A viral video supposedly recounting the harrowing story of a little girl named "Alice," who was missing for seven months before authorities found her in an odd-looking log pile, has been circulating on social media since June 2021. One version posted to the Unknown Facts Facebook page racked up more than 2 million views:
This video does not recount a true story. This is a work of fiction that is illustrated with a series of unrelated photos.
The story appears to have originated on the website Creepy-World.com in an article that was published in April 2021. A few months later, a video with the same title — "Girl Vanishes, 7 Months Later Hiker Tells Cops To Look Closer At Log Pile" — was shared to the Creepy World YouTube page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXbzIFdMhQ
One indication that this video is a work of fiction is that it is unnecessarily light on detail. For example, the law enforcement agency in this story is simply identified as "local police." The story doesn't provide any specifics about where or when this happened, nor does it link to any news reports about this girl's alleged disappearance.
The big giveaway that this video is a work of fiction, however, is that the included photos come from a variety of unrelated sources, none of which have anything to do with a girl who was found in a log pile.
The photograph of this girl's missing bike, for example, comes from an April 2021 news story about a damaged bicycle that was found on the side of the road in Lagrange, Indiana; and the photo of "Riverside," the fictional town where this fabricated story is centered, actually shows a picture of Perrysburg, Ohio. The picture of "searching hikers" comes from a 2017 story about a missing person in the Great Smoky Mountains. The image of a reporter speaking about a "missing 11-year-old girl" is also real, but it's completely unrelated to the above-displayed video. That comes from a 2017 news segment about 11-year-old Jenna Irmler, who went missing after she reportedly ran away from home. Irmler later returned home, and she was not found in a log pile.
The big reveal in this fictional story is that the girl was found inside of a small cabin that had been disguised as a log pile. The pictures in this article feature two different "log pile" cabins, but neither of them were the location where a missing girl was found.
The first set of photographs actually show a wood chapel in Germany that was designed by John Pawson, an architect. Pawson described this building on the architecture website Archdaily.com in 2019:
When John Pawson was commissioned by the Siegfried and Elfriede Denzel Foundation to design a wayside chapel for a site in southwestern Germany, he became part of a longstanding tradition of erecting chapels as spiritual and architectural features in the landscape. The purpose of the Sieben Kapellen or Seven Chapels project is to provide cyclists with a series of places in which to take shelter, but also to pause and reflect. A common brief for all of the seven chapels stipulated a timber construction, with a cross in the vicinity and provision of seating.
During his first visit to the site, Pawson quickly formed the intention that people should encounter the chapel as a found object at the transitional point between the forest and open ground, rather than as a conventional work of architecture. The structure is thus framed as the simplest of gestures. From certain perspectives its mass appears as a pile of logs stacked up to dry; from others, the considered placement of the elements on a concrete plinth creates a more formal impression of a piece of sculpture.
Here's a video that features a few pictures (many of which are included in the fictional story) of this "log pile" chapel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ZDF8-Am5o
The other set shows a log cabin designed by architect Piet Hein Eek for Dutch musician Hans Liberg. That unique house, which is located in the Netherlands, can be glimpsed in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLg6h1rlkuI
In short, this viral video cobbles together a series of unrelated images that were taken in a wide variety of locations over the span of multiple years in order to create a fictional narrative about a missing girl who was found in a log pile.
Sources:
creepyworld. “## Girl Vanishes, 7 Months Later Hiker Tells Cops To Look Closer At Log Pile.” CreepyWorld, https://www.creepy-world.com/2021/04/girl-vanishes-7-months-later-hiker.html. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.
“Missing 11YO Girl from Brandon Found Alive.” WFTS, 15 Feb. 2017, https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/11-year-old-girl-with-aspergers-syndrome-reported-missing-in-hillsborough-county.
“Police Searching for Owner of Mangled Bike Found on Side of the Road.” ABC57, https://www.abc57.com/news/damaged-bicycle-found-on-monday-with-no-bicyclist. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.
“It Looks Like A Pile Of Logs, But Inside It’s A Musician’s Secret Lair.” Tiny House for Us, 9 July 2015, https://tinyhousefor.us/alternative-dwellings/it-looks-like-a-pile-of-logs-but-inside-its-a-musicians-secret-lair/.
“Wooden Chapel / John Pawson.” ArchDaily, 14 Mar. 2019, https://www.archdaily.com/913153/wooden-chapel-john-pawson.