Mysterious Reappearances: Steven Kubacki and The Lake Michigan Triangle

Written By Kaelyn Moore

In 1978, Steven Kubacki went skiing near Lake Michigan and vanished without a trace.

Danny Filippidis was heading to his car to grab his phone when everything went dark.

What happened to these men, and do the strange areas where they were last seen have anything to do with their disappearances, and their even stranger reappearances?

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SOURCES

https://stevenkubacki.com/about/the-disappearance/, https://stevenkubacki.com/writings/the-disappearance-what-really-happened-to-one-of-historys-last-unexplained-missing-persons/

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  • 6 County skier missing (attached)

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  • Dogs Hunt Skier on L Michigan Petoskey News Review (attached)

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  • Degree in absentia South_Bend Tribune (attached)

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  • Skier lost 14 months ago Petoskey news review (attached)

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  • Apparent skier Berkshire Eagle (attached)

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  • A year is still lost to him Boston Globe (attached)

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  • Missing Man Recalls Hazy Journey (attached)

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TRANSCRIPT

On April 28, 1937, a ship captain named George R. Donner was leading a freight ship, the O.S. McFarland, through the still frozen channels of the great lakes. At 57, he was an experienced captain who had been sailing nearly since his birth in 1879. 

Though it was mid spring, this northern passage was still freezing. Still, His goal seemed simple, navigate the freighter from Lake Erie up through the icy waters of Lake Huron, over the tip of michigan, and down the slushy Lake Michigan to his destination of Port Washington in Wisconsin. There, he'd drop off the coal supply the ship was carrying. 

But The journey had begun three days prior on April 25 and Captain Donner had barely slept for any of them. Steering through ice was nothing new to him but the compasses in both the fore and aft of the ship had broken, making things unusually dangerous. He gripped the wheel of the freighter, pulling in back and forth to dodge ice floes in the narrow Straits of Mackinac at the very tip of Michigan. He knew The chances of capsizing were perilously high and conditions were only getting worse with each passing day.

But he was a good captain, with a steady sense of direction and a level head under pressure. With his guidance, the ship and it’s crew seemed to be getting through the worst of the ice. 

Just then, something strange happened. Captain Donner released his iron grip on the helm twenty minutes past 10PM. The freighter was quietly chugging through the pitch black night, only three hours out from port. Donner told his crew to let the boat cruise into the shore and he went down to his quarters to finally try and rest.

Crew members reported hearing the captain walking around his room, perhaps putting things away and finishing up some paperwork on the journey. 

The ship approached the dock, and the second mate raced down the stairs towards the tucked-away captain’s cabin end of the hall. He knocked on the door (SFX) but there was no answer. Perhaps the rockingn of the ship had lulled Donner to sleep. He tried the door (SFX). locked.  After more persistent knocking, the second mate decided to grab the first mate — and the key to the locked wooden door.

The gently pushed the door open, hoping to not startle the captain. But to their surprise, the room was empty. Their captain was gone — seemingly disappeared into thin air.

The entire boat crew was called in to search every room, hull, and compartment from the stern to the bow but no trace of Captain Donner was ever found. The watchmen who had been on deck all night were certain they hadn’t seen him roaming around. After docking, the search made its way to the water, where rescuers expected to find George Donner’s body floating or washed ashore on the lake. But instead, there was no indication he’d even been there.

Urban legends say the captain jumped overboard with weights tied to his feet so he’d never be found, though that doesn’t explain how he would have made it out of his windowless room at the bottom of the ship, the door still locked from the inside. 

But if you ask those who live in the area, they have another idea. Throughout history, strange things have been happening around lake michigan, unexplainable things. Some even call it the Lake Michigan Triangle, and have suggested that there was something in the air — something supernaturally strong — that may have whisked the captain off to another dimension.

Now, I don’t know if that is true, but what I do know is that it’s this area, this strange and unexplainable area, where our first story takes place. 

This is heart starts pounding and I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore. I’m going to tell you two stories today that both feature stories of people who disappeared in the snow. But both stories have very strange twists to them that even I can’t make sense of. Some people believe this falls under Missing 411, the David Paulides theory that something otherwordly is responsible for unexplained disappearances. I know Mr. Ballen brought that up when he talked about each of these cases. But I wanted to take a little bit deeper of a look and see what might have been going on. 

