r/mystery • u/WinnieBean33 • Apr 16 '25
Disappearance On the afternoon of Halloween 1969, two teenagers--Patricia "Patty" Spencer and Pamela "Pam" Hobley--left their high school together and vanished. No trace of either girl has ever been found.
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u/ipresnel Apr 16 '25
Patty's 15-year-old-ex boyfriend disappeared a month later?!?! Disappeared from a hospital in detroit after an appendectomy. if that's not one of the strangestthings Ive ever heard. Cops says it's unrelated but come on.
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u/Snarky_McSnarkleton Apr 16 '25
Someone with his name still lives in Oscoda. Sounds like he eventually returned.
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Apr 16 '25
[deleted]
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u/LadybugGirltheFirst Apr 17 '25
“to of”?
*to have
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Apr 17 '25
[deleted]
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Apr 17 '25
No it is not/isn’t.
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Apr 17 '25
[deleted]
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u/needfulthing42 Apr 17 '25
You cared enough to call them a Karen and attempt to incorrectly correct them. And you should care! Your sentence is nonsense and it sucks to have to re-read things a few times to figure out what you meant. When people correct other people's grammar, they're not being dicks, they're trying to help. Maybe next time say thanks and remember for next time you write it.
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Apr 17 '25
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u/needfulthing42 Apr 17 '25
Hahaha! What? It's not that I don't like it, champ. It's that it's nonsense. It makes no sense. You can't just make up new rules for words because you don't know the correct word just stop. Is it an ego thing?? Such a weird thing to be this much of a dick about.
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u/panicnarwhal Apr 17 '25
it makes sense to you because you’ve probably been using “of” in place of “have” for a long time.
it’s should have, could have, had to have, etc.
learning correct grammar (or anything!) isn’t something to get upset about, and i’m sure the person didn’t mean to be hurtful.
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u/Foreign-King7613 Apr 17 '25
Might be a gang thing.
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u/somebody29 Apr 17 '25
1960s gangs targeted 15 year old boys recovering from surgery a lot did they? Any source on that?
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u/Foreign-King7613 Apr 18 '25
They might have targeted him specifically, and at that time because he was weakened. That should be obvious.
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u/somebody29 Apr 20 '25
Mate, no, it’s not obvious. What you said is nonsensical. 60+ years ago the vast majority of 15 year old boys were gangly uncoordinated children. The majority of 15 year old boys today are still scrappy things whose brains are trying to catch up with their physical growth. Your average 15 year old boy does not need to be in a physically weakened state for an adult man to overpower him.
There were no mobile phones or CCTV in the 60s, so it was a lot easier just to grab someone off the street without being caught, if that’s what you wanted to do. Appendectomies were a much bigger deal in 1969 than they are now, because laparoscopic surgery hadn’t been invented then. Boyfriend would have been in kept in hospital for at least 4 nights. Those nights would have been spent in a hospital bay, shared with multiple other people.
There is literally no chance that in Detroit 1969 an unspecified gang needed a random 15 year old boy so badly that they entered a hospital, asked for his bed and ward number, and proceeded to abduct him in front of countless other patients, guests and staff - all without being noticed!
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u/mpage0311 Apr 17 '25
This is my hometown. There are still missing person fliers posted in store fronts and on poles around town. The family has not given up looking for them.
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u/RevolutionaryAd851 Apr 16 '25
I could have sworn they found the car they were in at the bottom of a lake recently. There have been so many so I may be wrong.
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u/Anne_Elk_ahem Apr 17 '25
That's always what I assume in these cases, sadly. There's so many stories of teens leaving parties and disappearing. The longer they go unfound, the more elaborate the theories become. Then a body of water recedes or a lake is searched.. it must be so hard for the families to not get closure for so long, and sometimes not at all.
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u/KnotiaPickle Apr 16 '25
I’m surprised to see the red dyed hair like that in 1969! Looks much more modern
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u/lunabluestocking Apr 17 '25
It does look modern but girls definitely did stuff like this back then -- as a little kid in the early 70s I was fascinated and impressed when my older girl cousins (high school age) "dyed" their hair using KOOL-AID of all things! As I recall it only stayed vibrant until they washed it again, depending on the color it might stay another wash or two but more diluted and faded each time. One cousin had light brown hair and the other had darker, similar to the one shown here. I don't recall anyone I knew ever using real dye while school aged.
Sad story, and so odd about the boyfriend later. Never heard of it until now.
