I don’t usually talk about this on Facebook. Most days I post pictures of my kids, complain about the weather, share recipes like everyone else my age.

But every time I see a “MISSING” poster on my feed, or someone shares a true crime clip for entertainment, my stomach twists.
Because for me, “missing” isn’t a genre. It has a name.

Her name is Barb.

And once, a long time ago, I watched her walk out of my life and into a night that never ended.

Back in 1981, we were fifteen and thought we were so grown. Small town girls in Williston, North Dakota, dreaming of anything that looked bigger than the prairie and the same three streets we walked every weekend.

Barb was tiny but loud in the best way. Brown eyes, straight hair that never did what she wanted, always smelling like coffee and fries from her job at Country Kitchen. She saved her tips in a glass jar on her dresser, counting them out loud, telling me,

“Just a few more months, Di. When I’m sixteen, I’m getting my own place. No more sharing a bedroom. No more asking anyone if I can stay out late.”

She wasn’t running from home, she was running toward independence. There’s a difference. Her mom, Louise, worked herself to the bone. It wasn’t a bad home. Just a tired one.

We did what every bored teenager did back then: roller skating, coffee, walking circles around town, talking about boys and movies and how we’d escape. I asked her to be my maid of honor for my summer wedding. Yes, I was that girl—engaged at fifteen, planning a July wedding like I knew anything about life. Barb took it more seriously than I did. She’d circle dress pictures in magazines, critique my color choices, tell me I was out of my mind and then help me anyway.

If you’d asked me then which one of us was more likely to disappear, I would’ve said me. I was the one throwing myself into marriage. She was the one making practical plans: work, apartment, saving up, counting down to sixteen.

Girls who are busy planning their next shift and the next sleepover don’t usually vanish into thin air.

The last week before she disappeared felt… normal. That’s the part that still haunts me. No big fight. No dramatic goodbye. Just little moments that only feel heavy when you replay them with the ending already written.

We saw each other less that week. I was wrapped up in wedding stuff, she was picking up extra hours. When we did talk, it was over coffee, complaining about customers and teachers, laughing over nothing. She didn’t sound scared. She didn’t sound like someone hiding a terrible secret.

If she was worried about anything, she didn’t tell me. And that’s the guilt I still taste sometimes at three in the morning.

The night she vanished, April 11th, I stayed home. My memory of it is stupidly ordinary: TV on too loud, my mom yelling at my little brother, me lying on the couch thinking about flowers and music for the ceremony. At some point, I told myself, I should call Barb. I didn’t.

She ended up at a small get-together at some apartments on 18th Street. Not a wild party, not a hundred people, just local kids, music too low to be fun and too loud to be ignored by neighbors. Somewhere in there, a boy appears in the story. Depending on who you ask, his name was Stacy, or “that quiet guy with longish hair,” or “I don’t really remember him.”

I never met him. Never even heard his name that week. That part still feels like someone edited a stranger into my favorite movie and told me he’d always been there.

What I know now, from years of retelling and re-questioning, is a mess of almosts.

Almost midnight near the Plainsman Hotel.
Almost home through Recreation Park.
Almost safe on streets she’d walked since she was little.

Someone says he offered to walk her home. Someone else says she left the apartments with him and he came back alone, saying she “got a ride.”

All I know for sure is this: there’s a stretch of sidewalk between that park and her front door where the world just… erased her.

The next day, I woke up late, because teenagers always think there will be another morning. My mom was on the phone in the kitchen, her voice low and tight. When she handed me the receiver and I heard Louise’s voice, something inside me went cold before she even finished the sentence.

“Di, have you seen Barb? Did she stay with you?”

I can still hear the pause after I said no. That silence was the first time I realized normal could break.

At first everyone thought “sleepover”. “Oh, she probably crashed on someone’s couch.” “She’ll come home when she’s hungry.” The usual lines adults use when they’re trying to convince themselves more than you.

But hours went by. Nobody had seen her. She hadn’t shown up for work. Her money, her clothes, even her nearly full pack of cigarettes were still in her room.

You have to understand Barb to know why that’s important. If she’d run, she would’ve taken her savings. She would’ve at least taken her smokes.

Instead, there was nothing. Just an empty bed and a mother holding a phone like a lifeline.

