Hannah Upp, who first disappeared in 2008 and then in 2013, has a rare condition known as dissociative fugue, and she hasn't been seen since she vanished in 2017.
Find Hannah Upp/FacebookHannah Upp experienced multiple dissociative fugue states, during which she had no recollection of who she was.
The disappearance of Hannah Upp in New York City in 2008 launched a frantic search. The 23-year-old was missing for almost three weeks before she was thankfully found safe. But then Upp vanished again in 2013. And again in 2017. And, sadly, she remains missing to this day.
However, her disappearances had nothing to do with foul play.
Upp had experienced multiple episodes of what is known as dissociative fugue, a rare psychological condition characterized by sudden amnesia and identity loss. People with this condition forget who they are, but retain their knowledge and skills, and often wander far from home.
But though Upp was found safe in 2008 and 2013, she sadly has not been seen since she vanished in 2017. Then, Upp was living on St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She seemingly decided to go for a swim before heading to work, but never showed up. A year later, an adult skeleton washed ashore on a nearby island, but the body was too decomposed to identify.
Some believe that may have been the end of the story; others think — and hope — that she might still be out there.
Hannah Upp’s First Disappearance In New York City
Hannah Upp’s first disappearance occurred on Aug. 28, 2008. At the time, the 23-year-old was a Spanish teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem and a graduate student at Pace University. On that day, she left her Hamilton Heights apartment for a run, leaving her ID, phone, wallet, and passport at home.
Find Hannah Upp/FacebookHannah Upp in an undated photo.
Then Upp vanished — only to reappear on September 16. She was found floating face down in the Upper Bay near Staten Island, still wearing the red running shorts and black sports bra she’d had on when she vanished. The captain of the Staten Island Ferry happened to spot her in the water, and sent two of the ferry’s deckhands to rescue her. Incredibly, Upp was alive.
But confused. From her perspective, time had suddenly jumped forward.
“I went from going for a run to being in the ambulance,” she told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. “It was like 10 minutes had passed. But it was almost three weeks.”
Though Upp had no memory of what happened in those three weeks, some of the holes in her memory would soon be filled by various surveillance cameras around the city. Upp was seen entering her gym to shower, checking her email at an Apple Store, and engaging in a conversation with a classmate, who had even asked her if she was the missing teacher everyone was looking for. Upp declared that she was not.
But other questions remained. Where had Upp slept? What had she eaten? And most importantly, why didn’t she have any memory of the past three weeks?
Find Hannah Upp/FacebookDoctors found that Hannah Upp had a very rare psychological condition that causes a temporary fugue state.
Doctors soon provided an answer. They diagnosed Hannah Upp with dissociative fugue, a condition which can last days or even years, in which the sufferer forgets their identity but are otherwise able to function as normal. Most people know of the condition because of the character Jason Bourne — portrayed by Matt Damon — who amnesia was inspired by the most famous sufferer of dissociative fugue, a preacher named Ansel Bourne.
The preacher vanished for two months in 1887, set up a shop in a different state, and lived under the name Albert Brown. Then, one day, he suddenly remembered who he was and asked, “Where am I?”
Indeed, people with dissociative fugue often travel.
“People [experiencing dissociative fugue] have been known to not only travel across cities or countries, but also across continents,” Dr. Philip Coons, a professor of psychiatry who wrote a book on the condition, said. “The explanation behind the fugue is that the person is running away from a bad situation, from a bad marriage or a bad financial situation.”
But if she was running away from something, Hannah Upp claimed to have had no clue what it was. Ultimately, she took some comfort in the fact that such fugues are normally once-in-a-lifetime events.
“If you work through it,” she said, “you can usually go on to live a normal life.”
But five years later, it happened again.
Hannah Upp’s Second Disappearance In 2013
Almost exactly five years later, Hannah Upp disappeared again. This time, she went missing on Sept. 3, 2018, and was last seen walking to her job as a teaching assistant in Kensington, Maryland. Upp’s purse was found near a local footpath, but she was nowhere to be found.
This time, however, Upp reappeared just two days later. On September 5, she found herself in a creek in the Wheaton-Glenmont area with a shopping cart beside her. Upp borrowed a stranger’s cell phone and called her mother, Barbara, who came to retrieve her.
Find Hannah Upp/FacebookHannah Upp vanished three times, but hasn’t been seen since 2017.
