Missing (New Yorker Artwork)

This case is wild and it has kept me awake many nights, researching and writing and pondering. Where could Hannah be? Is she alive? Here’s some thoughts.

Hannah grew up in Oregon, the daughter of two Methodist ministers. Though both of her parents are caucasian American, she grew up in Japanese-American churches in Oregon, where her parents served as pastors. Her mother, Barbara, spoke fluent Japanese and spent some time teaching in Japan as well.

Her parents got divorced when she was fifteen and her father moved abroad to “spread the gospel” – he traveled to India, Guam, Malta, and many more places. He decided to settle in the Philippines. Hannah’s father was very strict about sexuality and believed homosexuality was unnatural, and as Hannah discovered more about herself as she grew up, she realized she was keen on dating women. She tried to see him at least once a year. Hannah kept her sexuality from her father, which definitely could have been hard on her. She had a good relationship with him, nonetheless.

Hannah graduated from the Pennsylvania Seven Sisters school in 2007 and moved to New York City, where she was working as a teacher while studying for her master’s in education. She spent her free time volunteering for AIDS organizations – Hannah had a big heart and was helpful to the core, according to everyone that knew her.

Hannah’s admiration for and openness to other cultures has taken her to Ghana, Japan, Puerto Rico, and Poland, among many other places.

At 23, she became a public school teacher in Harlem at a middle-school, Thurgood Marshall Academy. Bright, funny, and outgoing, she had many friends and a busy social life. Her coworkers and students adored her.

Everything appeared to be going to plan, until suddenly, in September of 2008…

Hannah didn’t show up for the first day of classes.

She left her NYC apartment to go on a run that she did not return from. This quickly became a high profile missing person’s case – her face was on every local news channel, which were all asking the public for more information. Her friends and former classmates must have put up a thousand flyers on signposts and bus stops and all over the subway stations.

Ten days later, she pops up at an Apple store and logs in on one of their computers with her own Apple ID! Security cam footage shows her being approached by a high school classmate in the Apple store.

He says, “Hey, aren’t you Hannah? Everyone is looking for you!”

Hannah says, “No, I’m not Hannah!” She walks away from him.

Later, she was spotted at Starbucks getting a coffee, and then using her own gym pass at a popular gym called New York Sports Clubs (most likely to take a shower). Authorities were on her tail but ultimately could not track her down – until she was pulled from the New York Harbor by crew members of the Staten Island Ferry. She was dehydrated, sunburned, and hypothermic.

She had no memory of what had happened the past 3 weeks.

Hannah is then diagnosed with dissociative fugue:

In dissociative fugue, people lose some or all memories of their past, and they usually disappear from their usual environments, leaving their family and job. (“Fugue” comes from the Latin words for “flight” and “to flee.” (Source: Merck Manual Consumer Version)

This condition is nicknamed “Jason Bourne Syndrome” after the movies about a CIA agent with dissociative fugue who remembers basically nothing except his extensive training.

A lot of people who experience dissociative fugue have suffered from a tremendous trauma. But Hannah’s mother insists that her fugue episodes do not have clear triggers, and when asked, Hannah could not recall any traumatizing events she had endured. She even got hypnotized in attempts to recall such an event if there was one, but still, nothing.

“People have been known to not only travel across cities or countries, but also across continents,” said Dr. Philip Coons, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Indiana University and the author of a book on the subject. “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.”

One of her many friends, Piyali Bhattacharya, tried to discuss the events with Hannah, but said they often just sat in silence, feeling unable to talk about it.

“It felt like the words we have in the English language were not sufficient to describe this,” Piyali said.

In 2009, Hannah sat down with a reporter in a coffee shop and described this terrifying ordeal in her own words:

It goes from, like, going to a run, to like, being in the ambulance. For me, that was like ten minutes passed, but it was like three weeks. The hardest part is the period right after. You feel shame, and you feel embarrassed, or you feel guilt. All things that I’ve definitely felt. It’s weird. “ow do you feel guilty for something you didn’t even know you did? It’s not your fault, but it’s still somehow you. So it’s definitely made me reconsider everything. Who was I before? Who was I then — is that part of me? Who am I now?

