SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. – It was April 2010 when word got out a little girl from Central Florida was missing.
Nadia Bloom was just 11 years old when she set off on a bike ride near her Seminole County home and got lost in alligator-infested woods. Her story captivated the nation when the girl with Asperger’s did not come home.
An all-out search was launched for Nadia, who later admitted she thought she would never be found.
After four grueling days, alone, hungry, afraid and covered in mosquito bites, Nadia heard someone calling her name.
Central Florida and the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief when Nadia emerged from the woods.
[TRENDING: Become a News 6 Insider]
I got the chance to catch up with Nadia recently. She is now a college graduate navigating her way through the real world, which at times can be just as tough as the woods she survived.
When we spoke, one of the stories making headlines was about the four siblings who had survived 40 days in the Amazon after a plane crash.
“I was just as surprised as you are, especially since one of them was only 11 months old,” Nadia said. “I wonder how they were able to survive in the jungle for that long, because I know what it’s like. I was lost for only four days but with 40, and one of them was still a baby. That, to me is just mind-blowing. That’s what I would call a miracle.”
It was 13 years ago her own story of survival was considered a miracle. I asked if all these years later she remembered what it was like when she realized she was lost.
She said it didn’t take her long to know something wasn’t right.
“Well, I tried to turn back, and I didn’t remember because here’s the thing about the woods is that, like anyone who has ever been in the woods definitely gets this feeling after a while, because it all starts to look the same,” she explained.
She said she was very aware of the alligator situation in the area where she was lost and was afraid.
When I asked her how she was able to sleep that first night, knowing she was in danger, she was quick to say, “Oh, I didn’t sleep. I maybe slept for maybe 30 minutes, and then decided to keep pushing onward because it was too risky to sleep. I was about to get in the log and thought, ‘No, there are fire ants in that thing, I can’t do that.’”
What she could do was keep moving. And she did.
Nadia said one of the things that kept her moving was a story she had learned about American abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. Tubman escaped slavery and made missions back and forth to rescue other slaves using a network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.
Nadia said she was in second grade when she first heard about Tubman.
“We were learning about the story of the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman and how she had the song about ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd,’ which of course, is the North Star in the constellation of the Little Dipper. So, what I was wondering is could I use the stars to get back out? So, I was able to find the Little Dipper. I saw it. It was a pretty clear night; I was walking towards the Little Dipper.”
It didn’t lead her out, but it did keep the 11-year-old looking up where she noticed something else.
“There were houses that you could see above the trees,” she explained. “You could see the roofs of the houses and I was like, ‘Is that my neighborhood?’”
Even more frustrating than seeing a neighborhood in the distance was hearing helicopters buzzing above and calling her name. She says there were times she thought she was on the verge of being rescued, but because she was hungry and thirsty, she was also hallucinating.
“Sometimes I’d have hallucinations about the helicopters because I was lost, I was dehydrated. I was in the middle of nowhere. So, I would hallucinate,” she said.
She said there was one time, in particular, she thought she was seconds from being rescued.
“I was walking in the woods, and I thought I saw in the distance a big black police helicopter on the ground,” she said. “I thought, ‘Is that a police helicopter?’ Like that’s one of the rescue helicopters, right, because the police and the fire department were out looking for me. So, I was walking toward it because I thought the helicopter was there, you know, they were waiting for me to get in so they could carry me out of the woods. But it was a hallucination. There was no helicopter.”
She thinks those hallucinations took her even deeper into alligator-infested swampland.
Nadia says her Girl Scouts background helped her know what things were safe to eat in the woods.
“There are these water hyacinths growing in the swamp, and there are bugs crawling all over them. They were eating the water hyacinth and the bugs didn’t die. So, I figured, oh, well, I’m going to eat it, you know?” she said.
“I am not Robinson Crusoe; I didn’t randomly come across things that had been left behind by other people who were lost. You know, I just had to find things in the woods and eat those. And by things in the woods, I meant the water hyacinth,” she said. “I know not to drink the water, so I know not to drink the water. I know that the water is bad, but the water hyacinth I would eat those every now and then to survive.
“It tasted like a wet salad. So, it wasn’t too bad,” she added.
On day four it was a church member, James King, who said he was called to search a certain area of the woods to find Nadia. He was right.
Nadia says she spent some time in the hospital because she had so many mosquito bites that her blood had become infected.
Through it all, she says she relied on her faith.
Fast forward 13 years and she graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2021.
Since then, she has had a series of setbacks but is still pursuing her dream of becoming an artist.
She loves illustration and character design. She hopes to one day illustrate a children’s book.
Nadia tells me she has applied many times for jobs at Disney and keeps getting turned down, but she says she isn’t giving up. If she can survive four days in the woods, she can certainly survive a few rejection letters.
If you would like to hear more from Nadia and learn why she stopped talking out loud when she was lost for those four days, watch the interview in the player above.
You can listen to every episode of Florida’s Fourth Estate in the media player below: