Speaker 1: Hey guys, Steve here, you are listening to one of
Speaker 1: our original twenty six episodes. If you listen to any
Speaker 1: of our new episodes, you're gonna notice that we're sounding
Speaker 1: a little different in these ones. Yeah, there's a reason
Speaker 1: for that. There is they've been remastered. They have been
Speaker 1: remastered because they had a really annoying hum. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean a huge thanks to listener James for doing almost
Speaker 1: all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice
Speaker 1: if you had listened to what we're calling the last
Speaker 1: twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the
Speaker 1: music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone
Speaker 1: back to straight audio, So be warned. We sound a
Speaker 1: little different today than we do in what you're about
Speaker 1: to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't
Speaker 1: understand you never know what stories of things. We simply
Speaker 1: don't know the answer too. Well. Hold there, Welcome to
Speaker 1: another episode of Thinking Sideways. We are the podcast that
Speaker 1: tackles the unsolved mysteries that baffled people through the ages,
Speaker 1: and we solved them. My name is, my name is Joe,
Speaker 1: on my left is Steve, and on my right is
Speaker 1: and so we're gonna delve into another really cool unsolved mystery.
Speaker 1: This is the Angel Couni Lake mystery. It's a disappearance
Speaker 1: of an entire tribe of Escobos. And this story has
Speaker 1: got everything. It's got mysterious blue blinking lights in the sky,
Speaker 1: church desecration, Canadian mounted police, grave robbery, and across dressing
Speaker 1: dog And did I leave anything out? Yeah? Yeah it is,
Speaker 1: It really is, Okay, So let's get started here. Our
Speaker 1: story starts in November of nineteen thirty. A fur trapper
Speaker 1: named Joe Label is in the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Speaker 1: This is like the area north of Manitoba since been
Speaker 1: partitioned off, and they've created a new problem. It's called
Speaker 1: I forget what it's called. It's like Neiva two or
Speaker 1: something like that. But they created a new province of
Speaker 1: province for the Innuit Indians that are in Northwest territories. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: Lake on Jokani is located about two miles west of
Speaker 1: Hudson Bay and well north of Manitobah. So anyway, he
Speaker 1: was trudging along looking for this village where apparently he
Speaker 1: was familiar with the inhabitants and he'd been by there
Speaker 1: many times. And had friends there, and he was hoping
Speaker 1: to spend the night there and maybe get a hot meal.
Speaker 1: He comes to it in the evening apparently, like I
Speaker 1: don't know what, like early evening too, and it was
Speaker 1: not quite dark yet, apparently like around twilight. Yeah, maybe twilight,
Speaker 1: that's a good word. The village, as the story goes,
Speaker 1: was huts and some tents, and when he was when
Speaker 1: he approached it, he noticed that it was unnaturally quiet,
Speaker 1: and normally you would expect to hear the sounds of
Speaker 1: people and then the dogs barking in such things, and
Speaker 1: there were no noises coming from the village, which purpose
Speaker 1: interest piqued his interest just a little bit. Also, he
Speaker 1: noted that none of the chimneys had smoke coming out
Speaker 1: of them, which is unusual. This is late November and
Speaker 1: so and this is of course, of court kind of
Speaker 1: towards the Arctic circles, so it's going to be really
Speaker 1: really cool out. So he did notice a fire some
Speaker 1: distance away from the village, and so he walked to
Speaker 1: the fire and when he got there and the fire
Speaker 1: was embers, but there was nobody there. So he walked
Speaker 1: back to the village and he started looking in the huts,
Speaker 1: and what he found is that they all looked like
Speaker 1: people have been living in them recently. They all were
Speaker 1: stocked with food and had clothing and other possessions laying around.
Speaker 1: The rifles all the all the villagers rifles were leading
Speaker 1: in the usual spot against the wall near the doorway,
Speaker 1: and but there was nobody there. In any of these huts.
Speaker 1: He found a pot of stew caribou in one, which
Speaker 1: was moldy, apparently had been sitting there for a while.
Speaker 1: He found a half and half mended sealskin coat in
Speaker 1: another that had still had the needle in it. But
Speaker 1: there were there was nobody there, and there was no
Speaker 1: size of violence. Nothing was torn up or anything, but
Speaker 1: the people were all gone. So his next step was
Speaker 1: to circle the upside of the village. He was looking
Speaker 1: for any footprints that would tell him what direction they
Speaker 1: had gone, and if they had all suddenly made a
Speaker 1: mass exodus, he was wondering what direction they had gone.
Speaker 1: He circled the entire perimeter of the village, found nothing,
Speaker 1: so at this point he was getting kind of creeped out,
Speaker 1: so he decided to head off too. Apparently there was
Speaker 1: a telegraph office about twenty five miles away, So he
Speaker 1: decided to head to this telegraph office and get a
Speaker 1: message off to the Mounties and get them in there
Speaker 1: to investigate this mysterious disappearance. Uh and some telling they
Speaker 1: arrived there several hours later, and some tellings they arrived
Speaker 1: like the next day. All that sounds a little fantastic
Speaker 1: to me because this place was hundreds of miles away
Speaker 1: from anywhere and so but eventually, but eventually, the Mounties arrived.
Speaker 1: So they meet up with Mr. LaBelle, and then they
Speaker 1: started heading back to Anticony, and on their way they
Speaker 1: encounter a trapper named armand Laurent and his two sons
Speaker 1: who lived in a shanty somewhere in the way of obviously,
Speaker 1: and they asked them if they had seen anything out
Speaker 1: of the ordinary. They said that they had seen a
Speaker 1: gleaming object in the sky a few days before. Laurent
Speaker 1: said that the object changed its shape and that it
Speaker 1: was flying in the general direction of Lake Anjocuney. So
Speaker 1: the Mountains continued to Anjocuny and found it was still empty.