It felt appropriate to tell these stories as I sit here in the rogue detecting society headquarters and the snow gathers outside. If you’re new here, I tell these inside of our community headquarters, an old Victorian home high up on a hill. Sometimes i have visitors, like the Psychopedia podcast, but usually it’s just me and Jinx, our friendly ghost. Oh and also Gordy, our terrifying monkey doll who may or may not be haunted (SFX)

Actually, as I was listening through the tapes on this episode, I think I heard jinx in the background at one point, please let me know if you hear anything or if I’m losing my mind in here. 


Before we dive in, I just wanted to shout out the listener who told me they are a chemical warfare specialist. I love learning about the strange and sometimes morbid things you guys do for work and as hobbies, so please share more of that with me. 

Like I said, I have two great stories for you today, whether your listening on the audacy app, Patreon, or wherever you get your podcasts. So lets get into it. 

February 1978, college senior Mark Bajer watched as his roommate packed ski gear into a bag, and asked him where he was headed. 23-year-old Steven Kubacki said was headed off on a solo cross country ski trip around the Lake Michigan shore. There was a ton of fresh snow out there, it was a perfect time for a trip. That winter he was only one semester away and nine credits short of finishing his degree at Hope College, a small school in Holland Michigan. 

By his senior year, Steven Kubacki had made a reputation for himself at the small Christian college. Classmates described him as a “little more free-spirited” than the average student. By that, they meant one time he lead a one-man protest to protect the books at the campus library. He had also taken a year to study abroad in Europe, to expand upon his work as a History major with an emphasis in German. 

So his roommate Mark wasn’t surprised that Steven was taking this solo trip. He was a daring guy. He finished packing his bag and then headed out of their off campus house, making sure to say bye on the way out. 

Mark wasn't exactly sure when Steven was supposed to be back, but a few days passed and he hadn’t returned. There was no word from Steven actually, he hadn’t called at all. Mark knew that the length of Steven's trip was dependent on the amount of ice that had accumulated on the path he planned to take, but as the days went on, he started getting a really bad feeling. By sundown on the seventh day of his roommate's absence, he called the authorities and reported him missing.

A search started almost immediately. Police put chains on their tires and drove down the icy streets to the location Mark though Steven might have been at. There, the flat terrain was covered in snow and the lake was frozen solid. And there was no sign of Steven. 

But one day later, they get a lead. 

On Monday, February 20, 1978, snowmobilers were out on the ice near Saugatuck, about 20 minutes south of Hope College, when in the distance, they saw debris. They drove over to get a better look, thinking it was just trash, but it was snow skis, poles, and a backpack, all which were later confirmed to be Steven’s  The riders reported it to the State Police, setting off a bigger search and rescue mission for the missing college senior.

Officers and college officials worked together to track Steven’s movements, walking on foot while helicopters showed a wide scope from above. The search charged on, even as a thick fog rolled in and threatened to ground the university’s plane. As the visibility worsened, it seemed like all hope was lost, but then, out in the distance, someone started screaming that they had found something. 

There were footprints in the snow that matched the boots Steven was wearing. 200 yards of his prints were found, leading just past the edge of the lake onto the ice.

But The strange thing was that the footsteps abruptly ended, without any further sign of a disturbance. Like he had been beamed up, or worse, had fallen through the ice which had refrozen over. State Trooper Joe Armstrong, one the lead investigators during the search, characterized the disappearance point as “an unsafe place to go.” Certain areas of the lake are prone to fractured ice due to the strong currents that flow there. 

While the cops saw this as a classica case of a young adventurer who had fallen through the snow, this raised a lot of questions for people that knew Steven. Like why would he have taken off his backpack at a different location than where his prints disappeared? And why was he on the ice? Steven was a seasoned outdoorsman, By all accounts, he  was considered to be an experienced cross-country skier, and very familiar with the area. they just didn’t buy that he ran out onto the ice without his skiis

A vigil was held for Steven at Hope College. He was remembered at the 1978 commencement ceremony months later that May, where the school granted him a bachelor's degree in absentia.

For many, it harkened back to the story of Captain Donner, the one who vanished under mysterious circumstances out on this very lake. Was the answer so simple, or was there something more to it?

Some in the area heard this story and got a really, really bad feeling in their stomachs. They had heard stories of young men like Steven going missing around Lake Michigan. Young men from good families, with no past criminal records, just like Steven, vanishing into thin air without a trace. It wouldnt be until months later, however that they’d know what was happening. John Wayne Gacy was prowling from Des Plaines to Chicago on the other side of the lake from where Steven was found. 

