Episode 5: Missing and Unsolved: Michael Bryson

When a young man out at a forest renegade steps off a party bus and disappears, everyone is left with too many questions and no answers. Today on The Odder, we talk about Michael Bryson. Missing since 2020, his family desperately look for clues to his whereabouts. What happened in Umpqua National Forest and where is Michael? 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the oter podcast. I'm your host Madison Page. And today we're gonna talk about a missing person's case from Oregon. A young man who was out for a good time at a Renegade steps off a party bus, and seemingly vanishes into the surrounding forests. Today on the oter side, we talk about Michael Bryson. Where is he in what happened in that park strap in, and let's go Hello again and welcome back everyone. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode about the blue few gates of Kentucky. Today, we are moving from one mountain range to another. As we talk about our first missing person's case, I actually asked a strange disappearances group on Facebook for recommendations, and this is one of the ones they submitted. I wanna thank everyone who contributed to that. And I did write all of them down and now have a, a little notebook. I hope to work through most, if not all of them, as we continue on our little journey here together, if you ever want to make a recommendation for anything you want to see discussed on the O you can submit an email to the Otter pod, gmail.com. This case is a very frustrating one, especially for the family. They have felt from the very beginning that several people know much more than they are willing to tell. They have fought tooth and nail to keep eyes on their son's disappearance and spent every moment available. Searching for him. This search is fraught with the lack of viable witnesses and the time it took for anyone to even be alerted that Michael was missing their Facebook page titled let's find Michael is a hub of information, and I encourage all of you to go check it out. The goal really right now is to keep talking about Michael, keep awareness of his case alive. That way the people who might have been too afraid to say anything before may be pushed to say something. Now, maybe somebody will hear about this and remember something, but let's jump right in and talk about Michael Bryson. Michael Bryson has been described by many as someone who didn't know a stranger. He was friendly and generous and genuinely enjoyed being around people. Anna Brant, a close friend of Michael's him as having an infectious smile and a laugh that lit up the room. He grew up in a middle class family and was very involved with the church. He went on several mission trips, two to Mexico, where he built housing and one to Liberia at 17, where he was part of an outreach to local kids, trying to get them to attend a school. This trip affected him so much that inspired his first tattoo, which depicted two hands shaking, surrounded by the words be strong. My brother, He attended Northwest Christian university for a year before transferring to a different school that he ultimately dropped out of before. COVID 19, he'd been working at a local bar and had told his parents he was interested in becoming an electrician. However, only one thing really excited, Michael, and that was music. Michael was a huge fan of EDM, EDM or electric dance. Music is heavily percusive and popular it for raves and festivals. I'm playing some EDM in the background right now. And lemme tell you, it's kind of weird to be talking about a missing person while dance music is playing, but this is what Michael loved, and we will honor him with it. Michael was known on the music scene as he was an amateur DJ and a talented one too. Before his disappearance, he had actually been invited up on stage to DJ his own set. Michael could very well have gone on to DJ full time. Had he not walked into the woods one day? Never to be seen again. Michael decided to attend a Renegade with his friend Ben on August 3rd, 2020. So what is a Renegade? Well, listen, I tried to find an official difference and I ended up on urban dictionary where a Renegade is like if a RA had a warrant out for its arrest, a RA is an organized underground party involving music and dancing drug use is common, but not always present. A Renegade is an unorganized version of a RA perform without a permit. Usually by trespassing onto a property, raves can be organized legally. The renegades are not. I also found one definition that stated the only difference is a rave is a dance party inside while a Renegade is a dance party outside, but it seems that that's not always the case. The Renegade Michael was attending was outside. It was located at hobo campground, a primitive campsite located in qua national forest. Now, for those of you who are not campers, or outdoory a primitive, campsite is as basic as they come, there is no electrical hookup. There's often no water. Sometimes there isn't even a fire or pit. It's really just a patch of dirt in a cleared area. It's not a place that invites staying for very long.