Speaker 1: They were searching the village and they discovered that the
Speaker 1: village burial ground had been plundered. All of the graves
Speaker 1: have been opened and the bodies have been removed um
Speaker 1: and other accounts only one grave had been opened with
Speaker 1: the body removed, and some accounts say the marker stones
Speaker 1: for the graves were stacked into two neat piles on
Speaker 1: either sides of the graves. They also discovered some sled
Speaker 1: dogs about three feet from the village. Some accounts say
Speaker 1: two to three sled dogs and sub stay seven. But
Speaker 1: they apparently had starved at death, and in one account
Speaker 1: they were they were tied to some scrubby trees. And
Speaker 1: I don't know how much how much they having away
Speaker 1: of scrubby trees up there, because again this is kind
Speaker 1: of like in the Arctic, and it's up of the
Speaker 1: tree line, so there might not have been a tree
Speaker 1: around for miles. And lastly, they reported seeing bluish lights
Speaker 1: on the horizon in the twilight. There were, and of
Speaker 1: course obviously these people were used to living in the
Speaker 1: frozen waste lands of the North, and then you know,
Speaker 1: they know what the Aurora borealis looks like, So wasn't
Speaker 1: that Yeah, so it wasn't the Aurora borealis. It was
Speaker 1: blue blinking lights which eventually disappeared. They found some berries
Speaker 1: in a cooking pot, and based on the growing season
Speaker 1: for these berries, et cetera, in the state of deterioration
Speaker 1: of the berries, they concluded that the Innuits have been
Speaker 1: gone for two months or longer. So we've got a
Speaker 1: completely deserted village. Deserted village. We don't know, we don't know,
Speaker 1: we don't know what happened to these people. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they didn't just show up, you know, twenty miles away
Speaker 1: or anything like that. You just disappeared. They just disappeared.
Speaker 1: This isn't like that the Roanoke Island story right where
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, all of these people disappeared, but all
Speaker 1: of a sudden there's blonde haired, blue eyed Indian. How
Speaker 1: weird like that, We're saying they've just disappeared on They
Speaker 1: just they apparently just disappeared. Nobody moving forward. This is uh,
Speaker 1: we've talked about these sorts of things before. This is
Speaker 1: a tale that's kind of grown in the telling. Ye.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's all it's been around since nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: when the original story was published. I remember this one
Speaker 1: has inflated. Oh, it's mass massively inflated. Massively inflated. For example,
Speaker 1: the part about the Mounties running into that trapper named
Speaker 1: armand lorent And who purported seeing a Ufo headed towards
Speaker 1: Lake Antikuti. Apparently that that that part of the story
Speaker 1: appeared in three somebody wrote a book called The World's
Speaker 1: Great Ufo Mysteries, and they just sort of tacked on
Speaker 1: that part of the story the well, not the blue
Speaker 1: Lights part, but the part about running into this trapper
Speaker 1: named armand lorent And and damn him saying that he'd
Speaker 1: seen a Ufo okay into the trap. No, apparently not
Speaker 1: before three. So so yeah, so they so the other things,
Speaker 1: the other embellishments have been put in, and and just
Speaker 1: for for the sake of our listeners, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go back to the original story, but first I want
Speaker 1: to go through some of the later stories because they're
Speaker 1: kind of fun. In another version of the story, there
Speaker 1: were two thousand people in the village who managed that's
Speaker 1: that's a big village. Yeah, that's a pretty big city. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In in this in this retelling, the village had a
Speaker 1: population of oh this is you got another one had
Speaker 1: a population of up to It had a Catholic church,
Speaker 1: a local watering Holy I e. Bar and it had
Speaker 1: docks with kayaks tied up to them. As in the
Speaker 1: other versions, most of the has had possessions, including rifles
Speaker 1: left behind in them. Yeah. The rifles are the interesting part,
Speaker 1: right because I can kind of explain it away to
Speaker 1: go to into theories. Yeah, but you can kind of
Speaker 1: explain stories like this way, like, oh, they just left,
Speaker 1: and they all left for like some mysterious reason. But
Speaker 1: if you're going to wander into the Arctic, you wander
Speaker 1: with your rifles, right, They're kind of are critters out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's yeah, I'm glad to see that at least
Speaker 1: that persists. Yeah. Yeah. So so there's all these rifles
Speaker 1: left behind, which is inexplicable they left their kayaks behind.
Speaker 1: So uh So, anyway, our our friend the trapper joe
Speaker 1: Leabelle went to this watering hole. He came to the
Speaker 1: village it found it mysteriously empty. So he went to
Speaker 1: the local watering hole, which was on the outskirts of
Speaker 1: the village. It's kind of a cafe, or it was
Speaker 1: kind of a cafe bar and it was called the
Speaker 1: mac Shack. So this is in the over Zealous This
Speaker 1: is in later retelling of the story. Yeah, so he
Speaker 1: goes to the mac Shack, which is named for its owner,
Speaker 1: fran mackenzie. He found it empty, but mackenzie McKenzie had
Speaker 1: been had been crippled in while serving in the military,
Speaker 1: so he used to crutch that He found the place empty,
Speaker 1: but mc mackenzie's crutch was in pieces on the floor,
Speaker 1: which he found kind of disconcerting. And then he looks
Speaker 1: to a window and he notices a bonfire about four
Speaker 1: yards away, so he heads that way. But when he
Speaker 1: gets there, there's no one there. There's a stew apparently
Speaker 1: of seal, a seal stew, seal meat cooking in a pot,
Speaker 1: and so a few but a few artifacts and possessions
Speaker 1: were laying about, but there were no people. Um, he
Speaker 1: left at that time because he was sloroughly creeped out,
Speaker 1: and went to it to that I went to that
Speaker 1: same telegraph office twenty five miles away. The Royal Canadian
Speaker 1: Mounted Police arrived. Some say the next day, and uh,
Speaker 1: some people say longer. I'm guessing longer really in real life,
Speaker 1: really in real life, but of course this isn't really
Speaker 1: real life. So people, yeah, yeah, I think the I
Speaker 1: think the population of the entire province is about today,
Speaker 1: about fifteen or twenty thousand people and that thirty I'm
Speaker 1: sure it was a lot less. Yeah, it's a pretty
Speaker 1: empty place in this fantasy full version. Well, so anyway,
Speaker 1: the mystery deepens. When they got there, they found Mackenzie's
Speaker 1: diary in his bedroom. So in the entry previous to
Speaker 1: the day that LaBelle arrived, he wrote that strange blue
Speaker 1: lights had been appearing in the night sky for several
Speaker 1: days before. So that's true. Then, of course that means
Speaker 1: he was there just the day before LaBelle arrived in
Speaker 1: the village. So yeah, a real sudden exodus of these people. Here.
