Woman’s World recently reported that “Overboard” was based on the story of a memoryless woman found in Florida in winter 1980, who was later identified as Cheryl Tomiczek. Tomiczek wasn’t taken in by a gruff Kurt Russell type and his gaggle of untidy kids, but her story is even more harrowing. According to a story from United Press International, Tomiczek was found “naked, filthy and dehydrated” in a Florida park, with other press at the time describing her as near death. A psychiatrist posited that a major stress may have caused her amnesia, and while there’s no hint that she washed ashore as in the film, the doctor also said that she “may have been running in the woods for a long time.”

Far from the uppity rich girl Goldie Hawn plays in overboard, the survivor who was known only as “Jane Doe” for seven mysterious months was eventually identified as the daughter of an Illinois couple. Adding another weird twist to the story, she was positively identified after taking a dose of sodium amytal, which a Tampa Tribune article describes as a “truth serum that induces sleep-talking.” The drug helped the woman recall fragments of a childhood that matched that of Tomiczek, who had fallen out of contact with her family a full seven years earlier. Separately, her mother had also identified her based on an appearance she made on “Good Morning America.”

There are plenty of disturbing details in this case: an article from Listverse claims that Tomiczek was found in a “shallow grave,” and that her parents had worried about her after receiving a phone call in which she sounded upset and cut off all contact years earlier. A man in Florida contradicted the family’s story, saying he had been living with Tomiczek for 13 years before she disappeared the summer before amidst “personal problems,” per UPI.