He was told his father walked out in 1961. Then he started digging up the basement.
Michael Carroll had always wanted to know what happened to his father. A former soldier, George had gone missing out of the blue while Michael was still a baby. Neither Michael nor his three older siblings had ever found out where he’d gone, but the mystery always cast a shadow over their lives. That’s why Michael took matters into his own hands many decades later, calling upon both high-tech scientific instruments and supernatural methods to try and finally track his dad down. And it worked!
A skeleton in the basement
Fittingly, it was the day before Halloween 2018 when Michael made the chilling discovery he’d been chasing his whole life. He was excavating the basement of his very own home, thanks, in part, to advice he’d received from a psychic, when he finally found something: a skeleton.
Right away, Michael knew exactly to whom it belonged. “It’s going to be my dad,” he remarked to The New York Post following the discovery. “This is going to be a great thing for him, to be emancipated from that place where he didn’t belong.”
Questions without answer
Michael hadn’t seen his father since he was eight months old, way back in the early ’60s. George had disappeared from the family home on Long Island, and he had never been seen again. Michael and his older siblings were never given any information about what might have happened.
The kids had initially asked their mom, Dorothy, about their dad, but she never told them anything solid. “I was always told, ‘Don’t ask,’” Michael explained to The New York Post. “So I stopped asking.”
Fishy, changeable stories
Whenever Dorothy did tell the kids anything, it usually seemed fishy. Her story seemed to change all the time, which meant Michael had never fully trusted anything she said in relation to his dad. During a chat on the As It Happens podcast, he ran through some of the stories his mom told him.
“The common one was he went out to get cigarettes and he never came back,” he explained. “There was another one… she said that he went to take the garbage out and he never came back.”
No missing persons report
There was never a missing persons report filed about George, which in itself was strange. It just added a whole extra layer of shadiness, and the situation haunted Michael and his siblings throughout their lives: they could never shake off what had happened.
The mystery really became pressing for Michael again when he was fully grown: he bought the very house the family had lived in when George had disappeared. He purchased the property from his mom, who died shortly after the sale in 1998.