<inaudible> national forest is located on the Western slopes of the cascade mountains in Southwest Oregon. It's a beautiful place with scenic mountains and waterfalls. Michael was from Eugene, Oregon, which was only about a an hour drive away. Michael last saw his parents on August 3rd, 2020 when he and a friend stopped by the visit before heading up to the Renegade, his parents reported nothing out of the ordinary with his behavior that day. Although it did come out later that he had texted his ex-girlfriend and told her that he didn't have a good vibe about the party and him didn't want to go. You see, this Renegade was actually part of a 21st birthday for an unnamed girl, but Michael didn't especially know these people. He was also booked to DJ an event on Friday. He had told his father that he planned to go to the Renegade from Monday to Wednesday, leave Thursday and hit your ride back to his apartment and then attend the other function on Friday. He did not drive and he rode with his friend, Ben. Instead, this is key later that he did not have a car and that the car he took was Ben's. So jot that down, moving on Michael and Ben said goodbye to his parents and headed out for hobo campsite. They make get to the party at around 10:30 PM. At this point, it is already in full swing to set the scene as best I can. The Renegade is spread out over two sides of the campground. The DJ is set on the larger side with a fire pit. There are people 10 camp around sleeping in their cars or sleeping in one of the two very large vans they had there. The smaller van was being used as a makeshift DJ station while a larger is more of a place for people to hang out. Now, these vans were, were more like school buses, but in a lot of the reports they referred to as, as vans or buses. So I just I'm calling them vans. I do have a picture of the large party bus that Michael was last seen on, and we'll be posting it to the socials. It has been estimated that 40 to 50 people were invited to this thing with all the plus ones and plus threes and plus fives, and even locals just wandering in off the road. It swelled to close to a hundred people. Ben and Michael joined the party. And at one point, Michael is even invited up by the DJ to do a set the movements of Michael during this first night and into the next day are not really concrete. As you'll see a big problem with substantiating, a timeline is we don't really have any reliable witnesses. Renegades and RAVs are known for their drug and alcohol use. And while this alone can impair people's memories, the fear that also comes along with it can stop people from being completely honest. People are both afraid of getting in trouble for their use of drugs, as well as those threatened into silence by those who are selling them, they may not feel safe enough to be honest, maybe Michael was acting completely erratic during this time, or maybe Michael was missing a lot earlier than reported, but we don't know because we don't have a good way to substantiate anything. A party goer named Donovan reported that Michael spent a good amount of time in a bean bag area near where a photo booth had been set up. There was a photographer there as part party taking pictures, but strangely, none of these pictures have ever surfaced that something in those pictures maybe capture Michael or capture something that led to his disappearance, but was suppressed. Donovan did report that during this time he witnessed Michael taking ketamine. He also said Michael had told him that night before he went missing, that someone had stolen his wallet off the bus with$600 inside. But he said he didn't seem concerned. He said that Michael seemed like he was having a great time. This is setting off several red flags in my mind. Now, granted, I am not part of the Rav scene. I can't even take an aspirin without reading the bottle, but if somebody stole my wallet with$600 inside, I would be freaking out the way Donovan tells it though, Michael just shrugged it off. Maybe he wasn't aware enough to really feel panicked about it, or maybe he was. And it ultimately led him to a situation where he met his demise. This just the has a lot of questions. Why did he have$600 in the middle of the woods? Was it to buy drugs? Was he just casually carrying it? Or did he owe money to someone and was intended to pay a debt? The wallet has never been found. So how do we go from Michael having a great time to Michael being missing? This is where things get really convoluted. Ben Michael's friend reported that he went to sleep at around midnight in his car. We don't know what Michael was doing from midnight to 4:00 AM, but at 4:00 AM. Michael was in one of the buses with some people just hanging out. They reported that they were having a great time, but that out of nowhere, his demeanor completely shifted. And, and he stood up angrily and said something to the effect of, well, you don't want me here. I'm just going to leave and stormed off the bus. And then he was just gone. According