Every Town - His FINAL Photo Shows Someone Watching – Then He vanished Forever

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Hawaii's Most Haunting Disappearance - Daylenn "Moke" Pua 🗣 Taking care of your health just got easier – start here with Zocdoc: https://zocdoc.com/EVERYTOWN #sponsored 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/X33ioWVfo3o 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves, I think it is murder.

Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. There's a photograph out there of a teenage boy standing high on a mountain in Hawaii.

At first glance, it's gorgeous. There's green ridge lines that roll off into the blue sky. This is the sort of place people would cross an ocean for it just to see for themselves. But people have been staring at this one particular photo for more than 10 years now. and it has nothing to do with the view. It's because something is off to the side. Down in the brush, half swallowed by leaves, there's a shape. You'd miss it if you weren't looking for it.

It's a head. It's what sure looks like a man crouched low in the bushes on a trail that was supposed to be completely empty, just sitting there, watching or maybe waiting. The kid who took that picture, he disappeared that very day, has never been found. The guy in the photo,

well, he's never been identified. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to every town where today. We've got a genuinely unsettling case for you. It's a vanishing with no body and one photograph that's haunted everyone who's ever looked closely at it.

So, let's head on out to the island of Hawahu together. This is Hawaii's most haunting unsolved disappearance, the stairway to heaven. Most missing persons cases turn the person into a poster. You see a name, a date, a height, and wait, and of course a phone number to call in with any tips. It doesn't take but a moment to see it and then forget that there's a whole life attached to it

if that even crosses your mind in the first place. And so before we get into the staircase and the photo and everything that went wrong, well, you should know who we're actually talking about. Dalin Pua, though pretty much everyone who knew him just called him Moke, was 18 years old, and by every account a good kid. He was from South Kona, down on the Big Island of Hawaii, a senior at a Hawaiian immersion school. In graduation, it was right around the corner. And he already knew what he wanted to do next, culinary school.

And the kid wanted to be a pastry chef. His family later said that he loved to bake, and if you go back and look at the GoFundMe, they put to together, well that detail just sits there reminding you how innocent you can be at that age. An 18-year-old whose big dream was making desserts for people just to put a smile on their face. Now, Moak was outdoorsy. He liked to swim and hike, and he was into photography, which is part of why we even have the pieces of this story that we do. His social media was filled with photos of beach days, friends, all the normal happy things. and Moak wasn't some clueless tourist either who never set foot on a trail. It's worth knowing that his own dad described him as an experienced hiker.

So, this was not a boy who didn't know how to handle himself in the mountains. That weekend, Moak was over in Oahu, staying with his grandmother, Martha Bear. And somewhere in there, a thought got into his head. There's a hike on Oahu, the most famous, most forbidden, most flat-out illegal hike. on the whole island, and Moak decided he was going to do it. If you've never heard of the haiku stairs, picture this. Almost 4,000 metal steps, 3,922 of them, to be exact, bolted straight up the spine of the Kalahu mountain range in Oahu.

They climb more than 3,000 feet into the sky, up ridge lines so narrow and steep that in places, it can feel less like climbing a staircase and more like climbing a ladder up into the clouds. When the weather's right, you come out the top to a panoramic view of Kenohy Bay that genuinely does not look real. People call it the stairway to heaven,

and standing up there you understand why. And many feel the risk is worth the reward. However, the name can be a bit deceiving in the sense that this heaven has a bit of a dark side to it. These stairs were never built for hikers. They went in back in the 1940s during World War II, put up by the U.S. Navy to reach a top-secret radio station hidden in the Haiku Valley. A transmitter so powerful that could supposedly send signals all the way across the Pacific

to ships near Tokyo Bay. They were wooden steps at first, later swapped for metal, so they were a military access route and on a tourist attraction, never built for the public. And over the decades, as the base shut down and the jungle moved back in, well, those stairs stayed behind but started to rot. By 1987, it was bad enough that the authority shut the whole thing down. Closed to the public completely, the railings were loose, and whole sections of stair were rusted out, and vegetation had crept over the path, making it pretty dangerous.

