The Missing Boy Who Haunted a Generation

I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I’m haunted all the same.

Not in the supernatural sense. This haunting is mental. A fixation, if you will. Glued to my imagination since I was a boy. The strange thing is, I’ve never met the subject of my haunted thoughts. We were hundreds of miles and years apart. As far as anyone knows, we never walked this earth at the same time. Until recently, I didn’t even know his name—Adrien McNaughton. Yet his story has stayed with me for more than thirty years, as vivid as any spook or spirit.

Adrien was born on Nov. 4, 1966, the fourth of Murray and Barbara McNaughton’s five children. On June 12, 1972, he accompanied his father, a family friend and three of his siblings on a fishing trip to nearby Holmes Lake in Southeastern Ontario, Canada. And sometime around 6 p.m. that same day, Adrien disappeared.

No one saw him wander into the woods. Or fall into the lake. There was no scream, no splash. He was there one moment, gone the next. He had, for lack of a better phrase, ceased to exist.

I didn’t know any of this when Adrien McNaughton first took hold of my imagination. That knowledge wouldn’t come until decades later, not long after the completion of my latest thriller, The Last Time I Lied. But they’re related, the boy and the book. They occupy the same space in my brain where wild things grow and dark thoughts linger. The two are forever intertwined, even though it took thirty-plus years and a finished manuscript for me to realize it.

***

To understand my fascination with the Adrien McNaughton case, it helps to know that every few years my family would cram itself into my grandparents’ hulking RV and travel north, across the border into Canada. We always ended up at the same spot—a campground beside a jagged lake where the terrain was rugged and the nearest town remote. There we’d spend a week fishing, boating, swimming and sunbathing.

The older I get, the less I remember about those trips. Specifics elude me. I can’t, for instance, recall the name of the lake. Or the campground. Or even the exact years we went and how old I was each time. All I know is that it was the early eighties and I was young. Impressionably young. The type of young that simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and just like yesterday.

The memories I do have amount to random moments and minutiae that have been shuffled together like a pile of faded and unlabeled photographs. I remember there were no showers at the camp. The lake and a bar of soap sufficed. Nor were there bathrooms, just an outhouse. (It is, quite frankly, impossible to forget using an outhouse in the Canadian wild.)

Other recollections: An area of the lake known simply as The Stumps because of all the dead trees that poked out of the water. Riding in a motorboat with my aunt and uncle when it hit one of those stumps and thinking for a moment that all of us might drown. How my grandfather would light cheap cigars to keep mosquitoes at bay and how my grandmother always carried hard candy that tasted like coffee. That our visits often coincided with Independence Day and that there’d invariably be another American staying elsewhere on the lake shooting off fireworks over the water.

And I remember the nightly campfires, which were lit at dusk, when the ghostly call of loons began to echo across the lake. We’d roast hot dogs, marshmallows and mountain pies, a beloved treat from my childhood that consisted of fruit filling pressed between slices of bread in a cast-iron mold placed directly in the fire’s embers.

It was during one such campfire that my grandfather said, “A boy went missing here a few years back.”

He said it casually, in the same offhanded way someone brings up the weather. He wasn’t trying to scare us. This was no precursor to a campfire tale. It was just something on his mind that he decided to share.

There wasn’t much to the story. My grandfather couldn’t recall the boy’s name or his age or the year he went missing. I suppose his memory then was as persnickety as mine is now. All he knew was that this nameless, ageless youth was there, in that very neck of the woods, until—quite suddenly—he wasn’t. No one had seen the boy since. No trace of him had ever been found.

I spent that night lying awake in my ungodly hot and cruelly small bunk above the RV’s driver seat. I was convinced the missing boy was right outside. A dark, featureless figure who was roughly my age, my weight, my height. I imagined this shadow twin roaming the campsite, circling the woods around us, beckoning me to find him. Or join him. I wasn’t sure.

He haunted the daylight hours, too. For the rest of that week, I kept expecting to see him on the lakeshore, standing as still as the trees. Or in the depths of the lake itself, his body cradled among the submerged branches in that unnerving area of The Stumps. The way I saw it, there was good reason to be afraid. A boy—likely dead, but maybe not—was sharing the same open sky, dense woods and dark lake. And if he could suddenly disappear, then it could also happen to me.

We returned home. Years passed. I grew older. But the boy—that nameless, faceless phantom—remained in my thoughts. Not constantly, mind you, but on a recurring basis. He’d spring to mind when I went hiking in the woods or was driving alone late at night. Whenever I heard a particularly mysterious bump in the dark, I would think of him. Each time he reappeared in my thoughts, I’d wonder Who was he? And Was he ever found? And that most important question of all—What happened to him?

