With Thanksgiving coming up, I always think about this and it sends chills down my spine.
When I was about 8 or 9, we hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our home. Relatives came and went and the whole day ended pretty uneventfully. I remember saying goodbye to an aunt and uncle who gave me money because my birthday usually falls the weekend after Thanksgiving. About an hour after they left, I heard a frantic knock at the front door. It turned out to be my aunt who was freaking out saying she couldn't find my uncle. She said on their drive home on the highway, my uncle had to pee so he had her pull over. We live in the desert so its completely pitch black and the road they were on had no other cars. She waited in the car while he walked towards the brush. After a few minutes, she called after out to him and got no response. She got out of the car but could not find him and became panicked. This was in the early 90s when many people had a cell phone, so she sped back to our house and we called the police. The police arrived pretty quickly and began taking down a description of my uncle so they could begin a search. Just then phone rang and I answered, it was my uncle! He sounded very somber and I asked where he was. He just kept saying "put an adult on the phone". I handed the phone to my aunt and I just recall her saying "San Francisco?! San Francisco?!" over and over. Apparently my uncle was claiming he was in San Francisco somewhere and he needed to be picked up. The crazy thing is we were in Southern California and there is no possible way that could be true. The police spoke to him on the phone thinking he was having some psychotic episode but he insisted he was fine. They instructed him to call 911 but he said he was going to walk to the nearest police station to prove he was actually there. Eventually we got a call from an officer saying he was in fact there and they also thought he was having a psychotic episode and he was held on a 51/50. My aunt and mother flew up to SF to bring him home and tried to ask him how exactly he got up there and what happened to him, but to this day he refuses to speak about the incident.