To be lost, to disappear from the face of the earth, may be a fleeting fancy for many, and maybe even a dream for the few, particularly battered down by the vagaries of life. But for those of whom it is a reality, the experience is perhaps quite different.
What exactly is the Fugue Disorder?
The condition that Hannah was diagnosed with, dissociative fugue, is as rare as unsettling. Unlike ordinary amnesia, which disrupts certain fragments of memory, fugue distorts a person’s sense of identity.
In fact, an affected person may lose all recollection of who they are, where they come from, or any other linkage to their life. At times, they may even cover long distances, even crossing cities or countries.
What is most important about this experience is that they are neither unconscious nor unresponsive in this state. They can actually do things, talk, and even behave normally around other people.
As some people put it, think of it as yourself in a dream—maybe you could carry out otherworldly feats, such as flying across the sky—but you wouldn’t really stop to question it; you would be going with the flow. Something similar is assumed to be happening to people in a fugue state.
Disappearances without Explanation
When a person normally disappears, there’s always an underlying assumption of some form of murder, accident, or voluntary disappearance occurring due to harsh conditions. However, for people such as Hannah Upp, there seems to be no external cause whatsoever for their disappearance.
In fact, a person might disappear without any obvious cause at all.
Hannah Upp’s First Disappearance
Hannah Upp was living and working in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, teaching at a local school in August 2008. By almost all accounts, her life was perfectly normal. In fact, there were literally no external signs of distress that could hint at her disappearance.
However, this would all change on August 28th. Not long before her disappearance, Upp had been appointed as a Spanish teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem, and this was supposed to be her first day.
Alarm bells rang almost instantly when she rather uncharacteristically missed her very first day at work, and soon she was reported missing, even though her keys, wallet, ID, and other belongings had been found, which she had left behind. She had reportedly been last seen jogging in a sports bra and jogging shorts.
Quite to the amusement of investigating officers, during the entire period of her disappearance, she was apparently spotted at several places, where she seemed to behave almost totally normally. For instance, she was spotted at an Apple Store in Midtown Manhattan, where she even logged into her email.
She was also seen at the New York Sports Club and other public spaces, but didn’t seem to recognise herself or realise she was missing.
Eventually, she was found by a Staten Island ferry crew, lying face down in the Hudson River on 16th September, 2008. Fortunately, she was found alive and eventually taken to the hospital for treatment.
What people didn’t realise at that point is that her relationship with the fugue, and especially going into water bodies while in the fugue, had just begun.
“I went from going for a run to being in the ambulance,” Upp told The Times in an interview several months later. “It was like 10 minutes had passed. But it was almost three weeks.
Speculations regarding her journey during the fugue, including her own assumption, are that she jumped into the water from a pier in Chelsea, probably because she had been tired of walking, and eventually swam to Staten Island.
A Second Vanishing
After her River Rendezvous, Upp took comfort in the fact that these fugues are usually once-in-a-lifetime freak incidents. “If you work through it,” she said, “you can usually go on to live a normal life.”
Her life was never going to be normal. About five years after her initial disappearance, Hannah would once again make the news headlines, this time from Kensington, Maryland, where she was employed as a teaching assistant.
Upp was last seen heading to work on September 3rd, 2013, while her phone and purse were found lying by the roadside. However, there were no signs of her.
Her disappearance this time, however, would be short-lived. On September 5th, Upp came to her senses in a creek in the Wheaton-Glenmont area with a shopping cart beside her. Hastily borrowing a stranger’s phone, she called her mother, Barbara, who then came to retrieve her.
Hannah Upp’s mother’s perspective
In an interview with the Times, Hannah’s mother, Barbara, likened her disappearances to the two distinct definitions of time in ancient Greece, i.e., kronos, chronological time as we know it, and kairos, which cannot be measured.
She imagined Hannah might have entered more fully into kairos, describing it as the appointed time or the fullness of time, and added that there was a suspension of certainty.
Regardless of the cause, Hannah seemed to recover quickly from her second fugue. Returning to work only a few days later, she was as efficient as ever, with no other instances of the fugue occurring during the school year.
Despite discussions of getting her an ankle monitor, it never materialised, and a year later, she moved to a different school on St. Thomas Island.
A return to Paradise
Life at St. Thomas was ‘paradise’ according to Hannah. An adept swimmer, the proximity to water overjoyed her, and her new experiences at the school were all apparently very pleasant. She seemed to have made new friends on the island as well.