to the people who were on the bus, they waited and they went after him and tried to find him. Now, here is where we really get knee deep in the mud one person who was on the bus. So they only waited a minute before searching him out. One said they waited 30 minutes. And one just said it was after a while that they went looking. They also said that they were yelling and searching with flashlights and waking people up with bullhorns. But a DJ who was present, who was facing outwards into the crowd and towards the bus where Michael was said, he never saw any flashlights or people searching. They also said that after a while, they figured he must have gone somewhere to sleep and waited for the morning to look for him. But Michael didn't have his tent set up or he may not even have had one. He was sleeping either in one of the buses or in Ben's car. Nobody walked in up until noon, the stay. So like, if you're looking for someone so desperately, but you neither wake up the person they came with or check the car where they are sleeping, what are you really doing? The fact that they never woke Ben up really doesn't sit well with me. I'm not a scientist, but I've noticed from people are in large groups. We tend to do some social seat assignments to elaborate. We assign people to other people they seem close to. So if you are in a couple, we assume your partner is responsible for you. If you are in a smaller group of friends, you might all be looking out for each other. When you enter a larger group, kind of like a click people who are by themselves, coming into groups, tend to link up with someone else through socialization and may stick with them until the social event is over. So Michael arrived with Ben. He is sleeping in Ben's car. All of his stuff was in Ben's possession. So why, if he went missing from this group of people he didn't know, did no one go, Hey, Ben, Michael walked off and we haven't seen him. Can you find him? We have a trail mixed bag worth of conflicting issues and obvious errors. Why did no one wake up in? Why did no one notify the police that Michael was missing? Why did the DJ report seeing no search efforts that the people on the bus said they were out there with bullhorns and flashlights, nothing about this is making sense. It also doesn't help that we don't know exactly what Michael's movements were prior to his disappearance. There were no security cameras with timestamps telling us where he was at, what time this wasn't an open campground where people were coming and going at random. And nobody thought to tell, search and rescue, or even notify his parents until two to 3:00 PM the next day. So we don't even have a way to substantiate that. Michael did disappear at 4:00 AM and with the amount of drugs and alcohol present, what if he did walk off the bus earlier, but nobody else on the bus was even aware enough to react to his outburst for another hour when people are high or drunk, time moves differently. They might have also been too afraid for getting in trouble for the drug. And alcohol used to, to be honest about how impaired they were in that moment. When Ben did wake up at noon, the next day he was informed of Michael's disappearance. He drove to a place of cell service and started calling everyone who could think of to see if they had seen Michael when nobody had, he finally alerted the police Michael's parents were, are not told until 5:00 PM by his ex-girlfriend Natalie. Natalie had been told by Sean Michael's roommate who was at the party. As soon as they were told the parents went up to the campsite and found search a rescue, talking to the people present. The problem was there was no way to stop anyone from leaving. So a bunch of people from the Renegade were leaving or had already left. The police are apparently a real damper on a party. Yeah, of course. It's the police dampening the party, not the fact that one of your people has gone missing this inability to stop vital witnesses and likely evidence from escaping proved detrimental to the investigation. Most of the campers left Thursday or Friday, but they were all gone by Saturday parish, Bryson. Michael's father said that when he arrived and started getting together, some of Michael's friends and volunteers to look for him, he didn't think it would take long. He figured they would find him out in the brush after a bit of searching. But sadly, he would never turn up. Tina Michael's mom reported that when they got there, nobody was looking for him. They were eating, drinking and sitting around. She said she had a gut feeling something bad had happened. Another odd fact was that a group of five to six people who were talking to police all had the same story about Michael's outburst. This is strange. There's only two to three. People were reported to actually have witnessed it. So why did almost double that number, have all the exact same details with the exact same story were present. People remember things differently, depending on their location to the event, their focus on the actions of an event and their overall