WEBVTT
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Now, there's a particular kind of quiet that settles over
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a room when someone has gone for good. It isn't
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the peaceful silence of an empty house on a Sunday morning.
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It's a heavy, hollow thing. It's the silence of an
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interrupted sentence, of a door left hanging open on its hinges.
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Most mysteries we talk about start with a bang, a
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screech of tires, a frantic phone call, a set of
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muddy footprints leading off into the dark woods. But the
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disappearance of Elizabeth Connie Converse didn't start with a bang.
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It started with a whisper and then a slow, deliberate
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fade into the American ether. If you were wandering the smoky,
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dimly lent streets of New York's Greenwich Village in the
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early nineteen fifties, long before Bob Dylan never picked up
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a harmonica, you might have crossed paths with her. Connie
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was a striking woman, brilliant but incredibly solitary, with a
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mind that always seemed to be turning over some sad
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secret truth. She worked at a prince house by day,
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but by night she sat in her small apartment, armed
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with an acoustic guitar and a reel to real tape recorder.
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Now she wasn't singing the upbeat pop tunes of the
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00:01:10.239 --> 00:01:13.599
Eisenhower era, nor was she singing the traditional folk ballads
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that were just starting to gain traction in the local
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00:01:16.040 --> 00:01:21.280
coffee houses. Connie was doing something entirely different. She was
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writing deeply personal, hauntingly poetic songs about loneliness, about empty rooms,
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about walking in the shadows while the rest of the
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world walked in the sun. If you listen to her
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old recordings today, her voice comes through the tape hissed,
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like a transmission from a ghost. It's delicate, melodic, and
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draped in a bone deep sorrow. She sounded like a
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woman who was already practicing how to haunt a house.
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A few friends recognized her genius. They invited her to
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00:01:50.519 --> 00:01:53.280
small gatherings, trying to get her to play for crowds.
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An animator named Gene Ditsch even recorded her in his kitchen,
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hoping to help her catch a break in the music industry.
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But the world wasn't quite ready for Connie Converse. The
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00:02:04.159 --> 00:02:06.719
record executives didn't know what to do with a quiet,
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intellectual woman singing achingly sad complicated songs. They wanted polished,
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they wanted happy, and Connie she was neither. After a
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00:02:17.280 --> 00:02:20.319
decade of trying, of knocking on doors that refused to open,
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something inside her began to fracture. The dream didn't just expire,
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it began to wither, turning into something heavy and dark.
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In nineteen sixty one, feeling defeated and exhausted, she left
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New York City. She moved out to ann Arbor, Michigan,
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to be closer to her brother. For a while, she
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tried to build a normal life. She got a job
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writing for a journal. She threw herself into her work,
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and she put the guitar away. She stopped singing. But
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you can't just box up a piece of your soul
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and expect it to stay quiet. As the nineteen sixties
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00:02:53.599 --> 00:02:56.680
led into the nineteen seventies, the world around her changed,
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but Connie felt entirely stuck in time. The music she
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00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:03.360
had pioneered was now making other people famous and rich.
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Her health began to fail, and a dark, suffocating depression
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00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:11.159
wrapped its cold fingers around her. She started drinking heavily.
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Friends and family noticed the light fainting from her eyes,
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replaced by a distant, hollow stare. She was a woman
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that seemed to be untethering herself from the very earth,
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one rope at a time. In August of seventy four,
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just a few days before her fiftieth birthday, the tether
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finally snapped. Now we don't know exactly what time of
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day it was when she made her preparations. We can
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only imagine, though, the eerie calm that must have washed over.
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She sat down at her desk and wrote a series
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of letters to her family and closest friends. Now these
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weren't panic notes or anger manifestos. They were poetic, cryptic,
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and chillingly serene. She wrote that she needed to go
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west to make a new life. She wrote about how
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human beings are deeply isolated creatures islands in a dark sea.
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One of the most haunting lines she penned at that time,
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I'm read quote, let me go, let me be if
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I can, let me not be if I can't end quote.
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She gathered those letters, dropped them in the mail, and
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walked back to her house. She packed her pupiloggings into
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her dark green Volkswagen Beetle. Now she didn't take much
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with her, just the absolute essentials. She turned the key
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in the ignition, put the car in gear, and drove away.
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By the time the letters arrived in her family's mailboxes,
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Toni was already a ghost. Her brother Philip, alarmed by
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the profound finality of her words, immediately contact to the authorities.
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But in nineteen seventy four, tracking a missing adult who
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had explicitly stated she wanted to disappear was an almost
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impossible task. There were no cell phones to ping, no
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credit card chips to trace, no sprawling network of highways,
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sternveilance cameras. Once you're out on the long, lonely stretches
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of the American Highway, there were just another pair of
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headlights in the dark. The family waited for a phone call.
