Authorities in a small Western Pennsylvania village called Marguerite are looking into the disappearance of a 64-year-old woman named Elizabeth Pollard, who went missing while searching for her cat Pepper. The cops think this is no ordinary disappearance. They don’t think she was kidnapped nor did they believe she fled to another country. They suspect the grandma was swallowed up by a manhole-sized sinkhole.
Pollard’s family reported her missing at around 1 AM local time Tuesday. She had been missing since the previous evening when she left her house looking for her cat.
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To add a little more sadness to this story, she was in her car while looking for Pepper, with her five-year-old granddaughter in the passenger seat. At some point, she parked her car and stepped out to search for the cat, leaving her granddaughter behind in the car.
Once the cops pieced together that Pollard disappeared in an area with a freshly opened sinkhole, they immediately sent rescue teams in with cameras and listening devices to probe the open stretch of earth. They found nothing on their first attempt.
On their second, they found a shoe about 30 feet below the surface. “It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” State trooper Steve Limani told The Independent.
The authorities believe that the sinkhole might be a knock-on effect of the nearby abandoned coal mine that possibly created a loose cavity in the earth that Pollard perhaps stepped onto.
All of this is just a theory for now, as authorities have found no signs of Pollard. Her granddaughter fell asleep in the car as Pollard searched for her cat, which remains missing. Her granddaughter was later rescued by police.
