BHP was the code for Bear Hollow Project. 27 was one of the buildings. Storage or containment, I think. For what? Tom crushed

the cigarette out. Nobody ever said, but I do remember this. When the bus disappeared, no distress call ever came in.
The transponder on that bus just stopped pinging like someone cut the signal mid-trip. Clare sat back. And one more thing, Tom added. A week later, the school board sealed all personnel files for that year. Said it was to protect staff privacy. Claire’s mind was racing. Do you remember the teacher?

Mr. Bed. Tom nodded slowly. Yeah, new guy. Quiet.
Didn’t make friends. After the bus went missing, he didn’t show up to the debriefing. No one ever saw him again. Not even in town. Nope. Just gone. Clare pulled out her phone and showed him the photo of the redacted bus list. He nodded grimly. “Looks about right. Why hasn’t anyone talked about

this?” Tom looked at her, eyes heavy.
Because nobody wanted to believe it. And the ones who did. They stopped asking. Clare swallowed hard. Not her. She wasn’t stopping. Clare wasn’t paranoid. Not really. But when the same silver pickup truck appeared behind her twice in the span of 20 minutes on Main Street, she started paying

attention.
She turned onto Graange Hill Road, then quickly veered off into the Delp Pine Library parking lot. The truck kept driving. Probably nothing. Probably someone else taking the same shortcut twice, but in Delpine, that was rare. Back inside the library, the warmth and silence greeted her like a friend

who didn’t ask questions. The place smelled like paper and wood polish, exactly as she remembered.
Clare hadn’t been here since 8th grade, and even then only once, to study for a science test Janie never got to take. The librarian was new. Mid-30s, glasses, earbuds in. She barely looked up as Clare moved toward the local history section in the back. She’d come for two things.

The archived town council minutes and any documentation about Bear Hollow’s former use before it became a nature preserve. The archives room was small and dimly lit, filled with plastic tubs, yellowed newspapers, and fading binders. Clare found the town council records in a filing cabinet marked

1970 to 2010. She started in 2007. The October meetings dated days after the disappearance were missing, pages torn out, her heart skipped.
She checked the index and saw minutes listed for every other week that year. Only October 15th and 22nd were gone. Coincidence? She flipped backward, scanning earlier meetings from August and September. Approval to renew restricted lease with Department of Environmental Testing. Bear hollow parcel

BHP27. Parcel BHP27. The same code on the concrete slab. Clare snapped a photo.
The next entry chilled her. Temporary access granted to third party research observers under non-disclosure agreement. No public access permitted until November 1st. She took another photo and closed the folder carefully, her fingers trembling slightly. If Bear Hollow had been leased to a

government contractor or research group, the field trip never should have happened, and someone made sure that detail vanished with the bus. Back at the front desk, the librarian finally looked up. Find everything? Clare nodded
absently. Do you have any archived newspapers from that week in October 2007? The Delpine Courier. The librarian tilted her head. Sure, but a bunch of local editions from that fall were water damaged a few years back. Flood in the basement. We had to toss most of them. Claire wasn’t surprised.

Still, she asked to see what was left. They had one issue. October 9th, 2007, the last edition before the field trip. On page three, wedged between an ad for propane and a bake sale announcement was a short notice. Dell Pine Middle School to resume Bear Hollow field trip after hiatus.

Following a three-year pause, the annual trip to Bear Hollow Preserve will resume this Friday. The site was closed during cleanup efforts, but has since been deemed safe by the town council. Clare reread the line three times. Three-year pause. No one had ever mentioned that. She left the library

with copies of everything she could get.
As she walked to her car, an elderly man with a dog gave her a long measuring look. “You’re Ren’s girl,” he said flatly. Clare stopped. “Excuse me.” “Dan Ren’s daughter, Clare, you’re the one digging up the old ghosts.” His tone wasn’t friendly. “Just trying to understand what happened,” she said.

You don’t need to,” the man muttered. “Nothing’s going to change. You stir it up.
All you do is wake the wrong people.” He turned and walked off, dog in toe. Clare stood there a moment longer, heart hammering. Back at her dad’s house, she brewed coffee and spread everything across the kitchen table, the photos from the town records, the council minutes, the concrete slab, and

the article. She pulled out her notebook. Investigation log.
BHP27 was leased to an unnamed entity weeks before the field trip. October Town Council minutes are missing. Bear Hollow had been closed for 3 years before the 2007 trip. School board didn’t disclose this to parents. Mr. Bear disappeared after the trip. Janie’s bracelet surfaced in a public thrift

store in 2025. She circled one word. Why? Her phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number. You’re asking dangerous questions. Let it go. Clare’s fingers went cold. She stared at the message, then looked up at her father’s old metal filing cabinet in the hallway. He had worked at the school. He’d taught shop there for over a decade.