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They waited for a postcard from some dusty roadside motel
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in Nevada, or maybe a quiet beach down in California.
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They waited for the police to find the little green
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VW beetle broken down on the shoulder of Root sixty six.
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But the call never came, the postcard never came. They
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never heard from the police, not that year, not the next,
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or the next decades. Slipped by the mister deepened, not
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because of what was found, but because of what wasn't.
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A human being conveyed. Is sure. A person can walk
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into the deep woods and be swallowed up by the underbrush.
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I've made many videos about it. But a car, a
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Olkswagen Beetle, is a solid, heavy machine of steeling glass.
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It doesn't just evaporate. Yet. No junkyard, no impound lot,
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no police precinct ever reported finding Connie's car. Instance, if
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she drove straight off the edge of the map. Did
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she find a secluded and possibly deep lake out west
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and just keep her foot on the gas. Did she
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find a dirt road that wounds so far into the
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wilderness that no hunter or hiker has ever tumbled across
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the rushed out hulk of her car? Or did she
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actually do what she set out to do, what she
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said she was gonna do, change her name, cut her hair,
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and live out the rest of her days as a
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stranger in a strange town, watching the sunset over the Pacific,
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finally at peace. The strangest chapter of the mystery, though,
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didn't unfold on a lonely highway, but in a radio
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studio in New York City, thirty years after she vanished
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in two thousand and four, Geene Diitch, the man who
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recorded Connie in his kitchen half a century Euler, was
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invited onto a music history radio program. He brought along
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those old, dusty reel to real tapes. For the first
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time in fifty years, Connie Converse's voice went out over
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the airwaves. Two young music producers having to be listening,
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they were stopped dead in their tracks by the haunting
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beauty of the music. They tracked down. Her family acquired
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the rest of the tapes, and in two thousand and
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nine released an album Connie's Music titled How Sad, How Lovely. Suddenly,
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Connie Converse was everywhere. Critics held her as a lost genius,
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a pioneer of modern folk music. People all over the
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world were listening to her songs, analyzing her lyrics, and
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mourning the troubled, brilliant woman who had written him. She
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had finally achieved the success in recognition that eluded her
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and that she so desperately craved in the nineteen fifties.
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But she wasn't there to see it, at least not
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that we know of. Perhaps her ghost was left to
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take the bow. And when you sit alone in a
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quiet room, and play those old recordings, knowing how her
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story possibly ends. The songs take on a terrifying prophetic quality.
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She sings about walking alone in the dark, about wondering aimlessly,
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about being a stranger in her own life. It's as
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if she was leaving a map drawn in music and melody,
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hooding towards the day she would pack up her little
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car and just drive off into oblivion. Connie Converse left
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us with a handful of beautiful, melancholy songs and one
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of the most enduring, quietest mysteries in American history. And
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somewhere out there, maybe resting at the bottom of a dark,
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cold quarry, or maybe hidden under a tangled briars in
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a forgotten forest ravine, there's a rusted shell of a
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GREENVW beetle, And somewhere out there is the answer to
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what happens when a person just drives off into the unknown.
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Now, there's a particular kind of quiet that settles over
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a room when someone has gone for good. It isn't
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the peaceful silence of an empty house on a Sunday morning.
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It's a heavy, hollow thing. It's the silence of an
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interrupted sentence, of a door left hanging open on its hinges.
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Most mysteries we talk about start with a bang, a
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00:00:21.800 --> 00:00:24.359
screech of tires, a frantic phone call, a set of
8
00:00:24.399 --> 00:00:28.600
muddy footprints leading off into the dark woods. But the
9
00:00:28.679 --> 00:00:32.479
disappearance of Elizabeth Connie Converse didn't start with a bang.
10
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It started with a whisper and then a slow, deliberate
11
00:00:36.719 --> 00:00:41.240
fade into the American ether. If you were wandering the smoky,
12
00:00:41.280 --> 00:00:43.520
dimly lent streets of New York's Greenwich Village in the
13
00:00:43.560 --> 00:00:46.920
early nineteen fifties, long before Bob Dylan never picked up
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00:00:46.920 --> 00:00:50.640
a harmonica, you might have crossed paths with her. Connie
15
00:00:50.679 --> 00:00:54.799
was a striking woman, brilliant but incredibly solitary, with a
16
00:00:54.840 --> 00:00:57.280
mind that always seemed to be turning over some sad
17
00:00:57.399 --> 00:01:01.039
secret truth. She worked at a prince house by day,
18
00:01:01.479 --> 00:01:04.400
but by night she sat in her small apartment, armed
19
00:01:04.439 --> 00:01:06.959
with an acoustic guitar and a reel to real tape recorder.