A climate, and you're now not just risking your life, you're committing criminal trespass and you can be arrested for it. But you know there's a funny thing that happens when you tell people they can't do something, especially something with a view like this at the end. Well, they do it anyway. And so for years, people have ignored the signs and the warnings and climbed it, and the mountain has made some of them pay. Even experienced hikers, people who knew exactly what they were doing, have slipped on those steps. Rescue crews have had to be called out for people stranded halfway up, and in 2015, the same year that our story takes place,

a storm tore through and did even more damage, leaving sections of the climb more unstable than ever. Now that's the staircase, Moak set his sights on. Not a walk in the park, but a rusting, half-destroyed, four thousand-step climb up a cliff face, closed, illegal, and already known for hurting the people who underestimated it. His grandmother knew exactly what it was. She'd seen it on the news.

And when Moke brought it up, she told him flat out, don't. Moke, he went anyway. On February 25, 2015, Moke posted a picture of the stairs to Facebook. The caption read, Stairway to Heaven, hiking this insane hike tomorrow, wish me luck. So he wasn't really sneaking around about it, at least not online. Then on February 26 came what would turn out to be his final post on his account, four words and a hashtag,

and the hike begins at Haiku. You know what nobody tells you about working for yourself? It's that nobody sets up your health care for you. There's no HR person handing you a packet, no coworker going, oh yeah, everybody here sees Dr. So-and-so. You're just out here on your own and one day it hits you that you don't actually have a doctor, doctor. Well, that was me not too long ago, and this episode is sponsored by Zoc Doc, which is honestly the only reason I finally dealt with it. Because here's what I don't want for you, the old way.

Randomly Googling names, calling around and playing phone tag with the front desk just to hear the first opening is four months out. Well, Zoc Doc kills all that. Zocococ lets you search and compare local in-network doctors, so you're only looking at people who actually take your insurance. They've got more than 150,000 providers across 200 plus specialties in all 50 states and every profile is loaded with reviews from real patients so you get a feel for who someone is before you ever book. You see their real open appointment times, click and you're on the calendar usually within 24 to 72 hours sometimes same day and it's all completely free to use. Your health

matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find him book the right doctor with Zock Dock Dock and head to Zocdo.com slash every town to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's ZOC, do-o-c.com slash every town. By the early morning of Friday, February 27th, he was ready for his adventure. When Mok talked to his grandmother about his plans, the place he named wasn't the haiku stairs. He told her he was going to to hike Montalua Valley. Now those two things aren't unconnected. There's a back route through Montalua Valley

and up the trail that people used to get up there without going through the guarded residential entrance. And so it's likely Moak just told her the part of the plan that sounded less alarming, but the fact remains. What he told his family and where he actually ended up don't exactly line up. And that gap is something the police themselves would later note. But whatever the exact route, this much we know.

Moke boarded a bus that morning alone and headed for the mountains. At around 11 o'clock, he texted photos to his family and his girlfriend, photos of himself up on the trail, somewhere along the Kalahu Ridge Line, with the whole island spilling out behind him. It was proof that he made it out there and that he was alive and climbing and okay. And those texts, though, are the last anyone. never heard from him. After that, while his phone goes silent and he's never seen or heard from again. By air and on foot, Puna Lalu Fire Rescue Crew searched all day along the collows behind

Haiku Village for 18-year-old Dalyan Po. In the days right after Moke didn't come home, his family did what they could to aid in the search. They went back through everything he'd sent them, every text and photo looking for anything that could help in telling them where their boy had gone. They were trying to paint a clearer picture of his movements to figure out the best place to actually be looking. And in one of those last photos, they found something that was extremely creepy. The picture itself is what you'd expect. Smoke on the trail, the green walls of the valley surrounding them, but there in the background, tucked into the foliage, off to the side as a figure. Now, most of this person is hidden behind the leaves and branches,

but above the brush, clear enough that once you see it you can't unsee it, is what looks unmistakably like a man's head. It's a person crouched low in the bushes on a closed and supposedly empty trail in the exact place where Moak was last known to be alive. Now remember, this is a hike nobody is supposed to be on. It's illegal and remote, and in the frame, without him apparently even noticing, Well, somebody else is down there in the undergrowth nearby. Could it be another adventurer just like Moke out there to see the sights?

