Claim:
A 14-year-old Boy Scout named Eric Langford disappeared in New York’s Adirondack Mountains in 1989, was declared dead and miraculously reappeared in 2001.
Rating:
A rumor that circulated online in December 2025 claimed that, in 1989, a 14-year-old boy named Eric Langford disappeared from a Boy Scout camp in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. According to the story, officials declared him dead three weeks later. Then, in 2001, Langford miraculously walked into an Albany police station, telling officers a man named Charles Daniels kidnapped and held him captive for 12 years.
One Snopes reader emailed, “Can you investigate the case of missing boy scout Eric Langford in 1989? Video found on TikTok.” Users also searched Google for more details about the story, including for the phrases “Eric Langford found,” “Eric Langford disappearance,” “Eric Langford missing person” and “Eric Langford documentary.”
On Dec. 14, TikTok user @john.jolokai.68, the account the reader referenced in their email, posted six (archived) videos collectively receiving millions of views. The clips, six parts of the same video, told the story of Langford’s supposed disappearance.
In short, the story of Eric Langford’s disappearance was not true. The fabricated story originated from the UNKNOWN Files YouTube channel, whose owner shares fictional stories in lengthy videos generated with the help of artificial intelligence.
The aforementioned TikTok user edited the 28-minute YouTube video from Dec. 13 into six parts, each lasting around four to six minutes. Those clips each featured a completely different opening, with varying views from surveillance footage showing a shirtless man with very long hair walking into a police station to beg for help. Those six openings each lasted 10 seconds, the maximum duration allowed with some AI video-creation platforms. The entire YouTube video, and the majority of the TikTok clips, showed an alleged picture of a young Boy Scout.
A search of the massive newspaper archives on Newspapers.com found no information about the disappearance of a boy named Eric Langford, in 1989 or any other year. Had a child with that name disappeared in the Adirondack Mountains in any past decades, newspapers in New York would have widely reported on the matter.
We contacted the owner of the YouTube channel by email to ask for more details about the AI tools they potentially used to write the script, create the fake photo of the boy, generate the narrator’s voice and produce the finished video. We will update this article if we receive further information.
Scans of the YouTube video’s text captions with the Copyleaks and ZeroGPT websites determined an AI tool generated at least a small percentage of the script. Scans of the purported picture of the young Boy Scout with Copyleaks, Sightengine and WasItAI found differing results. (Tools that claim to detect AI in photos, text and videos often display unreliable results and their results should be treated with caution.) A Google Images reverse-image search for the same boy’s image resulted in no further helpful information.
The Lead Stories fact-checking website also reported on this rumor, labeling it fake and fiction.
The fictional story of Eric Langford
The lengthy YouTube video telling the entirely made-up story said that, in the summer of 1989, a 14-year-old boy named Eric Langford attended a Boy Scout camp at a location named Black Pond, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
On July 17, 1989, Langford, his instructor David Harrison and other Boy Scouts set off on a traditional night hike, with plans set up a temporary camp for the evening. Langford volunteered to gather water from a nearby stream but never returned.
Essex County officials twice searched a 50-square-mile radius but could not find a trace of Langford’s whereabouts, leading them to declare him as dead three weeks later.
More than 12 years later, on Oct. 3, 2001, an emaciated Langford walked into an Albany police station to beg for help. He identified himself to officers and said a man named Charles Daniels had abducted him and held him captive in a soundproof basement cell inside a remote hunting lodge, miles from any roads. Langford also told the officers Daniels convinced him his parents were dead and that the world had been destroyed by war.
Langford told officers he managed to escape after Daniels suffered a stroke. Police then located Daniels, who died in a hospital four days later, never having spoken one word about the abduction.
The fictional story then ended on a dark note about Langford’s future:
But for Eric himself, it’s not a story. It’s 12 years of his life that can never be returned. It’s a childhood stolen by a man whose motives remain a mystery. It’s a daily struggle with memories that time cannot erase. And it is a reminder that sometimes monsters do not live in fairy tales, but deep in the woods, in old houses where roads do not reach. And that disappearance is not always the end, but sometimes the beginning of the worst nightmare that can last for years.
AI-generated articles continued promoting false story
Following the uploading of the YouTube video and individual TikTok videos, online users continued promoting the fabricated story on Facebook with links to AI-generated WordPress blog articles.
For example, on Dec. 15, a user managing the Fame Frenzy Facebook page posted (archived), “BOY SCOUT VANISHED IN 1989 — RETURNED 12 YEARS LATER WITH A TERRIFYING STORY OF IMPRISONMENT.” A comment under the post directed users to an article on an ad-filled WordPress blog. Scans of the article’s text with the Copyleaks and ZeroGPT websites found AI wrote most or all of both stories.
The Facebook page’s “page transparency” information displayed at least some of its managers as residing in Vietnam — one of several countries often appearing as promoting countless false, AI-generated stories via Facebook and blogs.
For further reading, we previously reported about other AI-driven rumors, including a video allegedly showing a UFO taking off from the Amazon rainforest in 1987.