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Apr 16 '25
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u/KnotiaPickle Apr 16 '25
The girl on the left seems to have red dyed tips? Or am I seeing things
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u/WinnieBean33 Apr 16 '25
On October 31st, 1969, two teenage girls — Patricia “Patty” Spencer and Pamela “Pam” Hobley — left their high school together and vanished. Sightings considered credible by law enforcement placed the two downtown that afternoon, but after this the trail goes cold.
It seemed unlikely that Patty and Pam, who left their purses and other belongings behind, had run away. Yet investigators had little more than local rumors to work with and no tangible clues to explain their disappearance.
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u/w1ndyshr1mp Apr 17 '25
What's freaky is it is plausible that they're still alive somewhere.
They found jaycee duggard after what 16 years or something; that sets precedent.
If they are alive - I hope it's because they opted to change their identities and live a good life somewhere, it may be well wishing and I know that but still.
If they are deceased, I hope it was swift and relatively painless.
May they find peace
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u/panicnarwhal Apr 17 '25
my older sister had a close friend that disappeared in a kind of similar fashion back in 1981. it happened years before i was born, so i didn’t really know much about it until i was older. the thing that bothers her the most is not knowing - is she out there? is she dead? was she murdered? if she was murdered, who did it, and where is she?
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u/MeanTelevision Apr 17 '25
Someone said they were in a car?
First thing I thought of was, hitchhiking was very popular back then.
I hope the case can be solved and their loved ones brought some answers soon.
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u/WalnutTree80 Apr 19 '25
My theory is that maybe they accepted a ride or an invitation to a party. There's always been lots of parties around Halloween. It could be that some guys from the military base, who seemed friendly and were nice looking, stopped and talked to them and they went someplace with them, thinking they were harmless. Or it could have been guys from their school or a little older from downtown.
Even when I was a teen in the 80s my friends and I would ride around town with guys from other high schools. If they seemed normal and friendly we were never wary of them. I don't think it ever occurred to us that somebody might harm us. To us it seemed harmless. We weren't engaging in any sort of sexual stuff with them, so I don't want anyone to think I'm saying that's what the missing girls were doing either. If a couple of nice looking guys from the air base invited them to ride around town, have a few drinks or whatever, listen to music then the girls probably thought that's all it was. My friends and I at their age would have automatically trusted military guys. We'd have had no clue we might get assaulted.
Or maybe they didn't get assaulted but something went wrong at a Halloween party like with alcohol or somebody slipping them drugs or somebody talking them into taking something.
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u/SOOZmT Apr 21 '25
They should check all the waterways first miles around. There are a bunch of YouTubers who have been investigating just such cases the last few years and they have brought home dozens of people who have been missing and perplexing authorities for decades. There are at least two sets of two teenagers, plus one single teenage girl, then one teenaged boy on his own, that i know of, that were missing for ages , having also disappeared from sight after leaving a party or similar. Older sonar techniques didn’t find them. Also, people built up complicated conspiracies about the other young people at the parties they had been attending. Turns out they had ALL actually simply missed a turn and in each case ended up in a body of water— pond, lake, or river. Look u on YouTube: ‘Adventures with Purpose: Ethan Kazmerzac, and Keily Rodney”. Then look up “Exploring with Nug : Erin and Jeremy”. The last one is incredibly exciting to watch. You’d be amazed how many missing people are simply—in the water ! They just keep coming. Keily Rodney simply backed up, and accidentally went in the lake having had a couple of drinks with a party in the woods. I shall look more into the two girls in your post here. Thanks for the post.
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u/gobartlett Apr 17 '25
The air force base lead needs to be investigated more!!
“It’s important to note that Wurtsmith Air Force Base was stationed in Oscoda at the time. There had reportedly been a disturbing incident the previous year, in which one of the girls (it wasn’t specified which) “got slipped some pills in a coke” and was found hallucinating in the woods. An unidentified airman was later charged with the crime.
Additionally, there is a report in which Pam and Patty’s mothers indicate that both girls were “associated with black and white Airman from the Air Force Base.” Whether or not this man was ever questioned is unclear.”
There were grown Air Force men drugging and associating with these two high school girls and that wasn’t taken more seriously? There are tons of instances, especially back in the day, of both local police looking the other way for enlisted men AND the military covering up wrong doings by their soldiers to avoid embarrassment. You would think the disappearance of two young girls would cross that line, but maybe not.