Barbara later likened Hannah’s disappearances to the two distinct definitions of time in ancient Greece: kronos, chronological time as we know it, and kairos, which cannot be measured. “I imagined her as having entered more fully into kairos – the appointed time, the fullness of time,” she told The New Yorker in 2018. “There’s a suspension of certainty.”
But while Hannah Upp’s second disappearance initially seemed random, it actually had some similarities to her 2008 disappearance. Both times, Upp had entered a fugue state at the beginning of the school year. Both times, she had seemingly been drawn to the water. And both times, she had just returned from traveling with her father, David.
David and Barbara had divorced when their daughter was 15 years old, after which David moved abroad to be a missionary. Once a year, Hannah would travel with David, and this naturally got brought up after her second disappearance, with experts wondering if traveling had in some way been the catalyst for Hannah’s mental state.
“Travel? That’s just ‘what we do,'” David told the The New Yorker. “Hannah and I have been to 25 nations together, so it is ‘normal’ not disruptive.”
Regardless of the cause, Hannah Upp seemed to quickly recover from the second fugue state. She returned to work just a few days later, and there were no other incidents during the school year. There were discussions about getting her an ankle monitor, but this never happened, and, a year later, she was hired as a teaching assistant at a different Montessori school. Upp moved to the island of St. Thomas, a place she called “paradise.”
But paradise proved to be a dangerous place.
The Third And Final Disappearance In 2017
For three years, Hannah Upp lived peacefully on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She loved her work, and was loved by her students. One parent even likened her to a “modern-day Mary Poppins.” Upp also seemed to adore St. Thomas. She referred to her apartment as her “island palace” and swam in the ocean nearly every day.
Then, in 2017, her paradise was lost.
Public DomainSattelite view of Hurricane Irma.
That year, once again in September, two major hurricanes put St. Thomas in their paths. The first, Hurricane Irma, struck on September 6. Eighty-five mile per hour winds tore through the air as Upp and her roommates huddled in the laundry room of their apartment, and the next morning, St. Thomas was a devastated, apocalyptic image of itself.
“I don’t recognize anything,” Upp wrote to one friend.
Six days later, she drove to the marina to say goodbye to her ex-boyfriend, Joe Spallino, as he was waiting to board a “mercy ship” headed to Puerto Rico, fleeing the island before the next hurricane, Hurricane Maria, was projected to hit. Spallino asked Upp if she would be leaving too. She said that she had decided to stay.
After that, Upp stopped using her phone. As she helped staff at the Montessori school prepare for the next hurricane, some noted that she was not acting like herself. But Upp still seemed to remember who she was — she hadn’t entered a fugue again, at least not yet – and seemed determined to remain on the island for the benefit school’s children.
“I’m staying – that’s where my heart is,” she told one of her roommates. “School is going to be the first step toward normality for these kids.”
On the morning of September 14, with Hurricane Maria still a few days away, Hannah Upp said goodbye to her roommates and headed to the ocean for a pre-work swim. But Upp never arrived at the school. Days passed, and no one heard from her.
Friends found her sundress, sandals, and car keys sitting on the stool of a bar on Sapphire Beach, Upp’s favorite snorkeling spot. Her car was in the parking lot; her purse, wallet, passport, and cell phone were inside.
Find Hannah Upp/FacebookUpp was a strong swimmer, but the sea was unpredictable between hurricanes.
Though Upp was a strong swimmer, searches of the coast turned up nothing. Upp’s name was also not on any of the manifests of those who had left on mercy ships. And after three days, her friends were forced to stop looking.
Hurricane Maria was arriving.
Though the search for Hannah Upp continued after the hurricane — she was not in hospitals, homeless shelters, morgues, or on the beach — she has not been seen since that September morning in 2017.
It’s possible that Hannah Upp died after getting caught in a current – the ocean was behaving abnormally between the two hurricanes – and a badly decomposed skeleton did wash ashore on a nearby island in 2018. Unfortunately, the skeleton was too decomposed to be tested for DNA.
But the other possibility is more haunting. Maybe she’s in a fugue state, wandering somewhere, with no idea that the world is looking for her.
After learning about the mysterious disappearance of Hannah Upp, read the stories of 11 of the most famous unsolved mysteries. Or, read the strange story of Kenneka Jenkins, the 19-year-old found dead in a hotel freezer.