He might not have known what happened, but he knew the staff. She got up and opened the cabinet. Most of it was old receipts, lesson plans, broken mechanical pencils, and worn photos. But near the bottom, she found a folder labeled personnel 2007. Inside was a list of staff assignments by

department.
She flipped through until she found Alan Baird, interim science teacher, hired. September 2007, terminated October 2007. No forwarding address, no resignation letter, just a stamp. File closed. Do not pursue. Claire stared at it for a long time, then pulled out her phone. She opened her search

engine. Alan Baird, Vermont teaching license. No results. Alan Baird, missing persons 2007. Nothing.
Alan Baird, Bear Hollow, Dell Pine. One result, a cached forum post on a now defunct message board. I saw a guy matching his photo outside Bear Hollow in ’08. Looked messed up, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. When I asked if he needed help, he just said, “They’re not gone. They’re underneath.” Clare

clicked the thread.
Page not found. Clare wasn’t sure if she expected the Department of Transportation to actually return her call, but at 9:42 a.m. the next morning, her phone lit up with an unfamiliar Vermont government number. She took a breath, answered, “This is Claire. Hi, this is Drew Langley from Vermont State

DO.
You left a message asking about school bus GPS records from 2007.” That’s right. Specifically, bus 12 from Delpine Middle School. October 12th, 2007. Langley cleared his throat. Those records aren’t exactly easy to find. That system was pretty new back then. Not all buses had it yet. Clare

hesitated. Did bus 12 have it? According to our archived inventory, yes.
That fleet was upgraded in 2006. Bus 12 had a basic transponder. It pinged location data every 5 minutes. Clare’s pulse quickened. Is there still data from that day? Langley paused. That’s the weird part. The GPS unit transmitted normally until 8:14 a.m. about 20 minutes before it should have

reached Bear Hollow. Then it stopped.
Stopped how? Like someone cut the power or the unit was removed. Last ping came from just past the Deer Path Trail Fork. Clare opened her laptop and pulled up a satellite map. Could you send me the coordinates of that last ping? Sure, I can email you a screenshot. But one more thing. What? There

was a second signal. Another unit briefly picked up something at 3:17 a.m.
the following morning. Same model, same ID, but this time from a location 15 mi north near a defunct rail station. Clare blinked. How’s that possible? Langley exhaled. It shouldn’t be. We logged it as a glitch, but well, glitches don’t usually change location like that. He emailed the details while

Clare stared at the screen, stunned.
Two pings, one where the bus should have gone missing. The second, hours later, nowhere near the route. She clicked the file. The final coordinates resolved into a grainy satellite image. a railard long since overtaken by trees with a narrow access road and a rusted shed still visible from above.

Clare searched the address. No street view, no local references.
The only mention was from a 1981 zoning permit granting rail companies access for emergency depot functions. Emergency depot or a transfer point? She stared at the image. trees, shadows, forgotten space. If the GPS unit was reactivated there, even briefly, it might mean the bus wasn’t destroyed. It

had been moved, and someone had tried to make it disappear.
She didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Not her father, not Tom Granger, not even Janette, the clerk at town hall, who occasionally replied to her late night questions with PDF scans of council filings. She drove out past the old mill, past where the pavement ended and the gravel crunched

beneath her tires.
Her phone lost signal again around mile 10. The railard emerged behind a curtain of pine trees. A sagging chainlink gate had long since collapsed inward, and the tracks were rusted over, half swallowed by moss. The shed still stood, a rectangular building with flaking paint and no visible windows.

Clare parked on the edge and approached on foot.
The air smelled of rust and damp soil. The shed’s door was unlocked. Inside, dust, decay, and emptiness, except for tire tracks, faint, old, but there. She followed them across the concrete floor until they disappeared beneath a trapped door sealed shut with rusted bolts. A chain had once looped

through the metal latch, but had been snapped clean, leaving a twisted length dangling.
Clare took photos, then turned to leave. That’s when she heard it. A soft crack, branches breaking behind her. She froze. Footsteps 1, two, crunching across the gravel outside the shed. She stepped silently to the side of the door, pressing her back to the wall, heart pounding, hands slick with

sweat.
The footsteps paused, then a low, grally voice. You shouldn’t be here. Clare didn’t recognize it. Male, older, deliberate. She said nothing. The footsteps moved on, fading. Whoever it was didn’t come inside, just lingered long enough to let her know she wasn’t alone. and that someone was watching.

Back at her car, Clare drove fast.
Her tires kicked up gravel and sent birds scattering from the treetops. She didn’t stop until she reached town limits. She pulled into a gas station and checked her phone. Still no signal. She opened her laptop and loaded the photos, the snapped chain, the faint tire marks, the inside of the shed.