Yeah, definitely could be. But given the circumstances of that day and the fact that this person appears to be crouched, almost hiding from the camera, well, it's all a little suspicious. For the family, seeing that image didn't feel like a coincidence anymore. To them, this looked like someone who had followed their son up on, into an empty mountain. In their minds, that man did something to moke. So they did everything right. They took the image straight to the Honolulu PD, then to the press in public, begging anyone who recognized the figure, or who'd been on that trail that day to come forward.

The police looked at it and put out a crime stopper's alert, and they said that if that shape in the Bushes was in fact a person, and that person would be considered someone of interest in the case, aka someone they'd like to chat with. But from that push, all they heard was crickets. Nobody came forward with any info and no one ever stepped up to say, that's me. I was just taking a break in the bushes. Here's what I saw. The man in the photo, if it's a man at all, has never been identified to this day. Now, the authorities were never as convinced about the this photo as the family was. They couldn't even confirm it was a human being, he was just so far away. Some who have studied it have suggested it could be an animal or just a trick of the brush in the

shadows, the way your brain finds a face and a pattern that isn't really there. It certainly looks to me like a person, but there really is just no way to know for sure. And even if it is a man, well, being on that trail doesn't make him a killer, so to speak. and he could have been just another trespasser who never came forward because, well, he wasn't supposed to be up there either. But what really makes this photo so hard to shake, as I mentioned, is the timing. Of all the pictures Moak ever took, this is one of the last, maybe the last. And in it, at the precise moment, a healthy experienced 18-year-old is about to disappear without leaving so much as a threat of clothing behind, well, there's a figure crouched in the bushes close by.

And when Moog didn't come home, the U.S. Navy got involved because of the old military land. The Honolulu Fire Department launched into the Koloa Range and the steep valleys around it. And for about five days, they scoured that mountain, every inch of the valley where a person could fall and be hidden in seconds. Then on Monday, March 2nd, well, something happened that yanked everyone's hopes right back up. A two hikers in the area reported hearing cries for help. voices coming from somewhere near the stairway to heaven. And you can imagine what that did. If Moak was alive, hurt, stranded, stuck on a ledge somewhere down in that valley, then it was still time.

The fire department pushed the search harder, extending it on the strength of those cries. They went out there and listened, they looked, and combed the area the sand seemed to come from. And they found no Moak or source for the voice at all. all. By around March 4th, the official search was called off. In the Navy, working with the fire department, made the call that there was simply nowhere left they could safely reach that they hadn't already tried. For the agencies, it was over, but for the people who love Moat, it wasn't. His family and a crew of volunteers refused to walk away, and on March 5th, a team of people repelled hundreds of feet straight down the cliffs at the end of the Kalanahani tree.

trail. And why there? Well, because that was the spot. That was the area where Moek's last photo had been taken. They went down into the one place they thought might hold an answer, dangling off a sheer rock face in the rain, and still, they found nothing. It's been really hard on our family, bo'kee. You know you got all the love and the support from your family. From here in Oahu, all over the world and back home. So come home, Mokti. We are waiting for you. The whole island, it seemed, tried to help. And helicopter pilots donated their time. A local school principal offered up a parking lot as a landing pad, so they had somewhere to set down. It rained hard most days up in those mountains. And that rain didn't just make the

cliffs more dangerous. It erased things. Any tracks or sent, I was there. I was walking. I was washed away and so whatever trail Moak might have left just disappeared. In the end, after all of it, the Navy, the fire department, those helicopters, the repelling volunteers, the grieving father shouting into the wind, while they came away with the same thing they started with. Not one confirmed trace of Dalen Moq Puwa has ever been found from that day to this one. With no trace or remains, plus the picture of the man in the bushes, this case has had more than 10 years to grow theories. And they basically split into two camps. The first and the one authorities leaned toward is the simplest and the saddest.