20
00:01:07.799 --> 00:01:10.239
Now she wasn't singing the upbeat pop tunes of the
21
00:01:10.239 --> 00:01:13.599
Eisenhower era, nor was she singing the traditional folk ballads
22
00:01:13.599 --> 00:01:16.040
that were just starting to gain traction in the local
23
00:01:16.040 --> 00:01:21.280
coffee houses. Connie was doing something entirely different. She was
24
00:01:21.319 --> 00:01:26.840
writing deeply personal, hauntingly poetic songs about loneliness, about empty rooms,
25
00:01:27.319 --> 00:01:29.599
about walking in the shadows while the rest of the
26
00:01:29.599 --> 00:01:32.439
world walked in the sun. If you listen to her
27
00:01:32.439 --> 00:01:35.959
old recordings today, her voice comes through the tape hissed,
28
00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:40.040
like a transmission from a ghost. It's delicate, melodic, and
29
00:01:40.159 --> 00:01:43.319
draped in a bone deep sorrow. She sounded like a
30
00:01:43.359 --> 00:01:45.879
woman who was already practicing how to haunt a house.
31
00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.439
A few friends recognized her genius. They invited her to
32
00:01:50.519 --> 00:01:53.280
small gatherings, trying to get her to play for crowds.
33
00:01:53.879 --> 00:01:57.200
An animator named Gene Ditsch even recorded her in his kitchen,
34
00:01:57.519 --> 00:01:59.719
hoping to help her catch a break in the music industry.
35
00:02:00.159 --> 00:02:04.120
But the world wasn't quite ready for Connie Converse. The
36
00:02:04.159 --> 00:02:06.719
record executives didn't know what to do with a quiet,
37
00:02:06.760 --> 00:02:12.319
intellectual woman singing achingly sad complicated songs. They wanted polished,
38
00:02:12.759 --> 00:02:17.199
they wanted happy, and Connie she was neither. After a
39
00:02:17.280 --> 00:02:20.319
decade of trying, of knocking on doors that refused to open,
40
00:02:20.759 --> 00:02:24.560
something inside her began to fracture. The dream didn't just expire,
41
00:02:24.960 --> 00:02:27.680
it began to wither, turning into something heavy and dark.
42
00:02:28.360 --> 00:02:32.120
In nineteen sixty one, feeling defeated and exhausted, she left
43
00:02:32.199 --> 00:02:35.120
New York City. She moved out to ann Arbor, Michigan,
44
00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:38.120
to be closer to her brother. For a while, she
45
00:02:38.240 --> 00:02:40.759
tried to build a normal life. She got a job
46
00:02:40.759 --> 00:02:43.560
writing for a journal. She threw herself into her work,
47
00:02:43.919 --> 00:02:47.280
and she put the guitar away. She stopped singing. But
48
00:02:47.560 --> 00:02:49.960
you can't just box up a piece of your soul
49
00:02:50.199 --> 00:02:53.520
and expect it to stay quiet. As the nineteen sixties
50
00:02:53.599 --> 00:02:56.680
led into the nineteen seventies, the world around her changed,
51
00:02:57.199 --> 00:03:00.520
but Connie felt entirely stuck in time. The music she
52
00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:03.360
had pioneered was now making other people famous and rich.
53
00:03:04.080 --> 00:03:07.439
Her health began to fail, and a dark, suffocating depression
54
00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:11.159
wrapped its cold fingers around her. She started drinking heavily.
55
00:03:11.960 --> 00:03:14.560
Friends and family noticed the light fainting from her eyes,
56
00:03:14.840 --> 00:03:18.240
replaced by a distant, hollow stare. She was a woman
57
00:03:18.319 --> 00:03:21.000
that seemed to be untethering herself from the very earth,
58
00:03:21.400 --> 00:03:24.360
one rope at a time. In August of seventy four,
59
00:03:24.719 --> 00:03:27.439
just a few days before her fiftieth birthday, the tether
60
00:03:27.599 --> 00:03:30.800
finally snapped. Now we don't know exactly what time of
61
00:03:30.879 --> 00:03:33.479
day it was when she made her preparations. We can
62
00:03:33.520 --> 00:03:36.400
only imagine, though, the eerie calm that must have washed over.
63
00:03:37.080 --> 00:03:38.919
She sat down at her desk and wrote a series
64
00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.400
of letters to her family and closest friends. Now these
65
00:03:42.400 --> 00:03:46.680
weren't panic notes or anger manifestos. They were poetic, cryptic,
66
00:03:46.879 --> 00:03:49.879
and chillingly serene. She wrote that she needed to go
67
00:03:49.919 --> 00:03:52.879
west to make a new life. She wrote about how
68
00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:57.000
human beings are deeply isolated creatures islands in a dark sea.
