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Like my dad always says, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you."

As a child of the late 80s/early 90s, I was obsessed with Unsolved Mysteries. What more could you want? The creepy intro music. Robert Stack. His trench coat. The hot line (I always wished I had some inside information to crack a case, but that never happened). And of course the stories. They talked about everything weird and creepy a kid could love. Civil War ghosts. Past lives. UFOs (when I was 22, I was still so conspiracy theory influenced that I wrote my senior history thesis on Roswell (there weren't any aliens, I was so disappointed)).

And then there were the disappearances. How could people vanish without a trace?

When I recently heard about the Megumi Yokata case, I had an Unsolved Mysteries flashback. Of course I wanted to learn more. This is what I found out:

This is Megumi Yokata. In 1977, when she was 13 years old, Megumi disappeared while walking home after school. She truly vanished without a trace, no one had any idea what happened to her.

Twenty years later, a reporter contacted Megumi's parents and told them that their daughter was one of thirteen Japanese kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 80s.

Why would North Korea kidnap random Japanese citizens?

Well firstly, Kim Jong Il is crazy. I probably shouldn't have written that on the internet, because now he's going to find me and get me. I don't have too much experience with North Korea, but I did watch this documentary called A State of Mind-

(I know I bring up documentaries too much, I can't help it, I just watch a lot of them) Anyway, this movie made me even more freaked out about North Korea than I was before.

Why else did North Korea want to kidnap Japanese citizens? To train Korean spies to act Japanese. No joke. In 1987, months before the Olympics in South Korea, two North Korean spies posed as Japanese tourists and bombed a flight headed to Seoul. The spies learned the language from the Japanese captives.

Supposedly a picture of Megumi as an adult in North Korea. The picture might have been doctored.

When the Yokatas went public with their story, most people didn't believe them. The idea that North Korea picked up random Japanese citizens off the street seemed to far-fetched. The public opinion changed in 2002, when North Korea admitted to the kidnappings.

In 2002, North Korea allowed five Japanese citizens to return home. Megumi wasn't one of them.

What happened to the others? North Korea claims that everyone else died. How?

• Two died from heart attacks (ages 24 and 27)
• Two died from traffic accidents (ages 30 and 43)
• Two died from gas poisoning (ages 28 and 31)
• One died from liver cirrhosis (age 49)
• North Korea claims Megumi killed herself in 1994.

Even though the deaths happened in different places and different years, all of the death certificates were from the same hospital. North Korea also claimed that six of the eight graves were washed away in a flood. North Korea returned what they said were Megumi's ashes to her parents, but DNA testing was inconclusive whether the ashes were Megumi's or not.

North Korea, let me give you some advice. If you're really going to try and do a big cover-up, you need to try a little harder. There are way too many holes in your official story.

Megumi's parents (and many others in Japan) believe that Megumi is still alive. The Yokatas continue to fight to get their daughter back:

Will we ever find out what really happened to Megumi?