But still, when news broke in December of that year that a man was found with the bodies of twenty six males as young as 15 in a crawlspace below his home, they started to wonder if Steven was amongst the remains.

Nothing came of that though, at least not initially. It took quite some time for police to identify the bodies. Michigan police still sent Steven’s dental records to Chicago, just on the chance that his remains could be identified.  But with Steven’s case closed by local police as a drowning, it didn’t seem like there would ever be any more closure to it than that. His parents even hired a private investigator to look into his disappearance, but that didn’t turn up anything. 

Eventually, Spring came and the ice melted. a thorough search of Lake Michigan would finally be able to provide the Kubacki’s some closure. But to the experts’ surprise, a sweep of search of the Lake Michigan didn’t turn up the body. So, left with no choice, everyone just stopped looking. They would have to make peace with the closure they had.

Or so they thought. 

In May of 1979, fourteen months after Steven was last seen, June Bozak was approaching her home at 37 Christian Road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. June was taking an evening walk with a friend that Saturday night, and around 8PM they were approaching her front door. But from a distance, she noticed that someone was standing on her porch, waiting for her. 

She couldn’t believe her eyes, it was a man, early 20’s, with shaggy brown hair and wiry rimmed glasses. It looked just like her nephew, Steven Kubacki. But steven drowned last winter, she had attended his memorial 900 miles away…

Not able to contain her confusion, she blurted out, Steven?! Hi aunt (ant) June was all he had to say.

The question everyone had for the now 24-year-old was simple: where in the world had he been this whole time? June ushered Steven into her home, and soon his family and reporters had flocked to the scene.

And to their surprise, Steven recounted the same stranger-than-fiction story over and over again. According to him, He had woken up on May 15, 1979, in “a grassy meadow” in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. 

He said he woke up wearing random clothes next to a backpack he also didn’t recognize. Inside the bag were marked-up maps, homemade hitchhiking signs, a Wisconsin marathon t-shirt, and brand-new glasses he also didn’t recognize, as well as $40 in cash. What Steven didn’t possess was any recollection of how he got there, or how long he’d been missing for.

He only realized how much time had passed when he read a newspaper over a patron’s shoulder at a nearby restaurant in town. 

His parents were speechless as he told them this story, they were just overjoyed they got to see their son again, something they never thought would happen. But that didn’t mean that the rest of the world felt the same way.

Reporters were dying to learn any of the details about Steven Kubacki’s inexplicable reappearance. Had he been suffering from amnesia for 15 months, maybe from a head injury? Or worse, had someone been holding him captive and he just didn’t remember?

 In interviews, Steven was pushed to dig up the memories, But all he could remember were vague “feelings.” Being cold, stranded alone in the dark. And a creeping worry that he was going to freeze to death. He also noticed his body felt tired as if he’d been running a lot. Maybe that’s why he woke up in the field that spring day wearing worn-in running shoes he hadn’t owned before with a marathon shirt in his bag.

He also figured that whatever had caused his memory blackout was a physical injury, not a psychiatric concern. So, he wouldn’t be seeking any mental health treatment. Still, he told newspapers he had “a lot to think about.” He planned to find out “where [he] was and what [he] did” but he planned to do it all on his own. After the initial public welcome home, Steven stopped speaking to the press. If he saw a doctor about his condition, he never shared an update publicly. Instead, Steven moved across the country to the Pacific Northwest. He built a quiet life as a psychologist. And that’s the story of Steven Kubacki, no I’m just kidding, of course I looked into this more. 

Because this story drove me up the wall. It seemed like Steven was at peace with what happened to him, which, If you couldn’t remember 15 months of your life, wouldn’t you want to know what happened? 

If this was some sort of hoax I thought maybe some time in the last 47 years he would have come forward and said something. Or SOMEONE would have come forward and said, Oh steven was on my couch the whole time, or I saw him at a bus stop. But no, no one ever did. 

Which made it feel less like a hoax, and that’s probably why over the years, so many people have pointed to the area, and said that the Lake Michigan Triangle is responsible. Steven is not even the strangest disappearance to happen in the area.

 Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 took off on June 23, 1950, from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. It was headed to Seattle, Washington with 55 persons aboard including the captain, his second, and the flight attendant. The captain checked in with ground control at 12:13AM. The plane had hit a patch of turbulence and requested to drop down to 2,500 feet, but ground control informed him there wasn’t airspace. That was the last communication the world ever heard from Flight 2501. The plane nor its passengers were ever recovered.

