The True Story Behind Bachelor Star Bekah Martinez's "Disappearance" Is So Bizarre

It’s been a while since Bekah Martinez — the first Bachelor contestant with a pixie cut and the youngest at the time — apparently disappeared in late 2017. Of course, the world later realized she definitely was not missing when she appeared on Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s Bachelor season soon after. The story is as confusing as it sounds: At the time, Martinez chalked it up to a miscommunication (she playfully tweeted to her mom, “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t get cell service on The Bachelor??”), before revealing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that she had indeed been eliminated from the show before her apparent blip from society. Now, she’s ready to tell all.

Even after assuring her fans that she was totally fine and had simply been in the mountains without cell service, as she explained to Kimmel, Martinez never really revealed in detail how her not-so-missing-person’s case came to be. But on her Instagram on May 4, the Bachelor alum cleared things up once and for all — and the details are bizarre.

As Martinez explained via a series of posts to her Instagram story, she was “broke” after her time on the show, as she had to quit her nanny job to be a contestant. “I needed to make some quick cash, so I went with a friend to work on a weed farm trimming for a couple weeks,” she wrote.

Driving on the dark roads of Humboldt County, she continued, she hit a bear that darted into the road — it was OK and ran off into the forest, though! Eventually, after making it to the weed farm, she said, “The girl I was with got kicked off the farm,” which put Martinez in a tricky spot, communication-wise. It was her companion’s phone that had service out in the mountains, so Martinez had used it to keep in touch with her parents.

“She got mad I wouldn’t leave with her when she got kicked out,” she explained, “so she texted my mom that I was being held hostage [by] meth heads with knives and then stopped replying.”

Her parents’ response was, naturally, one of major concern. They filed a missing person’s report, and Martinez said her “dad was about to go all Liam Neeson on the weed farmers.” Martinez, of course, didn’t know any of this since she had no service. But the night the report was filed, she had “a weird feeling” and decided she needed to leave the farm right away, despite not having been paid yet. Once she got cell service, she was able to reconnect with her worried parents and confirm that all was well. And somehow, she did ultimately get paid!

Martinez gave a simpler, shorter account to media outlets because “the actual story was so long and confusing,” she explained. Fair.

Nearly four years after not going missing, Martinez is a mother of two and regularly shares her mental health and motherhood journeys on Instagram. Even though her short stints on The Bachelor and the weed farm are far in the past, they’re still fascinating to her followers years later.