He ran from an airport in broad daylight, leaving behind his phone, luggage, and passport. His last words hinted at something far darker than paranoia.
“I Don’t Want to Die Here”
On June 30, 2014, Lars Mittank landed in Varna, Bulgaria for a vacation with friends — a routine summer getaway for the 28-year-old German. What followed was anything but ordinary. Lars was described by his mother and friends as happy, grounded, and responsible. He was a power plant worker from Itzehoe, loved soccer, and had no history of mental illness. But in the span of just a few days, something shifted.
While in Bulgaria, Lars got into a minor altercation at a bar over football team rivalries. He suffered a small ear injury — a ruptured eardrum — and was advised by a doctor not to fly until it healed. His friends returned to Germany, and Lars booked a later flight, staying alone in Varna to recover.
That’s when things got strange.
Lars began acting paranoid. He called his mother whispering that he was being followed and asked her to cancel his credit cards. He texted that he was hiding from “four men” who he said were trying to kill him. At one point, he left a hotel abruptly, telling staff he felt unsafe.
On July 8th, he arrived at the Varna Airport, planning to finally fly home. Security footage shows Lars walking through the terminal calmly. But minutes later, he’s seen sprinting out of the building — abandoning his luggage, wallet, and passport. He runs across the parking lot, climbs over a fence, and disappears into a nearby forest.
He has never been seen again.
The Forest, the Fear, and the Footage
The video of Lars fleeing the airport has become infamous — an unsettling 20-second clip that lives rent-free in the minds of internet sleuths. It’s the kind of footage that makes you feel, instinctively, that something is deeply wrong. Lars looks over his shoulder as he bolts. He’s not jogging. He’s running as if his life depends on it. No one was visibly chasing him.
Some speculate his behavior was the result of a psychotic break — possibly brought on by trauma, stress, or even side effects from the antibiotic he was prescribed (a fluoroquinolone called Ceftriaxone, known to cause rare but severe neuropsychiatric reactions). But his mother, Sandra Mittank, has never believed that her son was simply hallucinating. She insists he was genuinely scared — and that someone or something triggered that fear. In interviews, she recalls his last phone call: “He said he didn’t feel safe. That people were trying to poison or drug him. He told me: ‘I don’t want to die here.’”
Theories, Sightings, and Dead End
Since Lars vanished, sightings have surfaced around Europe. None have been confirmed. A man resembling Lars was seen wandering near a gas station in Germany. A homeless man in Brussels claimed to have no memory of who he was. A truck driver swore he picked up a hitchhiker in Bulgaria matching Lars’ description.
Still, no hard evidence. No trace. No body.
His family has never stopped searching. They launched global campaigns, hired private investigators, even consulted psychics. A Facebook group dedicated to the search has thousands of members, many of whom comb through photos of unidentified people hoping for a match. Lars’ disappearance has also become a case study for internet communities obsessed with “unexplained” phenomena. Reddit threads dissect every frame of the airport footage. YouTube documentaries speculate about everything from organ trafficking rings to government conspiracies.
But the most haunting possibility is the simplest one: that Lars was terrified of something — real or imagined — and ran straight into the woods, disoriented and alone, never to be found.
The Silence That Followed
Most missing person stories come with timelines, suspects, or signs of life. Lars Mittank’s story has none of that. There was no final message. No goodbye. Just a man sprinting into a forest, in broad daylight, with no plan, no supplies, and no one following him — at least that we could see. In the years since, his case has become one of Europe’s most famous unsolved disappearances. Yet there are no suspects, no theories that fully make sense, and no answers.
Only that video. That sprint. That final, desperate phone call to his mother.
“I don’t want to die here.”
