Kathryn Woessner, 68, Was Missing for 3 Days Before Two Strangers Found Her Submerged in a Mud Puddle with Only Her Mouth Above the Surface, Whispering “Help Me.”
The mud held Kathryn Woessner so tightly that rescuers needed about 90 minutes to free her after they reached her. Only her mouth, one kneecap, and part of a hand were still above the surface.
Woessner, 68, of Alexandria, Minnesota, vanished June 3 without her phone or belongings. Her van had gotten stuck roughly 80 miles from home, and she slipped into the puddle while trying to free it. She later told her rescuers it grabbed her instantly. “She said it was like quicksand, and she couldn’t get out,” Adam Sandbeck recalled.
Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin, two longtime friends from the Fargo area, were riding a Polaris side-by-side through trails near Backus on June 6 when they veered onto an unfamiliar path they’d passed for years without taking. Recent storms had left the route bumpy and waterlogged. Then they hit a clearing.
“There’s this van in the middle of nowhere that has no real off-road capabilities to get there, but it somehow did,” Gravalin said. Gravalin, a 22-year deputy U.S. marshal, checked the area before they approached. That’s when they saw her.
“We could see that there was a body in the puddle next to the van, and then that’s when it got real,” Sandbeck said. “When we walked up, we thought she was dead. We thought it was just a body, and then she whispered, ‘Help me,’ and it scared the crap out of me.”
“All you could see was just the round part of her face, like her mouth, her lips,” Sandbeck said. “You couldn’t even see her ears. It was all submerged.”
They pulled her out and called 911. Responders, including paramedics, volunteer firefighters, and sheriff’s deputies, tracked them down through GPS coordinates broadcast by the Polaris Ride Command unit on the side-by-side. “That feature from Polaris made the difference,” Sandbeck said.
Woessner was taken to Essentia Health-St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Brainerd with severe sunburn and dehydration. Doctors expect her to recover fully.
Sandbeck and Gravalin both pointed to the trail itself as the part they can’t shake. “We’ve driven past it for the last eight years and never went down,” Gravalin said. “We ain’t heroes,” Sandbeck added. “I have no doubt the hand of God was there guiding us.”
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