Headspace. At the time, you can think of it as if you were witnessing a car, hitting a telephone pole, you and five of the people saw it happen. However, none of your stories are going to be identical. Some saw the car only from behind. So they didn't see that the driver was texting. Some only saw it from the front. So they didn't see that a tire on the back blue and caused the car to swerve. Some saw it from the side. So they saw everything, but they don't know if it was the texting or the tire. It caused the accident. So all these people will give different stories, even though they all saw the same thing. But if everyone reports the same story of the car crash, even though they all saw it from a different spot, that means that they rehearsed them or had been coached on what to say. This can lead investigators to think the group of witnesses is trying to cover something up. Unfortunately, police did not have a good reason to detain anyone. So everyone was allowed to leave taking whatever evidence they had with them. Despite hundreds of volunteers and searchers using drones, canines, and horses coming into the wilderness for 19 day straight, Michael did not turn up. They used boats and searched nearby rivers and lakes, ATVs to scour roughage rain. And even when the going got near impossible, they were out there on foot. Eventually search and rescue had to fall back and focus their efforts on other cases, but would still come out and help on their off time. Tina and parish continued to search the area three to four times a week and created and distributed flyers. They created the Facebook group called let's find my Michael Bryson, which currently has 22,800 members and features all the missing info and updates as they continue search efforts. To this day, a breakthrough cane went on December 11th, 2020, some articles of clothing that Michael was last seen, wearing were found on Bryce Creek road, a mile west of hobo camp. However, they believe these items were planted. They are in an area that had already been searched several times and was visible from the road. This is distressing. Why would they only find clothing? If Michael was just missing shortly, he hadn't stripped down and continued on. So what happened to Michael? There are a lot of different theories and possibilities thrown around online. I've done the best I can to try to through everything. Some key theories are a Michael overdosed on drugs available at the party and the people he was with panicked and got rid of the body B Michael got an altercation, or he owed somebody money. Or maybe he found out who stole his wallet and confronted them. There was a fight which resulted in Michael's death and the people he was with panicked and got rid of the body. C Michael was hit while walking on the road and the driver of the car panicked and got rid of his body. D Michael stumbled across something. He shouldn't have noticed that one of the local people or transients living in the area was involved in and they took him or killed him and got rid of his body. E Michael left everything hi, to join a cult and F Michael left everything behind to start somewhere fresh. As you can see, almost always in with Michael, having been the victim of a homicide, which is what the parents believe happened. The cult theory is far reaching. And parish has actually been in contact with an El of the rainbow family, which is the call that Michael was rumored to have joined. They told him that sudden disappearances were not their style for members, and they would've told him if Michael was with them, but just did not want to be communicated with the theory that Michael dropped everything and vanished is also highly unlikely. If you remember earlier, Michael came in Ben's car, all of his possessions were later found to still be in Ben's car, including a flash drive, which contained all the music he planned to use for his gig on Friday. If he is going into this with the intent of suddenly disappearing using Ben's car and leaving his phone and keys behind makes sense, but not leaving the flash drive that shows that he had all of intention of going to the Friday gig. A lot of times when people go missing, you hear, well, maybe they just want a fresh start away from everything. But I have yet to hear that actually being the case, nobody who is making plans for the future is suddenly gonna drop everything and leave on a whim. Now let's talk about drugs. It's important to the family that Michael's disappearance doesn't center on that was present at the Renegade parish has said that when he talked to some of the people there and asked them to be honest with him about what was present, they refused to tell him much of anything. Now, ketamine isn't kidnapping anybody, whether or not someone is on drugs at the time that a crime happens to them does not lessen the need to find them and figure out what went down. Mike had a history of drug abuse using methamphetamines, but he had gone to rehab and gotten cleaned for two and a half years. Unfortunately, he also loved the RA scene. And