But, I will say, in 2023, a youtube channel called The Missing Enigma got an interview with Steven, but strangely, he didn’t want to talk about his disappearance at all. That’s because he actually wrote a book about it and is looking for a publisher. He said that over the years, memories of what happened while he was gone have come flooding back, and he remembered more than he would admit to in 1979. 

He said that his disappearance had to do with “ a revolutionary organization, an idealistic terrorist-in-training… spiritual experiences with hallucinogenic drugs and alternate realities, the French Foreign Legion, and a young man’s struggle to find meaning during a turbulent time.” 

But if we wanted to learn more about it, we’d have to buy the book?

So, did something strange and potentially interdimensional happen to Steven, or was this a very very long con to sell a book? I guess we’ll have to wait to read it and find out. 

Our next story starts just outside of Lake Placid in New York, another lake with an eerie . (JINX NOISE- a ghostly breathe that starts on the left and quickly pans to the right. Not too obvious, but like a ghost swiftly passing by)


On February 7th of 2018, a 49-year-old firefighter Constantinos Filippidos, who went by Danny, was with a group of work  friends on their yearly ski trip to WhiteFace Mountian in New York.

Now whiteface mountain is a popular skiing location near lake Placid in new york, with 94 trails that stretch 25 miles in total. It’s a big mountain, and it’s known for having the biggest vertical drop east of the rockies. 

As a result, like with basically any ski mountain, people get hurt. People sometimes veer off a narrow path into uncharted territory.

But Danny had been doing this trip for years with his coworkers, he was an experienced skier. He loved skiing so much, that by the early afternoon, he was a little disappointed that his friends were ready to call it for the day. At around 2:30pm, the group was heading towards the lodge to grab a drink and rest, when Danny said that he was going to go for just one more run.

First, he needed to grab his phone from the car though, so he took off on his skis toward the bottom of the mountain

His friends sat there drinking for a while when one of them looked at their watches, Hey, where’s danny, he wondered aloud to the group. They all looked around, thinking they’d catch him coming down the mountain by this point, but no one saw him. 

They waited a little while longer. And then a little longer, and then longer still. But Danny never returned. 

By 4:30PM they left the lodge to look for Danny at the main resort. He wasn’t there. So one of the guys thought they should go check his car because that’s where he said he was going, and when they got there, his car was parked in it’s spot, and there sitting in the front was his phone…

That was enough for the group to report him missing, kicking off a massive search across Whiteface Mountain.

The foot search drew more than 6,000 members to look for the missing father of 3. Police officers, forest rangers, homeland security, U.S. border patrol officers, and local ski patrol for Whiteface and the neighboring Mountain came together to cover every inch of the resort and the surrounding areas. 100 Toronto firefighters even crossed the border to volunteer their time towards the simple mission: find Danny Filippidis, who officials were certain had to be lost somewhere in the snow.

Danny's  wife flew into Lake Placid to join the search the next day, but law enforcement didn’t have good news. They let her know that they were  able to locate her husbands passport, so it seemed unlikely that he grabbed his things and took off. He wouldn’t have been able to fly or get back to Canada. And his car was still parked at the ski lodge with the keys inside, so they knew he hadn’t driven anywhere himself. He was most likely still somewhere on the mountain.

Panic was setting in for Danny’s family as those hours grew into days. He had become one of the East Coast’s most important missing persons overnight. News stations everywhere were picking up the story. The chances of finding him dwindled as the week grew longer. If he had fallen somewhere, the freezing temperatures would have made it nearly impossible for him to still be alive each passing day. It seemed like maybe he had fallen off of a trail and disappeared, 


By February 13th, a week after Danny was last seen, it was almost certain he was dead. No other trace of him had been found on the mountain, no one had come forward saying they saw him. His wife was basically ready to start making arrangements for a memorial service.

When she got a phone call from an unknown number (SFX)

Something inside her told her to pick up, and when she did, she recognized the voice on the other end of the line. It was Danny. 

And as much as she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, that he was alive, she really couldn’t believe what he told her. He said that he was at the Sacramento airport, 3,000 miles from where he was last seen, with no memory of how he got there. 

Danny told her that He had woken up the day before, feeling “cold and sore,” with very little awareness of his surroundings and a “crushing headache”. When he looked around, he was sitting in the cab of a big rig truck, still wearing his skiing gear. After throwing up on the side of the road and climbing back into the truck, Danny wanted to question why he was there, who the driver was, and how long he had been out for, but he was so disoriented and fatigued he could only muster a much more basic one: “where am I?” The truck driver told Danny he was in Utah 

The driver then said that they were on their way to Sacramento and that would be the “end of the line” in their journey together. By the time Danny got out of the truck, he wasn’t able to remember the man’s name. When Danny set foot in Sacramento on February 13th, Danny had nothing but the same ski outfit on his back. No a phone, no wallet, no ID, however he did find cash he’d saved for the ski lift in his pocket.