Then she uploaded everything to a private backup folder titled field trip restricted access.
She added a new note to her log. GPS findings. Last confirmed ping. 8:14 a.m. near Bear Hollow. Unexpected ping. 3:17 a.m. 15 mi north at Old Railard. Railard shows signs of vehicle movement and a trapped door. Someone was there today. Unknown male possibly watching sight.

She leaned back in the seat, heart still racing. If the bus had been moved and the GPS signal reactivated briefly, it meant at least part of the vehicle had survived. But the school board never said a word. No one had followed that signal or worse. Someone had and made sure it went nowhere. The

next place on Clare’s list wasn’t in any official report.
It was a gas station just 2 miles down the road from where bus 12’s GPS had cut out on October 12th, 2007. It was called Pinetop, a squat brick building with a faded sign and only two working pumps. The kind of place where time felt like it had stopped sometime in the late ‘9s.

Clare pulled in around noon, noting the small, outdated security camera mounted just above the front door. It looked dusty but functional. The man behind the counter was about 70 with white stubble and eyes that narrowed the moment Clare walked in. “Pumps broken.” “Credit only.” “I’m not here for

gas,” Clare said gently. “I’m looking into something that happened years ago.
” “Then you’re wasting your time,” he muttered, eyes back on the lottery tickets he was scratching. She took a photo from her coat pocket and slid it across the counter. an old yearbook image of Janie Delor. The man’s eyes flicked toward it. She came through here, Clare said. Or maybe the bus did.

October 12th, 2007, early morning. I don’t remember, kids, he said too quickly. Clare didn’t buy it.
There was a bus. It stopped briefly. It would have shown up on your surveillance system. He stared at her a long moment. Then with a sigh, he said, “I didn’t say there wasn’t a tape.” Her pulse quickened. “You still have it.” “I shouldn’t, but you do.

” He grunted and ducked behind the counter, emerging with a small, dusty box labeled cam backup 2007. Clare stared. “You kept it. I was told to erase everything after that week. Power outage did half the job, but this one tape got jammed in the system. Never recycled. He slid it across the counter

toward her. It’s VHS. Good luck finding a player. Clare took it carefully. What’s on it? He shrugged.
A school bus pulling into the lot around 8:10 a.m. Driver gets out, checks the hood, doesn’t go inside, stays parked 5 minutes, then leaves the wrong way. The wrong way? Not toward the preserve, toward the back road, the one they were supposed to avoid. Clare’s heart hammered. Do you know who the

driver was? Didn’t recognize him, but he was wearing the wrong jacket.
Not Delpeen school colors. Looked like a windbreaker. Plain black. What happened when you told someone? I didn’t. He met her eyes because a man came in the next day. Said he was with the school board, asked about tapes, told me not to share them. I didn’t like how calm he was.

You didn’t turn it in? He nodded at the tape. That is me turning it in. Clare left Pinetop with the VHS clutch tightly, heart pounding like it would crack her ribs. She drove straight to the only person she knew who might have a working VHS player, Margaret Harker. her father’s former colleague, a

retired teacher who had taught at Delpine during the 2007 incident.
Clare hadn’t spoken to her in years, but she remembered that Margaret had been one of the only teachers who publicly questioned the school board’s official story. Clare rang the bell on her cottage door. Margaret answered wearing a cardigan and holding a mug of tea. “Clare ran,” she said flatly.

“Took you long enough. I found something, Clare said.
I need your help. Margaret’s living room was a time capsule, shelves of annotated classics, cross-stitched wall hangings, and a cabinet filled with obsolete media players. You still use VHS? Clare asked. Margaret raised an eyebrow. The classics don’t stream. They sat on the worn couch.

The old TV buzzed to life and Margaret inserted the tape. The footage was grainy but clear enough. A yellow bus pulled into frame, parking crookedly by the pumps. That’s it, Clare whispered. Bus 12. They watched as the driver stepped out. He wasn’t a teacher, not anyone Clare recognized.

Tall, wiry, wearing a black jacket, not a school uniform. He didn’t open the door for the students. He opened the hood, checked something, then walked to the side of the bus. For a few seconds, he turned toward the camera. Margaret inhaled sharply. That’s not a driver. That’s Alan Baird. Clare

turned. You’re sure? I remember that face. He wasn’t supposed to drive that day. He wasn’t certified. He was just a temp hire.
He taught science barely. On the tape, Baird climbed back into the driver’s seat. The bus reversed out, not toward the preserve, but toward the side access road. Clare paused the tape. This changes everything, she whispered. He didn’t just vanish. He took them. Claire’s investigation log. Updated.