Moak slipped and fell. I know after everything I just told you, he fell, feels a bit too basic, but you have to remember what this place actually is. It's a mountain, ridge lines, a 4,000-step staircase, with drops on both sides that go down hundreds of feet into thick jungle. A landslide had hit the area not long before, stranding hikers who had to be rescued. Even during the search for Moak, the rescuers themselves reported slipping and falling on that terrain. The trails are very slippery, the cliffs are very steep. We want to limit how many people go up there. if they're untrained and they don't know what they're doing,

their goodwill could end up turning into more of a disaster and more heartache if they don't know what they're doing. If the pros are losing their footing while actively being careful and an 18-year-old moving alone full of confidence, all it takes is one bad step. The valley below is deep enough and dense enough to hide a person completely, which actually answers the question

everybody asks, if he fell, why didn't they find a body? Well, because that ground is brutal. It's steep, overgrown, and soaked. And there's an even darker possibility folded into this one. Well, the same instability that might have caused the fall, well, could have finished the job. Another slide, a wall of mud and rock and vegetation coming down and burying whatever was beneath it under tons of earth. If that's what happened, Moe could be up there right now, somewhere on that mountain, in a place no search team, no matter how long they looked, would ever find. But then there's the second camp, and the second camp keeps coming back to that image. The Moe's family has never accepted the accident situation. And they believe fully their son was attacked, and that someone,

perhaps on the same bus as him, just saw him alone and decided they were going to do something. something to him. We all know there's bad people out there. That's just a fact. And if someone did anything to them, well, the same concept as mentioned above applies as well. Up there around the stairway to heaven, well, there's a lot of places a person could deliberately hide or bury a body, and it would never be found. The trouble is, no matter what you think happened, belief is not evidence. So, everyone's left holding both at once. The likeliest answer is the mountain, the most unsettling answer is the man, and there is no way right now to know which one is true. As time goes on finding the real answer, well, that becomes less and less likely. And so,

that's where this case stands now. For years, the city has been trying to figure out what to do about the haiku stairs, and people kept climbing them in a little. illegally and people kept getting hurt. The neighbors at the bottom were sick of the trespassers. In 2021, the city council finally voted to do the unthinkable. It will tear the whole thing down.

They wanted to remove the stairway to heaven completely, step by step, and demolition work eventually began in 2024. Standing in the way is a group called the friends of Haiku Stairs, volunteers who fought to save it. They sued the city. pointing to the environmental damage of ripping out the structure,

the cost and the danger of forcing hikers were going to go anyway onto the even-sketchier backway instead. That's a serious endeavor, and the city has not even begun to grapple with the challenges, let alone cost out all the expenses. So we want them to slow down and really grapple with that and provide the taxpayers' answers before we rush, move forward. Their pitch is managed access, repair the stairs, fund it privately, put it under 24-7 surveillance, and let people climb it safely and legally.

But think about what all that means for Moak. If the stairs do come down, crews are going to be working that mountainside inch by inch. The cliffs, the brush, the gullies, places no search and rescue team ever got to or spend enough time in. And so, the very act of destroying the stairway to heaven might be the thing that finally finds Dalyan. And only then, but his family and the rest of us get the answers as to what actually went down. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're listening to this podcast, then just a heads up. We have another one called Scary Mysteries that you can check out. And we cover creepy stories from various states, from you, the audience,

and True Crime that's in the news. So go there for more True Crime and remember to come right back here next week for another episode of Every Town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.