Drowning or Foul Play on Horn Island? Inside the Conflicting Stories in the Nolan Wells Case

**Stephanie Soo** (0:02)
People back in the day were quite dramatic. There's this old Fisherman's Diary, where it reads like he's suddenly in a Christopher Nolan film. This is from back then. He writes in his little journal that he has just gotten to this island off the coast of Mississippi, and he writes that this island is, quote, dreary, sandy, wild, inhospitable spot. The wood abounds in mosquitoes, sand flies, and every insect that human flesh is food for.
It's a tad bit dramatic, especially when you realize he's just writing about Horn Island in Mississippi. He's not writing about some giant hunk of land in the middle of the ocean where those Agatha Christie books take place. This is just Horn Island. It's a remote barrier island about 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi, which a barrier island is essentially a deposit of sand. So it runs parallel to the mainland coast. Horn Island is technically part of the Gulf National Seashore. You can really only get to it by boat and probably a little bit of dedication. It's not a treacherous journey, but it's also not necessarily a tourist destination. Meaning you're not going to have these ferries or tourist boats heading out to Horn Island scheduled a few times a day so you can seashell and take pictures. They don't necessarily do tours of Horn Island because they're not going to take you out to Horn Island because eventually if you have a whole boat of tourists, eventually someone's going to need to pee and the entire island is uninhabited. There's no bathrooms, there's no restaurants, businesses, nothing, nothing but cacti on an island.
However, a lot of locals in Mississippi will ride their personal or they'll charter a boat out there, anchor it near the shore. You can't even dock it, there's no dock. So you have to anchor your boat near the shore, jump off your boat and kind of walk. Yeah, swim or walk depending on how big your boat is. You can't dock it and they'll usually go to get drunk or party on the island. That's what the locals do.
The island's dimensions get reconfigured every now and then, but it is a pretty substantial piece of land, okay? As of today, the island is about 10 miles long.
And the width of it, the longest point is like a little less than a mile. It's not huge, but it's not small.
There was a point where it was recorded to be much larger. It was about 17 miles long. It's shrinking, the island is shrinking. Also it's moving. So as the current is wearing down on the eastern side, it deposits sand on the western side. So it's slowly moving. It's like shrinking and moving to the side. It's kind of interesting, but it is now the largest island in the Mississippi-Alabama barrier chain. And it is also protected by the National Park Service. Meaning, really, you cannot go in there and build a bathroom. You can't bring in motorized equipment or build any sort of infrastructure on the island.
Not that any of that will even matter come 2100, because it's said if sea levels continue to rise, the majority of the island is going to be underwater by then. But the interesting thing about Horn Island is, a lot of people, the locals, they treat it like a second home. It's been described to have these really white, sandy shores. When you go out there, it's weirdly loud and silent. They describe it as all you hear all day, all night long, are like the crashing wave noises. But then nothing else. So it's once you block out the wave noises, there's no other sound.
The entire center of the island is filled with thick brush. It's just cacti, which is crazy because it's essentially a functional desert in the middle of the ocean. It's just cacti. And weirdly, there's alligators living on this island, which is alarming because alligators are freshwater predators. What are they doing in the middle of the ocean? But there's ponds, there's marshes in there. You don't really go in there as a local. You either camp, because camping is permitted. You either dock your boat and set up a tent and camp on the shoreline, but you never really go in.
It's just kind of, it's a lot.
But people treat it like a mini vacation, a second home, a party spot. And people have nothing but positive things and feelings towards Horn Island.
Until July 6th of this year, at the northwestern tip of the island, a body washes ashore, face down in the water. This is the body of an 18-year-old boy, a college football player, Nolan Wells.
This is the current ongoing case of Nolan Wells, where 18-year-old Nolan Wells had gone missing while out with his friends on a boat during the 4th of July. Two days later, his body is found in the water. And every single day since, there have been more questions than there have been answers, witnesses are reportedly sharing vastly different accounts of what happened on the island with Nolan. His friends that he was with that day have had varied public responses to his passing. Some have shut down their social media. Some have talked to media. Others have been quietly posting their tributes on Instagram. And because there's so many unanswered questions, like were there things deleted on his phone the day that he went missing? Why didn't he have his phone on him? Why did his friends have his phone? There's so many questions. The internet has taken it upon themselves to come up with their best theories on what they believe happened to Nolan. But is that even helping the case? This case has unfortunately become so divisive, so complicated on all fronts that it feels like it's only getting harder for the family to get the answers that they want. This is the current ongoing case of Nolan Wells, as well as all the internet theories about what happened, to who, who's lying and why.