Bus 12 was last seen on Pinetop footage at 8:10 a.m. Alan Baird was driving, not a certified bus driver. Wore unmarked clothing. No school ID visible. Bus diverted from assigned route toward unmonitored back roads. School board rep told station owner to erase the footage. Tape was secretly

preserved. Bair was complicit. Clare stood from the couch, heart racing. Margaret sipped her tea slowly.
“What are you going to do with this?” “Everything,” Clare said. “I’m going to find out where that road leads and what it leads to.” The back road Alan Baird had taken, the one visible in the VHS tape, didn’t appear on modern GPS. Clare had to overlay 2006 county zoning maps with a faded copy of the

original bare hollow trail guide to trace it.
It was called Gravel Spur, an old maintenance road used by forestry crews decades earlier, now technically inactive, but it hadn’t always been. and she suspected it led to the heart of everything. Clare packed lightly. Flashlight, her notebook, a backup battery, and the bracelet, the one Janie

never should have left behind. She parked at the pine stop again, this time locking her car more tightly than usual, and hiked up the trail to where gravel spur split off into the woods. The moment she crossed the treeine, the temperature dropped.
Branches curled low overhead, turning daylight into dull gray haze. There were no tire marks, no signs of recent foot traffic, but the path was still there, beaten down by time, not completely reclaimed. Clare walked for nearly an hour. She passed a collapsed gate, then a rusted sign bent sideways.

Property of US environmental testing. No entry. The Bare Hollow Project. She stepped beyond the sign. That’s when she saw the structure. Half buried in moss and earth. Concrete walls jutted up from the forest floor like the rib cage of a dead animal. The entrance was a narrow stairwell. Its door

long gone painted on the frame in cracked red.
Was a number BHP27. Clare descended slowly, flashlight in hand. The air grew colder, thicker. Every step echoed in the narrow stairwell, swallowed by silence. At the bottom was a metal hallway, narrow with peeling paint, and exposed pipes. She was in the remains of the bare hollow facility.

She passed faded signs, interview room, a storage, medical observation chamber. Then she found the room. It had no label. The door was a jar. Inside the floor was stained. A child-sized chair was bolted to the ground with a broken strap hanging from one side. A viewing window was cracked and fogged

with mildew.
In the corner, a chalkboard still clung to the wall with three words faintly visible beneath smudges. She said, “Wait.” Clare swallowed hard. On the floor was something small and metal. She crouched and picked it up. A charm, a music note, just like the one on Janie’s bracelet. She checked her

pocket. Janie’s bracelet was intact. This was a second one. Her mind reeled.
Had Janie ever even left this place? She stumbled back, heart hammering, and nearly screamed as her flashlight flickered, then cut out completely. Total blackness. She fumbled for her phone and switched on the flashlight app. It barely cut through the dark, but enough to see the wall ahead of her.

There were names scratched into the paint. Dozens. Some were legible. Some weren’t. Natalie BJ Delcourt e Thomas K.
Menddees. No one leaves. Not really. They listen. They wait underneath. Clare backed away. The flashlight flickered again. Something was wrong with the air. Too heavy. Too still. She turned to leave. A sound stopped her. Faint, metallic, like chains shifting on concrete. Not imagination, not memory.

Something else was down there.
She ran. Clare didn’t stop until she reached her car. Her clothes were damp with sweat, her hands shaking too hard to fit the key into the ignition on the first try. She finally turned the engine over and sped down the road, gravel spraying behind her. Once she was back in town, she parked in front

of the diner and just sat there breathing.
She pulled out the charm. It was scratched, burnt along one edge. Not fresh, not recent, but not ancient either. Someone had been there recently. Someone who still remembered Janie or wanted her to be remembered. She opened her notebook and wrote in block letters across a clean page, BHP27, Field

Notes. Underground facility still intact. Interview chambers exist. Restraint chair present. Names carved into wall.
Possibly other students music note charm found. Not the same as Janie’s bracelet chalkboard message. She said, “Wait.” Chains heard. No explanation. Then she circled one name. Jay Delcourt. Janie had made it there. But had she ever left? Clare couldn’t shake the sound. Chains on concrete. It looped

in her mind like a haunted echo.
She tried to rationalize it. Maybe something shifting overhead or the building settling. But deep down she didn’t believe that. It felt personal, too precise. The name scratched into the wall. Jay Dell Court had confirmed what her gut already knew. Janie had never left Bear Hollow. Clare needed a

second opinion. Someone who had been there. Someone who had seen something before the silence set in.
She remembered a name that had come up in one of her dad’s old files. Ray Alvarez, a substitute bus driver who had filled in occasionally during the 2007 to 2008 school year. There had been a sticky note on his personnel record. Reassigned. No further use after B12 incident. Paid out. No one paid

