Speaker 1: Now, there's a particular kind of quiet that settles over
Speaker 1: a room when someone has gone for good. It isn't
Speaker 1: the peaceful silence of an empty house on a Sunday morning.
Speaker 1: It's a heavy, hollow thing. It's the silence of an
Speaker 1: interrupted sentence, of a door left hanging open on its hinges.
Speaker 1: Most mysteries we talk about start with a bang, a
Speaker 1: screech of tires, a frantic phone call, a set of
Speaker 1: muddy footprints leading off into the dark woods. But the
Speaker 1: disappearance of Elizabeth Connie Converse didn't start with a bang.
Speaker 1: It started with a whisper and then a slow, deliberate
Speaker 1: fade into the American ether. If you were wandering the smoky,
Speaker 1: dimly lent streets of New York's Greenwich Village in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen fifties, long before Bob Dylan never picked up
Speaker 1: a harmonica, you might have crossed paths with her. Connie
Speaker 1: was a striking woman, brilliant but incredibly solitary, with a
Speaker 1: mind that always seemed to be turning over some sad
Speaker 1: secret truth. She worked at a prince house by day,
Speaker 1: but by night she sat in her small apartment, armed
Speaker 1: with an acoustic guitar and a reel to real tape recorder.
Speaker 1: Now she wasn't singing the upbeat pop tunes of the
Speaker 1: Eisenhower era, nor was she singing the traditional folk ballads
Speaker 1: that were just starting to gain traction in the local
Speaker 1: coffee houses. Connie was doing something entirely different. She was
Speaker 1: writing deeply personal, hauntingly poetic songs about loneliness, about empty rooms,
Speaker 1: about walking in the shadows while the rest of the
Speaker 1: world walked in the sun. If you listen to her
Speaker 1: old recordings today, her voice comes through the tape hissed,
Speaker 1: like a transmission from a ghost. It's delicate, melodic, and
Speaker 1: draped in a bone deep sorrow. She sounded like a
Speaker 1: woman who was already practicing how to haunt a house.
Speaker 1: A few friends recognized her genius. They invited her to
Speaker 1: small gatherings, trying to get her to play for crowds.
Speaker 1: An animator named Gene Ditsch even recorded her in his kitchen,
Speaker 1: hoping to help her catch a break in the music industry.
Speaker 1: But the world wasn't quite ready for Connie Converse. The
Speaker 1: record executives didn't know what to do with a quiet,
Speaker 1: intellectual woman singing achingly sad complicated songs. They wanted polished,
Speaker 1: they wanted happy, and Connie she was neither. After a
Speaker 1: decade of trying, of knocking on doors that refused to open,
Speaker 1: something inside her began to fracture. The dream didn't just expire,
Speaker 1: it began to wither, turning into something heavy and dark.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty one, feeling defeated and exhausted, she left
Speaker 1: New York City. She moved out to ann Arbor, Michigan,
Speaker 1: to be closer to her brother. For a while, she
Speaker 1: tried to build a normal life. She got a job
Speaker 1: writing for a journal. She threw herself into her work,
Speaker 1: and she put the guitar away. She stopped singing. But
Speaker 1: you can't just box up a piece of your soul
Speaker 1: and expect it to stay quiet. As the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: led into the nineteen seventies, the world around her changed,
Speaker 1: but Connie felt entirely stuck in time. The music she
Speaker 1: had pioneered was now making other people famous and rich.
Speaker 1: Her health began to fail, and a dark, suffocating depression
Speaker 1: wrapped its cold fingers around her. She started drinking heavily.
Speaker 1: Friends and family noticed the light fainting from her eyes,
Speaker 1: replaced by a distant, hollow stare. She was a woman
Speaker 1: that seemed to be untethering herself from the very earth,
Speaker 1: one rope at a time. In August of seventy four,
Speaker 1: just a few days before her fiftieth birthday, the tether
Speaker 1: finally snapped. Now we don't know exactly what time of
Speaker 1: day it was when she made her preparations. We can
Speaker 1: only imagine, though, the eerie calm that must have washed over.
Speaker 1: She sat down at her desk and wrote a series
Speaker 1: of letters to her family and closest friends. Now these
Speaker 1: weren't panic notes or anger manifestos. They were poetic, cryptic,
Speaker 1: and chillingly serene. She wrote that she needed to go
Speaker 1: west to make a new life. She wrote about how
Speaker 1: human beings are deeply isolated creatures islands in a dark sea.
Speaker 1: One of the most haunting lines she penned at that time,
Speaker 1: I'm read quote, let me go, let me be if
Speaker 1: I can, let me not be if I can't end quote.