But Paradise would be lost pretty quickly. Hannah Upp would vanish again in September 2017, but, sadly, this time, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Maria, one of the worst storms ever to hit the Caribbean.
Hannah Upp was last seen leaving her apartment early on the morning of September 14, 2017, following Hurricane Irma and evacuation proceedings, with everybody’s nerves already on edge, as she left for a swimming trip at Sapphire Beach, where she often snorkelled.
Upp was reported missing after she failed to attend a scheduled school meeting, much like the first time when she’d been lost. The black Suzuki she owned was found parked near the beach, while all her possessions, including her wallet, mobile phone, and passport, were dropped off at the nearby bar.
Unlike earlier cases, however, preparations for the approaching cyclone hindered the search efforts, a delay that would soon prove fatal.
Hurricane Maria struck on September 20, bringing devastating winds, severe flooding, and widespread destruction across the Virgin Islands. Subsequently, communication systems were severely affected, and the focus shifted away from the search for Hannah toward disaster response and recovery.
Tragically, unlike her earlier disappearances, there were no confirmed sightings of Hannah in the days following this incident.
Paradise Lost
As the days passed, several theories began to emerge regarding her disappearance. While some argued that she may have entered another fugue and, as on previous occasions, been drawn towards the water, others find it plausible that the hurricane itself may have played a more direct role.
It’s a strangely common thing to be drawn to water in times of distress, and although no confirmed theories exist, it is believed that water has a soothing and calming effect on many people. Why Upp was drawn towards water in the first place, though, will always be a mystery.
Discovery of Unidentified Remains
In September 2018, an adult skeleton washed ashore on an uninhabited island near St. Thomas in September 2018, according to NamUS, a resource centre for missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases across the U.S.
Unfortunately, the remains were too decomposed to retain any identifying information, so it’s unknown who those remains belonged to, with speculations pointing towards Upp.
This is partly because the location of the skeleton strongly suggests a link to where Hannah was last found, and the timeline of the skeleton’s discovery also seems to align with Upp’s disappearance.
The Psychological Aspects of Dissociative Fugue
Dissociative fugue is often associated with conditions of extreme mental stress and trauma, almost like a psychological escape mechanism, or an extreme severing of the mind from a circumstance.
In Hannah’s case, although there was an external veil of normalcy, there was always an undertone that her family were rather opposed to her sexuality and dating a woman, as discussed on many forums. This, in turn, may have triggered the fugue state.
Further arguments people propose for this theory include that she refused any sort of monitoring or location tracking and purposefully moved near water, knowing quite well that it might be very dangerous given her fugue states.
Her best friend on the island, Maggie Guzman, even joked that it could be “exhausting being her friend” given Upp’s high energy, and while that does not necessarily imply a deviation from normalcy, it could quite well have been a result of underlying issues.
Faith and a Lingering Hope
Another popular theory regarding the cause of Hannah’s fugue attributes it to her father. Described as a deeply religious man who even left his family to be a missionary in foreign countries, Hannah’s states often seemed to be triggered after her travels with him.
Upp’s mother, however, is deeply optimistic about finding her. “I do have the sense sometimes that she’s around any corner,” she said in an interview for the New Yorker.
Reports about her ‘sightings’ seem to emerge almost every other week, and most often than not, they’re the same vague description of either a white teacher at one of the private schools on the island, or a homeless woman from Massachusetts.
In an email correspondence, Hannah’s father noted, “I am sure that Hannah is out there… but I do not know if she is ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’ or if she is still walking around on this earth with the rest of us.”
Hannah Upp’s current status
While the feeling of faith seems to offer some comfort to Upp’s parents during these tough times, the truth is that Hannah’s case has not been resolved.
Given the circumstances of her disappearance and her affinity to water, it seems possible that Hannah could have drowned, although her mother continues her search with as much zeal as ever, and even drives around in the black Suzuki left by her daughter on the beach.
The latest lead on Hannah came to light on February 6, 2019, through a Facebook page created to search for her, but it too led nowhere. As of now, no active leads remain.
Whether she was claimed by the sea, lost within her own mind, or simply beyond the reach of explanation, remains unknown, leaving her family with the dwindling hope that perhaps, Hannah might just turn up once again.
If you love reading about unresolved mysteries, our stories on the Voynich Manuscript and Sarah Winchester’s ‘Mystery House‘ might interest you.