I really enjoyed something else Hannah shared with the reporter, showing she has a good sense of humor:

“My roommates and I have a code word to show that I’m not going to fugue again,” Ms. Upp said. “My roommate had done this long interview with ABC, and the only thing they ended up printing was that I was a friendly vegetarian who likes to try new dishes. So if I don’t get home one night, they’ll text me, like, ‘friendly vegetarian.’ And I’ll say, ‘who likes to try new dishes.’ And we know we’re on the same page.”

She left New York in 2010 and lived near Philadelphia for awhile, working at a Quaker study and retreat. A young man named Patrick Roesle, an intern at Pendle Hill whom Hannah dated, said that he looked at the fugue episode as a “freak accident.”

He went on to say: “Hannah gives so much to other people that at a certain point there is literally nothing left, and she departs from herself.”

She then moved to Maryland in September 2013 and experienced another bout of dissociative fugue that lasted two days. She suddenly came to and found herself sitting in a creek with a shopping cart beside her.

A common theme starts to emerge here with Hannah’s episodes of fugue:

It was the beginning of the school year.

She spent days wandering the city she lived in.

She only came to once she was immersed in water.

In 2014, Hannah moved to St. Thomas to start over, and embraced island life and new friends. She worked at a Montessori school as a teaching assistant. She loved working with preschoolers.

Then, days after a category five hurricane and days before yet another one (Hurricanes Irma and Maria), friends noticed something was off – she seemed super out of it. They described her as being almost in a trance.

On yet another beautiful September day, 32 year old Hannah Emily Upp disappeared again.

The New Yorker reported that Hannah was helping the Montessori school prepare for the storm. On September 14, 2017, he told her roommates she was heading there. She got in her car and was never seen again.

Despite desperate searches of the homeless shelters, beaches, hospitals, and morgue, Hannah was nowhere. Police interviewed the captains and crews that were around the island’s marina.

Her car was found at Sapphire Beach with many of her personal items still inside – her purse, passport, and hundreds of dollars.

There was a small bar on the beach that served burgers and drinks. Her sarong, sundress and sandals were found nearby, neatly folded on a bar stool there.

The Coast Guard sent three helicopters to search for her. Her friends checked the manifests of people evacuated from the island on mercy ships.

If Hannah had drowned, her body would likely float to the surface within a few days. An EMT, Jacob Bradley, circled the island in a rescue boat with no luck. He even went to the morgue and looked at 10 unclaimed bodies. None were Hannah.

Her mother has moved to St. Thomas to search for Hannah. When she first arrived, she did work for the Red Cross in exchange for a bed as to not take up precious island resources during the aftermath of such devastating hurricanes. She believes Hannah is still alive, and she says, “It has never been an option to give up. Hope is persistent, and many people join me in that hope.”

An employee at the bar on Sapphire Beach told Hannah’s mom Barbara that only a few people had drowned near the beach in the past, and they were found pretty quickly. “I don’t think she went out into the water,” he said. “Everything that goes out comes back this way. She would have washed up already.”

Law enforcement are also still actively searching for Hannah. If you have any information on the disappearance or the location of Hannah Upp, please contact investigator Steve Wagner at swagner@sherawassociates.com or 724-591-0675.

A&E documentary on Hannah hosted by Elizabeth Vargas:https://www.aetv.com/specials/vanished-in-paradise-the-untold-story

Facebook Page:

Find Hannah Upp

Missing Poster

Article from when Hannah disappeared in New York: Teacher, 23, disappears into thin air

Two great write-ups about Hannah that I got a lot of info from:

Mystery of missing teacher with Jason Bourne-style amnesia who wanders off and turns up in rivers – but hasn’t been seen in two years

How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity – this New Yorker article is great

A Life, Interrupted – wonderful NYT article written after the first time Hannah went missing, featuring an interview with Hannah

More about Dissociative Fugue, including two case studies:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680202/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525440/

https://www.healthline.com/health/dissociative-fugue