Tracker Recap With Spoilers: “Aurora”

Tracker is back on Sunday night with a brand new episode, the ninth of Season 1. Justin Hartley’s series, which has already been renewed for a second season, is coming down to the wire with the final batch of Season 1 episodes. “Aurora” finds Colter Shaw looking for a missing person who has been gone for three years, and the job takes him deep into the world of amateur ghost hunters. You can check out a full recap of the episode’s events below! Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!

In Aurora, Vermont, the body of a young woman is pulled out of a river and a man approaches wondering if it’s his daughter, Lana. It’s not hers, but it does belong to her friend, so Lana is still missing. Three years later, she still hasn’t been found. Colter is hired by her father, Gavin, to help crack the cold missing persons case. Lana and Jamie disappeared after school one day three years ago. While Jamie was found dead from drowning, Lana’s body wasn’t ever discovered. The police found a note about desiring death in one of the girls’ backpacks and assume they made a choice about ending their own lives. Gavin is convinced that’s not what happened to Lana. He has “proof” of Lana being alive, in the form of a photo of a fair in the newspaper. There’s a young woman in the back of the crowd in the photo that Gavin is convinced is Lana.

Colter takes the paper to the local police and they aren’t sure it’s Lana. The chief explains that Gavin has come forward with so many theories and ideas over the years and they have pursued them all. She wants Lana found, it just doesn’t seem realistic. So any help from Colter is welcomed by the department. Lana and Julie were social outcasts who were into supernatural and paranormal type things. Colter watches some videos that Lana made exploring an abandoned, potentially haunted hospital. 

Colter follows the detective to the hospital and searches the eerie building for clues. He finds all sorts of creepy things in the hospital, like the words “Trapped in Here Let Me Out” carved into the walls. He leaves when he gets a call from the photographer who took the picture at the fair. Getting another picture from that day, Colter and the police are able to cross-reference the woman in the photo with a picture of Lana and it comes up as a match. Colter analyzes the picture and wonders what could be going on with Lana, like if she’s in a fugue state or is being held by someone. Gavin explains that Lana didn’t have any real friends outside of Jamie. There was a guy in her film club named Toby who had a lot in common with her and dropped out of school shortly after she went missing. Toby tells Colter he doesn’t believe that Lana and Jamie would’ve taken their own lives, and that the note in the backpack might have come from a message they heard from the “other side” during a paranormal investigation. They were all at the Harkwood hospital a week before she disappeared, and Toby said they had a terrifying encounter with something known as the Harkwood Witch. He believes this presence may have latched itself onto Jamie or Lana, causing their tragedies.

Back at the police station, Colter checks out the video that Lana and her friends made on that visit to Harkwood. During the video, Toby gets attacked by something off-camera. Colter notices a thermal signature in the video not belonging to either of the three teenagers. Someone was watching them through a hole in one of the walls. Colter and the detective head back to Harkwood and split up to find the locations from the videos. He discovers the hole in the wall and notices a a makeshift living space on the other side. Breaking down the locked door that leads to the back room he can see that someone has been there recently. Someone takes off in the distance and runs away through the hospital. Colter chases them through the hospital and outside. It’s a man named Richard who had lived in and out of the hospital when it was operational and apparently continued his stay after it closed. 

When questioned back at the station, Richard isn’t responding to any of their inquiries about the girls. He says he lives at the hospital sometimes because he finds it peaceful, and he remembers seeing the kids with the cameras. He also remembers seeing Lana in the woods outside of the hospital on the day of big storm when she went missing, wearing a distinct yellow raincoat. She was being “taken away” across the river by someone in a big black raincoat. The detective leaves the room and tells Colter that there was another case about a decade prior where a teenage boy went missing. His body was found buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in a yellow raincoat. That case was closed, though, as the killer confessed and has been locked up in the state prison for several years.

Colter is shown a video of that killer, Errol, who expressed remorse over the murder. He said that he was overcome with something evil and gave in to it, but has since dedicated his live to repentance. The detective takes Colter to the place where Jamie’s body was found and explains that it has been haunting her for years. Her marriage ultimately ended because of the job. He tells her he has a similar situation, as he’s been stuck trying to figure out what caused his dad’s death. He’s given Errol’s file and told it has some similarities with Lana and Jamie’s situation. 

At the prison, Errol agrees to meet with Colter because he’s told Colter also has a past he’s remorseful about. It’s slightly true, because Colter is remorseful about his father’s killer going free. Errol tells Colter that he was abused by his father when he was a child. His father always put a yellow raincoat on him before those abuses. The man also tells Colter that he was possessed by a demon but has since banished him. Colter’s convinced that Errol is lying, based on something he said about a previous resident of his apartment who never actually existed. There’s a theory that Errol had an accomplice and his “reformed” act is just a ruse to protect the person he was working with. 

Colter heads out to talk to Errol’s sister to try and get any kind of information he can. Colter tells her about the theory of the accomplice and she goes into the kitchen to fix some tea. While she’s gone, he notices a bag in the living room from the blood drive where Lana was photographed at the fair. Her keys, hanging above it, have a red string tied to them, almost like a bracelet. The Witch of Harkwood was known to wear a similar thread, and one was seen on the ground in the video taken by Lana and her friends. Colter keeps looking through the house and May, Errol’s sister, reveals herself to be the accomplice. He chases her down into the basement of the house where he finds all sorts of creepy stuff. There are rooms set up like they belong to children, coloring pages on a table in front of dolls. May blindsides Colter and attacks him but he’s able to subdue her. Back into the basement, behind a makeshift closet and inside the wall, he finds Lana Russo alive. May stalked the girls and used the stories of the witch to lure them to the hospital. She pushed Jamie into the river and kept Lana as a prisoner for three years.