out substitutes.
She tracked him down through a mutual friend of her dad’s, a retired mechanic named Pete, who still played poker on Thursdays with Ray from Depot 3. It only took one phone call. Clare drove an hour north to a trailer park near Rutland, where Ry now lived. His porch sagged, and a wind chime made

from spoons clinkedked lazily in the afternoon breeze. He opened the door, shirtless, eyes blurry, but alert.
You’re Ren’s kid? I am, Clare said. Clare. He nodded, motioning her inside without a word. The trailer was cramped but clean. Old furniture, a TV with aluminum foil on the antenna, and a plastic tub full of crossword puzzle books. Rey cracked open a beer and offered her one. She declined. “So,” he

said, settling into his chair. “You’re asking about the bus.
” She pulled the VHS tape photo from her satchel. The one showing Alan Baird driving. Did you know him? Ry squinted at the image. Yeah, Baird. Weird guy hired out of nowhere, not union. They stuck him on rotation last minute. That was always fishy. Clare leaned forward. Did he normally drive? Nope.

He wasn’t even on the driver roster. That bus, bus 12, was assigned to Dale Marks, a vet with 10 years behind the wheel. But the morning of the trip, Dale’s shift got cancelled. Called in, told not to show. Clare blinked. By who? Ry tapped his beer can. That’s the thing. He never found out. It

didn’t come from dispatch.
Just a voicemail from a blocked number said he’d been replaced. And no one followed up. Ry shook his head. He raised hell, went to the union, but then they paid him off. Said it was a miscommunication. They reassigned him to training in Male quietly and bared. Never saw him again after that week.

No one did. Not even at the depot. I asked around.
Some said he wasn’t even living in town, just driving in from a hotel. Clare stared at him. So someone planted him. Yeah, Ry said, taking a sip. Someone who wanted a specific driver on that bus on that day. Ray scratched his jaw and glanced toward a cabinet. Hold on. He stood and returned a minute

later with an old clipboard wrapped in plastic.
I shouldn’t have kept this, but I didn’t trust what was going on. Clare looked down at the sheet attached to it. A driver assignment roster for October 12th, 2007. Handwritten initialed bus 12 reassigned to a bear c directive. No AM check-in required. Why wouldn’t he check in? Clare asked. Exactly.

Ry said.
We all had to clock in, record mileage, do safety checks. Baird skipped it, which means he wasn’t part of the system. Clare took a photo. Rey looked at her with something between sadness and fear. You think those kids are still out there? I think the truth is still out there, she said. And someone

spent 15 years trying to bury it. Ry nodded slowly.
Then you’d better hurry because I’m pretty sure whoever set this up, they’re still around. Later that night, Clare sat in her father’s garage with all the evidence spread before her. yearbook photos, the thrift store bracelet, the redacted student list, GPS pings, the VHS tape still in its box, and

now proof that the driver was a plant, she wrote across a clean page in her notebook.
Driver evidence, bus 12, originally assigned to Dale Marx. Dale was removed via anonymous call Alan Baird assigned with no check-in record. Bard’s address. Dar employment not verifiable. Subd driver Ray Alvarez confirmed system was bypassed. School board covered up driver change. She stared at the

line she’d just written. Covered up.
This wasn’t negligence. It was orchestrated. And it was time to go back to Bear Hollow one last time. Because whatever they’ done to Janie and the others, it hadn’t started on the trail. It started on the bus. Clare didn’t sleep. She tried, but the walls of her childhood bedroom, once filled with

posters and books, felt too close, too loud with the weight of silence. At 2:13 a.m.
, she gave up and sat in the garage with a notebook in her lap, the bracelet on the table, and the names spinning in her head like static. There were 14 of them, 14 kids, and one teacher. if that’s what Alan Baird had really been. She had their names. She had photos. She had a VHS tape showing the

bus turning off the assigned wrote.
But what she didn’t have, what she still needed was a direct link to whoever had orchestrated it. Someone powerful enough to shut down the investigation, bury the personnel files, and erase entire records. She stared at the school board letterhead she’d scanned earlier that week. Morningington

Educational Trust. And one name stood out, E. Rutherford. She’d signed every file closure order from 2007 to 2010.
Her name was on the audit that erased the student list, and her address had been redacted in the town’s public registry, but old printed directories, those couldn’t be edited retroactively. Clare drove to the Morningington Library as the sun was just cresting over the trees. It opened at 8:00.

She was on the steps at 7:59, bouncing her foot impatiently. The reference librarian, Janette, 40something, blurryeyed, coffee in hand, was startled, but not unfriendly. Clare recognized her from the town hall office. Janette blinked when Clare gave her the name. Elellanor Rutherford, she repeated.