The police came. They asked the questions they always ask in the movies, except this wasn’t a movie and nobody wrote the script well.

“Did she ever talk about running away?”
“Any fights at home?”
“Boy trouble?”

Louise said no, no, no. She told them about the job, the wedding, the money still in the jar. She told them Barb had nothing with her but the clothes on her back.

Still, in that era, in that town, a missing teenage girl defaulted to “probably ran away.” No Amber Alerts, no social media, no phone pings. Just a thin report, a few calls to neighboring counties, and a lot of assumptions.

Meanwhile, we were out yelling her name into the wind.

I still remember walking through Recreation Park that first evening of the search. The sun was going down, the grass damp, swings barely moving. Every rustle made my heart jump. We checked behind trees, in ditches, along the riverbank. Nothing looked disturbed. No broken branches, no drag marks, no blood, no dropped shoe, nothing dramatic. The park just sat there, stupidly normal, like it hadn’t swallowed my best friend.

That’s the part people don’t get about “mystery cases.” They expect drama. They expect obvious clues. But real life is quiet. The scariest thing in the world can happen and the grass still grows, the swings still creak, and the neighbors still watch their Saturday night shows.

Days turned into weeks. The town tightened. Parents started picking up their kids earlier, locking doors they’d left open for years. Every old truck with an out-of-state plate suddenly looked suspicious.

Tips came in, each one like a cruel little rollercoaster.
A girl that “looked like Barb” at a bus station in Montana.
A rumor someone heard in a convenience store in Minot.
A boy who said his cousin’s friend had “heard something.”

Every time the phone rang, Louise would jump. I saw her more than I ever had before, sitting at her table with a notepad covered in names and half-remembered details. Some people stopped taking her calls. Others answered but with that tired tone that said, I wish I could help, but I have nothing new to give you.

People get compassion fatigue. You never think it’ll happen in a missing-child case until you watch it from the inside.

And me? I oscillated between hope and dread so fast I made myself dizzy. One minute I was sure she’d walk through the door, rolling her eyes, saying, “Di, you will not believe the week I’ve had.” The next, I’d catch myself imagining worst-case scenarios I didn’t even have words for at fifteen.

Guilt is a weird thing. It doesn’t care whether you actually did something wrong. It just finds a crack and lives there. Mine sounded like: If you’d called her that night… if you’d insisted she come over… if you’d walked with her…

There’s no answer to any of that. But try telling that to a teenage brain—or to a grown one, honestly.

Years passed, but Barb never turned up. Not alive, not… otherwise. Her case slid from “active search” to “we’ll keep our eyes open” to “cold” without anyone saying the words out loud.

And then, slowly, the whispers started.

A quiet boy named Stacy who’d supposedly been with her that night.
A drifter in a van who later hurt other girls in another state.
A brother with moods that made people uncomfortable.

Little facts, half-facts, rumors. None of them strong enough to hold alone, all of them heavy enough to crush you if you carried them too long.

I met Stacy only through stories. Louise told the police about him early on, gave them his name, even mentioned a hotel in Montana where she thought Barb might be with him. Decades later, two sisters from that apartment gathering looked at an old photo and said, “Yeah… he kind of looks like the guy Barb came with.” Not sure. Not definite. Just… “kind of.”

By the time investigators tried to untangle his timeline, he was already gone. Picked up in Montana, in trouble, then dead by suicide in a jail cell months after Barb vanished. His mother later told Louise that he’d mentioned Barb before he died. She never said exactly how. Guilt? Fear? Just a name dropped into a conversation? No one knows.

What do you do with that?

How do you process a maybe-confession from a dead boy you never met?

Then there was the drifter, a seismology worker living at the KOA campground around that time. His story took a brutal turn in Wyoming, where he lured girls with a “lost puppy” and did things I can’t comfortably type out here. When his crimes made the news, people in Williston looked at each other and asked, silently at first and then louder: Could it have been him?

But again—no witnesses, no physical evidence, no one who remembered his van near the park or the hotel or those apartments. His pattern in Wyoming was daylight, public, reckless. Barb’s disappearance was midnight, silent, invisible. The parallels were chilling, but parallels are not proof.

And then there was the name that hurt the most when it came up: her brother, Frank. Some people swore he’d never hurt her. Others told stories in quiet voices about tempers, about tension in the house, about moments that sat wrong in their memories. Law enforcement, at some point, listed him as a person of interest. Nothing more, nothing less.

