Forbidden Files - The Disappearance of Sorensen Transportation

Why are nearly 40 tractor trailers abandoned somewhere in the woods of New England, in a spot that before Google Earth they were apt never to be found? That question was asked by a whole lot of people last year after a video of these trailers was posted on YouTube, and the debate ranged anywhere from this being a grand robbery, an insurance scam, or a few ideas that were even more sinister.

Although it's hard to tell what you're looking at by the picture above, here is a zoom in of the northern group of trailers.

First let me give you the background. This adventure began last summer when I received a message from my friend Barry with a link to a YouTube video titled Mystery of the 39 Abandoned Trailers, about a guy who found these trailers while looking on Google Earth for new places to ride his dirt bike. The link my friend sent me included one simple sentence - We need to find this!

The video was careful to not disclose the trailers location - and in fact three weeks after it was posted it disappeared from the user's channel altogether - but there were just enough clues to start our investigation. All the trailers had the name Sorensen Transportation on them, a shipping company from Bethany CT that either went belly up or merged with a larger firm in the 1990's. Whichever happened, it took place prior to the Internet being the informational catch-all that it is today, and after three days of chasing every lead to a dead end I was beginning to lose faith in ever finding them. That's when Barry, who turned out to be a much better detective than I was in this case, sent me an excited message - I found them!

No sooner did his coordinates hit my inbox than I was clicking them and seeing the satellite image for myself, and we immediately made plans for that weekend to hike to the spot, winter weather be damned. These weren't the kind of woods that came with parking lots and hiking trails and benches dedicated to loved ones though, they're the kind where hundreds of acres are densely pack with trees and bushes in a remote area of a remote town. So I located a cemetery that bordered the woods, and thinking it would make a convenient enough place to park the car while we made the 1-1/2 mile hike in, our plan was set.

That Sunday morning we arrived and our first obstacle was that the cemetery wasn't nearly as handy as Google Earth made it seem, with houses and a cliff-like hill bordering the access point, so off we went looking for another spot. We finally parked down an old logging road, waited while a pickup crept by, then confident they weren't stopping to check out what a Toyota Yaris was doing running around the woods, we set out.

The next hour consisted of avoiding private residences, trudging through snow and slush, and climbing the same long and steep hill we'd tried to avoid at the cemetery, and which surrounded this location like a fortress. Days later I plugged the GPS coordinates into an elevation map and learned our destination was 1,014 ft above sea level, a brutal and unexpected climb that at the time had me wondering why we weren't at home watching football with a beer like other grown men. And to make things extra fun this remote area had no cell phone service, so for navigation we were relying on my new Garmin GPS which I hadn't quite gotten the hang of yet. My biggest accomplishment with it thus far was pinpointing the neighbors shed that borders our backyard.

So I was more than a little surprised when vehicles started appearing through the trees.

And soon after we began seeing trailers.

One of the things mentioned in the YouTube video was that the trailers were full of various merchandise like appliances, mattresses, and other valuables. Part of that was true, as most of these trailers were packed full, but everything we came across was used, not the newly packaged merchandise we'd assumed the trailers were hiding. We found ourselves looking at trailer after trailer of some pretty nasty junk. I'd take my chances on a jailhouse cot before snuggling up on one of these mattresses for the night.

And in trailers that were full on the inside, more goodies were piled underneath.

After spending some time wandering among this group, we followed the overgrown remains of a dirt road - a road once wide enough to drive these trailers down - in search of the second cluster.

This group had once been neatly parked but have sat so long they've begun toppling onto each other.

We didn't open any of the trailers ourselves, but enough had been left open to see that once again we were dealing with stuff that would look more at home in a dumpster.

Including the trailer full of appliances that had been talked about in the video. I'm guessing this fridge last saw action around the same time milk was being delivered to your front steps.


Another thing debated on were the rigs used to drive these trailers out here. More than one person claimed these cabovers (a name I had to google) would certainly have had value to them, especially if they'd been running well enough to haul all this trailers out here to begin with.

There were many other vehicles, including these dumptrucks which on the outside at least seemed in pretty descent shape. Of course, I sit behind a desk all day and have no dirt under my fingernails, so probably I'm not the best judge of heavy equipment.

Here was one of my favorites, this old beast that I posed next to like some bad Sears catalog model.

Which had a hood ornament that, as chick repellent, would've rivaled the hand grenade shell I once mounted to my old Chevy Chevette.

So what conclusion did we come to on why these trailers are abandoned in the middle of nowhere? By dirt road, these woods are accessed only by a house a quarter-mile to the north. Whether they own the property or not we do not know, but we didn't encounter a single Private or No Trespassing sign the entire day. I couldn't find any connection to the owners of the property and Sorensen Transportation though, so here are my theories:

a) The company hid them as an insurance scam - Although this was a popular theory online, it just doesn't make sense to me. What would the claim be, that someone stole 40 of your trailers plus all your trash? Unless it happened so long ago that the stuff was all in good shape at the time.

b) The flip side of this, that the trailers are actually stolen and hidden out here - Another one that seems plausible at first but has some holes. Why steal all these trailers just to let them rot?

c) This is an illegal junkyard - The amount of other vehicles out here makes me consider this, but not all the vehicles seem like they were junk. Plus this wouldn't explain where the contents came from, unless the final job of Sorensen before going out of business was to dispose of it all, and this was how they saved money doing it.

d) This is the world's biggest hoarder - In the end, this is the theory I'm leaning toward, mixed in with a dash of the illegal junkyard. Most of what we saw in those trailers smacks of that TV show Hoarders, where an item doesn't have any practical value but has just enough Yeah, but what if I cleaned it up potential that the person refuses to part with it. Additionally, at least one of the trailers had a sticker on it advertising storage trailer sales. Could it be that these are retired shipping trailers that were sold for storage, and owned by the house to the north?

Although a giant hoarder is what I've decided on, one thing keeps me from going all in with this theory. Every hoarder I've seen on TV is surrounded with their clutter. Usually they live in a house that has barely enough pathway to walk room to room, which allows them to look at and touch their belongings whenever they want. But in this case you'd have to hike a quarter-mile into the woods if you wanted to roll around in your junk. Then again, most of this is stuff you can't exactly bring into the living room with you, so what else are you supposed to do with it?

So the king of all hoarders? Yeah, maybe.

But ... 39 overflowing trailers is an ungodly amount of anything, and it still makes me wonder if somebody isn't hiding something out there in all this mess.