69
00:03:57.680 --> 00:03:59.960
One of the most haunting lines she penned at that time,
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00:04:00.080 --> 00:04:03.319
I'm read quote, let me go, let me be if
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00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:06.639
I can, let me not be if I can't end quote.
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She gathered those letters, dropped them in the mail, and
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00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:13.280
walked back to her house. She packed her pupiloggings into
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00:04:13.319 --> 00:04:16.040
her dark green Volkswagen Beetle. Now she didn't take much
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00:04:16.040 --> 00:04:19.639
with her, just the absolute essentials. She turned the key
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in the ignition, put the car in gear, and drove away.
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00:04:23.800 --> 00:04:26.680
By the time the letters arrived in her family's mailboxes,
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00:04:27.120 --> 00:04:31.160
Toni was already a ghost. Her brother Philip, alarmed by
79
00:04:31.199 --> 00:04:35.120
the profound finality of her words, immediately contact to the authorities.
80
00:04:35.720 --> 00:04:38.879
But in nineteen seventy four, tracking a missing adult who
81
00:04:38.879 --> 00:04:42.120
had explicitly stated she wanted to disappear was an almost
82
00:04:42.120 --> 00:04:45.560
impossible task. There were no cell phones to ping, no
83
00:04:45.639 --> 00:04:49.079
credit card chips to trace, no sprawling network of highways,
84
00:04:49.079 --> 00:04:52.839
sternveilance cameras. Once you're out on the long, lonely stretches
85
00:04:52.879 --> 00:04:55.439
of the American Highway, there were just another pair of
86
00:04:55.439 --> 00:04:59.000
headlights in the dark. The family waited for a phone call.
87
00:04:59.399 --> 00:05:02.639
They waited for a postcard from some dusty roadside motel
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00:05:02.879 --> 00:05:06.800
in Nevada, or maybe a quiet beach down in California.
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They waited for the police to find the little green
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VW beetle broken down on the shoulder of Root sixty six.
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But the call never came, the postcard never came. They
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never heard from the police, not that year, not the next,
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or the next decades. Slipped by the mister deepened, not
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because of what was found, but because of what wasn't.
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A human being conveyed. Is sure. A person can walk
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into the deep woods and be swallowed up by the underbrush.
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I've made many videos about it. But a car, a
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Olkswagen Beetle, is a solid, heavy machine of steeling glass.
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It doesn't just evaporate. Yet. No junkyard, no impound lot,
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no police precinct ever reported finding Connie's car. Instance, if
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she drove straight off the edge of the map. Did
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she find a secluded and possibly deep lake out west
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and just keep her foot on the gas. Did she
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find a dirt road that wounds so far into the
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wilderness that no hunter or hiker has ever tumbled across
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the rushed out hulk of her car? Or did she
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actually do what she set out to do, what she
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said she was gonna do, change her name, cut her hair,
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and live out the rest of her days as a
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stranger in a strange town, watching the sunset over the Pacific,
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finally at peace. The strangest chapter of the mystery, though,
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didn't unfold on a lonely highway, but in a radio
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studio in New York City, thirty years after she vanished
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in two thousand and four, Geene Diitch, the man who
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recorded Connie in his kitchen half a century Euler, was
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invited onto a music history radio program. He brought along
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those old, dusty reel to real tapes. For the first
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time in fifty years, Connie Converse's voice went out over
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the airwaves. Two young music producers having to be listening,
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they were stopped dead in their tracks by the haunting
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beauty of the music. They tracked down. Her family acquired
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the rest of the tapes, and in two thousand and
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nine released an album Connie's Music titled How Sad, How Lovely. Suddenly,
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Connie Converse was everywhere. Critics held her as a lost genius,
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a pioneer of modern folk music. People all over the
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world were listening to her songs, analyzing her lyrics, and
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mourning the troubled, brilliant woman who had written him. She
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had finally achieved the success in recognition that eluded her
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and that she so desperately craved in the nineteen fifties.
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But she wasn't there to see it, at least not
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that we know of. Perhaps her ghost was left to
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take the bow. And when you sit alone in a
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quiet room, and play those old recordings, knowing how her
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story possibly ends. The songs take on a terrifying prophetic quality.
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She sings about walking alone in the dark, about wondering aimlessly,
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about being a stranger in her own life. It's as
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if she was leaving a map drawn in music and melody,
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hooding towards the day she would pack up her little
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car and just drive off into oblivion. Connie Converse left
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us with a handful of beautiful, melancholy songs and one
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of the most enduring, quietest mysteries in American history. And
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somewhere out there, maybe resting at the bottom of a dark,
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cold quarry, or maybe hidden under a tangled briars in
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a forgotten forest ravine, there's a rusted shell of a
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GREENVW beetle, And somewhere out there is the answer to
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what happens when a person just drives off into the unknown.
