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Goodbye, New Mexico possessed many urban legends. Too many, if me and the other paranormal researchers had anything to say. Something about the Route 66 ghost town drew the supernatural and strange phenomena to it in the same way it did for Area 51, Stonehenge and the Bermuda Triangle. One could spend the rest of their lives exploring the town's mysteries. So many paranormal events and traces of dark secrets could be found across the town's near-century of existence, but nobody really made a complete dossier compiling them all together. That's where we came in: the Paranormal Hunters Society. Very few Goodbye mysteries raised as many questions marks as this one did. Unfortunately, any answers found did little to explain what did happen, and this story would be overshadowed by some of the more infamous paranormal phenomena that happened in the town. Picture this: it's the summer of 1960. A well-knit, rambunctious group of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds decided to celebrate their high school graduation by taking their parents' car-a 1957 Fjord Skyline with a retractable roof and orange-and-white paint-out for a drive. The teens' names were Donovan Ruiz (coyote), his longtime girlfriend and third cousin Erica Harris (she-coyote), Donovan's best friend Mitchell Fleming (gray fox), their friend and next-door neighbor Franklin Piercer (timber wolf), his girlfriend Jaqueline Campbell (chihuahua), and another former classmate named Alexander Sawyer (raccoon). Everyone grew up together in their supposedly dinky small town. All six teens told their parents that they all wanted to visit a drive-in theater several towns over and would be back before dawn. The parents were alright with it. Different times back then and all of that. Why not let them all have a bit of fun before starting college in the fall? It was all fun and games, especially for the parents who felt they were responsible young adults, but things got serious when the group of teenagers didn't return home. The Fjord car couldn't be found either, not at the drive-in theater they supposedly went to, nor with friends and family in neighboring towns. One day passed. Two days passed. Three days passed. Erica, Donovan, and Mitchell would be discovered wandering in a patch of desert two miles south of the town, covered in dirt, grime, blood, and mild burn marks. Alexander would be discovered deceased inside the parked Fjord car, having died from heroin overdose. Jaqueline and Franklin were never found, and even after the three survivors left their quasi-catatonic states and the validity of their tale questioned extensively, the bodies of the two missing teens remained undiscovered. They would be declared dead two months later. Little by little, after cycling in and out of intensive hospital care, the three surviving friends would separately tell their parents what had happened, to them, to their friends, and what led to them being found in such a harrowing state. Truth be told, the teens actually did go to the drive-in theater but left halfway through the film. They found it boring and lame. Instead, Franklin had obtained a pouch of marijuana and his friends wanted to smoke it before returning back to Goodbye. They searched for a place to do so and eventually settled on an area between the state road and a rising mountainside. All the teens felt that the shrubbery would hide them from passersby and police cars. The teens did what teens do. They got into arguments tied about drama, relationships, the future, and Donovan had gotten so mad that he left in a huff. However, that was when he returned to the group to tell them he'd discovered something. A large tunnel embedded into the mountainous rock, one that looked neither natural nor small. It went deep, deep into the Earth. Curiosity got the better of all but one of the teens, who choose to stay with the parked Fjord Skyline, desiring to get high on the dosages of heroin rather than explore a mysterious tunnel nobody had ever heard of before. That was the last time they'd see Alex Sawyer alive, and the last time he would see his friends again. The teens went down into the tunnel, wielding two flashlights. In the reports, Mitchell and Donovan described the roof as being circular, inclined by angled to the point that nobody would need to worry about slipping and falling, with Erica commenting that there was a strange smell the deeper they went. It smelled like burning chemicals. Jaqueline begged to go back repeatedly, with Franklin eventually agreeing with his girlfriend half an hour into their descent. They started to turn back when everyone suddenly heard a terrifying noise: screaming. They described finding a steep opening in the tunnel, with steel bars grated between them and what appeared to be an underground city, with some buildings engulfed in fire. Peering closer gave them a better, more horrifying view. They talked about seeing different mammals either praying or dying on the streets, some with large boils and others vomiting on sidewalks. All of the buildings looked artificial and the sky fake, until it suddenly started to bleed magma everywhere. One of the poor wrenches noticed the group that's still