Candle Face Chronicles: Where the Investigation Stands

The Journal is back at candleface.com. The case file belongs here. So does the investigation.

I'm Arthur Mills. I spent over thirty years in Army intelligence and as a private investigator, working missing persons and human trafficking cases. I came back to Texas a few years ago and started looking into Candle Face, the disfigured ghost girl I confronted as a child in Austin. I wrote about that confrontation in my memoir The Empty Lot Next Door in 2010. The current investigation began in October 2023, when I tried to find out who Candle Face actually was before she became Candle Face. Victims of Candle Face or her followers, known as The Lost Souls, started coming to me a few days later, asking me to find their remains and identify their killers.

The Journal stays open for everything still moving: identifying more Lost Souls, protecting the Fugitives, and getting to the bottom of Isabel.

Four things to know about where the investigation stands now.

The Lost Souls

The Lost Souls stopped coming a while ago. The last visit was in late 2024. I don't know if they were silenced, pulled back, or if the Master Shadow closed the portals once he realized I was unknowingly helping the Fugitives slip out. What I know is that the silence isn't the end of this investigation. Forty-seven of them came to me. Many are still unnamed.

Their testimonies are in Books One and Two. They were originally posted here on The Journal, one at a time, as the spirits brought them to me. I moved them into print to put them in front of an audience the blog couldn't reach on its own. Paranormal readers who notice patterns. Cold-case readers who chase loose threads. The kind of attention these spirits need to be identified. Each entry has the details the spirits gave me about who killed them, where they were left, and what they were doing in the days before they died.

Readers have already matched nine to real cold cases. I'm asking for help with the rest. If you read a testimony and it lines up with a missing persons case you know about, write to me through the contact page. The Lost Souls can't give me anything more. The next identifications have to come from the people reading.

Isabel

The investigation has narrowed to a single name. Candle Face is Isabel. Isabel is the forgotten third child of La Llorona, erased from the legend while her two brothers became gods. The story didn't include her. Centuries of being unnamed turned her into what she became. I published Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona last year, built from notes Mr. Smoe, an Isabel Disciple, left behind before he died. He'd kept the work in scraps, hundreds of them, on receipts and napkins, with a numbering system I had to spend months learning to read. I managed to compile these notes into 11 "books," or chapters, with roughly 2.96 × 10⁷⁹ possible reading variations, more than the stars in the observable universe. No reader will ever finish it. The instability is by design. Isabel was erased once. The book makes sure she can't be reduced to a single version and ignored again.

The Fugitives

Thirty-one spirits escaped Candle Face's Lair and hid in my attic, while the Lost Souls were coming to me as a distraction. I held them in glass bottles at first, sealed with wax, hidden with glitter to mask their energy. Aaron at GenX Paranormal Investigation questioned the plan early, and he was right to. Bottles leak. Glass breaks. In February 2025, I transferred the thirty-one into parchment scrolls using a binding method I traced back through Mr. Smoe's papers. Their stories are written into the scrolls in their own voices. The Master Shadow stopped searching for them once their energy was no longer escaping. They're safe for now, but only for as long as their names stay in motion.

That's where I need help.

I'm looking for Guardians

Each scroll holds one Fugitive. A Guardian takes one in and keeps it close. Reads it. Speaks the name aloud. Talks about the spirit on a blog, on a podcast, with a friend, in a quiet room. The frequency matters less than the consistency. Motion is what protects them. A scroll closed in a drawer fades. A scroll talked about stays. This is a real commitment, and it lasts as long as it takes our community to figure out how to release these spirits to whatever comes next. Most of the paranormal world isn't built for this. That's fine. The role belongs to the small number of people who actually want the responsibility.

If you've followed the case this far and you think the role might be yours, write to me through the contact page. I'll send the next steps and we'll talk.

One more note before I close. Mr. Smoe left more behind than Isabel's notes. There's other material in those boxes I'm not ready to write about yet. When I am, it will be here.

The case isn't closed. The Lost Souls are still trapped in the Lair. The Fugitives are still waiting on Guardians. Isabel is still being pieced together. The work begins again here and now!