Couple Vanished in Oregon Mountains – 10 Months Later Found in BAGS Filled With FEATHERS…

In October of 2012, a young couple from Eugene, Agnes Ashdown and Lionel Blackmore, went on a weekend hike in Three Sisters Wilderness and never returned. Their car was found near the trail head, but they were not. The search lasted for weeks and ended in failure. 10 months passed. In August, a hunter from Bend came across two large bags filled with feathers in the woods. They were inside.

In October of 2012, 23-year-old artist Agnes Ashdown and 25-year-old geology graduate student Lionel Blackmore left Eugene, Oregon, intending to spend 2 days in the mountains. They set off early in the morning to reach the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, a popular destination for hikers and photographers. The fall of that year in Oregon was mild with wet mornings, clear air, red maple trees, and the smell of smoke from distant fires.

According to their friends, it was their vacation together before winter, a time when Agnes was planning a new series of landscapes, and Lionol was about to complete his dissertation on the volcanic formations of the Cascade Mountains. They were seen in a coffee shop on the outskirts of Eugene at about 8:00 in the morning. The owner recalls that they were sitting by the window. Lionel was flipping through a map.

Agnes was scribbling in a notebook and laughing. They left a few dollars as a tip and continued on the highway to the north. The next time they were captured by a surveillance camera at the Summit View gas station in the town of Sisters was the same morning around 9:20. On the recording, they look carefree. Lionel is carrying a gas can and bottles of water, and Agnes is holding a small bag of groceries.

The cashier, who was later interviewed by investigators, recalled, “They were laughing, arguing about music. They didn’t look like people in a hurry at all.” After that, the couple headed toward Lake Linton. There, in the parking lot at the Linton Lake trail head, they parked their white Hondas and by all accounts, packed their backpacks. It was from there that Agnes made her last phone call.

Her mother still has a recording on her answering machine. a short message in which the girl says that everything is fine, that they have just arrived and plan to return on Sunday evening. Her voice sounds calm, even cheerful. This was the last confirmed contact with the couple. Their route was only partially recovered.

In the visitors log near the trail, someone wrote down the name Blackmore and the date of departure, but not the date of return. The signature, according to the handwriting, belongs to Lionol. From that moment on, according to other hikers who went up to the lake that day, neither Agnes nor Lionol was seen again. One man, who was walking the same trail later, recalled in a conversation with the police that he saw a young couple with an art easel and maps near the stream, but did not attach any importance to it. The weather changed

dramatically in those days. It rained during the night and most of the campers went down into the valley. On Sunday evening, Agnes did not answer the phone. At first, her mother thought the children had simply lost contact. Cell coverage is unstable in that area.

However, by Monday morning, her anxiety grew. Agnes always communicated changes of plans, even when it was only a day’s delay. when it turned out that Lionel hadn’t shown up for work at the university and his supervisor confirmed that he was supposed to be back yesterday. Mrs. Ashdown called the Dashuites County Sheriff’s Office. At 11 in the morning, an officer on duty drove to the Linton Lake trail head parking lot. It was as if time had stood still.

When the deputy reached the Linton Lake trail head, Agnes and Lionel’s white Honda sat exactly where they had left it—doors locked, a thin layer of wet pine needles stuck to the windshield. Inside, rangers found Agnes’s sketchbook in the backseat, a page open to a charcoal drawing of twisted trees and what looked like a human figure covered in feathers.

At first, it meant nothing.

Only later would investigators realize it was the last thing she ever drew.

THE DISCOVERY – 10 MONTHS LATER

In August, a bowhunter from Bend named Travis McKean was tracking elk deeper in the timberline when he noticed something odd:
Two large canvas bags, weathered, half-sunken into the moss.

Both were tied shut with vines.

Each bag was bursting with feathers—thousands of them, gray and white, like something had tried to mimic the inside of a bird’s nest.

The smell was unbearable.

Inside the first bag was Agnes. In the second, Lionel. Their bones were arranged in fetal position, wrapped carefully, almost ritualistically.

There were no signs of mutilation.
No animal marks.
No clothing.
Just feathers.

And something else:

On the inside of each bag, written in charcoal, were symbols matching those Agnes had sketched months earlier.

THE THEORY INVESTIGATORS HATED MOST

The autopsy showed something unsettling:

• Both had no broken bones typical of falling trauma.

• No signs of struggle.

• No defensive wounds.

• Lionel’s fingernails were packed with dirt and… down feathers.

• Agnes’s were clean, as if someone had held her hands still.

Time of death?
Impossible to pinpoint.
Anywhere between late October and early January.

Meaning… they may have been kept alive for weeks.

Or moved.

Or posed.

The forest rangers offered a quiet explanation nobody wanted to write down officially:

“Sometimes… people disappear into the Sisters. Sometimes they come back wrong.”

But the locals in Sisters?
They had a different explanation—one older than the park itself.

They called it: The Watcher of Linton Lake.

A shape locals swear they’ve seen at dusk: a tall, thin figure draped in feathers that don’t belong to any single species. Something that collects hikers who wander too far off trail. Something that builds nests.

Something territorial.

THE SKETCHBOOK REVELATION

When the families received Agnes’s belongings, her mother flipped through the sketchbook one last time and noticed a page that investigators had missed.

Dated the day they vanished.

A drawing of a narrow trail.
Trees bending inward.
A silhouette standing at the far end.

Not human—longer, too angular.

Underneath, Agnes had written:
“It keeps following us. Lionel doesn’t see it yet.”

But the final page was the one that broke her mother:

A hasty, shaking scribble:

“Not a man. Not an animal.
If we don’t come back, it’s because it took us.”

The case was reopened two months later when the hunter, Travis, reported something else he hadn’t shared earlier.

He had found a third bag.

Empty.

But inside were freshly shed feathers and… a map.

A hand-drawn map of the Sisters Wilderness.

Agnes’s handwriting.
Lionel’s handwriting.
Mixed, overlapping each other.

As if they had both been forced to draw it.

The last mark on the map was a small X.

Right over the words:

“Trail not maintained.”

When rangers went to check the spot—

The bag was gone.

The feathers were gone.

But the trees around the clearing had changed.

They were bent inward.

As if something large had rested there.
Nest-like.
Waiting.

To this day, hikers report hearing rustling overhead at night—too heavy for birds, too soft for deer.

And sometimes, when they shine their flashlights into the trees,

they see a single white feather

falling
falling
falling.