Speaker 1: Here's a really another really creepy part nearby. Outside, they
Speaker 1: found Mackenzie's dog, which was a husky, a female husky.
Speaker 1: The dog was dead. Somebody addressed the dog in women's clothing,
Speaker 1: including underwear. Some we're actually taking the trouble to put
Speaker 1: women's underwear on this dog, draped the dress over it
Speaker 1: and put lipstick on its lips, pierced it's ears, although
Speaker 1: they didn't apparently get around to putting ear rings, and
Speaker 1: and forced a wedding ring onto her left paw. Apparently
Speaker 1: did some damage to the paw while forcing this wedding
Speaker 1: ring on you are you are pulling my leg. I
Speaker 1: am not pulling a leg. This is actually out there.
Speaker 1: This is actually no, that's not like the cheap of Cobra.
Speaker 1: I'm not making this not just just a messenger here,
Speaker 1: I'm just passing it along. Okay. So, as I said
Speaker 1: before this, the village had a Catholic church. Um it
Speaker 1: was trashed and smashed up and had been heavily graffiti.
Speaker 1: The graffiti referenced Unitarian Universalist church symbols, which I think
Speaker 1: is kind of bizarre. We've been grown up in the
Speaker 1: Unitarian Church, yeah, I tell you, yeah, what y facing
Speaker 1: other churches is not something that typically happened, especially especially
Speaker 1: the Unitarians. The Unitarians are all about all about the
Speaker 1: fact that they don't really believe in anything, and so
Speaker 1: that's a that's a that's a big centerpiece of the
Speaker 1: Unitarians believe. They come together in the belief that there
Speaker 1: might be something, but there might not. But it's good
Speaker 1: for adults to come together and talk about how to
Speaker 1: live a good life even if there is a God,
Speaker 1: but maybe there isn't. But I do think that's one
Speaker 1: of the intriguing things about this particular part of the
Speaker 1: story though, is that, you know, yeah, they don't seem
Speaker 1: to have very much hate for the Catholic Church. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are definitely some religions you could be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess I could see there's like a feud there
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, yeah, I mean but that typically maybe
Speaker 1: this is maybe this is not made up at all,
Speaker 1: because typically if he makes up up, it's Satanic symbols, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be what you would expect. Yeah, I don't know. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe the person that that actually made this up, and
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it's made up, of course, but maybe
Speaker 1: the person who made this up didn't understand what the
Speaker 1: Unitarian Church is all about, and they thought they were
Speaker 1: Satanic or something like that. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So at the Catholic church, which of course, as we said,
Speaker 1: was trashed and covered with the Kramiti, there was also
Speaker 1: a graveyard. Graves had all been opened and the bodies
Speaker 1: have been removed except for one. This was the grave
Speaker 1: of a guy named Punkylos Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1: He was He was a tribal leader who had founded
Speaker 1: the village years back, and his grave was undisturbed, but
Speaker 1: the Mountie's found that the grave was warm to the
Speaker 1: touch and no snow on it because the stone melted
Speaker 1: off the grave was warm. The other graves have had
Speaker 1: trash thrown in them. Okay, So anyway, that that is
Speaker 1: our telling. Those of the story so far, apparently it's
Speaker 1: been embellished a little bit over the years. Don't like it.
Speaker 1: It's so far the accounts sound like they vary a lot.
Speaker 1: So the facts are very soft on this at this point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. In fact, the you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you guys know this, you probably did, But the
Speaker 1: Royal Canadian menta Police um as you know, has a
Speaker 1: website and they've actually got a little page devoted just
Speaker 1: to this little mystery, basically denying that they had no
Speaker 1: involvement in it. There's no record whatsoever of any Mountie's
Speaker 1: ever heading out to this place or ever finding any
Speaker 1: any disappeared eskimos. They say the whole thing is an
Speaker 1: urban legend. And they say, by the way that given
Speaker 1: the topography and the weather of the place, they doubt
Speaker 1: that Lake Anchocuni could in this area could have sustained
Speaker 1: a community of even people. So that's what the mantis
Speaker 1: say yeah, the mountis Yeah, the Mattieves denied it very strongly.
Speaker 1: It stinks of a cover up, doesn't it. Well, I
Speaker 1: was just gonna say, actually that like this, this is
Speaker 1: just like exactly the kind of story that like, there's
Speaker 1: no reason for them to deny any kind of involvement, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like there's like some renegade submarine
Speaker 1: like or maybe there is, I don't know. It doesn't
Speaker 1: stink of something that you want to cover up. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of stories we talk about, you can say, Okay,
Speaker 1: it would make sense that this government is faking knowledge
Speaker 1: of it, are saying they don't have knowledge of it,
Speaker 1: because that would be something you'd want to cover up.
Speaker 1: This doesn't. Yeah, one of the things like like, for example,
Speaker 1: in this telling of the story where he goes out
Speaker 1: to the bonfire and there's a stew of seal meat
Speaker 1: in a pot. Well, I'm sorry, everybody thinks of any
Speaker 1: eats is as eating seals all the time. But the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is it's only the ones that
Speaker 1: live by the ocean get to eat the seals. These
Speaker 1: guys seals are Yeah, the nearest source of seals for
Speaker 1: these people was two hundred miles away and Hudson Bay,
Speaker 1: and so it's not too likely they would track two
Speaker 1: hundred miles to kill a seal and make some some
Speaker 1: stew up. That's that's that's a long way to go
Speaker 1: for takeout. Yeah, it really is. So where did this
Speaker 1: story originate? I mean, obviously it's been embellished. There are
Speaker 1: places like the UFO History thing that have talked about it.
