Montana has never been a stranger to strange disappearances. We have had hikers vanish without a trace in the Bob Marshall to hunters whose gear is found but bodies never are. Our wide-open spaces have long been a backdrop for unanswered questions. Maybe that’s why the story of Virgil “Wade” Tackett, a 17-year-old from Ohio who vanished in Alaska in 1986, hits close to home. He wasn’t a Montanan, but the circumstances of his disappearance — sudden, unsettling, and followed by decades of speculation — feel eerily familiar to anyone who has grown up around our own campfire stories of the lost.
Wade had flown north for what he thought would be a deckhand job on a friend’s fishing boat. After some work and exploring in Sitka, he ended up in Pelican, Alaska, and one calm June day he set off in a skiff to poke around the islands. He never came back. The skiff was later found adrift, throttle wide open, with nothing inside but silence. The official word was drowning, one of Alaska’s occupational hazards, but Wade’s family never believed it. What followed was part mystery, part folklore, part fever dream: psychics, politicians, tabloid sightings, even whispers of him living under another name in Canada.
And if that all sounds a little far-fetched, well, that’s the thing about missing-person stories in places like Alaska or Montana. The wilderness doesn’t hand over answers easily, and in the absence of a body or clear evidence, people fill the gaps with legend. Here, we tell stories about mountain men who never came back down, about the Kóoshdaa Káa or the “little people” of the Pryors, about friends who swear they saw someone they’d already mourned. Wade’s case may belong to Alaska, but the unease it leaves behind — that blend of grief, mystery, and the haunting possibility of what if — feels right at home under Montana’s big, shadowy sky.
This story was originally published in 2022 by OutdoorLife. You can read more about this curious cold case here.
