Lisa Theris – Legally blind in the forest for a month
Time stranded: 4 Weeks
Distance traveled: Unknown
Terrain types: Forest
Deaths: 0
Situation ended: Spotted by a passing car
Location: Midway, Alabama
25-year-old Lisa Theris was a radiology student at the time of her disappearance and at first everyone just thought her going missing was due to the bad crowd she was spending time with. She had always been a bit unpredictable and her bipolar disorder didn’t help with her behaviour.
After none of her family members could reach her for five days, her father called the police on July 23, 2017, to report his daughter missing, fearing the worst because of the company she kept. A missing person case was launched and the local police began to search the most obvious spots only to find nothing. Just two days after they began their search, a local Walmart reported seeing her in their store, and so the search was scaled back.
Since Walmart couldn’t produce the video footage of her it was classed as a false alarm, but by now the authorities were becoming increasingly concerned for her safety. The last two people known to have been with her were two local men named Manley Davis and Randy Oswald, well known to the police and now wanted in connection with a robbery at a hunting lodge.
The police finally caught up to the two men who both claimed she had been with them the night of the robbery, but their stories were completely different. One of them claimed she had jumped out of the truck before they rammed the lodge gates, while the other claimed his partner killed her and disposed of the body.
The police believed she was dead and now began a body search, bringing in dogs trained in sniffing out corpses. It had now been about a month since she was last seen and everyone including her family now feared the worst.
Just two days after she was pronounced dead, a woman by the name of Judy Garner was driving down one of her local roads when a rough-looking Lisa Theris stumbled out of the trees and collapsed on the road. An ambulance was called and she was taken to hospital, weighing 50 lbs less than when she first went missing. Completely naked and covered in insect bites and sunburn, she was barely still alive and in her state wouldn’t have lasted more than another day or two.
After she recovered she gave a strange story about her ordeal, claiming she thinks she was drugged and left naked in the middle of the woods. She says she survived by eating mushrooms and berries and drinking muddy stream water, but there are many who don’t believe her story.
She did seem to be in the condition of someone who was stranded for a month in the forest, and the berries she claimed to have eaten didn’t grow in that area, and mushrooms are almost entirely made of water and provide next to no calories, plus a single wrong one and you’re dead. She is also classed as legally blind when she isn’t wearing her glasses so the chance she could survive alone on nothing but berries and mushrooms is very low indeed.