A Halloween Mystery: The Disappearance of Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer

Halloween is a day of ghosts, witches, goblin cats…and occasionally, as the case below will demonstrate, an eerie real-life mystery.

16-year old Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer, who was a year younger, were high school students in Oscoda, Michigan.   The public learned relatively little about the girls, but they appeared to be normal, unremarkable middle-class teenagers.  Pamela was engaged to be married, but I presume the wedding was intended to be in the distant future.  There were rumors that the girls liked to party and did a bit of experimenting with drugs and alcohol, but if so, that does not seem to have had any major negative impact on their lives.

Pamela Hobley

On October 31, 1969, some anonymous idiot decided to celebrate the holiday by phoning a bomb threat to the girls’ high school.  It was believed to be a mere hoax, but Pamela and Patricia signed out of school early.  They were seen walking away from the building at around 2 p.m.  The fact that they left together was considered odd.  The girls knew each other, but were not considered friends.  Neither of them had their purses or any other belongings with them.  

Both the girls had plans to attend a homecoming game that evening, followed by a Halloween party, so when Pamela’s mother, Lois, and younger siblings returned home from trick-or-treating, they were not surprised that she was not at home.  They only started to worry when Pamela’s boyfriend phoned, asking why she was not at the party.  Lois began phoning the families of other students, but none of them had seen Pamela.  When she reached the Spencer home, and learned that Patricia was missing as well, Lois contacted police.

Patricia Spencer

This was one of those missing-persons cases where investigators had almost nothing to work with.  At first, police assumed the girls had simply run away, but if such was the case, why did neither of them take even the basics like money or ID?  Also, both the girls seemed happy enough with their lives, with no discernible reason to disappear.  Police believed that after leaving the high school, Pamela and Patricia hitched a ride to Oscoda’s downtown area, but after that, it was as if they simply walked into oblivion.  We have no reliable clues for what subsequently became of either girl.

There is one odd footnote to this disturbingly vague case:  Shortly before the girls disappeared, an old boyfriend of Patricia’s named Francis Tebo got into some sort of trouble with the law, which caused him to be sent to Whitmore Lake Boys’ Training School.  In November 1969, he underwent an appendectomy in a Detroit hospital.  Soon after the operation, Francis ran away from the hospital and vanished.  At first, there was speculation that Francis’ disappearance was somehow linked to the Hobley/Spencer mystery, but it appears that the boy was subsequently traced, and police were able to satisfy themselves that he knew nothing about the two girls.  

Police learned that in 1968, one of the girls had, without her knowledge, been given a drugged drink by an airman at nearby Wurtsmith Air Force Base, after which she was found “in the woods having hallucinations.”  (The airman was subsequently convicted of the crime.)  However, no one could find any connection between this incident and the girls’ disappearance.

Despite the long passage of time, police are still hoping to solve the case.  Over the years, they have pursued various leads, but without any success.  The girls’ remaining family members are also actively searching for answers, but at least some of their relatives are convinced Pamela and Patricia were murdered soon after they vanished.  Pamela’s sister Mary Buehrle, who was eight when her sibling vanished, told a reporter in 2023 that "We watched my mom on her deathbed and she saw Pam.”