By now, although hearts are still filled with hope, there is little doubt that dwelling restlessly amongst those mountain spirits is the soul of a young man born and raised in the township of Tupper Lake named Colin Gillis. He was only 18 when he mysteriously disappeared without a trace on March 11, 2012, and no one has seen or heard from him since.
When Gillis had returned from college on Spring Break that March, the days had already begun to grow longer and warmer, although the nights, dipping down into the teens and well below, were still characteristically unforgiving.
The pre-med student was excited to once again be in that familiar neck of the woods he “knew like the back of his hand” and was particularly looking forward to a party being held on the evening of March 10th.
There, he was planning to meet up with some of his former high school classmates, some of whom he hadn’t seen since graduation.
Gillis was dressed for a 40-degree day when he grabbed a backpack and set out for the gathering shortly after having dinner with his parents. But it was already down into the twenties and the mercury still falling when he later left that party on foot at around two in the morning, presumably intoxicated and reportedly annoyed.
The youth was last observed by a passing motorist “flailing his arms” at the side of Route 3, a desolate section of roadway between Tupper Lake proper and the village of Piercefield, where the Gillis family lives.
As it turned out, the driver of the car that passed Colin Gillis at the early morning hours of March 11th was the editor of the local paper The Lake Placid News. This trusted eyewitness happened to be ferrying his elderly mother back to her home in the village of Tupper Lake and, concerned by Gillis’ frantic conduct and for the safety of a vulnerable passenger, decided not to stop. He went instead to the nearest police station to relay the incident.
Officers from that police department have since repeatedly stated that they responded immediately to this man’s urgent-sounding report and quickly drove out to the area in question but, upon arrival, saw no one there at all. Days later, however, when a massive rescue mission was fully launched searchers came across Gillis’ driver ID card together with one of his sneakers in that exact same spot.
It’s not known therefore who it really was that last saw Colin Gillis alive. Or what.
