YatharthA Total Shock
Not thoroughly, however, Hannah was able to recall a few incidents of her 3-week-journey when the police made her go through the surveillance footage of some places she had frequently visited. While Hannah was still looking for answers, she came across several articles that comprised the news of her disappearance. She was left embarrassed and even considered changing her real name but ultimately she made peace with herself and chose not to escape the reality.
A New Start
A lot had happened in the past and Hannah found it difficult to move on being in the same place and stuck with the same old memories. After a year of struggle, she eventually moved to her mother’s place in Philadelphia. She also enrolled herself at a Quaker study center named Pendle Hill. It looked like everything was back on track for Hannah, she successfully completed three years at the center and went on to become a teaching assistant in a Montessori school in Maryland.
History Repeating Itself
Given the medical history of Hannah, Barbara wanted to get things under control before it’s too late. Barbara had already witnessed her daughter disappear once, so when she learned that Hannah didn’t turn up to her place the night before, she immediately started to put up leaflets with her daughter’s friends. To make things even more complicated, Barbara got a phone call from an anonymous number…
A Call
The person calling from that unknown number was no one else but Hannah and all she uttered before hanging up was, “Mom?” The police traced the number and found Hannah within a couple of hours. She was found just a mile and a half away from her school, in Wheaton, Maryland, holding a shopping cart. As strange as it was, Hannah was stunned when she discovered the harsh truth. She had borrowed a phone from a complete stranger and had been wandering around without any purpose for two days.
Back To Normal
Hannah went back to her normal life and started working again soon after her recovery. Though both of the dissociative fugues seemed to have struck Hannah out of nowhere, there were a few signs of warning that went unnoticed. For instance, her text messages would sound peculiar and not very much like Hannah just days before both the times she went missing. There was a certain sort of transition in the way she felt and thought of things. “She could remember sending some of the texts, but then there came a point where she said, ‘I don’t remember writing any of this,’” Barbara said.
A Pattern
Hannah’s change in behavior and forgetting about the text messages she sent to her friends weren’t the only fire alarms. There was also a pattern that preceded all the three times she disappeared i.e. Hannah had traveled with her father David Upp right before the school began. Although Hannah and her father had traveled together a lot of times when Hannah was a kid, David wonders if the traveling might have triggered the fugue. “Hannah and I have been to twenty-five nations together, so it is ‘normal’ not disruptive,” said David.