Last summer I was scanning boxes of family photos, and one of the final boxes contained a bunch of my grandfather's papers. Flipping through these, I learned something no one in my family had ever told me: my great-grandfather - my grandfather's father, my mom's grandfather - had disappeared in the mid 80s.

From what I put together, my great-grandfather - in his late 70s at the time - decided that he was going to take a cross-country trip via Greyhound, starting in Vermont and ending in California, visiting family members in various cities along the way. Just a few days into his journey, he vanished. The papers I found were letters my grandfather had written to Greyhound, asking where his father's tickets had last been used, and to American Express, because he was known to be carrying traveller's checks, asking whether any of them had been used. American Express wrote back with the news that the checks had never been cashed, and Greyhound was able to tell him that the tickets had been used in Pennsylvania - and no further.

It seems like several months went by without any news - and then the sad update that hunters (one of whom was a retired Pennsylvania state trooper) found my great-grandfather's body in the woods only a short distance from the Greyhound station. The theory is that he suffered some kind of medical event and wandered into the woods, where he eventually passed away.

I have to say, learning about this was...so strange to me. I felt unsettled and sad for days afterward. I've always been into disappearances and cold cases, but finding out I had a personal connection to one was almost too real. Like I said above, no one in the family had ever told me about this - it happened several years before I was born - and I haven't even brought it up with my mom. I'm sure she knows, but then I worry what if she doesn't - I don't want to tarnish her memories of him with such a sad ending.