Nineteen-year-old Brandon Swanson was on his way home to Marshall, Minnesota for spring break in 2008 when he slid into a ditch and called his parents for help — but he was never seen again.
In the pre-dawn hours of May 14, 2008, Annette and Brian Swanson awoke to the sound of their phone ringing. Their 19-year-old son, Brandon, was on the other line. He told them that he’d driven his car into a ditch and needed their help getting home. Annette and Brian immediately got into their pickup truck and headed out into the night.
Brandon Swanson told his parents that he was just ten minutes from their home in Marshall, Minnesota. But though Annette and Brian drove to where Brandon thought he was, they couldn’t find any sign of their son or his car. While on the phone with Brandon, Annette and Brian flashed their headlights — and could hear Brandon doing the same on his end. However, there was nothing around them but darkness.
As time went on and the search seemed increasingly fruitless, both parents and son began to get frustrated with each other. This was 2008: it wasn’t as easy as it is today to drop a pin on a map and notify someone of your location. At one point, Annette even hung up the phone, though she immediately called back and apologized to Brandon.
GINA For Missing Persons FoundationBrandon Swanson has been missing since 2008.
Finally, Brandon told his parents that he was going to try to walk to a friend’s house in the nearby town of Lynd. The 19-year-old thought that he was pretty close to there, so Brian dropped Annette off at home, then headed back out into the night to try once more to find Brandon.
Father and son then agreed to try to meet at a local landmark: the parking lot of a nightclub in Lynd. They continued to talk as Brandon walked, with Brandon trying to describe where he was, and Brian driving around and searching the roadside for any sign of his son.
Forty-seven minutes into the call, Brandon was saying something to his father when he suddenly shouted “oh, shit!” Then Brandon Swanson stopped talking. The phone went quiet. It was like he’d vanished into thin air.
Though his father tried calling back several times, Brandon never picked up. Local police were doubtful that Brandon was missing at all — to the fury of his parents, they stated that Brandon had “the right” to be missing at his age — but once they started to search for him, they found no trace of him.
To this day, Brandon Swanson has never been seen again and his case remains one of the most mysterious disappearances in modern history. So what happened to him? Though theories abound, nobody knows for sure.
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