Speaker 1: But so so where did it originated? Well, that's a
Speaker 1: good question. So the earliest mention of this story was
Speaker 1: from a reporter named Emmett E. Kelleher. His story was
Speaker 1: picked up by a newspaper. This is the only this
Speaker 1: is the only one that we can find. Supposedly, the
Speaker 1: story actually circulated all over Canada. In the US, Emmett
Speaker 1: Callaher worked for a organization called the NIA, which was
Speaker 1: what stood for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. So the NIA
Speaker 1: was a news distribution network. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: the APS today, has strangers all over the place. I've
Speaker 1: actually done a little research on on Kellagher and I
Speaker 1: can't I don't know if he actually worked for any
Speaker 1: actual newspaper, if he was just a stringer for the NA.
Speaker 1: So it's it's hard to say. There's very sketchy information
Speaker 1: on this guy, but we'll talk about him in a
Speaker 1: little bit. So he published a story soon the na
Speaker 1: which was picked up by apparently supposedly a lot of newspapers,
Speaker 1: but the only, the only actual archived version anybody can find,
Speaker 1: appeared in a Virginia newspaper town of Danville. The paper
Speaker 1: is called the Danville b and this story was published
Speaker 1: in November, November seven. That would be a real quick
Speaker 1: turn around, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And if you read the story,
Speaker 1: I'll get him that in a moment or two. Obviously
Speaker 1: this happened, not, this incident did not happen in November
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. That's you know, there's a little confusion there.
Speaker 1: That happened long before that months at least. So in
Speaker 1: this version, which I have a copy of, um, he
Speaker 1: arrived by kayak over the lake instead of walking as
Speaker 1: in the other stories. There were no docks to tie
Speaker 1: up to. He just pulled his kayak up on the beach.
Speaker 1: He got there, not in the We're probably about mid
Speaker 1: day or early afternoon. The village had no huts. It
Speaker 1: was six tents made of carib hides. And when he
Speaker 1: walked towards the village. He was calling out to them
Speaker 1: because he didn't want to arouse suspicion. Nobody replied, but
Speaker 1: two dogs came out to very almost nearly dead from starvation.
Speaker 1: Dogs came out of the village, and he noticed there
Speaker 1: were seven other dogs lying nearby who were start to death.
Speaker 1: Um so he went to the village and the village
Speaker 1: was deserted, and he was at this point a little
Speaker 1: creeped out, and he wants to look at one of
Speaker 1: the tents, and he was afraid he might find a
Speaker 1: corpse in there, but luckily there wasn't one. But he
Speaker 1: looks in there and he pokes around. He sees possessions
Speaker 1: in the tent. There's a parking laying on the on
Speaker 1: the ground, and he picks the tarp up, the park up,
Speaker 1: and he finds a rifle underneath it, and the rifle
Speaker 1: had been rusted from laying there for a while. He
Speaker 1: went to the other tents, and in another tent he
Speaker 1: found some fox hides. When he moved those aside, there
Speaker 1: was another rifle, also rusty, and those were the only
Speaker 1: two rifles he found. He had. His guest was that
Speaker 1: there had been more or less twenty five people living there,
Speaker 1: and he estimated that they had been gone for perhaps
Speaker 1: as long as twelve months based on the amount of
Speaker 1: rifle rifle rust. In this story, he didn't know people
Speaker 1: of the village, Yeah, exactly, there's no in this account,
Speaker 1: he had had no relationship with these people. He just
Speaker 1: was paddled along, saw a village, went up to it
Speaker 1: and it found it deserted, and found a couple of
Speaker 1: rusty rifles in there, along with some other odds and ends.
Speaker 1: So he walked down to the lake and discovered what
Speaker 1: he believed was an Eskimo grave. The grave was a karen.
Speaker 1: You know what a karen is, just like a pile
Speaker 1: of stones based on Yeah, and so it had been
Speaker 1: if it had been a grave, and he apparently believed
Speaker 1: that it was a grave, that it had been exsumed.
Speaker 1: Somebody pulled the stones and stacked him on the side
Speaker 1: and on one side, and then the body was gone.
Speaker 1: So he thought that that was kind of puzzling and inexplicable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a little weird. And so in his account, he
Speaker 1: around for a while. He fished, caught some fish and
Speaker 1: gave them to the dogs who obviously needed them, and
Speaker 1: then after that he left because he didn't want to
Speaker 1: be there after dark, because obviously he was a little
Speaker 1: creeped out by the whole thing. But he went on
Speaker 1: his way. He didn't he did not go to a
Speaker 1: telegraph office. And at this point, let me stay there.
Speaker 1: There was no telegraph office within miles of this place.
Speaker 1: I was, I was checking out a map of the area.
Speaker 1: And even today, there were no settlements within a hundred
Speaker 1: two hundred miles of this place. I mean, so there
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been a yah, it's really remote. So there
Speaker 1: would not have been a telegraph office within twenty five
Speaker 1: miles of this place. So he didn't high he didn't
Speaker 1: high tail it to a telegraph office. He just went
Speaker 1: on about his business of being a trapper. According to
Speaker 1: the news article, during the season, quote unquote, he visited
Speaker 1: at least a dozen enemy camps, and in those he
Speaker 1: inquired about the village of the Dams and so I'd
Speaker 1: like to call it. And he told them the story,
Speaker 1: and they were all they all claimed to know nothing
Speaker 1: about it. They assumed that it was Corno Suk. And
Speaker 1: I'm not pronouncing that correctly, I'm sure, but Durnarsuk is
Speaker 1: a is an Eskimo legend. He's an evil sky spirit
Speaker 1: and he actually is a commander of a legion of
Speaker 1: evil spirits, and he's they're very terrified of him, and
Speaker 1: they all wear charms to ward him off, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And so when stuff like this happens, they just assumed
Speaker 1: that it was him. So the article. The article refers
Speaker 1: to an investigation by the Mounties, but it's a little vague,
Speaker 1: and it says that they're puzzled. Here's what it says.
