A 64-year-old grandmother from Marguerite, a village in western Pennsylvania, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Elizabeth Pollard was last seen on Monday evening when she left her home to search for her missing cat, Pepper. Her family reported her disappearance to the police in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The police found Pollard’s car parked near Monday’s Union Restaurant in Marguerite, approximately 40 miles east of Pittsburgh. Inside the car, they found Pollard’s five-year-old granddaughter, who was unharmed. The child had fallen asleep in the car and woke up to find her grandmother missing.
In the vicinity of the parked car, authorities discovered a sinkhole, roughly the size of a manhole. This sinkhole had not been noticed by hunters and restaurant workers who had been in the area just hours before Pollard’s disappearance. This led the rescuers to believe that the sinkhole had formed recently.
A pole camera equipped with a sensitive listening device was lowered into the sinkhole, but it detected nothing. However, a second camera revealed what appeared to be a shoe about 30 feet below the surface. “It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” said Trooper Steve Limani.
The authorities used an excavator to dig in the area, despite freezing overnight temperatures. “We are pretty confident we are in the right place. We’re hoping there is still a void she could be in,” said Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief John Bacha.
Sinkholes are not uncommon in the area due to subsidence from past coal mining activities. A team from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection responded to the scene and concluded that the underground void was likely the result of work in the Marguerite Mine, which was last operated by the H.C. Frick Coke Company in 1952. The Pittsburgh coal seam is about 20 feet below the surface in that area.
The state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will examine the scene after the search is over to determine if the sinkhole was indeed caused by mine subsidence. The fate of Pepper, the missing cat, remains unknown.