In the late summer of 2013, a single, happy photograph was the last trace the world would see of the VanCranenbroeck-Quaid family. The image, automatically uploaded to a cloud server from a pocket of faint signal, showed Serena Quaid, 32, and her husband, Kalin VanCranenbroeck, 33, smiling warmly on a sun-dappled trail.

Nestled in a carrier on her father’s chest was their six-month-old daughter, Eela, her face turned to the camera, a pink bow in her hair. They were dwarfed by the ancient, colossal trees of California’s Redwood National and State Parks. It was a perfect moment of family joy, frozen in time just before they vanished forever.

The alarm was first raised by Serena’s mother, Odilia Hastings. The planned three-day trip had stretched into silence. The scheduled check-in calls never came. A knot of anxiety tightened into full-blown fear, and soon a massive search and rescue operation was underway.

The family’s car was found parked neatly at the trailhead, locked and undisturbed, suggesting they had embarked on their hike as planned and fully intended to return.

But the forest, a sprawling 139,000-acre labyrinth of steep ravines and dense undergrowth, gave up no secrets. The towering canopy rendered aerial searches useless, and on the ground, the thick carpet of fallen needles and giant ferns could hide a person just feet from a trail.

K-9 units, expert trackers, and dozens of volunteers found nothing—no dropped baby blanket, no discarded water bottle, no sign of a struggle. It was as if the ancient woods had simply swallowed the family whole.

An early lead emerged when investigators identified the person who took that last photograph: a German tourist who vividly recalled the happy, friendly family. He confirmed he had snapped their picture and watched them continue down the main, well-established trail. He saw nothing unusual, no one following them, nothing to suggest the horror that was to come. The lead evaporated.

Another theory surfaced—that the family, with Kalin’s expert navigation skills, had ventured off-trail and stumbled upon a lucrative and dangerous illegal redwood poaching operation. But that, too, hit a dead end. After two months of exhaustive, fruitless searching, the active operation was scaled back. The case went cold, becoming another tragic legend whispered among the silent, towering trees.

For four years, the silence held. Then, in the summer of 2017, a group of graduate students in mycology, led by researcher Xander Zeller, ventured deep into a remote sector of the park, miles from where the family had disappeared.

Their mission was scientific: to study the impact of wildfires on fungal regrowth. While taking a break near a large oak tree, Zeller’s trained eye caught something bizarre. At the base of the tree was a large, amorphous mass, a chaotic mix of sulfurous yellow, stark white, and oily black.

It looked less like a fungus and more like solidified chemical foam. The sight was strange, but the smell was what was truly unsettling. It was the pungent, unmistakable stench of advanced decomposition, concentrated and overwhelming.

Intrigued, the students documented the anomaly. A park botanist they consulted later hypothesized that the strange growth was likely an extreme fungal bloom, fueled by the decomposition gases from a large, buried animal like a bear or an elk.

For the students, this was a rare scientific opportunity. They decided to return the next day to excavate a small section to study the unique phenomenon.

Armed with small shovels and sampling tools, they began to dig at the edge of the growth. The putrid smell intensified with every scoop of loose soil. Then, a few feet down, a shovel struck something that wasn’t a rock or a root. It was a sheet of heavy-duty black plastic. The atmosphere of scientific curiosity instantly evaporated, replaced by a cold wave of apprehension. This was not a natural burial.

Working with a new sense of urgency, they cleared away more dirt, revealing a large tarp, layered multiple times in a clear effort to seal its contents. This was a clandestine grave. With a field knife, Zeller carefully cut through the plastic. The concentrated odor that rushed out was overpowering. Peering inside, they saw not the fur of an animal, but the heavily decomposed remains of a human being.

The students immediately backed away, the reality of their discovery sinking in. Deep in the wilderness, miles from civilization, they were standing over a hidden tomb. With shaking hands, Zeller used his satellite phone to contact the authorities.

The remote location that had kept the grave a secret for four years now presented a formidable challenge for law enforcement. A specialized forensic team had to be airlifted in to begin the painstaking process of excavation.

The bizarre fungal growth was now understood to be a grim, organic marker, a byproduct of the horror that lay beneath. The team slowly unearthed the body, which was tightly wrapped in multiple layers of tarp, confirming the burial had been a deliberate, calculated act of concealment, not a hasty attempt to hide a crime.

The remains were identified as those of an adult male. For Odilia Hastings, the news was another agonizing twist in her long nightmare. The discovery of a body in the same vast forest could be a coincidence, or it could be the first clue in four years.

As the remains were transported to the medical examiner for identification, the mystery of what happened to the VanCranenbroeck-Quaid family was no longer cold. A single, strange fungus had led investigators to a grave, proving that the family didn’t just get lost in the woods. They had met with a fate far more sinister, and the search for answers had just begun.