The Vanishing of Brian Shaffer — A Mystery Inside a Bar

On the night of April 1, 2006, 27-year-old Brian Shaffer, a medical student at Ohio State University, walked into a crowded bar — and was never seen again.

What makes his disappearance one of America’s most baffling cold cases is that he seemed to vanish inside a building lined with security cameras.

Brian had spent that Friday celebrating the start of spring break with his friend William “Clint” Florence. The two began the evening with a few drinks before heading to the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a popular bar in Columbus’s Short North district. Cameras recorded them arriving around 1:15 a.m. on Saturday. Brian looked happy, laughing as he talked to two young women near the entrance. A few minutes later, he turned toward the bar’s interior — and that’s the last verified image ever captured of him.

When the lights came on at closing time, Clint assumed Brian had already left. He tried calling but got no answer. On Sunday, Brian’s girlfriend Alexis Waggoner, who was supposed to meet him for a vacation in Miami, also couldn’t reach him. When he failed to show up for their flight Monday morning, she reported him missing.

Police immediately reviewed the Ugly Tuna’s surveillance tapes. The footage clearly showed Brian entering the bar, yet there was no video of him leaving. Officers checked every possible exit — front door, emergency stairway, even construction areas behind the bar — but none offered a clean escape route without being caught on camera. It was as if the young med student had disappeared into thin air.

Investigators searched every nearby bar, rooftop, alley, and dumpster. They even inspected sewer drains and construction shafts. There was no trace — no blood, no personal items, no signs of struggle. His bank account, cell phone, and credit cards were never used again.

Early theories spread quickly. Some believed Brian had fallen victim to foul play, possibly assaulted after stepping outside a back exit under renovation. Others thought he might have chosen to disappear, still grieving his mother’s death only weeks earlier. Yet friends insisted he was looking forward to his trip with Alexis and had no reason to run.

One clue that deepened the mystery was the behavior of his companion, Clint. Police asked Clint and the women seen on camera to take polygraph tests; the women passed, but Clint refused. He later hired an attorney and declined further interviews. Detectives never named him a suspect, but his silence kept suspicion alive.

Over the years, internet sleuths have proposed countless possibilities: an accidental fall into construction shafts later sealed over, an abduction, even theories tying his case to the so-called “Smiley Face Killer” drownings. None have been proven.

In 2020, the Ohio Attorney General’s office digitally aged Brian’s photo to show what he might look like today in his mid-forties. Despite national coverage on shows like Dateline and America’s Most Wanted, no credible sighting has ever been confirmed. His father, Randy Shaffer, kept a candle burning on his porch for years until his own tragic death in 2008, when a storm knocked down a branch that fatally struck him outside his home.

Nearly two decades later, Brian Shaffer’s disappearance remains one of the strangest modern mysteries: a man walks into a bar — and never walks out. No body, no clue, no goodbye. Only a haunting video frame frozen in time and a single question that refuses to fade:

How can someone vanish from a place where every door has a camera?

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