Speaker 1: Officers of the Northwest Mounted Police trying to trace the
Speaker 1: lost tribe are equally puzzled. They say the tribe may
Speaker 1: have perished in as a blizard while off on a
Speaker 1: caribou hunt, although admitting that it is unlikely that all
Speaker 1: the women and children would have gone along pastile ch
Speaker 1: occasionally strikes Eskimo camps, but in that case there would
Speaker 1: have been bodies one and that mentions another another couple
Speaker 1: of interesting clues. Tribe Willing, about a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: miles to the north of the abandoned camp, has an
Speaker 1: adopted ten year old Eskimo boy who appears to wandered
Speaker 1: into the camp a few months ago and does not
Speaker 1: belong to any of the nearby tribes. So this isn't
Speaker 1: again the news story by the original accounting the original
Speaker 1: account in nineteen thirty other boy in the tribe are
Speaker 1: resisent about things, and nobody has learned anything but from
Speaker 1: them so far. And the other the other interesting clue
Speaker 1: is and this is like a non clue, but it's
Speaker 1: in the article and asking my names. Uh so mac
Speaker 1: I think his house pronounced walked into a hospital on
Speaker 1: the Hudson Bay Railway for treatment for frozen legs. That
Speaker 1: was thought that he might know something about the situation.
Speaker 1: So they found an Eskimo who could speak dialect and
Speaker 1: who began to question him. Salimc refused to talk about it,
Speaker 1: and mentioning torn Ark. He does it, he calls the
Speaker 1: evil spirit, not torna Suk or torn Suk, but torn Ark.
Speaker 1: And this one acally mentioned torn Ark and refused to
Speaker 1: answer any questions they got. They got a bottle of
Speaker 1: whiskey and tried to get him drunk, but he refused it.
Speaker 1: And that's what the articles for. Yeah, I had I
Speaker 1: tried to get him drunk and he wouldn't And so
Speaker 1: that's it. Those are dead ends And obviously both of those.
Speaker 1: I mean something some you know, some random innuit shows
Speaker 1: up and you're thinking, I have been he knows something
Speaker 1: about them disappeared people. So it's like it's like I
Speaker 1: don't really know about this. That's about it for that article, again,
Speaker 1: written by Emity Kelleher, a stringer for the NIA, It
Speaker 1: appeared in a number of newspapers and it pretty much
Speaker 1: died out now. Subsequently, other other websites have sided and
Speaker 1: I found a few of these. They cited an article
Speaker 1: in the Toronto Star of all places, which appeared on
Speaker 1: November twenty three, nineteen thirty. According to this according to
Speaker 1: this article, the Canadian Mounted Police went out to the
Speaker 1: lake and came back on the day of the tent
Speaker 1: and basically said they had no idea what had happened.
Speaker 1: So let me quote from it here. The inspector for
Speaker 1: the Royal Canadian Menta Police returned to day to confirm
Speaker 1: the disappearance of an escopole village in the Northern Lakes region.
Speaker 1: So he returned with the team's funding today confirmed the
Speaker 1: store the village hat was indeed abandoned in the most
Speaker 1: strange circumstances. And so this appeared prior four days prior
Speaker 1: to tell of her story UH in the Toronto Star.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, my I think somebody could very
Speaker 1: easily have just written this out and posted on the website,
Speaker 1: and it's pure bunk. I have no idea. I went
Speaker 1: out to the Toronto Stars website and they actually have
Speaker 1: uh an online archive, and I was hoping to be
Speaker 1: able to get in there and look for this article,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately requires a subscription, and I checked her expense account.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately it's not there. As it turns out, there's nothing
Speaker 1: in there, and I have to keep the pap for myself.
Speaker 1: I would like to say that if any of our
Speaker 1: listeners actually want to pay to go out to their
Speaker 1: go out to their archive and look for this article,
Speaker 1: and the day if you want to search on again
Speaker 1: is November tent I. You know, I'm just guessing that
Speaker 1: somebody just made this up and posted on their website,
Speaker 1: has been copied over the other website since then. It
Speaker 1: follows the thread of a lot of the quote unquote
Speaker 1: facts in details of the stories that they just as
Speaker 1: we said before, tacked on, Oh yeah, definitely, and then
Speaker 1: they gain momentum and then they're tacked on. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I like the story from the Danville b I think
Speaker 1: it's um it makes a lot. I mean, yes, it's
Speaker 1: a mysterious, but it's believable, right, it's believable that these
Speaker 1: things happened. He didn't know these people, you know, he
Speaker 1: wasn't like wandering around. There were some dead dogs, there
Speaker 1: were a couple of rifles left, but it wasn't like
Speaker 1: just everybody had been like teleported or something. The situation, right,
Speaker 1: which I appreciate. Also, you know, it corresponds pretty well
Speaker 1: with what the Mountie's have said where they didn't really investigate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but you see the we see a lot of
Speaker 1: the components or you know, the elements of the grandier,
Speaker 1: more grandiose retelling to the story. Okay, if not a
Speaker 1: couple of rusty rifles and they're okay to pay the foundation. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that. And and then he found his cairn, which
Speaker 1: he assumed to be a grave and probably was but
Speaker 1: maybe not, which had been taken apart, and the stones
Speaker 1: neatly aside, and that crew of course into an entire
Speaker 1: graveyard being opened up. And so the elements are there
Speaker 1: as far as the rifles go. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: possible that if he was telling the truth about finding them,
Speaker 1: they might have been broken rusty rifles that they didn't
Speaker 1: bother taking with them when they left. So let's let's okay.
Speaker 1: So we do have what sounds like a very simplified
Speaker 1: version of a base story, of the base story of
Speaker 1: this group of people disappearing. So do we have anything
Speaker 1: what actually happened to him? Uh? No, But you know,
Speaker 1: the the anyways were kind of a nomadic people. They
Speaker 1: would go around like they were into fishing and hunting,
Speaker 1: and then later on they got a little bit into
Speaker 1: world commerce. They started trapping and trading, but they were
Speaker 1: still nomadic and so they might have just abandoned their camp.
Speaker 1: Well I know that. Well, let me let me go
Speaker 1: through some let me go to some of the other ones.
