Imagine a peaceful place, a tourist campsite in the dense forests of Belgium, families with children, tourists, laughter around campfires. Now imagine that right beneath your feet, just a couple of meters deep, lies a corpse in a plastic box. It’s been there for three years. The body of a young woman everyone thought was missing.

They searched for her, but never found her, and she’s been there all this time. This story isn’t about ghosts. It’s about how the most terrible evil can hide where you least expect it, in an ordinary plastic box, buried under a tourist trail. And the most chilling thing about this story isn’t how she was killed, but how they hid her and that they never found the killer.

This happened in the early 2000s. Marin, a 29-year-old French woman, wasn’t rebellious or adventurous; on the contrary, according to her family and friends, she was an extremely organized person. She worked in an archive in León and liked everything to be orderly. She had her vacation planned for the next six months.

Routes, campsites, packing lists. Everything was noted in her notebook. She wasn’t one to just jump into a spontaneous trip. A hike through the Ardennes had been a long-time dream. She’d spent months preparing for it. She read forums, studied maps, bought new gear. For her, it wasn’t just a vacation, but a kind of project she wanted to execute flawlessly.

She went alone, but that wasn’t unusual. Marin liked solo hikes; they helped her organize her thoughts. She didn’t seek company; she felt comfortable with herself and with nature. That year, the summer in Belgium was hot and dry. The Ardennes were full of tourists. Marin arrived at the official tourist camp called Valle Verde (Green Valley).

It was a popular place, with well-maintained clearings for tents, a small administrative building, showers, gravel paths—all civilized and safe. At least, that’s what it seemed. She arrived in her old car, checked in at reception, and paid for two nights. The receptionist remembered her as polite, soft-spoken, and with a slight accent.

She said that the next day she would be heading out into the mountains for the whole day on one of the most popular trails. Nothing out of the ordinary. Thousands of tourists did the same thing every season. She pitched her tent in a secluded corner of the camp at the edge of the woods. The place was quiet and secluded, just the way she liked it. Other tourists watched her unpack her things and prepare dinner on a small gas stove.

She didn’t speak to anyone, only responding to greetings with a gesture. The last time she was seen was at night, sitting by her tent reading a book. The next morning, her tent was still closed. At first, no one paid any attention. Perhaps she had decided to sleep in or had gone hiking before dawn, although that seemed unlikely, given her plans.

At lunchtime, when the sun was high and the zipper on the tent entrance was still closed, the neighboring tourists, a couple from Germany, began to worry. They approached and called her name. Silence. They didn’t dare look inside. It would be too intrusive. Instead, they went to find the manager.

He, an elderly Belgian, also initially dismissed the matter. He said everyone had their own plans and that it was best not to interfere in other people’s affairs. But at dusk, when Marín’s search was about to end and there was still no sign of her, he decided to go and take a look.

He approached the tent and called out to her several times. “Mademoel Maren.” There was no answer. Then he carefully pulled the zipper. The tent opened. It was empty, but it was an eerie emptiness. On the floor was a neatly rolled-up sleeping bag. Next to it was her large travel backpack. The manager, breaking all the rules, looked inside the backpack.

There were her things: food, a map, a wallet with money and documents, the keys to the car still in the parking lot. Everything was in its place. Only Maren was missing. It was completely illogical. No tourist in their right mind would go into the mountains without a backpack, without water, without documents. It was tantamount to suicide. The manager immediately called the police.

The officers who arrived cordoned off the tent. The usual questioning began, but it was useless. No one had seen or heard anything. The night was quiet. There were no shouts or sounds of a struggle. No one saw anyone approaching her tent. It was in a remote corner, and the lanterns from the main avenue barely reached it.

The search operation began. Dozens of police officers and volunteers combed the woods around the campsite. A helicopter with a thermal camera and police dogs were used. The dogs followed the scent trail from the tent, but lost it almost immediately. The trail ended on the gravel road leading to the parking lot and the campsite exit.

