I looked, and found only one story worth adding to...
Weird
David Paulides, whose Youtube show takes Bigfoot and UFO stories seriously, got hold of a local news item from 1954:
His narration of the story made me laugh several times. Here's the Kingsport Times-News' more levelheaded report:
How easy is it, even for a geriatric patient, to camp out on the Clinch Mountain for a week? Well, the biggest deterrent to most people's doing it is the little woodland creatures--the insects, spiders, and snakes that live in the woods in September. Some of these cold-blooded animals are attracted to warmth and will crawl in under whatever a human is wearing, and some of the bigger and more unpleasant ones are just chasing the little harmless ones for food. Danger of exposure? Very little. Starvation or dehydration? None; if a person knows what to eat, in September the woods offer a feast; the main hazard would be Vitamin C shock.
Would a patient have wanted to get away from friends, family, the doctor whose prescriptions--in 1954--might easily have been toxic, and spend a week camping on the mountain? It's not impossible. We are not talking about the deep woods where a person could get lost. On the Clinch Mountain it is possible to get "turned around" and come down on the wrong side of a ridge, but you're never more than a few hours' walk from a farmhouse, if not a small town. The biggest danger, unless you managed to get bitten by a rattlesnake, would be a leg injury. The Clinch Mountain woods are the kind I'd feel safe going into with children, or alone--though most of them are privately owned, and I'd want to clear it with the owner. If injured, all you'd really have to remember is to crawl down until you came to a house, and shout.
What probably complicated Molly White's adventure was that, although she did want to visit friends and confide something before she died, when she came to their house nobody was living in it. The house was broken into but not raided or damaged. During a week in Scott County in September there would undoubtedly have been rain, probably a thunderstorm; Miss White might have broken into her friends' house to stay warm and dry.
Miss White might or might not have been confused. People wouldn't have discussed that with reporters while she and her siblings were alive. In 1954 most people in Scott County belonged to Protestant churches that said little about solitary meditation in nature, but some people knew the benefits thereof from experience.
If she was not badly confused and was in the sort of physical condition many 75-year-olds in Scott County are in, and had gone into the woods with clear intentions of having a last conversation with a friend and then meditating, praying, having a healing vision or dying in peace, there is a very simple solution to the question of how "the most hunted person in the annals of Scott County" evaded the search party.
When our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters was not making a long retreat, but just didn't want to deal with some visitors, she vanished from their world in less than five minutes--by climbing a tree. GBP was not a Missing Person; she just didn't want to talk to the sort of pushy pest of a "friend" who keeps pounding on the front door, and windows, and then snoops around the back as if they want to force you to say out loud "I may be at home but I'm not 'at home to you'." She was doing some maintenance work on a rental property where it was relatively easy to scramble up onto a low branch and just keep climbing. So that was what she did.
People searching the ground almost never think to look up overhead. Most missing persons want to go missing. An easy way to stay missing is to perch in a tree and watch a search party pass by. Once a relatively small person is up in the branches, it's dead easy to climb high enough to elude bigger pursuers; they know the tree won't bear their weight as high up as it'll bear yours. But usually they don't look.
Would Miss White have gone into the woods without shoes? Not likely. Many a child in Scott County looked forward to going barefoot all summer, toughening the soles of their feet to a point where they could have walked in the woods without shoes, but adults seldom did that. If Miss White had been walking barefoot in the woods before the search party passed where she'd been, they would have been likely to notice blood. Likely she left her muddy shoes outside when breaking into the house, or just kicked them off in her sleep, and animals attracted to the taste of sweat-salty leather dragged the shoes away.
Why the spaniel didn't yap at the search party is the only part of the story that sounds very mysterious to me. There are explanations that don't involve portals to alternate dimensions, but the only one that makes sense to me is that some of the volunteer searchers did not recognize the dog as a clue and told it to shut up and go home.
So what I find easiest to picture happening is this: Little old lady goes to friend's house. Friend and her family have moved across town. There weren't telephones back then, and there's not time for the gossip system to work--the edge of a hurricane is coming on. Little old lady breaks into friend's house, leaving her muddy shoes outside, and shelters there. During the night a dog or some other animal that's attracted to salty leather drags her shoes into the undergrowth. Then she sees police approaching, realizes she's committed a crime, and remembers the easy way to disappear. She roosts in one of those big green shade trees until the searchers are gone. Then she comes down, can't find her shoes, and limps up into the woods. She is old. She has probably had a completely undiagnosed cardiovascular disease for years, while dear old Dr. Grigsby has been telling her not to worry and prescribing mild painkillers for her occasional arthritis. She covers some steep ground, fast. Nature takes its course. The dog, having docilely shut up and gone home a few days earlier, comes back into the woods, smells the faint trail of bare feet, and finds his human
Of course, there are other possibilities. Apart from the alien abduction Paulides' audience probably want to imagine, there's always the one where a vindictive former student steals her shoes, ties her to a kitchen chair, forces her to write ten thousand penalty lines, and then chases her off into the woods...
And there's always the one that appeals to writers of speculative fiction: She stepped through a portal into a different world and stayed because things on that side of fourth-dimensional space were just so interesting. Maybe she was gone for only a week in our time, but spent twenty years on the other side of the portal, and someone kindly took her home for burial when she died of old age.
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