He got sick later, cancer eating him from the inside. Louise, who had chased every lead for years, seemed to slow down around then. People noticed. People talked. Losing one child to thin air and another to disease at the same time can snap anyone in half.

When she eventually had Barb declared legally dead, she put her name on a stone right beside Frank’s. A shared headstone. Their names next to each other for as long as granite lasts.

I remember standing in front of it the first time, fingers tracing the dates. My chest felt tight enough to crack. Part of me wanted to scream, “How could you put them together like that?” Another part of me whispered, “Maybe she knows something we don’t. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand to bury two children separately.”

That’s the thing about this story: every choice can be read three different ways, and every version hurts.

If you’re still reading, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with the image that keeps circling in my head—the one with the woman running across a foggy street toward a glowing girl.

The truth is, that woman is me. Or at least, the version of me that lives in my nightmares.

In those dreams, it’s always the same. The town looks almost like Williston did back then—old truck headlights cutting through mist, utility poles fading into the distance, yellow police tape flickering at the edge of my vision. I’m older now, of course. Hair darker, body slower. But I’m running like I’m fifteen again, feet pounding the pavement.

She’s standing by the curb. Small, pale, with that straight brown hair. Not bloody, not broken, not aged. Just… paused at the moment before everything went wrong. There’s a faint glow around her, not horror-movie scary, more like the way streetlights blur in the fog.

She’s looking right at me. Direct eye contact. That’s the cruel part. Not staring into nothing, not turned away. We are locked in, like we both understand that this is the last second either of us gets.

I’m holding a crumpled missing poster in one hand, my wedding ring glinting on the other. The truck is behind me, brakes smoking, trying not to hit me as I run. I don’t care. I’d rather be hit, crushed, erased, if it means reaching her in time.

I always wake up just before my hand touches hers.

I’ve never told my kids about those dreams. To them, Aunt Barb is a story, a name on a stone, a photo on our fridge. To me, she is eternally fifteen, eternally walking through that park, eternally a half-second out of reach.

Why am I writing all this here, on a random night, under my real name where my coworkers and neighbors can see?

Because I am tired of this story living only in whispers and old newspaper clippings.

Because somewhere out there, maybe even scrolling this app from a couch that looks just like mine, is someone who knows something about a girl named Barb who didn’t come home in 1981.

Because the distance between “I heard something once” and “I called it in” can be the difference between closure and hell.

And because unresolved grief does something to a person. It freezes a part of you in the year things went wrong. I have built a whole life since then—marriage, kids, moves, jobs. But there is still a piece of me stuck in that small town, standing in that park, waiting for her to come out of the dark.

Some people ask, gently or not, “Why don’t you just let it go?”

Let me answer that.

Imagine your best friend. The one who knows your ugly cry, your worst secrets, your dumb crushes. Imagine planning a wedding or a big trip or just next weekend with them. And then one night, they’re supposed to walk five minutes home and they never arrive. No body. No confession. No clear suspect.

Do you really think you’d ever stop replaying it?

Letting go isn’t a switch. It’s more like learning to carry a heavy box. At first it crushes you, knocks the air out of your lungs. Over time, you get stronger, or numb, or both. You figure out how to live with it balanced on your chest. But you never stop feeling the weight.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I know this is long for a Facebook post. You could’ve scrolled past after the first line, but you stayed. It means Barb’s name lived a little longer in someone else’s head tonight.

So let me end with this:

If you were me, would you keep digging, or would you choose the numbness of pretending it’s “in the past”?

If you once heard a rumor about a missing girl, but it felt too small or too old to matter, would you speak up now?

And if you’ve ever lost someone without answers—maybe not to a mystery like this, but to silence, to distance, to unfinished conversations—how did you learn to keep breathing?

I don’t have a neat lesson to wrap this up with. I’m not here to say “hug your loved ones tighter” like that fixes everything. All I can say is: somewhere out there is a fifteen-year-old girl frozen in 1981, in the space between a park and a front door, and I’m still running toward her.

Tell me what you honestly think in the comments. Would you keep chasing a ghost… or would you finally stop at the edge of the light and let the dark have its secrets? 🥲