On January 31, 2026, I returned my focus to Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona after months of pushing my investigation outward, especially toward the Lady Bird Lake drownings. That shift gathered records and mapped patterns, but it pulled Isabel out of the center, and that was a mistake. This post resets the case back to its origin: a handmade, numbered book assembled from three boxes of Mr. Smoe’s handwritten notes on receipts, sticky notes, and napkins. The text is built as eleven shifting books with 704 total notes that rearrange with every reading, creating about 34 trevigintillion possible variations, which means it cannot be completed or resolved through repetition. Isabel isn't a retelling of La Llorona, but a reconstruction of the forgotten third child that the legend doesn't preserve. I argue the book likely hides deeper clues in long-run patterns, and I introduce my new trailer as a glimpse into the investigation. The conclusion remains the same: Isabel is unfinished, and the work begins again.
Subjects of Interest:
- Candle Face Chronicles
- La Llorona
Isabel
- Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona
January 31, 2026
Months have passed since I last focused directly on Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona.
In that time, my work shifted outward. The investigation widened. Lady Bird Lake became a focal point. Records were gathered. Patterns were mapped. Official explanations were documented, but they didn’t account for everything I was seeing. Isabel remained present in all of it, but no longer centered.
That was a mistake.
Before Isabel became a name spoken in connection with drownings, theories, or fear, she was something much quieter. She was a manuscript. A collection of handwritten scraps left behind by a man who never explained why he kept them. A story that refused to stay still long enough to be read the same way twice.
This post is a return to that starting point.
For those unfamiliar with the book itself, Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona isn’t a retelling of La Llorona’s legend. Most versions describe a mother who drowns her children, then wanders the waterline crying for them as she searches. The story usually fixates on two drowned sons. It doesn’t preserve a third child. Isabel exists in that omission. A daughter whose life ended in the same water, but whose name was never carried forward.
Before he died, Mr. Smoe left me three boxes labeled ISABEL. Inside were hand-scribbled notes written on receipts, sticky notes, and napkins. I spent months organizing them, matching his crude numbering system to something I could actually follow. I did the best I could. Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona is what I came up with.
So what is Isabel, exactly?
It’s a handmade, numbered book built from Mr. Smoe’s notes and assembled into eleven shifting “books,” or chapters. Each copy is sealed. There’s no digital version. No algorithm is generating the instability. The variation is embedded in the design itself.
Eleven books.
Eight pages per book.
Eight notes per page.
704 notes in total, yet no one can ever read the entire text.
Those lines shift with each reading. Rearranged, they alter meaning, emphasis, and outcome. Scenes reform themselves into new versions of the same event. The physical pages remain unchanged. The story doesn’t. No two readings are identical. There is no final pass through the text.
On paper, the manuscript is short. Eighty-eight pages. Yet it cannot be completed. Across the full work, there are approximately 34 trevigintillion possible reading variations. The number is so large that it exceeds the stars in the observable universe. Even that comparison misses the point. Isabel cannot be exhausted. She cannot be resolved through repetition. It resists certainty.
Over time, Isabel became associated with something larger. Candle Face. The Lady Bird Lake in Austin. The dead around the country. But it’s important to state this clearly. Isabel isn’t the threat. She’s the absence that allowed the threat to form. Candle Face doesn’t exist without erasure. Without a story that was never told.
I also believe the text hides clues about Isabel, her brothers, and La Llorona. Not in an obvious way. Not in a single note. Deeper than that. Buried in patterns that only appear after enough readings. If you treat the text like a puzzle, it starts to behave like one. Every read is another attempt. Every shift is another chance. Most runs give you noise. Sometimes you get something else.
If you have ever watched people mine for Bitcoin, you understand the idea. They run countless attempts looking for a rare result. Most of it produces nothing. Then one day, the system hits, and the output changes everything. That’s what this book feels like. A machine made of paper.
Recently, I released a short book trailer. It’s not an adaptation. It doesn’t summarize the manuscript or explain its mechanics. It captures a single moment. A mother searching water that will not answer her. A name that never returns. A life that fails to enter the record.
The trailer exists for one reason. To mark that this work is still active.
Isabel hasn’t been solved. The manuscript hasn’t stabilized. Whatever Mr. Smoe intended by preserving these notes remains unclear. Whether the structure documents something that already happened or guides something still unfolding is an open question.
After months of looking outward, this is a return inward. Back to the object itself. Back to the instability that started everything.
Isabel remains unresolved.
And that is where the work must begin again.
Arthur Mills
For over two decades, Arthur served as an Army Intelligence Warrant Officer, specializing in piecing together what others missed: patterns, threats, enemy intent, and clandestine activity. He also trained intelligence professionals, built threat models, and briefed commanders and world leaders on global threats and battlefield strategy. After retiring from the military, he transitioned into private investigation, focusing on missing persons, human trafficking, opposition research, and fraud cases. He also holds a degree in Counterterrorism, adding academic grounding to the skills he developed in the field. Today, he continues his work as an Intelligence Analyst for a leading global agency, following domestic and international threats.
He is an award-winning author who has been writing books since 2006. While he publishes under his own name, much of his best and most widely read work has appeared under pseudonyms. Readers may already know those titles, although they would not know they are his. That separation is intentional because just as his books invite readers to participate and interpret what is hidden between the lines, his career as a writer reflects the same principle.
Is Candle Face real?
This is a complex and deeply personal question. On the one hand, there's the possibility that Candle Face is a manifestation of my childhood trauma, a figure created by my mind to cope with fear and emotional turmoil. On the other hand, the consistent details, physical evidence, and shared experiences with others suggest that Candle Face may be a genuine supernatural entity. Whether Candle Face is real or a creation of my psyche, her impact on my life has been undeniably profound. Ultimately, the answer to this question is up to you.