Speaker 1: Of course, that uh turned our suit the evil spirit
Speaker 1: some people have said proposed aliens trans dimensional traffic travel.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, they might have left just because it
Speaker 1: was an infestation. Maybe they were taken over by fleas,
Speaker 1: you know, like the coastal Indians around here used to,
Speaker 1: and there was a terrible fleet problems that would have
Speaker 1: got bad enough they would just abandon their villages and
Speaker 1: move on to somewhere else. They built another village because
Speaker 1: that's how bad the fleas would get. So there was
Speaker 1: something that was just some local pest and one possibility.
Speaker 1: But but apparently, you know, abandoned any week. Camps are
Speaker 1: not that unusual way up in the frozen North, you know,
Speaker 1: for one reason or another, they just had to move on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess as far as them being nomadic goes, I mean,
Speaker 1: they are, but they usually take their stuff with them,
Speaker 1: Like making a tent out of caribouo hide is not
Speaker 1: particularly easy task, even if you don't take the polls right,
Speaker 1: you take the outside of it, and you leave the
Speaker 1: bare bones of your camp maybe and you know, maybe
Speaker 1: some cast off like your rusty rifle or you know whatever,
Speaker 1: but you know, not fox skins, not Parka's not the
Speaker 1: out food that you're probably gonna want to eat. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's um a little bit of a head scratcher.
Speaker 1: But let me stop for a second and talk about
Speaker 1: the reporter, Emmy emit Eat kelleher As I said, work
Speaker 1: with the new Newspaper Enterprise Association, and I did a
Speaker 1: little a little digging, and I found some other stories
Speaker 1: that have been written by him because thought I was
Speaker 1: interested in finding out about him, is like, you know,
Speaker 1: is he an actual legitimate reporter or did he just
Speaker 1: write crackpot stories and so and the stories that I found,
Speaker 1: I only found a couple of them, but they were
Speaker 1: actually they've been reprinted in various newspapers and they were
Speaker 1: fairly straight up news stories. One was about there some
Speaker 1: missing airman they're playing crashed and it was this big
Speaker 1: search on for them, and so he wrote a story
Speaker 1: that was picked up by some papers. And another one
Speaker 1: there was a two hundred mile dog sled race in Manitoba,
Speaker 1: and that appeared in several papers that I was able
Speaker 1: to find. And they were straight up news stories, no
Speaker 1: no supernatural stuff at all. So, yeah, he lives in
Speaker 1: Flint Flon, Manitoba, or he lived in Flint Vallon, Manitoba, Manitoba.
Speaker 1: Let me say, obviously he's probably not alive anymore. Flynn
Speaker 1: Flon is right on the border with Saskatchewan. It's like
Speaker 1: five hundred miles south of Andrew Cooney. And apparently this
Speaker 1: story was picked up the Eskima disapparian. Eskima story was
Speaker 1: picked up by many, many papers, but only nobody has
Speaker 1: been able to find any of them except for the
Speaker 1: Bill Dan will be in Virginia. But you know, some
Speaker 1: of the stories were picked up, like the dogsled story
Speaker 1: that was picked up by the Miami Daily News Record
Speaker 1: and Hope, Arkansas Star, the Pittsburgh Sentinel letting his stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, these guys, this is actually a very successful
Speaker 1: news distribution organization. So his his stories stories whenever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there was talk about that, the talk about the
Speaker 1: investigation by the Canadian menta Police. They did say in
Speaker 1: nineteen they got an inquiry from the Australian skeptics, who
Speaker 1: are a bunch of people who look into talk about
Speaker 1: the paranormal, and the reply from the RCMP historian was
Speaker 1: that the people working in that area back in those
Speaker 1: days had since retired, but years before, because his story
Speaker 1: was circulating around, they had been asked about what happened,
Speaker 1: and not one of them could recall anything like this
Speaker 1: ever happening. There's no record anywhere of any sort of
Speaker 1: investigation by the Royal Canadian mount of Police. There was
Speaker 1: never any search expedition and they never went up to
Speaker 1: Leak Couny to see about the disappearing innuits. According to
Speaker 1: this is again according to the RCMP My personal theory
Speaker 1: is this, and you guys can dispute this if you
Speaker 1: want to. But Kelleher was a stringer, which meant he
Speaker 1: probably got paid by the story. In other words, you know,
Speaker 1: he didn't get paid a set salary. He had If
Speaker 1: he did get paid a set salary, then he had
Speaker 1: to produce work. Now, a stringer is basically freelance. Would
Speaker 1: that be correct in a modern phrase? Yeah? And he
Speaker 1: was there guy, He was there guy up in the
Speaker 1: frozen North. So obviously, you know, when something happened like
Speaker 1: this plane crash, well he got to write some stories
Speaker 1: about it and make some money. You know, there's dogs
Speaker 1: led ray, same thing. You know, things are probably up
Speaker 1: there kind of uneventful. So there's probably not a lot
Speaker 1: of not a lot of stories. And my my best
Speaker 1: guests would be that he talked to some guy. Maybe
Speaker 1: there was actually a guy named Joe LaBelle that he
Speaker 1: had a chat with over a beer. And the guy said, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, was wandering around and lake on Jakuni and
Speaker 1: I came upon this abandoned Eskimo village and I want
Speaker 1: to look at it. It It would just creep me out.
Speaker 1: And so he was saying that probably was like the
Speaker 1: germ of a good idea, because obviously he wants to
Speaker 1: make some money, so he probably took this story and
Speaker 1: embellished it just a little bit. So it's not unusual
Speaker 1: at all to finding at and abandoned any village, but
Speaker 1: one that's got they left behind their rifles and their
Speaker 1: in their possessions and their dogs and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a little sex here. And you know,
Speaker 1: the odds of that story being picked up by more
Speaker 1: and more papers, which would make him more money, are
Speaker 1: much higher if there's a sexy, sort of mysterious, supernatural
Speaker 1: element to the whole thing. So you're telling me we're
Speaker 1: just discounting aliens. Yeah, I'm sorry. Here's my my question
Speaker 1: for you, Joe, is that do we know from any
Speaker 1: records or have you found anything in the records about
Speaker 1: any kind of turf worce in the area among the natives,
Speaker 1: because this this is something that sounds very similar to
Speaker 1: stories that we've heard, you know, with American Indians, where
Speaker 1: one tribe would go ahead and walk in and kill
Speaker 1: the other tribe, take some of the people away, and
Speaker 1: just leave the tribe. They didn't burn it like you're
Speaker 1: seeing all the Old West movies, they just went ahead
Speaker 1: and took what they wanted, and they left everything behind
Speaker 1: because they didn't care, because they had enough. So I
Speaker 1: wonder if this could be a situation where they just
Speaker 1: came in and grabbed him and took them. You know,
Speaker 1: I could see that possibility, except this area is so
Speaker 1: sparsely populated that I can't see a lot of contention
Speaker 1: for hunting grounds and fishing grounds and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I also like kind of unlikely. I feel like there
Speaker 1: would be signs of some kind of struggle, would be
Speaker 1: some kind of fight. Well, if it's let's say it's
Speaker 1: just six months to a year later for that time
Speaker 1: to take for a rifle that's sitting in a tent
Speaker 1: to russ. A lot of those signs are footprints in
Speaker 1: the dirt and things being knocked over. But as a
Speaker 1: year's time goes by, they take the bodies and stuff.
Speaker 1: Is that the deal? I mean, like, if they killed
Speaker 1: any of the men in the village, what you're saying, no,
Speaker 1: I I don't know that they even killed them. I
Speaker 1: mean there's all kinds of takeovers where not no blood
Speaker 1: is spilled. I mean I'm thinking of this grave, that
Speaker 1: this care and that he saw that then seemed like
Speaker 1: maybe had been desecreated, and that was kind of their
Speaker 1: their you know, their last act to prove, all right,
Speaker 1: we we own you now and you're part of us,
Speaker 1: and you're trying no longer exist because we just destroyed
Speaker 1: this this altar, whatever it may be to them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I still say, like, yes, they might have
Speaker 1: a lot, but you can never have too much caribou.
Speaker 1: You have too many caribou skins, rifles which warmth, well, rifles, Okay,
Speaker 1: if they're again, we can just I feel like I
Speaker 1: in my brain like those rifles were just bad rifles.
Speaker 1: The like in my brain, they probably were busted, best
Speaker 1: to repair, unless the tents were like in bad shape.
Speaker 1: All He said that one of them was, according to
Speaker 1: the story, one of them was kind of shredded. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and but that's but then again he also estimated again
Speaker 1: that the camp have been abandoned for at least a year,
Speaker 1: so you know, when and everything else, whether conditions are
Speaker 1: harsh up there, it's entirely possible. I you know, I
Speaker 1: guess my theory is the kind of nomadic situation except
Speaker 1: for that it's it's inhospitable to anyone. So you know,
Speaker 1: this tribe of people Ish goes out and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's no one around here, we're gonna just set up
Speaker 1: camp here. And they set up camp and then, you know,
Speaker 1: because they've had to leave their old camp for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: they get there and they realize that they're literally dying,
Speaker 1: so they leave some of their dogs, right, because you
Speaker 1: don't want to have to feed the dogs all the time.
Speaker 1: You take some but not all. You leave some stuff
Speaker 1: because you literally just can't carry it. You know, you
Speaker 1: can carry what's on your backs or whatever, and you
Speaker 1: just walk away from it. But then you would think that,
Speaker 1: you know, if this guy was traveling around meeting with
Speaker 1: other Innuit tribes, they would be like, oh yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that was us so the other well, and that that
Speaker 1: makes me wonder, okay, well, why would they get Well,
Speaker 1: the infestation is one reason. Um, And if they're nomadic,
Speaker 1: that means they go to different sites during different seasons
Speaker 1: and times of year to take advantage of what's there.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if they either overstayed one time, as in, okay,
Speaker 1: we should we should be leaving it September and then
Speaker 1: everybody drugged their feet and suddenly it's late October. We
Speaker 1: really got to get out of here. The weather is terrible.
Speaker 1: Or if they got there and there was a sudden
Speaker 1: change in the weather and winter came super early, and
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of things that would force them
Speaker 1: out of the village in a hurry. If suddenly there's
Speaker 1: a blizzard and grab yourself and go. You know, they
Speaker 1: may have died in route wherever they were going, or
Speaker 1: they may have made it and just ignored the story. Well,
Speaker 1: the fact of the matter is is like if if
Speaker 1: they were saying no matter, if they abandoned the village,
Speaker 1: say because I say they had fleas, and then that's
Speaker 1: that's a good reason to abandon your all your caribou
Speaker 1: chance because they and so if they had a band
Speaker 1: in there that and then moved down the road a
Speaker 1: little ways and build another village, how would anybody know?
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, there's another Inuit village and maybe away,
Speaker 1: and how would anybody Now, I mean, it's like that,
Speaker 1: this is nineteen thirty. It's like, you know, so it's
Speaker 1: entirely possible these guys left and just set up shops
Speaker 1: somewhere else, and for just normal, mundane reasons, this one
Speaker 1: is scarily simple. Yeah, very simple answers, but none of
Speaker 1: them seem to match exactly. As in the it's when
Speaker 1: you get two pieces of jigsaw and they look like
Speaker 1: they're going to go and don't. Yeah, I think you know,
Speaker 1: And that's a great argument for why it's made up.
Speaker 1: It's just a made up story. Again. Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: you have a reporter who who maybe had a small
Speaker 1: incentive to jazz of the story just a little bit,
Speaker 1: or just make it up entirely. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you could have also made it up entirely if we're
Speaker 1: gonna go with the he made it up theory, you know.
