I Fell For The Harlow Sisters, and Now I Have Some Thoughts About Myself

It was 11:40 a.m. on a Tuesday and I had eleven unread emails, four of which required action, when I clicked on a YouTube video about the Harlow Sisters.

The video was called “Two Sisters Vanished In Oregon Forest — 3 Months Later Found Tied To A Tree, Unconscious.” I want to be clear that I did not intend to watch this video. I intended to watch ten seconds of it, register that it was fake, and return to my emails a slightly worse person for having looked. Instead I watched the whole thing, twice, and then told Casey about it; and Casey — an English Springer Spaniel who has never been tied to a tree, though I now realize I’ve never checked — looked at me the way he looks at the vacuum.

I did not question the premise, which was: sisters go camping, sisters vanish, sisters are found — three months later — tied to a tree. I accepted this detail with the same credulity I bring to weather forecasts. I did not ask who tied them. I did not ask why a person capable of abducting two adult women for a season would, upon releasing them, choose a tree, upright, visible from the trail, as an exit strategy. I asked none of the questions a functioning adult asks, because I was not functioning. I was receiving.

A narrator with the calm authority of a man reading a ransom note aloud at a PTA meeting explained that the sisters, Nina and Rebecca, were “experienced hikers,” a phrase I now understand exists solely to make the audience feel that competence is no match for fate, and therefore neither is yours.

After I had finished the video, I sat with it. I did what any self-respecting Class X secular Buddhist with a functioning search engine should have done at minute zero. I typed “Harlow Sisters, Oregon” — and learned the following: no police report exists; no news outlet covers this story; the forest in question is actually in Washington; and the surname Harlow has also been deployed, in a completely unrelated video, to describe three sisters running a “breeding cabin” in the 1894 Ozarks, which is a sentence I did not enjoy typing.

The Harlow sisters, it turns out, are not people. They are a setting. A pair of load-bearing names the internet keeps handing out like extras on a low-budget production of “Grief, But Make It Engagement.”

Here is what bothers me. It isn’t that I wasted four minutes on a Tuesday. It’s that somewhere in me, a part I’d like to believe is reserved for things that matter, briefly grieved for two women who have never existed, while three months from now, real people who do exist will vanish in real forests, and I will not click on their story, because it won’t have a tree in the thumbnail.

Casey, for his part, has recovered. I have not fully. I remain, notionally, an experienced hiker.

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