It was as if she had approached the road and vanished or gotten into a car. But whose car? The police began to consider all the possibilities. The first and most obvious was an accident. Perhaps she went for a walk without taking anything, twisted her ankle, and fell into a ravine. But the search within a 10-kilometer radius yielded nothing.

They combed the woods meticulously. The second possibility was a voluntary disappearance. But it didn’t make any sense. Why leave behind all her money, documents, and car? Her bank accounts were untouched. Her family in France was in shock. They all insisted that Marine would never have done something like that.

She wasn’t depressed, she had no enemies, no reason to simply vanish. That left the third version, the most terrible: kidnapping and murder. But here, too, there were inconsistencies. Why would a kidnapper leave all her valuables behind? Usually, in these cases, robbery is the main motive.

Here, everything pointed to her being the target. Days passed and turned into weeks. The search operation gradually dwindled. The volunteers left, and the police returned to their usual duties. Only the posters with her photo stuck to the trees and information panels served as reminders of Marín. The Valle Verde campsite remained open.

New tourists pitched tents, lit campfires, and went on hikes. Few knew that a few weeks earlier, a girl had disappeared without a trace in that very same place. Marín’s story slowly became one of those local legends told around the campfire to send shivers down your spine.

The investigator who led the case later confessed in an interview that it kept him up at night. The lack of evidence was complete. Not a fingerprint, not a single hair, not a single witness. The case reached a dead end and was filed away, the note having disappeared under unknown circumstances. Marín’s car remained in the police impound lot for several months and was then returned to her parents.

They sold it, unable to bear the last memory of their daughter. For three years there was no news of Marín. Three long years, her family lived in uncertainty, not knowing if she was alive or dead. And then, at the Selena Dolina campsite, they decided to lay a new power cable. Three years later, the Valle Verde campsite continued with its usual routine.

The story of the missing French woman had almost faded from memory; it had become a mere line in the police reports. One ordinary day, when there weren’t many people at the campsite, a small team of workers entered the grounds. The local council needed to lay a new power cable to a remote part of the campsite.

The work was routine, dirty, but simple. Two men armed with shovels and a small excavator began to work. They were digging along the old gravel road, the same one where Marín’s trail had been lost three years before. The earth was compacted, trampled by thousands of feet. The work progressed slowly.

At one point, the excavator’s bucket struck something hard with a dull thud. It wasn’t a rock. The sound was different, duller, like plastic. The workers stopped the machine. One of them jumped into the shallow trench and began to loosen the earth with a shovel. Soon the edge of something large and dark gray appeared.

It was an enormous plastic container. It didn’t resemble the household storage boxes. It was made of thick, rugged plastic, with strong reinforcements and metal latches along the sides. They were the kind used by the military or industrial companies to transport equipment. The workers looked at each other. What was something like that doing buried underground in a tourist camp? Perhaps it was old trash they hadn’t bothered to remove.

Or had someone hidden something valuable? Curiosity got the better of them. The two of them painstakingly pulled the heavy box from the ground. It was hermetically sealed. One of the latches clicked; they had to break the second with a hammer. When the lid finally moved, a strange smell escaped through the crack. It wasn’t the rotten smell they were prepared for.

It was a strong, acrid chemical odor, similar to the smell of formalin or some industrial solvent. Beneath that smell, they could sense another: nauseating and cloying. One of the workers, pinching his nose, yanked the lid shut. Inside, filling the entire space, was a large bundle wrapped in a shiny black film.

The film was thick, like the kind used to pack goods in warehouses. It was wrapped around something that was clearly a human body. It was in a fetal position with its knees drawn up to its chest. The workers recoiled from the box as if it had burned them. One of them, pale and trembling, pulled out his phone and called the police.

That very day, the Valle Verde campsite became a crime scene. The news of the discovery shocked the local police. The Marín case, which had been gathering dust in the files for three years, returned to investigator Jean Pierre Logier’s desk. He had aged in those years. His hair was grayer and he was more tired, but he remembered the case in detail.

