I assumed it was a glitch. But the phrase stuck. Nickey Huntsman. It sounded like a stage name, or a child’s misspelled diary entry. “Nickey” with an ‘ey’—not Nikki, not Nicki. “Huntsman”—like the spider, or the fairy-tale woodsman.
If you knew Nickey Huntsman—if you know what comes after “in-”—you can reach me at the email below. The search is still open.
Then, on a whim, I searched the exact string—dashes and all—in an old FTP index from 1999. One match. A file named nh_list.txt inside a folder called /incoming/unsorted/ . The file was corrupt, but the directory timestamp read:
I have not found Nickey Huntsman. But I have found her absence, and it has a shape. It looks like a purple jacket. It sounds like a tape hiss before a voicemail. It feels like 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, clicking a dead link, and realizing someone, twenty-five years ago, was searching for her too—and never stopped. Searching for- Nickey Huntsman in-
Ed dug up an old backup tape. Among the corrupted logs was one intact session from August 14, 1998. DeepSix, typing in bursts: > Searching for- Nickey Huntsman in- > No one else remembers her > She would be 14 now > In- the place where the highway bends > In- the last voicemail before the beep I felt the floor drop.
Closed. Not solved.
I spent the next six months digging through microfiche of small-town newspapers from the Pacific Northwest. I searched for “Jane Doe,” “unidentified child,” “runaway.” Nothing matched a “Nickey.” I assumed it was a glitch
Who was uploading a list about Nickey Huntsman in the middle of the night? And what was the “in-”? A place? A state of being? “In trouble”? “In hiding”? “In pieces”?
I started calling her N.H. in my notes. A phantom.
That’s when I knew I’d found something. Or rather, that something had found me. It sounded like a stage name, or a
I Googled it. Zero results. Not even a misspelling correction.
My break came from an unlikely source: a retired systems administrator named Ed, who had run a small BBS in Oregon in the late ‘80s. I’d posted the query on a vintage computing forum. Ed messaged me: