General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Disappearance of Hannah Upp

Hannah Emily Upp is an American teacher who went missing three times, in 2008, 2013, and 2017, during episodes of dissociative fugue, a rare condition in which a person loses access to autobiographical memory and personal identity and may travel abruptly. She was rescued alive after the first two disappearances; she has been missing from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, since September 14, 2017, and her case remains unsolved.

Key fact	Detail
First disappearance	Went missing in late August 2008, days before the first day of school at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem, where she taught middle school¹^•²
Rescue	Found September 16, 2008, floating face-down near Robbins Reef in New York Harbor by a Staten Island Ferry captain, on the 20th day she was missing¹
Diagnosis	Dissociative fugue, assigned after brain-imaging tests found no neurological cause for her memory loss¹
Second episode	September 2013 in Kensington, Maryland; she vanished for two days and was found in a creek in Wheaton, Maryland³
Last seen	September 14, 2017, leaving her home in St. Thomas around 8 a.m., reportedly planning to swim at Sapphire Beach, a week after Hurricane Irma³
Status	Still missing; her case is carried in NamUs, the federal database for missing and unidentified persons³

Background

Upp was a native of Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2007 before moving to New York City, where she taught while volunteering for AIDS organizations and studying for a master's degree in education². Her parents, Barbara Bellus and David Upp, were both pastors in Japanese-American churches in Oregon; they divorced when she was fifteen, and her father later taught abroad as an itinerant preacher¹.

The 2008 disappearance

Upp was 23 when she went missing on August 29, 2008, according to police, days before the school year began². Her roommate found her wallet, passport, MetroCard, and cell phone in her purse on the bedroom floor¹. Friends, many of them Bryn Mawr classmates, posted a thousand flyers and searched the city's parks in organized quadrants¹.

During the search she was seen alive several times: at an Apple Store in midtown Manhattan, where surveillance footage showed her logging into her Gmail account; at a Starbucks in SoHo; and at five New York Sports Clubs near midtown, where the detective presumed she had gone to shower¹. Her brother Dan "Wally" Upp, a Navy officer stationed in Japan, told ABC News that a midtown sighting was "a huge sign of hope and encouragement"².

On September 16, after twenty days without any sign of her, a Staten Island ferry captain spotted a body floating in the water off Robbins Reef, a stony islet topped by a lighthouse that lies south of the Statue of Liberty. Deckhands pulled the floating woman aboard; she gasped for air and began crying¹. She was treated at Richmond University Medical Center for hypothermia, dehydration, and a severe sunburn on the left side of her body¹.

When staff asked her questions, she was suddenly able to say her name was Hannah and give her mother's phone number. Her first words were "Why am I wet?" Her last memory before the disappearance was of a run in Riverside Park. She was transferred to a psychiatric unit at Columbia University Medical Center, where brain-imaging tests found no neurological condition, and doctors concluded the episode was psychological¹.

Dissociative fugue

She received a diagnosis of dissociative fugue, a condition in which a person loses access to autobiographical memory and personal identity, occasionally adopting a new one, and may abruptly embark on a long journey. It is typically triggered by trauma or by an unbearable internal conflict¹. The condition has a long history in psychiatric literature; David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who has studied dissociation throughout his career, has described fugue as "the stuff of... psychiatric literature for hundreds of years"³.

Upp's case was atypical in one respect. Her mother said that for Hannah it was "more like the complete absence of identity," a "dangerous nothingness," rather than the adoption of a new identity that the medical literature describes; Spiegel said he had never heard of someone navigating the world without something that resembles a self¹.

Reconstructing the 2008 episode, Upp and her family concluded she had spent roughly three weeks wandering Manhattan, apparently living off knowledge she retained, such as a freegan tour of grocery-store discarded food, while her autobiographical memory was inaccessible. Her family believes she entered the Hudson River in lower Manhattan and was carried south by the tide, clinging at one point to a barge's hull, before reaching Robbins Reef, where scraped knees and sunburn suggested she had slept¹.

The 2013 episode

After about a year at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat outside Philadelphia, Upp worked as a teaching assistant at a Montessori school in Kensington, Maryland¹. On the morning of her first day of class there, her purse, wallet, and cell phone were found on a wooded footpath, and a colleague saw her walking quickly in the wrong direction. Two days later, at 10:30 p.m., she called her mother from a creek in a residential area of Wheaton, Maryland, a mile and a half from her school, having realized she had been walking for more than two days¹. She returned to her job within a few days¹.

Life in St. Thomas and the 2017 disappearance

A year later, Upp took a job assisting teachers of preschool children at a Montessori school on St. Thomas, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands. She disclosed her condition to the school, whose administrators were accepting, and she became a valued teacher; the head of school, Michael Bornn, said tours for prospective parents were taken to her classroom¹.

Hurricane Irma hit St. Thomas on September 6, 2017, a week after Upp began her fourth year of teaching. Wind reached 185 miles an hour, and she and her roommates sheltered in their laundry room. She survived the storm and communicated with friends and family throughout, telling one friend, "I'm staying, that's where my heart is." Islanders then prepared for Hurricane Maria, which landed on September 20¹^•³.

On the morning of September 14, 2017, Upp left her home around 8 a.m., reportedly planning to go swimming at Sapphire Beach. She was 32 years old. She has not been seen since³^•⁴.

Aftermath

The 2017 disappearance remains unsolved. There have been a number of reported potential sightings over the years, the most recent posted on the Find Hannah Upp Facebook page in February 2019³. In 2024, seven years after she was last seen, her former school in St. Thomas held a gathering to honor her, where loved ones shared memories of her teaching⁵.

Upp's case drew wider attention through Rachel Aviv's 2018 New Yorker article "How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity" and the 2019 A&E special Vanished in Paradise: The Untold Story, hosted by Elizabeth Vargas. In the special, Aviv observed that the confusing nature of fugue makes people inclined to dismiss such cases¹^•³.

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026