The complete lack of evidence haunted him. Now he had the key piece of evidence. Horrible, but evidence nonetheless. He went to the site himself. The campsite was cordoned off, and all tourists were asked to leave immediately under the pretext of unforeseen technical work. The atmosphere of rest and carefree abandon gave way to glacial terror.

Forensic doctors in white coats worked on the coffin. Their every move was recorded by a camera. The coffin was then taken to the forensic laboratory. There, truly gruesome details began to emerge. First, the identity. Dental records quickly confirmed that it was Marine. The

three-year search was over. All that time, she had been lying there beneath the feet of hundreds of tourists, just a few dozen meters from her tent. Second, the state of the body. The pathologist was astounded. In three years underground, the body should have been reduced to little more than a skeleton.

But Marin’s body was in a state that experts described as partial mummification. The level of decomposition was minimal. Tests revealed that before the box was sealed, it had been filled with a powerful chemical compound, essentially an embalming fluid. This completely halted the decomposition process. This

was not a spontaneous murder. The killer acted in cold blood and possessed specialized knowledge. They didn’t just want to hide the body; they wanted to preserve it. Third, the cause of death. And here the investigation hit another dead end. The body showed no fatal wounds, no fractures, and no traces of bullets or knives.

The internal organs were saturated with chemicals, but it proved impossible to determine whether death had been caused by poisoning. There were no signs of strangulation either. The coroner shrugged. In his report, he wrote: “Cause of death, undetermined.” But during a detailed examination, he discovered something that chilled the blood of even the most experienced criminalists.

Beneath each of Marín’s fingernails and toenails were tiny metal staples, deeply embedded, the kind used in construction staplers. This had nothing to do with the cause of death. It was torture—sophisticated, sadistic torture that left no visible marks on the body but caused excruciating pain.

And the last, most gruesome detail. The criminalists began examining the plastic box. Inside the lid, just above where the victim’s head should have been, they found scratches—many parallel scratches. Forensic examination confirmed it: they had been made with a person’s fingernails.

That could only mean one thing. Marin was placed in the box while still alive. She was conscious, in complete darkness, in a confined space, and desperately trying to escape. She clawed at the lid until her fingers bled. The crime scene was not only gruesome but monstrous. Not only was she killed, but she was buried alive in a coffin filled with chemicals after being tortured.

The investigation resumed with renewed vigor. Now it was no longer a case of disappearance, but of a serial killer. Because a person capable of doing something like this would hardly have stopped at just one victim. The first thing the police did was examine the box. Experts determined that containers of this type were manufactured in a single factory in Belgium.

Their main buyers were the military and several large industrial companies involved in chemical production. The search area narrowed, but it was still too broad. So, the investigators refocused their attention on the field itself. The killer must have known the area well.

I knew about the old drainage well where the box was hidden. This well didn’t appear on any maps; only the elderly residents or those responsible for maintaining the grounds knew about it. The police requested all the employee files for the year Marin disappeared from the camp, and that’s where they encountered the first anomaly.

The personnel file of one employee, a temporary guard who had worked at the camp that very summer, was missing. His name appeared on the payroll, but there was no record, no address, no photo—nothing. The folder had vanished. The camp administration couldn’t provide a clear explanation.

Perhaps it was lost during the transfer of the files, or perhaps someone intentionally destroyed it, and there’s more. The police recovered the security camera footage. At that time, the camp’s system was rudimentary. There were only a few cameras at the entrance and in the administration building. Upon examining the system logs, investigators discovered that on the night Marín disappeared, the entire video surveillance system had been offline for 24 hours.

The log contained a note stating scheduled technical maintenance. Police identified the person responsible for that maintenance. It was the same night security guard whose personnel file had vanished without a trace. The circle was beginning to close. You had a ghost, a man who was in the right place at the right time, who had the ability to disable the cameras, and who then disappeared without a trace.

The search for the phantom guard became a central focus of the investigation. They had his name on the payroll: Luke Verhoven. But when you started searching that name in the databases, you hit a void. A person with that name existed, but his digital and paper life was virtually clean.

