‘Y’all Wanna See Something Scary?’: Man Finds Abandoned School Bus in North Carolina Woods, Sparks Chowchilla Theories
"That's a school bus."
A North Carolina man’s boat ride led to an unsettling discovery deep in the woods. According to BroBible, TikToker Chandler Todd filmed the moment. “Y’all wanna see something scary?” Todd asks at the start of the clip, panning his camera across the lake and surrounding woodland. “Middle of the woods, out here in the middle of nowhere,” he says, before turning the camera on a decrepit, abandoned vehicle. “That’s a school bus,” he adds.
The outlet said it reached out to Todd for comment. Commenters quickly connected the discovery to theories about the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping, one of the most infamous mass abductions in US history. On July 15, 1976, three masked men held up a school bus outside Chowchilla, California, at gunpoint, according to CNN.
The perpetrators, Frederick Newhall Woods and brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld, split the 26 children, ages 5 to 14, and their driver, Ed Ray, between two vans and drove them roughly 11 hours to an abandoned rock quarry near Livermore. There, the group was placed inside a buried moving van outfitted with only a few mattresses and little food, water, or ventilation.
What Actually Happened in Chowchilla
The kidnappers intended to ransom the children for $5 million, but the plan unraveled almost immediately. After hiding their captives, the men tried to call in their ransom demand, only to find the local police line jammed with calls from worried families and reporters. They decided to nap and try again later, and by the time they woke up, their captives had already dug their way out.
Ray became a national hero for the escape, and Chowchilla later renamed its largest park in his honor. Survivors have since said the credit wasn’t entirely fair. Fourteen-year-old Michael Marshall did much of the actual digging that freed the group, but Ray, as the only adult present, absorbed most of the media attention at the time, something Marshall reportedly carried resentment over for years afterward. Ray died in 2012 at age 91.
All three kidnappers were convicted in 1977 and initially sentenced to life without parole, though an appeals court later ruled they were eligible for release. Richard Schoenfeld was paroled in 2012, James Schoenfeld in 2015, and Woods, the last of the three still incarcerated, was granted parole in 2022 after 17 previous denials.
The North Carolina bus almost certainly isn’t connected to the case. Beyond the fact that the Chowchilla bus was recovered from a ditch decades ago, California and North Carolina sit on opposite coasts, thousands of miles apart.
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