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Rafael Duarte

Millwright

Joined the Institute in the winter it was founded. Never filed a sighting.

On the night of 3 October 1951, Rafael Duarte's wife Elena and their four-year-old daughter Marisol left their house outside Hollowfield and did not come back. The search ran eleven days. Nothing was found. No clothing, no trail, no sign of anyone at the house who should not have been there.

The county concluded that Elena had left and taken the child.

Rafael, who was twenty-nine, did not accept that and has never accepted it. He told the Institute in December 1953 what he believed had happened, and Ada Merrick wrote it down exactly as given, as she wrote everything down. The Institute has never confirmed a word of it. It was not asked to.

What he did instead was go out. For thirty years he walked the ridges above Hollowfield at night with a lamp and a notebook, and brought back other people's accounts. From loggers, from fire crews, from people who would talk to a man who had lost something and would not talk to anybody else.

He is the reason the Institute has a rule that members do not go out alone. He broke it constantly and would not hear an argument about it.

Asked in 1979 what he expected to find, he said he did not expect to find anything. He said that was not a reason to stop.