That’s when memories started coming back to him.  He remembered benign on the mountain, specifically leaving his group of friends after he said he wanted to do one more run. And then nothing.

He knew he needed to get in touch with his wife. He found and apple store and begged an employee to sell him an iPhone without identification but after he turned it on he couldn’t remember his wife’s number. So he just searched “Whiteface Mountain” on the internet, in hopes of finding the resort’s number. But the top result shocked him. It was his name, as a missing person

By the time Danny finally remembered his wife’s phone number he was at the Sacramento airport. All things considered, he wasn’t doing horribly, he even looked ok. He had managed to get himself a haircut and shave with the leftover cash. 

But after confirming Danny was safe, a million other questions followed. People were skeptical. Danny said that he had a horrible head injury that left him without a memory for a week, but the man that came back from Sacramento had a new haircut, a fresh shave, and a brand new iPhone. It seemed…. Strange

 And danny didn’t make it any better because no matter how hard he’d been trying, he still couldn’t remember. While speaking with Danny, his family and friends could tell something sounded off about his state of mind. 

He was eventually transported to a hospital for medical evaluation. And the doctors there had a lot to say about this.

So Getting amnesia following a concussion isn’t unusual. It can happen in up to 25% of traumatic brain injury cases.

Losing your memory for days at a time is extremely rare, however. Memory loss of events that happen directly after a brain injury, also known as anterograde amnesia, typically only lasts a few seconds. Maybe as long as 48 hours. 

A dissociative fugue state, however, can last for much longer periods of time. This type of psychological episode can be triggered by a head injury but is often triggered by emotional trauma. Researchers are still figuring out the neurological causes of a fugue state, but for now, experts can best describe it as a “short-circuiting” brain failure. Patients in a fugue state lose track of time and even worse, completely forget who they are.

Fugue states typically come to an abrupt end when the person stumbles upon somewhere completely unfamiliar. When Danny Filippids heard the words that he was in Utah, a part of the country that was completely foreign to him, he snapped back into consciousness. If Danny Filippidis experienced a fugue state, did something something or someone trigger the episode?

The story that Danny was able to put together with the help of Police, is that he probably suffered some sort of head injury while heading down the mountain. Then, he was probably unable to get into his car and asked someone for a ride, perhaps it was the trucker, and that was the only person who saw him during this whole fiasco. 

But here’s what’s a little suspicious about that. The truck driver who police suspect took Danny from New York State to the West Coast was never able to be identified by the police or the press. Nor did he ever come forward. Danny doesn’t remember hailing the ride across the country or what he spoke to the driver about if anything at all. He tried recalling the man’s name or any details about the big rig, but the only guesses he could come up with were completely generic. Why would a truck driver pick up a skier, fully dressed for the mountain, and drive him out of upstate New York? Wouldn’t he have noticed Danny’s injuries and taken him to help, instead of across the country?

Some conspiracy theorists also wonder about Danny’s motivation. Why didn’t he borrow a phone instead of going to the trouble of buying a new phone? Once he got the phone and realized he was a missing person, why did he find a way to the airport, instead of going straight to the police? Their speculation feels expected in a case with so many loose ends and no one there to tie them up. But the doctors who have treated Danny following his reappearance would likely suggest his judgment was flawed by his altered consciousness. 

In months following his reappearance Danny Filippidis was not able to regain any of the memory. Just that he was on his way down the slopes that afternoon, all of a sudden, everything went dark. He started feeling painfully cold. And then he woke up in Utah.

What could have happened to these men in the time that they dont remember? Theories range from alien abduction to hoax with everything in between. Is it possibly the strangeness of the areas in which they disappeared

I talked about it in our summertime terrifying true urban legends episode last year, but Lake Place has a strange history itself. There’s rumors of ghosts in the forest surrounding the lake, and the strange disappearance of Mabell Smith Douglas still haunts the area, whos body was found perfectly preserved in the lake 30 years after she disappeared. 

But, I’ve said it before, Heart Starts Pounding exists in a place where sometimes, the legends are true. Where the mysteries around us can have fantastical explanations. 

Kaelyn Moore
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