Speaker 1: And he's a reporter, so he knows that it has
Speaker 1: to sound believable. It can't actually sound like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's two thousand disappeared out of nowhere. He knows it
Speaker 1: has to be totally reasonable, and that there can't be
Speaker 1: so many details that somebody could go up and like
Speaker 1: look for this place. Right. That's good, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: that's a very good point. You pick a spot, You
Speaker 1: pick a spot that's like five miles away and literally
Speaker 1: and is five hundred miles away from where this guy lives, right,
Speaker 1: and then you say, you know, like nobody's going to
Speaker 1: contact the mounteas and if they do, there's so many,
Speaker 1: like they're so far dispersed that there's no way. You know,
Speaker 1: it's ni it's all you can just call over, well
Speaker 1: you could, but it's Canada, so it's like the nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds really, So you know, you call over and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: did you guys go up to this place? You're not
Speaker 1: gonna do that. Nobody cares, you know, maybe that you know,
Speaker 1: they probably somebody else must have done it. I don't
Speaker 1: know where we're coming with it. It's just a head scratcher. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I you know, I don't think it's even
Speaker 1: a head scratcher. I think I think I think it
Speaker 1: was just a somewhat exaggerated story that grew in the telling.
Speaker 1: So the story actually well let me let me get
Speaker 1: into the history of the story too. So it was
Speaker 1: originally was published in nineteen thirty and then dropped out
Speaker 1: of existence for decades. And in the nineteen sixties a
Speaker 1: guy named Frank Edwards. She wrote a book named Stranger
Speaker 1: than Fiction or Stranger than Science or something like that.
Speaker 1: I remember reading that book when I was a kid. Actually,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember this particular story. So he dredged
Speaker 1: the story up and put it in his book, one
Speaker 1: of those unsolved mysteries kind of thing, and then it
Speaker 1: dropped out of existence again for years, and then in
Speaker 1: the mid seventies, a magazine called Fate published a story
Speaker 1: about it. At that point, that's when things really changed
Speaker 1: a little bit, because somebody read the article and wrote
Speaker 1: in a letter about it to the magazine, and this
Speaker 1: person I can't remember her name, but she claimed to
Speaker 1: have been a UFO abductee, and so she read the
Speaker 1: story and the part and she took great, great exception
Speaker 1: to the story that the Royal Canadian mount of Police
Speaker 1: had not investigated this or denied investigating it, because she
Speaker 1: said that on a ferry ride some years before this,
Speaker 1: she had met a guy who said he worked for
Speaker 1: the Canadian Mounties and that he spent nine years tracking
Speaker 1: this case, and that yeah, yeah, and that was I know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, yeah, yeah, I know. And so at
Speaker 1: that from that point on, of course, now now UFOs
Speaker 1: attached themselves to the story, and so UFOs are all
Speaker 1: an integral part of the story now now anytime, but
Speaker 1: anybody talks about it, it's like, oh what about UFOs
Speaker 1: and and that's and and again six years after that,
Speaker 1: I think it was six seven years after that book
Speaker 1: came out. Actually that actually appended that part about the
Speaker 1: trapper named armand Laurent and he mentioned seeing a UFO
Speaker 1: in the sky. Oh that's yeah, yeah, but the genesis
Speaker 1: was back from this this person's correspondence with this magazine
Speaker 1: who claimed to have talked to a mountee who's spent
Speaker 1: nine years investigating this. But I don't think there's nine
Speaker 1: years of material, and I don't think so is barely
Speaker 1: like what thirty minutes worth of material. Yeah, I fully
Speaker 1: investigated all. Yeah, we've gone through it pretty thoroughly, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine the mount he is getting too excited
Speaker 1: about it. Somebody comes and says, oh my god, my god,
Speaker 1: I ad any week camp and they'd say, yeah, why
Speaker 1: do we care? And that's I'm sure there wasn't a
Speaker 1: nine year investigation. Yeah, I'm sure there wasn't any investigation.
Speaker 1: So anyway, this result it was not a mystery at all.
Speaker 1: It's a fake y. Yeah, it's just kind of just
Speaker 1: I don't I don't, I don't I don't follow a fake.
Speaker 1: I think that there's some like we've talked about, there's
Speaker 1: some seed of truths in there, but I just don't
Speaker 1: know where it is. Steve going in for the underdog
Speaker 1: thing again. You just keep being the name there. That's
Speaker 1: crazy Nancy naysayer here. Yeah, well, I'm gonna go with
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with my theory, which is just this
Speaker 1: guy was drinking. This guy was drinking beers in a
Speaker 1: bar next to this porter and started telling this story
Speaker 1: about how he came across an abandoned Innywit village. He
Speaker 1: was creeped out by it. And then the reported thought,
Speaker 1: we're gonna I'm gonna drag a story out of this
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna jazz it up just a little bit
Speaker 1: so to get picked up by a whole lot more
Speaker 1: papers and all the more money. Have a new theory.
Speaker 1: Let's past on that, right. This explorer dude, he's like
Speaker 1: sitting next to a reporter and the guys like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a reporter, and he goes, oh you are, I
Speaker 1: have a story to him. Let's see, Yeah, there I was.
Speaker 1: I mean, and surely if he's if he sees inuits
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, he sees these abandoned places, he
Speaker 1: knows they exist. You know, it's perfect. It's the perfect
Speaker 1: mix of the theories. Okay, yeah, I like it. I
Speaker 1: think that's a good one. Or actually, a third theory
Speaker 1: is that he wasn't actually a trapper at all. He
Speaker 1: was a troop of cobra all right. Anyway, So that's it.
Speaker 1: If you want to check out links to the story,
Speaker 1: and we'll have plenty of stuff about there for you
Speaker 1: to look at. Check out our website Thinking Sideways podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. And if you would like to send us
Speaker 1: an email with your own particular theories about the case,
Speaker 1: send us an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com, and also check us out on iTunes and
Speaker 1: on Stitcher. I do hope that somebody out there is
Speaker 1: not as cheap as mean. You pull me up the
Speaker 1: cash for the Toronto Stars Archives site. Yeah maybe that too. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if you're an anyway, and I've mispronounced all the names,
Speaker 1: so I'm really sorry, feel a free to call us
Speaker 1: or send us an email and explain how to pronounce
Speaker 1: that stuff. Anyway. That's it for now, see you next week.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe, so long, Bye bye bye,