They were supposed to be picking blueberries.

Eight-year-old Jack Sullivan, in his bright red rain jacket and muddy boots, and his six-year-old sister Lily, Lily, with the pink ribbon in her blonde curls, waved goodbye to their mother from the back porch of the family cabin in Kejimkujik National Park just after lunch on December 5, 2024. “Stay on the trail, stay together, be back before the rain,” Jennifer Sullivan called out. Jack turned and grinned. “We will, Mom!” Those were the last words anyone ever heard him speak.

Six months later, on the exact anniversary of the day they disappeared, the forest is still silent. Not one credible sighting. Not one piece of clothing. Not one body. Just two tiny sets of footprints that march forty metres into the moss and then, impossibly, stop, as though the children stepped off the edge of the world.

What has unfolded since is no longer a simple missing-children case. It is a slow-motion horror story that has left seasoned search-and-rescue veterans shaken, hardened RCMP officers refusing to speak on the record, and an entire province sleeping with the lights on.

From the very first night, something felt wrong. The Sullivan children were not inexperienced wanderers. Their father, a park warden, had taught them bushcraft since they could walk. They knew the whistle code for danger. They knew never to leave the marked trail. Yet when darkness fell and the rain came down in sheets, the only trace the searchers found was Lily’s tiny pink backpack lying neatly on the path, zipper open, blueberries scattered around it like spilled blood-red pearls.

The footprints ended thirty-eight metres beyond the backpack. Soft ground, perfect impressions of two small boots side by side, and then nothing. No scuff marks. No turnaround. No sign they doubled back. Veteran tracker Michel LeBlanc, who has found lost hikers in these woods for thirty-two years, stared at the dead-end trail for a long time before muttering, “I’ve seen bear drags, I’ve seen bear carries, I’ve seen kids fall in rivers. I’ve never seen footprints just quit.”

Within forty-eight hours the dogs began acting strangely. Multiple cadaver and trailing units hit hard on the children’s scent, followed it exactly to the same spot where the prints vanished, and then simply sat down and howled. One German shepherd, a dog that once tracked a missing toddler for fourteen kilometres through a blizzard, refused to take another step forward. Its handler, visibly shaken, told colleagues off-mic: “He’s telling me they’re gone. Not dead-gone. Just… gone.”

Then came the drone footage that the RCMP has never released to the public. On the third night of the search, a thermal-equipped Parks Canada drone flying a grid pattern captured a heat bloom the exact size and shape of two small children huddled together, four kilometres deeper into the wilderness than any child could have walked in that time. The operator zoomed in, heart pounding. The figures were motionless. The drone held position for fifty-seven seconds. When the image refreshed, the heat signatures had vanished. Ground teams arrived nineteen minutes later with floodlights and rifles. They found crushed grass, still warm, but no footprints leading in or out.

Five weeks into the search, a volunteer stumbled upon something that turned parents’ nightmares into waking terror. High in an old-growth hemlock, nine feet off the ground on a trunk with no low branches, Lily’s pink hair ribbon fluttered gently in the breeze. It was clean, freshly tied in a perfect bow, as though someone had placed it there the day before. Forensic tests found no DNA, no soil, no pollen, nothing to indicate it had ever touched the forest floor.

Local Mi’kmaq elders were not surprised. They had warned search coordinators from the beginning to stay away from the area past the crooked birch. “That place has taken children before,” one elder told DailyMail.com on condition of anonymity. “Long ago, children went in for berries and never came out. We mark the tree so people know where the line is.” Searchers laughed, until the morning they discovered the ancient crooked birch snapped clean in half at the exact spot where Jack and Lily’s footprints end. The break was fresh, the wood pale and dripping sap. No storm damage. No lightning strike. Just a tree twisted off like a toothpick.

Perhaps the most disturbing evidence never made it to press conferences at all. Every single body-cam, GoPro, and dash-cam recording from the search teams contains the same three-second corruption at the precise GPS coordinates where the trail dies. Technicians describe it as a burst of digital static followed by a child’s voice, soft, genderless, unmistakably close to the microphone, whispering “We’re still here” before the file becomes unreadable. The glitch occurs on every device, every, device, even brand-new memory cards sealed in factory packaging. The RCMP’s digital forensics unit in Ottawa has no explanation.

Jennifer and Mark Sullivan have aged a decade in six months. Jennifer still walks the same trail every single day at the exact time her children disappeared, calling their names until her voice gives out. She posts the same message on Facebook every night at 9:17 p.m., the minute the children were last seen alive:

“They are my heart walking around outside my body. The forest took them. And the forest won’t speak.”

Official search efforts were quietly “scaled back” in April. Translation: the file has moved from active rescue to long-term recovery. Translation the parents refuse to accept: they are looking for bodies now.

But the woods around Kejimkujik are vast, ancient, and famously unforgiving. Rivers disappear underground. Sinkholes open without warning. Fog can roll in so thick you can’t see your own hand. And something about this case has convinced even the most skeptical investigators that the explanation is not natural.

Last week, a hiker deep in the backcountry reported hearing children laughing, clear, bell-like laughter, carried on the wind at dusk. When he followed the sound, it stopped. He found only a single child-sized boot print in the mud, pointing deeper into the trees, and then nothing.

Tonight, under a cold June moon, the search beacons have been turned off. The command post trailer sits empty. The amber alerts have expired.

Yet volunteers still come. Strangers still pin fresh ribbons to the same shade of pink as Lily’s, to the trees along the trail. And every evening at sunset, you can find Jennifer Sullivan standing at the place where her children’s footprints end, staring into the green darkness, whispering the same plea she has whispered for one hundred and eighty-two nights in a row:

“Jack. Lily. Mommy’s here. Come home.”

The forest does not answer.

And in the silence, Nova Scotia waits for a miracle it no longer believes in.