Frederick¶
Frederick is a young German tourist who vanishes from a tour of the Consolidated Gold Mine near Dahlonega, Georgia, leaving his Game Boy behind; one of his shoes is later found at the bottom of a hidden shaft.
| Type | NPC (missing person) |
| Aliases | German boy |
| Status | Missing, presumed dead by the team (as of Appalachia 04) |
| Location | Consolidated Gold Mine |
| First appearance | Appalachia 03 |
Description¶
Frederick is a heavyset boy in overalls with a gray Game Boy, who trails behind his tour group paying no attention to the guide. His mother stands at the front with a disposable wind-up camera and a rigid stare (Appalachia 03).
History¶
The disappearance¶
The cold open of Appalachia 03 shows a bearded tour guide in a Dahlonega mine explaining that the town's mines connect to each other and to natural caves, and that sealed shafts are deadly ("we've lost a couple people"). Frederick hears giggling down a roped-off passage and the camera zooms into black. The guide hears clanging, finds the rope poles tipped over and picks up the Game Boy, still bleeping on the floor (Appalachia 03).
The search¶
At the sheriff's station the team learns that the boy went missing on the mine tour about an hour and a half earlier. Because Kurt has spelunking experience, the sheriff enlists the team. In the mine Kurt calls "Wo bist du, Frederick? Komm her, Frederick!" Deeper in, the team is attacked in the dark by a pale, furry, very fast creature, which Kurt shoots before it flees. They follow its blood trail to a vertical shaft with coiled cables from an old elevator. At the bottom lies a single small, German-looking tennis shoe, which they take. A cave-in behind them seals the way they came (Appalachia 03).
When the team emerges, Huell bluntly says the boy is probably dead and hands over the shoe, and a German woman from the tour group bursts into tears. Kurt suggests that if someone took the boy, they carried him to the surface by a route the team could not follow (Appalachia 03).
The mother¶
In Appalachia 04, Frederick's puffy-faced mother speaks only German and is interviewed on an old speakerphone through an FBI translator in the sheriff's station break room. She says that they were in the "American gold tunnels" while her son played his video game, that she heard a noise and clattering but no scream, and that when she turned the corner he was gone and the game was left behind. She asks why the search of the cave has stopped. Kurt answers that the shoe led toward an exit that is partly buried by a cave-in, and that the area showed signs of recent activity, even vehicles (Appalachia 04).
Sheriff Burke complains to the team that he now has five missing people in two days (the cases include Frederick, Gene Cartwright and Aaron Richters) (Appalachia 04).
Unresolved¶
Frederick's fate is never stated. In Appalachia 09, the party tells the handler Clive that there were two missing kids, a truck driver and a Spud Hut worker, in the mining operation's tunnels, but the episodes never say whether the boys were taken by the ape-men or by the operation itself.