I haven’t heard that one in years. She’s still on the Morningington Educational Trust board, Clare said.
or at least her name is. She doesn’t attend meetings. Everything’s remote now. But yes, she’s still around. Has a private estate on Woodpine Lane near the reservoir. Can I see her old listings? Janette raised an eyebrow. You doing a school project? Something like that. After a few minutes, she

returned with a 2006 town register. Clare scanned the page and found it. Ratherford, Eleanor M.
48 Woodpine Lane, retired psychologist, former school administrator, psychologist. Clare jotted it down. Did she ever work with students? She asked. Janette nodded. Counsled kids back in the 80s, then moved into board oversight. Always behind the scenes, quiet. Clare thought of the quote Ray

Alvarez had given her. You’d better hurry.
Whoever set this up is still around. It had to be her. That evening, after printing everything she had into a single file marked field evidence, Greystone incident, Clare returned to her father’s house. The front gate was open. That was strange. She hadn’t left it that way. Her keys slid quietly

into her palm as she approached the front steps. The porch light was off.
The screen door swayed gently in the wind. Inside, the living room light was on. Her father was asleep in the recliner again, or so she thought, until she saw the blood. Dad. Clare dropped the folder and ran to him. Not much blood, a cut above the eyebrow. His glasses were broken. He stirred. M.

What? Dad, wake up. What happened? He blinked blurily. Don’t remember. Someone knocked. thought it was Pete. Next thing, someone’s in the house. Did you see their face? He shook his head slowly. No woman, I think. Small, fast. Took something. Clare’s heart dropped. She ran to the kitchen where

she’d left her satchel on the table, open, half emptied.
The VHS tape was still there, but the notebook was gone. Her backup USB gone. The original bracelet gone. Whoever had come wasn’t just sending a warning. They were covering tracks. She stayed awake all night documenting everything she remembered into a fresh file. At dawn, a white envelope appeared

on the porch. No stamp, no address, just her name. Clare.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. Stop digging. You’re not just stirring the past. You’re walking into it. There’s still time to leave. but not much. There was a drawing on the back, a child’s sketch in black crayon, a bus, a forest, and below it, a figure in the trees with no face. Claire’s

investigation log.
Addendum: My home was entered. Items stolen. Primary notes, bracelet, USB, timeline sketches, intruder left no trace. Father mildly injured. Drawing left behind suggests surveillance. Threat not idol. They know who I am and where I live. Clare looked at the message one more time. You’re not just

stirring the past.
You’re walking into it. It wasn’t a warning. It was a map. And the next place it pointed was Eleanor Rutherford’s estate. Because whoever this woman had been in 1979, she wasn’t just a board member. She had been inside Bear Hollow. And Clare needed to know what she saw. Clare parked a/4 mile down

from 48 Woodp Pine Lane, killing her lights as the sun slid behind the trees. Elellaner Rutherford’s estate was barely visible from the road.
Tucked behind a rot iron gate and choked by creeping ivy. The house itself looked more like a forgotten sanitarium than a private residence. It was quiet, too quiet. No cars, no porch lights, no dogs barking, just the creek of wind through branches and the soft rattle of something metallic hanging

from the rear gate.
Clare crouched beside the fence line, pressed record on her phone, and whispered, “May 28th, 9:07 p.m. Approaching residents of Eleanor Rutherford. Strong link to Morningington Educational Trust and the Bear Hollow Project. unknown risk level. She found a gap in the fence where rust had eaten

through the links and slipped inside.
The house loomed above her, tall and narrow. Its siding cracked like dried skin. Every instinct screamed for her to turn around, but she didn’t. She was too far in now, too close. She crossed the gravel quietly, avoiding the front door, and made for the side entrance. a sun room with shattered

pains and a door propped open with a stone.
Inside, the air was stale, almost chemical. Clare swept her light across the room. Stacks of paperwork, medical files, half burned photographs. A faint hum buzzed from somewhere deeper in the house, mechanical and low. She passed into the main hallway and the smell hit her. disinfectant and

something metallic underneath.
She stepped into what once must have been a sitting room. But this wasn’t just a home. It was an archive. Folders, cassette tapes, black and white photos pinned to corkboards. The wall was covered in sketches, some drawn with precision, some with the manic swirl of a disturbed hand. children’s

names, drawings of the bus, dates, times, scribbled numbers, and one word repeated over and over underneath. Clare approached the central desk.
An old realtore tape recorder sat at its center, still functional, labeled session 47, BHP/JD. She pressed play. A girl’s voice crackled through the machine. Small, afraid, familiar. I don’t want to go back in the room. Please, I told you everything. A second voice. Calm, female, clinical. What did

you hear last time, Janie? Silence.
Then it’s in the floor. It hums. It talks when we sleep. It said we shouldn’t leave. That it’s hungry. And the others gone. Some under. Some in the dark room. But it’s not their fault. You opened it. Janie, what did you see? A long pause. The bus never moved. You just made it feel like it did. The