No loans, no parking tickets, no active social media. He was almost invisible. Investigators began questioning everyone who had worked at Green Valley that summer. The picture was bizarre. Everyone remembered Luke. He was older than most of the seasonal workers, around 40. Quiet, solitary. He had no friends.

He did his job precisely, without complaint, but always kept to himself. No one remembered him ever talking about his family, his past, or his plans for the future. He was simply a function, a man in uniform patrolling the territory at night. Investigator Lorier felt they were on the right track.

He gave the order to continue the investigation, and after several weeks of meticulous work, an interesting detail came to light. Before becoming a security guard at the campsite, Luke Berhoven had worked for several years as an instructor at a private survival school. This school offered training courses for civilians, including in the Ardennes forests.

He knew those areas like the back of his hand. He knew how to survive in the wild, cover his tracks, and blend in. That explained his skills. But there was another detail. Before working as an instructor, he had a brief stint of just a few months employed in the warehouse of a large chemical company, the same one that was a client of the factory that produced those plastic containers.

The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This man had knowledge, access to resources, and opportunity. He was the ideal suspect. It took the police another month to find him. He wasn’t hiding, but he lived in such a way that he was difficult to spot. He lived in a small rented house on the outskirts of an industrial city in another part of the country.

He worked as a warehouseman in a large warehouse. He lived alone. They arrested him early in the morning, quietly and without a fuss. He wasn’t surprised to see the police at his door. He was completely calm. The interrogation lasted several hours. Investigator Laorier sat across from him and tried to break through the wall of that icy calm, but Luke Berhoven was like a rock.

He answered every question calmly, monotonously, without emotion. Yes. He had worked in that field. Yes, he remembered how the girl had disappeared. It was sad. Why had her personnel file disappeared? He had no idea; ask the administration. Why were the cameras turned off? Scheduled maintenance.

The system often malfunctioned. Everything is recorded in the logbook. His answers were impeccable. He used bureaucracy and other people’s negligence as a shield. He didn’t slip up once. He showed no sign of nervousness. He looked the investigator straight in the eye, and in his gaze was an absolute emptiness.

The police obtained a warrant to search his house. They turned everything upside down. They were looking for anything. Remnants of that black film, the construction stapler, the can of chemicals, any memento he might have taken from Marín. But they found nothing. The house was impeccably clean. Not a clue, not a hint, nothing that could link this man to that horrible box in the woods.

Investigator Lorier was 100% certain he had Marín’s killer in front of him. All his intuition, all his experience screamed that it was him. But intuition can’t be used in a case. The prosecutor studied the file. Yes. The body of circumstantial evidence was impressive. The motive, the opportunity, the specialized knowledge—everything pointed to the young man, but there wasn’t a single piece of direct evidence, not a fingerprint, not a DNA match, not a single witness who had seen him with Marín.

Nothing. A case built on such flimsy foundations would collapse in court on the first day. The charges would be dropped. A guilty verdict was impossible. With a heavy heart, the prosecutor gave the order. Luke Berheen was released. He left the police station, walked silently past several journalists, boarded a bus, and drove off.

No one ever saw him again. He vanished once more. He disappeared like a ghost. Investigator Lorier retired a year later. In his last interview, he said that the Marín case was the biggest failure of his career. He knew the killer, he had spoken with him, but he couldn’t prove his guilt. Camp Valle never recovered from this story.

News of the terrible discovery spread throughout the country. Tourists stopped coming. No one wanted to rest in a place where a tortured body had lain underground for three years. Two years after the discovery of the box, the camp went bankrupt and was closed. Now it’s an abandoned lot. The gates are rusted and hang by a single hinge.

The administration building is boarded up. The paved paths are overgrown with grass, and somewhere, beneath a layer of earth and roots, an empty drainage well still stands, a silent witness to a terrible tragedy. Marin’s case remains unsolved, and the man who was most likely her killer simply vanished, never to be heard from again.