How are you able to communicate with the dead? Are you a psychic or medium?
I don’t consider myself a psychic or medium, although many in the paranormal community believe I have some kind of gift, perhaps one that I haven’t fully tapped into yet. Unlike those who claim to communicate with any spirit, my ability seems limited to connecting with Candle Face’s victims and Candle Face herself. While I’m not sure how this works, the connection is strong and focused on these particular lost souls, allowing me to share their stories and seek justice for them.
Why did you end the Candle Face Chronicles podcast?
I decided to cancel the Candle Face Chronicles podcast for two key reasons. First, while the Get Haunted Network is a fantastic community for paranormal entertainment, it wasn't the right fit for the serious and important nature of my work with Candle Face Chronicles. The network's lighthearted tone didn’t align with my mission.
Second, the friends and family of one of Candle Face's victims reached out and asked me to stop discussing their loved one on the podcast because it was causing them too much pain. Their request made me realize that my work, while well-intentioned, was unintentionally hurting those who are still living and grieving.
These reasons led me to end the podcast, but I remain committed to continuing my mission to uncover Candle Face’s origins and methods with a renewed focus on compassion and respect for the living.
Do you use AI to create your content?
From October 2023 to around March 2024, I personally wrote the short descriptions you see on Google and social media platforms when my web pages or journal entries are shared or found in search results. These descriptions are those brief, 160-character summaries that pop up beside the URL. It was challenging to condense complex ideas into such a small space.
By March 2024, I began letting Wix, my website host, handle this task for me. Their AI generates these summaries much faster and often with more precision than I could manage within that tight character limit. It was a practical decision to let the system take over this small aspect of my work, allowing me to focus more on my writing and investigations.
The web pages and journal entries themselves are entirely my own. My writing encompasses a wide range of topics, including the testimonies of the Lost Souls, my investigations into Candle Face/Isabel, my books like Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona and The Haunted Handbook, as well as other works and research. Everything I write is rooted in my decades of experience in writing (over ten books in 15 years) and my 30+ years of expertise in intelligence analysis, missing persons cases, and human trafficking investigations. The core content you read always comes from me.
By December 2024, I also began using AI to help create some of the images featured in my blogs. Due to the nature of my work, which covers real events, people, and spiritual encounters tied to Candle Face, the Fugitives, and the Scrolls of Souls, it became increasingly difficult to find stock or royalty-free images that accurately represented what needed to be shown. Rather than settle for generic visuals or spend time searching through endless photo libraries, I chose to use a modern-day tool that could generate images tailored to the story being told. I review each image to make sure it reflects the tone and details of the post. This approach allows me to focus on the core work of sharing what others will not and presenting it in a way that respects the subject matter.
By early March 2025, I decided to create a Shopify account to sell copies of Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona, The Haunted Handbook, and to look for caretakers for The Scrolls of Souls. It was a tremendous amount of work to manually transfer all 130 journal entries from Wix to Shopify and recreate the Google SEO titles and descriptions for each entry. Shopify’s blogging platform also required a summary for each journal entry. Summarizing my work was taking around 30 minutes per entry, which became overwhelming and unsustainable.
To streamline the process, I allowed AI to create the summaries for me by uploading each journal entry and letting the AI generate the SEO descriptions, summaries, and ALT text for images. Here's a clear breakdown of what is AI-generated:
- Some journal entry titles.
- Nearly all SEO journal descriptions (up to 160 characters).
- Nearly all summaries (which are only available in the backend and not visible to the public).
Everything else you read comes from me, whether it’s documenting testimonies from the Lost Souls, researching Candle Face/Isabel, or writing my books. The AI simply handles the tedious, mechanical parts of the process, leaving the writing, storytelling, and investigations entirely in my hands.
I review all AI-generated summaries and descriptions to ensure they accurately represent the essence of my writing. My decision to use AI for these backend tasks is about maintaining efficiency and allowing me to focus on what truly matters: writing, storytelling, investigations, and giving voice to the Lost Souls, protecting the Fugitives, investigating Candle Face/Isabel, and exploring new projects. Your experience as a reader is shaped by my work, not by AI.
Why did you stop using www.candleface.com and start using www.branchingplotbooks.com?
I have had the branchingplotbooks.com domain since 2012, but I transferred the domain to Shopify to use it as my storefront. I needed to do this because Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona can't be published or sold via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing because of its spiral binding requirement. The same goes for The Haunted Handbook.
I decided to sell them, along with most of my other books, on Shopify because it allows me to provide a more streamlined and reliable experience for my readers. It also enables me to have full control over my work and how it reaches my audience. Additionally, all my books are still available on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), except for Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona and The Haunted Handbook due to their unique binding requirements.
I also chose to use Shopify’s blogging platform, keeping all books, my journal, and the shopping experience located in one place.
I plan on keeping www.candleface.com up for the interim, but it will likely go down as well, or at least be redirected to www.branchingplotbooks.com. In the end, I want my work to be more streamlined and easier for the paranormal community and my readers to find my work, read and help the lost souls, protect the Fugitives, and care for the Scrolls of Souls.
Your projects seem all over the place. Why not just stick to one subject or theme?
At first glance, my projects might seem scattered. I write about ghost stories, spiritual preservation, investigative reporting, and even political analysis. But they all serve one purpose. Each one invites readers to interpret what they see based on their own beliefs, experiences, and instincts. That's the heart of Branching Plot Books. Whether it's a scroll sealed with a forgotten soul, a book that can be read multiple ways, or a report that exposes something hidden in plain sight, the goal is the same. I want readers to take an active role, to question the surface, and decide what they believe is real. The stories may differ, but the purpose is always connected.
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