tape clicked off.
Claire stepped back, breathtight. It wasn’t a field trip. It was an experiment. In the corner of the room, a cabinet sat open. Inside, patient files, medical intake forms, all labeled with BHP case numbers. Claire flipped through and froze at one marked BHP12 JD Delcourt. Janie, age 12, subject

six.
Photos, vitals, drawings, notes, displays high auditory sensitivity. Speaks of bus beneath the bus. Expresses dissociation, temporal dislocation, records altered sleep cycles, told others, “We’re in a loop. We never left.” At the bottom, a signature Eleanor M. Rutherford, PhD lead clinical

observer. BHP Clare felt sick. This wasn’t about a missing bus.
This was a psychological field test conducted on children, on Janie. And Baird hadn’t been a teacher. He’d been a handler. Then a sound upstairs. A floorboard creaked. Clare froze hard in her throat. She grabbed her phone, snuffed her light, and ducked behind the desk. A silhouette passed across the

top stair. Slow, deliberate.
A figure, tall, moving like they knew the space. Not Rutherford, too big. She waited, breath shallow. The figure reached the hallway and paused just outside the room. Clare gripped the drawer handle of the desk slowly and tugged it open. metal groaning, a handgun, small, rusted, but loaded. She

stayed low.
Then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, the figure turned and walked away. Out the back, not toward the front door. Clare waited until the footsteps faded, then bolted. She stuffed the tape, Janie’s file, and the bus sketches into her bag and ran like hell back through the trees. She didn’t stop

until she was back in the car, hands shaking as she pulled the door closed and locked it.
She dumped the stolen evidence onto the passenger seat. The tape, the patient file, the photos. What they buried wasn’t the bus. It was the program. And it wasn’t the first time they’ done it. She flipped to the back of Janie’s file. One last note. Cycle complete. Recommendation. Silent site.

Reassign assets. Terminate. Bed.
Clare stared at the last word. Terminate. Alan Baird had never disappeared. He’d been erased. Just like the others. Just like Janie. Unless Unless she’d found a way to leave something behind. A clue. A warning. A voice. By morning. Eleanor Rutherford’s house was gone. Clare had barely slept.

her thoughts spiraling between fear and rage. She’d backed up every scan, every audio file, and every document she’d stolen the night before. She was about to make her first call to a journalist she trusted in Boston when the alert pinged on her phone. Breaking. House fire destroys historic

Woodpine property near Morningington Reservoir. She clicked the link.
Authorities have not released the name of the deceased, but neighbors confirmed the property belonged to Eleanor Rutherford, a reclusive former school administrator. The fire, which began shortly after 4:00 a.m., consumed the home completely. Investigators are currently assessing the cause, but

have not ruled out arson.
Clare sat in silence, the phone trembling in her hand. It wasn’t an accident. Someone knew she had been there. Someone knew what was left inside that house. She called the fire department, posed as a graduate student studying historical architecture. They wouldn’t confirm details, but one phrase

stuck.
We found what looked like an archive room burned through, but no human remains on site. No body, no Eleanor. Rutherford had disappeared again. Clare sat at her kitchen table staring at the wall of evidence she’d reassembled from her backups, the GPS ping, the VHS tape, the medical files, the

recorded session with Janie, the list of students redacted from the public record, and now a housefire conveniently destroying the last known link to the bare hollow experiments. Her laptop chimed.
A reply from the journalist. Elias Boon, an investigative reporter who had once exposed a corruption scandal in the Vermont State Police. Got your email. Sounds wild, but I’m listening. Let’s talk in person. I’ll drive out today. Relief swept over her. She’d finally found someone who would listen.

Someone outside Delp Pine. Someone not afraid of what she’d uncovered.
She emailed him everything. all the files, all the scans, every document, tape, and audio clip. She also gave him one name, Janie Delor. The rest of the day passed in quiet anxiety. Clare walked the yard, checked her dad’s locks twice, and slept in the living room, her phone clutched in her hand.

She woke up to another email from Elias.
Subject line: What the hell did you send me, Claire? This is big. like shut it down kind of big. I’ve started calling around but I already got push back. One source said bear hollow is still flagged internally off limits. I’ll run with it but you need to know. You’re not the first person to ask

about this.
A guy named Hunter Bllye tried 6 years ago. Freelance journalist vanished in the Catkills. I’m heading out now. Keep your phone on. If anything happens to me, your folder goes public automatically. Clare stared at the screen. She wasn’t alone. She never had been. Others had tried. Others had been

silenced. At 9:37 p.m.
, her phone buzzed again. Unknown number. She picked up Elias. But the voice wasn’t his. It was a young girl’s. Faint, static laced. Claire. She froze. Who is this? Don’t stop. You’re almost there. The voice was familiar. It’s under the road where the bus stopped. We never got off. We just kept