frozen behind the metal bars and raced toward them, begging for help. Stinky pus dribbled from each of his words though, and his muzzle was swollen to the point that nobody could tell if they were a canine or a feline anymore. Whatever his species was, poor Jacqueline had not been fast enough to step away from the bars before the misshapen leper grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and pulled her violently towards him. Jacqueline cried in horror, begging her friends to get her away from him. They hesitated for a few seconds too late. Whatever hysterical words he screamed, the terrified Chihuahua was drowned out by their screams as the chamber ceiling's molten magma fell on top of them and bathed the tunnel in a hellish orange glow. They tried to grab her, but it was no use. And the remaining teens were forced to flee as the molten magma suddenly turned the walls and ground beneath their feet incredibly hot to the point that it started to melt their shoes. Even their tears started to turn vaporous as everyone ran deeper back into the tunnel, and the words of the screaming mammals still ringing in their ears. They helplessly roamed for hours and hours. They charged and helplessly wandered through the darkness in a desperate attempt to leave the tunnel as quickly as possible, only to find themselves lost in tunnels that they did not notice before, and which suddenly turned a straight line into a confusing labyrinth with intersections nobody recognized. Everyone got lost at some point and would find their way back into a large group, with Franklin unfortunately meandering down a tunnel he insisted on being the way back up. The remaining trio had no idea what happened to him. For all they knew, Hell had claimed their friend for itself, and he was down there with Jacqueline, suffering alongside the rest of the other damned. Donovan, Erica, and Mitchell finally discovered an opening that led to an area of desert several miles south of Route 66 and a dozen miles west of their hometown. By the grace of God, the emerged from the ordeal alive. Of course, their claims and accounts were met with intense skepticism, especially given that they admitted to partaking in illegal narcotics. Authorities suspected foul play. However, they did agree to survey the areas in which they entered the tunnels and exited them. Surprise, surprise, they discovered the abandoned vehicle and Alexander's corpse inside it, but no signs of any tunnels or openings in the Earth. The three surviving teens would inevitably not face any charges due to lack of evidence. This did not negate their trauma though, with Erica spending the rest of her life in a mental asylum. Meanwhile, Donovan became obsessed with figuring out what exactly happened inside those tunnels, but the coyote eventually had a nervous breakdown and abandoned his work to become a born-again Christian before dying in 1999. As for Mitchell, he took over with his former best friend's research after spending most of his twenties and thirties addicted to various drugs, becoming clean and setting up an early Internet website dedicated to figuring out the mysteries behind Goodbye, New Mexico. Much of it left unanswered questions about his harrowing experience. Over the years, however, renewed interest in their extraordinary story led to niche communities of paranormal investigators reexamining the incident, especially thanks to the paranormal website that Mitchell Fleming owned. Sadly, the website eventually disappeared off of early AOL, and the reclusive gray fox no longer excepted any interviews. Nobody even knew how to contact him in the modern day or if he was even still alive. I suspected that he went underground. Dean suspected that he had passed away, and nobody in his family bothered to inform the greater paranormal research community. Whatever the case, that eventually led to a dead end for our own investigation at the Paranormal Hunters Society. Very much to our frustration. What we gathered for the Goodbye Files dossier mostly amounted to archived evidence and testimonies already taken. Some of them were decades old in fact. Much of it came from surviving records and anecdotes from the website that no longer existed but could be accessed from blogs that documented such phenomena. Too many tourists and amateur paranormal investigators also visited the sites of their supposed disappearance and reappearance, looking for a miraculous clue that they were each convinced the police report overlooked, all to no avail. It seemed nobody had anything else to add to the story that wasn't already told, including us. Well, except for one very interesting tidbit. Dean once again proved to be an astute observer and remarked on something that could be found in the official police report. Investigators claimed that all they could find from the two areas where the tunnel existed were a wall of rock and footprints, matching the shoes of Erica, Mitchell, and Donovan. The policeman who filed the report failed to question how exactly one set of three footprints could suddenly stop in one area and suddenly appear in another area, as if the teens had teleported from their campsite to the area of desert south of their hometown. Almost like they had gone somewhere.