On Mother’s Day, May 8, 1938, four-year-old Marjorie West disappeared from a family picnic in the White Gravel area of McKean County, Pennsylvania, after attending church in Bradford. Marjorie, described as a red‑haired child, was picking violets with her eleven‑year‑old sister Dorothea, who stepped away for only a few moments to give the flowers to their mother. When Dorothea looked back, Marjorie was gone; the family’s calls in the woods drew no answer.

What followed was one of the largest searches for a missing child at the time. Up to 3,000 local volunteers and 500 police officers scoured the Allegheny Forest, with bloodhounds tracing her scent from the picnic spot to a nearby road where the trail stopped. The violets Marjorie had picked were found near the road, a clue that led some to suspect she may have been taken by someone in a vehicle.

Investigators pursued many leads, including a taxi driver in Thomas, West Virginia, who reported seeing a weeping girl matching Marjorie’s description in a dark sedan with a man claiming she was his daughter. The timing could have fit, but the people seen were never identified. Theories over the years have ranged from accidental death in an abandoned oil well to abduction; no definitive trace of Marjorie has ever been found.