The last time the world saw Lilly and Jack Sullivan alive, they were the picture of ordinary childhood joy. Grainy black-and-white security footage from the Dollarama in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, time-stamped 2:25 p.m. on Thursday, May 1, 2025, shows the siblings skipping hand-in-hand down Aisle 7. Lilly, six going on sixteen, wears a purple hoodie with a glittery unicorn and pink light-up sneakers that flash with every step. Jack, four, clutches a half-eaten bag of gummy worms and a stuffed giraffe named Raffey that never left his side. Their mother Malehya Brooks-Murray pushes a cart loaded with birthday candles and juice boxes (Jack’s fifth birthday was only three weeks away). The kids wave at the camera when the cashier jokes about the candy. Lilly flashes her gap-toothed grin. Jack sticks out his tongue. They look happy. They look safe.

Seventeen hours and forty-four minutes later, they would vanish so completely that six months of the most intense search in Atlantic Canadian history would turn up nothing, not a shoe, not a hair tie, not a single gummy worm wrapper.

The family left Dollarama at 2:41 p.m., drove the twenty-minute route back to their trailer on Gairloch Road in Lansdowne Station, and spent the rest of the afternoon like any other late-spring day in Pictou County. Malehya posted a short video on TikTok at 5:17 p.m.: the kids chasing bubbles in the backyard while Daniel Martell grilled hot dogs. Jack squeals when a bubble pops on his nose. Lilly yells, “Do it again, Mommy!” The sun is low and golden. The forest behind them looks endless and harmless.

By 9:30 p.m. the house was quiet. Meadow, the one-year-old, was down first. Lilly and Jack shared the small back bedroom, Lilly on the bottom bunk, Jack on the top with Raffey tucked under his chin. Malehya kissed them goodnight, left the door cracked the way they liked it, and went to watch Netflix with Daniel in the living room. The dogs curled up on the rug. Nothing seemed unusual.

Sometime between midnight and 3 a.m., two neighbors heard a vehicle on the gravel. No headlights. Just the slow crunch of tires, an engine idling for half a minute, then fading away. No one thought much of it at the time.

At 7:30 a.m. on May 2, Malehya woke to what she thought was the sound of the kids playing. She smiled, dozed for a few more minutes, then padded down the hallway. The room was empty. Beds made. Pajamas folded. Window closed and latched from the inside. Back door unlocked, but no footprints in the wet grass. The dogs never barked.

By 10:07 a.m. the RCMP arrived. By noon the helicopters were overhead. By nightfall the province had issued a vulnerable-persons alert and the largest ground search in Pictou County history was tearing through the bush.

And then the rain came.

For the next ten days it poured, biblical, relentless, the kind of spring deluge that turns trails into rivers and washes every scent from the air. Cadaver dogs lost the trail before they ever found it. Searchers in chest waders sank to their knees in swamp water. Thermal drones flew blind through low cloud. The forest, which had looked so gentle in that golden 5:17 p.m. TikTok, revealed its true face: hundreds of square kilometers of alder hell, beaver floods, and sinkholes hidden under moss.

Six months later, the only confirmed images of Lilly and Jack Sullivan alive remain those Dollarama frames and the bubble-chasing video. Everything after 5:17 p.m. on May 1 is rumor, theory, and heartbreak.

Investigators have walked the children’s exact height through the bush in replica pajamas to see how far they could realistically travel. Answer: maybe 300 meters before the alders would have swallowed them whole. Thermal imaging experts say that in the cold, wet conditions of that night, two small bodies would have shown up on FLIR cameras for at least 48 hours, even under canopy. They never did.

The RCMP has never called it criminal, but they have never stopped treating it like one either. The Major Crime Unit still runs the file. The reward sits at $150,000. And every few weeks another search team goes back into the same soaked wilderness with new technology, new dogs, new hope that this time the forest will give the children back.

Malehya still checks the Dollarama footage when the pain gets too loud. She zooms in on Lilly’s flashing sneakers, on Jack’s gummy-worm grin, and whispers the same thing every time: “You were right here. You were safe. How did seventeen hours take you away from me?”

In New Glasgow, the Dollarama employees who rang up those juice boxes and birthday candles six months ago still have the kids’ photos taped above the register. Customers stop and stare sometimes. Some leave flowers. Some just cry.

And in Lansdowne Station, the forest that looked so harmless in the golden light of 5:17 p.m. on May 1 now stands silent and dripping, keeping whatever secret it swallowed that night.

Because somewhere between the last flash of a light-up sneaker and the first light of a cruel May morning, Lilly and Jack Sullivan walked out of a Dollarama aisle and into one of the most haunting disappearances Canada has ever seen.

Seventeen hours. From gummy worms to ghosts.