He Vanished From a Town That Doesn’t Exist — 20 Years Later, I Found His Final Diary Entry | HO

PINE BLUFF, ARKANSAS — In March 1988, a young Black man named Reuben Lamont Griggs vanished from his home, leaving behind nothing but a cryptic note: “If I don’t come back, it means I found it.” For two decades, his disappearance haunted his family and the small, tightly knit community on the edge of Pine Bluff. But the real mystery wasn’t just his vanishing—it was the place he claimed to be searching for: a town called Sulfur Hollow, a place that, officially, never existed.

Now, 20 years later, a battered diary and a cassette tape have surfaced, reigniting questions about where Reuben went—and whether he ever wanted to be found.

A Quiet Disappearance

Reuben Griggs was always a quiet soul, the kind of man who drifted out of conversations mid-sentence, lost in thought or scribbling in his ever-present notebook. His mother, Claudine, noticed a change in him during the winter of 1988—a darkness, she later said, that seemed to settle around him like a fog.

On March 12, Reuben left home in his usual gray hoodie and work boots, telling his mother he’d be back by dark. He never returned. His sister, Valina, found the note the next morning in his sketchbook. It was short, almost dismissive, but laced with finality.

The police, slow to act, dismissed Claudine’s concerns. Only Detective Darnell McGee, one of the county’s few Black officers, took her seriously. He’d heard the name “Sulfur Hollow” before, from an old man in a care home who spoke of a town the state “washed away.” But there were no records—no maps, no deeds, nothing but rumors and the memory of elders.

The Town That Wasn’t There

Reuben’s journals, later collected by his family, were filled with sketches and notes about Sulfur Hollow. Drawings of wooden gates in shadowy forests. Maps of winding roads that ended in blank spaces. “No roads, no clocks, just the hollow,” he wrote again and again.

His best friend, Otis Tillery, recalled a conversation days before Reuben vanished. “Not here, but not far,” Reuben had said, showing Otis a drawing of a gate. It was the last time anyone saw him.

Claudine never gave up. She kept Reuben’s room untouched, wrote letters to politicians, and begged church members for help. When she began losing her memory in the early 2000s, her daughter Valina inherited the search.

The Diary Surfaces

In 2008, Valina, now living in North Little Rock, stumbled upon her brother’s final diary at a storage auction. It was hidden in a shoebox inside a broken desk—a composition notebook, water-stained, filled with frantic sketches and a final entry dated March 14, 1988: two days after Reuben’s official disappearance.

“If this ever makes it back, I didn’t leave because I hated life. I left because I saw something more.”

Valina called retired Detective McGee that night. He still kept Reuben’s file in a fireproof box beneath his bed. When she told him about the diary, he asked her to bring it over immediately.

A Map of Memory

The diary was a map—of forests, gates, and the “hollow.” One sketch showed a wooden arch, half-buried in vines, with the words “No roads, no clocks, just a hollow.” Another page described a man in a white suit, “Mr. Alance,” who Reuben claimed appeared to him in the woods, always near water, always silent.

McGee pulled out an old county map from 1949. On it, in faint pencil, was a spot labeled “Sulfur Hollow.” No census data. No official record. Just a mark at the edge of the Bayou Bartholomew wetlands.

An old newspaper clipping from 1952 told of a Pentecostal revival where 18 people vanished near Sulfur Hollow. No bodies were found. The sheriff at the time declared the land “reclaimed for state use.” The town, it seemed, had been erased.

Into the Hollow

The next morning, Valina and McGee set out for the spot marked on the map. The roads had long since disappeared, but they followed game trails and diary sketches through knee-deep water and tangled brush. The forest was silent—no birds, no wind, just the oppressive stillness described in Reuben’s diary.

Then they found it: a collapsed wooden arch, half-swallowed by earth, carved with the letters “ITCHWELL L.” Below it, barely legible: “He found what he was looking for.” Nearby, a flat stone was marked with Reuben’s initials: RLG.

Beneath the stone, Valina found a scrap of gray hoodie—the same one Reuben wore the day he vanished.

The Man in White

The diary’s final pages were filled with drawings of the faceless man in white. Sometimes he stood by a creek, sometimes by a pay phone, always at the threshold between places. Reuben wrote of following him, of being called by name, of finding a place “where the air stops.”

A cassette tape found with the diary contained Reuben’s voice, calm and distant: “If you’re hearing this, then it means I didn’t come back. But don’t cry for me. I saw something in the trees. It knew me. It called me by name.”

Valina, listening in the dark, felt a chill. Was it a psychotic break? A metaphor for grief? Or had Reuben truly found a place beyond the reach of maps and memory?

A Town Remembered

Back in Pine Bluff, Valina and McGee pieced together the fragments. The preacher from the 1952 revival, Alons Gley, matched the name “Alance” in Reuben’s diary. Church elders whispered about a man in white seen standing across the street on Sundays, always watching but never walking.

Valina returned to the site with Otis. They found the old foundation stones of a church, a slab etched with Reuben’s name and the words: “He found what he was looking for.” She left her mother’s prayer charm on the stone, a final act of remembrance.

That night, Claudine Griggs passed away peacefully, a candle burning by Reuben’s photo.

The Final Entry

Valina read the last pages of the diary at her mother’s kitchen table. Reuben’s words were clear, deliberate:

“I know this will be hard to believe. Maybe you’ll think I lost my mind, but I need you to know I was more awake out there than I’ve ever been. The hollow wasn’t a place on a map. It was a sound, a pressure, like a door inside my chest opening slowly… You’ll think I disappeared, but I didn’t. I stepped sideways. In the hollow, there’s no pain, no clocks, no guilt. I waited for someone to come looking, but I knew you’d be the one. You were always the one who listened between the words. I’m sorry I left you, but I didn’t forget you.”

The final line read: “You’ll know when it’s time to come home.”

The Town That Needed Memory

Weeks later, Valina received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a single slip of parchment: “The town never needed a map. It only needed memory.”

Reuben Griggs was never found. But in the end, perhaps he didn’t want to be. For his family, the search brought not closure, but understanding: Some places exist only in the spaces between grief and memory, and some people are never truly lost—they simply step into the hollow, waiting for someone to remember.