going. Clare’s blood turned to ice.
Janie, you’re almost there. You have to finish it. The line went dead. Clare stared at the phone. The call history showed no number, no duration. She dropped the phone and backed away from the table. Was it real? A prank? Her own unraveling? Or had something, some part of Janie found its way back

through the cracks? She pulled out her map and traced the final stretch of gravel spur, the road where the bus had vanished.
According to the documents from Rutherford’s house, the final piece of the bear hollow complex was not above ground. The phrase kept repeating in every document. BHP-sub/access limited. Transfer via tunnel. The real chamber, the final test site, wasn’t in the woods.

It was under the road, exactly where the GPS had cut out. Claire’s final entry. Destination: Gravel Spur beneath the old mile marker. Mission: confirm presence of tunnel subchamber. Objective: retrieve physical proof of sight before it’s sealed again. Backup sent to Elias Boon. Fail safe timed

released to media of contact is lost.
She packed the flashlight, camera, phone, and what was left of Janie’s file. This time, she wasn’t just following leads. She was going underground. The road was quiet. Gravel Spur looked the same as it had weeks earlier. overgrown, deserted, forgotten. But Clare knew better now. She knew what lay

beneath the cracked ass fault and mosscovered branches. She parked at the edge of the last known GPS ping, checking the coordinates three times.
It was almost exactly where the bus had turned off the route, where the signal had stopped, where Janie’s voice, real or not, had told her to look. Clare stepped out into the fading dusk, flashlight strapped to her wrist, her satchel packed tight with recording equipment, spare batteries, and two

burner phones.
One would remain in the car, uploading her GPS every 5 minutes. The other she would take down with her. A stone mile marker stood nearby, weathered, partially collapsed. She crouched near its base and cleared away the debris. there, a rusted metal hatch, buried beneath years of pine needles and

dirt, bolted shut, but one hinge had cracked with rust. She gritted her teeth and prried.
It gave with a screech like a scream. A stairwell descended beneath the road, and at the bottom a sealed door marked simply, BHP-sub- was the airless dark, colder than before, deeper. Her flashlight flickered as she moved through corridors untouched by time, past metal bunkers and longforgotten

electrical boxes. Wires hung like vines. Mold grew in jagged lines across the ceiling. She passed a door marked observation room B.
Another sleep study 3. And then she saw it. The bus parked in the center of a massive underground chamber, intact, covered in dust. Its windows were blacked out as if it had never seen sunlight. Clare approached slowly, each step echoing. She circled the vehicle, hand trembling as she touched the

rusted handle. The door creaked open.
Inside seats still stood, some slashed open, others wet with mildew, and on each seat a name tag handwritten in faded marker. Natalie B. Eric TK Menddees J. Dell Court. Clare moved to the back, heart pounding. On the final seat, a single paper note rested. We weren’t taken. We were kept. They

tested the loop.
Some didn’t last. I remembered. That’s why they marked me. She turned the note over. A drawing. The same one left at her door. A forest. A bus. A faceless figure watching. and in the corner scrolled in tight, desperate handwriting underneath forever until someone saw us. Clare stepped off the bus

and turned toward the far wall of the chamber.
There, carved deep into the concrete were the names, all 14, every child, each one engraved by hand over and over again as if someone had been fighting to keep them remembered even as the world tried to forget. Carara Mendes, Eric Thomas, Janie Delcourt, Natalie Boyd, H. Collins, M. Roass, A. Win

T. Nuen, J Hart, C. Ellis R. Becker, P. Dancler, L. Ford, B. Sims.
Clare dropped her flashlight and raised her phone, snapping photos. Every angle, every name, the bus itself, the chamber, it was all real. They were real. She whispered to the dark, “I see you.” Back in the daylight, she uploaded everything. Photos, audio, location data, and sent one last text to

Elias Boon. Found the chamber. They’re all here. It was never a crash.
It was a program. BHP sharing files now going to press. But the text never sent. No signal. And when she turned around, a man was standing by her car, dressed in black, face expressionless. She froze. He didn’t speak, just raised a phone of his own and typed. Clare’s phone buzzed. A new message

from an unknown number.
Thank you. That’s all we needed. The man walked away, disappearing into the trees, and Clare realized they had never lost the data. They had just needed her to reopen the door. Epilogue. 6 weeks later, Elias Boon received an envelope. inside a USB drive on it. Everything Clare had collected.

He tried to reach her, called every hospital, every station. No record, no police report, no trace of her father either. They were gone, just like the bus, just like the others. But now the truth had an audience. And for the first time in 18 years, the names had voices again. The bus that didn’t

return.
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