Speaker 1: She gathered those letters, dropped them in the mail, and
Speaker 1: walked back to her house. She packed her pupiloggings into
Speaker 1: her dark green Volkswagen Beetle. Now she didn't take much
Speaker 1: with her, just the absolute essentials. She turned the key
Speaker 1: in the ignition, put the car in gear, and drove away.
Speaker 1: By the time the letters arrived in her family's mailboxes,
Speaker 1: Toni was already a ghost. Her brother Philip, alarmed by
Speaker 1: the profound finality of her words, immediately contact to the authorities.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy four, tracking a missing adult who
Speaker 1: had explicitly stated she wanted to disappear was an almost
Speaker 1: impossible task. There were no cell phones to ping, no
Speaker 1: credit card chips to trace, no sprawling network of highways,
Speaker 1: sternveilance cameras. Once you're out on the long, lonely stretches
Speaker 1: of the American Highway, there were just another pair of
Speaker 1: headlights in the dark. The family waited for a phone call.
Speaker 1: They waited for a postcard from some dusty roadside motel
Speaker 1: in Nevada, or maybe a quiet beach down in California.
Speaker 1: They waited for the police to find the little green
Speaker 1: VW beetle broken down on the shoulder of Root sixty six.
Speaker 1: But the call never came, the postcard never came. They
Speaker 1: never heard from the police, not that year, not the next,
Speaker 1: or the next decades. Slipped by the mister deepened, not
Speaker 1: because of what was found, but because of what wasn't.
Speaker 1: A human being conveyed. Is sure. A person can walk
Speaker 1: into the deep woods and be swallowed up by the underbrush.
Speaker 1: I've made many videos about it. But a car, a
Speaker 1: Olkswagen Beetle, is a solid, heavy machine of steeling glass.
Speaker 1: It doesn't just evaporate. Yet. No junkyard, no impound lot,
Speaker 1: no police precinct ever reported finding Connie's car. Instance, if
Speaker 1: she drove straight off the edge of the map. Did
Speaker 1: she find a secluded and possibly deep lake out west
Speaker 1: and just keep her foot on the gas. Did she
Speaker 1: find a dirt road that wounds so far into the
Speaker 1: wilderness that no hunter or hiker has ever tumbled across
Speaker 1: the rushed out hulk of her car? Or did she
Speaker 1: actually do what she set out to do, what she
Speaker 1: said she was gonna do, change her name, cut her hair,
Speaker 1: and live out the rest of her days as a
Speaker 1: stranger in a strange town, watching the sunset over the Pacific,
Speaker 1: finally at peace. The strangest chapter of the mystery, though,
Speaker 1: didn't unfold on a lonely highway, but in a radio
Speaker 1: studio in New York City, thirty years after she vanished
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, Geene Diitch, the man who
Speaker 1: recorded Connie in his kitchen half a century Euler, was
Speaker 1: invited onto a music history radio program. He brought along
Speaker 1: those old, dusty reel to real tapes. For the first
Speaker 1: time in fifty years, Connie Converse's voice went out over
Speaker 1: the airwaves. Two young music producers having to be listening,
Speaker 1: they were stopped dead in their tracks by the haunting
Speaker 1: beauty of the music. They tracked down. Her family acquired
Speaker 1: the rest of the tapes, and in two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine released an album Connie's Music titled How Sad, How Lovely. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: Connie Converse was everywhere. Critics held her as a lost genius,
Speaker 1: a pioneer of modern folk music. People all over the
Speaker 1: world were listening to her songs, analyzing her lyrics, and
Speaker 1: mourning the troubled, brilliant woman who had written him. She
Speaker 1: had finally achieved the success in recognition that eluded her
Speaker 1: and that she so desperately craved in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't there to see it, at least not
Speaker 1: that we know of. Perhaps her ghost was left to
Speaker 1: take the bow. And when you sit alone in a
Speaker 1: quiet room, and play those old recordings, knowing how her
Speaker 1: story possibly ends. The songs take on a terrifying prophetic quality.
Speaker 1: She sings about walking alone in the dark, about wondering aimlessly,
Speaker 1: about being a stranger in her own life. It's as
Speaker 1: if she was leaving a map drawn in music and melody,
Speaker 1: hooding towards the day she would pack up her little
Speaker 1: car and just drive off into oblivion. Connie Converse left
Speaker 1: us with a handful of beautiful, melancholy songs and one
Speaker 1: of the most enduring, quietest mysteries in American history. And
Speaker 1: somewhere out there, maybe resting at the bottom of a dark,
Speaker 1: cold quarry, or maybe hidden under a tangled briars in
Speaker 1: a forgotten forest ravine, there's a rusted shell of a
Speaker 1: GREENVW beetle, And somewhere out there is the answer to
Speaker 1: what happens when a person just drives off into the unknown.