The answers to at least some of those questions were out there. All it took to find them was a Google search.

***

My hunt for more information about the missing boy led me not just to Adrien McNaughton’s name, but also his face. The blank child of my imagination had finally been filled in, making his case less frightening and more heartbreaking.

Adrien was younger than I expected. Just five when he vanished forever. A widely circulated photograph of him shows a little boy with innocent eyes, rounded cheeks, a crown of blond hair. On that tragic June day, he had grown bored with fishing and was allowed to play on the shore.

It turns out he vanished not at the lake where my family stayed, but at one less than two miles away. It’s a much smaller body of water than the one from my youth, which gives his sudden disappearance an added air of mystery. If he’d fallen in, wouldn’t someone in the fishing party have heard his cries for help? And if he’d gotten lost, wouldn’t he have heard them calling his name? Although he was five, Adrien was as mentally developed as any child his age. Alert, verbal, aware of his surroundings.

I know all this because I wasn’t the only person with a long-held fascination about the boy who, to use my grandfather’s phrasing, “went missing here a few years back.” Documentarian David Ridgen, a native of Ontario, had also long been intrigued by the case. When he was approached by CBC Radio to create a true-crime podcast, Ridgen chose to focus on Adrien McNaughton. The result was Season 1 of Someone Knows Something, an eleven-part exploration into Adrien’s disappearance.

I missed the podcast entirely when it debuted in 2016. This was before I knew Adrien’s name and saw his photograph. But after a belated binge listen to the informative—and highly recommended—podcast, I knew more details about the boy’s disappearance than I ever thought possible.

I learned that some people think he simply got lost in the woods. Or drowned without a sound. Or was attacked by an animal. But more than 9,000 people scoured ten square miles surrounding the lake. Divers searched the lake itself. No trace of Adrien, in the water or out of it, was ever found.

I learned that people have more sinister theories. Scenarios in which Adrien wandered to a nearby road and was either run down by a car, his body hastily disposed of, or was picked up and whisked away by a kidnapper. Some members of his family would like to believe the latter. That he was taken by a couple who desperately wanted a child and has spent the past forty-six years as part of a loving family. I guess it’s better to think that than to dwell on the grim alternative.

As is typical in any mystery, there are red herrings, dead ends, false lead that eventually go nowhere. For instance, on the morning of June 12, 1972, a fisherman spotted a custom-painted Dodge at the Holmes Lake parking area, but it was no longer there when the McNaughton family arrived that afternoon. Two psychics, allegedly working independently of one another, both claimed that Adrien was living in a tiny hamlet an hour away called Clyde Forks. Hokum? Probably. Curious? Definitely.

Thanks to Someone Knows Something, the search for Adrien began anew, including an intense focus on Holmes Lake. Divers and volunteers sifting through the muck on the bottom of the shockingly deep lake discovered a piece of rubber that possibly could have come from a sneaker and an object that might be a tooth.

Earlier this year, Ridgen and the Someone Knows Something team returned to the frozen lake, drilling into the ice and pulling up mud samples. Three cadaver dogs were then brought in one by one to sniff the dozens of samples. All three zeroed in on two samples of mud, indicating there’s likely human remains on the bottom of Holmes Lake.

Is it Adrien? No one will know unless authorities in Ontario decide to do a more comprehensive search of the lake. Even if he is down there, there’s no guarantee Adrien’s remains will ever be found. Forty-six years is a long time, and with each passing season more mud and detritus gather on the lake’s floor.

There’s a chance we may never know what happened to Adrien. Sometimes there are no answers, no matter how much we long for them.

***

I never intended to write about Adrien McNaughton or those family trips to the lake and my silly, childhood fears. But it’s funny, the things that stay with us. Writers are known to be mental pack rats, plucking moments and images from our lives and storing them away in our thoughts in the unlikely event they can be used later. At least, that’s what I do.

Looking back on it now, I’m surprised by how much of those fishing trips from my youth has snuck into my writing. It seems I’m drawn to woods and lakes and the horrible things that can happen there. I suspect my adult mind still harbors a sliver of that scared little boy I used to be. It’s the part of my brain that warns, Don’t venture into the forest at night.

I go there anyway. I can’t help myself. In my previous book, it was a cabin in the woods known as Pine Cottage. In my latest, it’s a summer camp in the Adirondacks where three girls leave their cabin in the dead of night, never to be seen again.

I envisioned it as an updated version of the classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which answers are elusive and the thirst for truth takes an emotional toll. There’s a lake that’s equal parts beautiful and menacing, where the gnarled branches of submerged trees stretch just below the surface. There are campfires and dense forests and loon calls drifting across the water. And, of course, there’s a disappearance that haunts the protagonist for years until she finally decides to seek answers.