when it came to the use of ectasy, Molly, and a whole host of other drugs that was always present, Michael did have mental illness and use drugs and alcohol as a way to self medicate. We know that Donovan reported Michael taking ketamine, but ketamine is a downer. It can put people to sleep for 12 hours. Sure are people using it and then walking out of a national forest, shedding their clothes and going on further, never to be found. I've found no proof that ketamine can drive anyone to do that. The theory that Michael overdosed or came into contact with someone on drugs who was belligerent or out of control. And either one of these scenarios caused Michael's death seemed to be the most reasonable. Then the party growers got spoofed. They hit the body and they pretended he just wandered off. I'm not an investigator. I don't want anyone to think that this is the complete answer, but nothing about what people are saying happening at the already makes sense. I do really appreciate that. Michael's parents were honest about his drug use though. A lot of people get uncomfortable and embarrassed and may not tell the full truth about victims. But knowing this about Michael can go to the way to helping us find him. The bus that Michael was last seen on was poured have faced right out into the main road. This is what supports Michael was the victim of a hit and run theory. But if this is what happened, where is the body? If he was hit by a car, why did no one call medical assistance or report? Seeing the accident happen? The area where the RA happened was also known to be an area where transient people would squat before moving on the locals in the area, also lived private lives in the woods. It may have been involved in illegal activity that Michael stumbled upon. This theory is farfetched, but it is one that needs to be talked about. So where did he go? How far could he have possibly have gotten? If he did get lost and injured or died? Why haven't we found his body? Why did no one wake up in? I have so many questions and no one seems to have clear answers. As of today, the search for Michael continues, the qua national forest has been closed due to wildfires. And this has stopped the on foot searches. His parents can go into the park, but only if they get a fresh lead that has some standing perish. And Tina threw the face book group have organized fundraising, passed out flyers and have even released a list of names of people who might have been present. However, a wave of harassment has been pushed at these individuals and maybe keeping them from giving statements, which could help locate. Michael. If you do find the list I ask you, please do not participate in these actions. We people to feel safe enough to come forward. Cuz every little detail helps. Every little, anything can lead us to discovering what happened to Michael and where he is. The Bryson family just wants some answers and they have a rightfully earned them. Michael Bryson was 27 years old and he disappeared. He is Caucasian. Male has brown hair. That is medium link and Hazel eyes. He is six feet tall and 180 pounds. He has a nose ring, facial hair and several tattoos. He has a heart tattoo with hands on his ribcage, a geometric bear on the back of his arm, a geometric lion on one shin and a geometric elephant on the other. He was last seen wearing black shorts, white CROs with rainbow splots possibly a white shirt or a black sweatshirt and may have had a brown corduroy hat. He was last seen Wednesday, August 5th at 4:00 AM. If you have any information about his disappearance, you can call 5, 4 1 5 1 5 1 6 1 9 or 5 4 1 5 1 3 3 4 1 3. Remember every little detail helps. Even if you saw or heard something you thought was minor or insignificant, you are urged to come forward. You never know what could help find Michael. Well, that's all for this episode. We really do hope that the Bryon finally get some answers and that they can bring Michael back home. What do you think happened at the Renegade? Do you think they were telling the truth? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and leave a review. I'll be honest. I don't understand Twitter at all. So if you wanna reach out the best way is through Facebook or Instagram, please go on Facebook and check out the group. Let's find Michael Bryson to get any in all current information on this case. I did wanna take a side note to just have a little moment with you guys and tell you all. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being with us to episode five, the O just recently cleared a hundred downloads and I am static. I am over the moon. I really didn't know what the response to this podcast was gonna be when I created it. But I'm so happy that so many of you seem to be enjoying it and I hope you will stay with us until we hit the next milestone at 500, the honor podcast post every other Thursday. If you have any suggestions for a subject of the podcast, you can email us at the auto, a pod, gmail.com. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you next time on the O side.