Deep in the Keewatin Barrens of what is now the territory of Nunavut, amid an endless
plain of tundra and muskeg, lies lonely Angikuni Lake, one of a myriad of near-identical watering
holes which dot the historic homeland of the Inuit and Chippewyan Nations.
Although this nondescript body of water, with its resident populations of caribou, black flies,
and tundra wolves, bears no outward characteristic which might distinguish it from its many cousins,
it happens to lie near the junction of two ancient trade routes which connect Hudson’s Bay with the
Arctic Ocean. It also serves as the setting of one of Canada’s spookiest urban legends.
On November 25th, 1930, a disturbing article appeared in the Muncie Evening Press,
a newspaper based out of the city of Muncie, Indiana.
In a front page piece complete with three photos, journalist Emmett E. Kelleher, a reporter for the
Newspaper Enterprise Association based out of the northern frontier city of Le Pas, Manitoba,
described the mysterious disappearance of an Inuit village on the shores of northerly Angikuni Lake.
“Far up in the heart of one of the most lonely places on earth,” Kelleher began, “in the Lake
Angikuni country… a whole tribe of Eskimos has vanished. Somewhere, somehow, the endless
desolation of Canada’s northern Barren Lands has swallowed up to 25 men, women and children.
“It is one of the most puzzling mysteries that has ever come down out of the Arctic.
The news of it has just reached The Pas, on the fringe of civilization.”
Kelleher went on to explain how a white man named Joe Labelle, whom he described as a
“roving trapper of the Barren Lands,” came upon the tribe’s abandoned camp while crossing Angikuni
Lake in his canoe. Long before he paddled to shore, Labelle knew that something was very wrong.
Instead of the lively hum of activity which typically surrounded Inuit camps, the only
humming in evidence was that of black flies, which swarmed about the bodies of seven sled dogs
scattered throughout the grounds. When he hailed the camp’s unseen occupants, he was greeted by two
half-starved huskies, which rose up on skeletal legs and slunk toward him, substituting the lusty
barks by which Inuit sled dogs typically addressed strangers with pitiful whines.
Suspecting that the village had fallen victim to some terrible disease, Labelle walked over to one
of the seven ragged tents that comprised the camp and cautiously drew back its caribou-skin door.
“I’ll admit that when I went in the first tent I was a little jumpy,” he told Kelleher.
“Just looking around, I could see the place hadn’t known any human life for months, and I expected
to find corpses inside. But there was nothing there but the personal belongings of a family.
A couple of deer parkas… were in one corner. Fish and deer bones were scattered about.
There were a few pairs of boots, and an iron pot, greasy and black.
Under one of the parkas I found a rifle. It had been there so long it was all rusty.
The whole thing looked as if it had been left just that way by people who expected to come back.
But they hadn’t come back.” The trapper examined another tent, which
had been torn to ribbons by the wind. Inside, he found three fox skins and a rusty rifle. “Those
two rifles seemed strange,” he said. “The last thing an Eskimo ever parts with is his rifle.”
Try as he might, Labelle was unable to find any clue as to the fate of the vanished Inuit.
There were no signs of trouble or violence. The only thing of interest he noted was an empty stone
cairn by the lake shore, which he tentatively identified as a desecrated Inuit grave.
Labelle told Kelleher that the whole scene brought to mind the Tornrark, an evil spirit
of Inuit legend sometimes depicted as an ugly man with tusks, whose predations the natives
attempted to ward off with charms. This demon is likely an inland iteration of a deity which
the Greenlandic Inuit called Torngarsuk, which some anthropologists have equated with the Devil.
Shaking off the unsettling notion that the village had fallen prey
to that preternatural predator, the trapper caught some fish in the lake,
fed them to the two starving dogs, and fled the area, loath to spend the night there.
“Joe Labelle admits that stumbling upon the abandoned village gave him the creeps,” Kelleher
concluded. “A man doesn’t get the creeps readily when he spends months at a time trudging by his
lone across the Barren Lands, where there is never a house or a human being to break the white-rimmed
silence; but Joe Labelle got creepy, just the same. The empty sky and the silent, rocky plain
held a mystery, and the trapper didn’t like it.” Following his disturbing discovery, Labelle
travelled throughout the surrounding tundra, visiting several Inuit camps along the way.
None of the natives he met were able to shed any light on the fate of their missing kinsmen,
supposing, as he had, that they had probably been taken by the Tornrark.
Certain that the villagers had met some untimely end, the trapper proceeded to Le Pas, where he
reported his discovery to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. With the help of local trappers,
the Mounties launched a search for the missing Inuit, but were unable to find any sign of them.
The only potential clues they managed to unearth came in the form of a 10-year-old Inuit boy of
mysterious origins who wandered into another Inuit camp 150 miles north of Angikuni Lake,
and an Inuit man named Saumek, who was suspected to know something about the fate of the vanished
villagers. While being treated for frostbite at a Hudson’s Bay Company hospital, Saumek was
interrogated by an interpreter in the Mounties’ employ. “But Saumek refused to talk about it,”
Kelleher wrote, “mentioning Tornrark mysteriously and refusing to answer any questions.”
In the 93 years that have proceeded the publication of Kelleher’s article,
the story of the vanished village of Angikuni Lake has appeared in dozens of books and TV
programs on the unexplained, often being presented as a true historical mystery.
Indeed, many of the story’s trappings are grounded in reality.
Emmett E. Kelleher was a real northern journalist who, despite subsequent disparagements of his
work and character, wrote serious articles on northern Canadian news, covering, for example,
the famous 1929 search for the MacAlpine expedition, a party of aerial prospectors
who became stranded in the middle of the northern tundra during a severe storm.
Joe Labelle was a real trapper who plied his trade in the wilderness north of Flin Flon, Manitoba.
Angikuni Lake is a real lake which does have a mysterious stone cairn on its shore.
This structure, incidentally, was rediscovered by Canadian wildlife
biologist and author Farley Mowat in 1948, who described it in his 1961 book Ordeal by Ice,
writing that it “was not of normal Eskimo construction,” and proposing that it was
erected by either Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Samuel Hearne, who visited the lake in 1770,
or perhaps by Captain Francis Crozier, a member of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, who, in 1848,
vanished without a trace along with 105 of his men somewhere in the Arctic wilderness.
But the story itself, at least according to the RCMP, is a fabrication.
The Mounties’ first public rebuttal to Kelleher’s story was allegedly made less than two months
after the article’s first publishing in the Muncie Evening Press. According to the prolific Canadian
paranormal writer John Robert Colombo, in his 1988 book Mysterious Canada, Sergeant
John Nelson of the RCMP’s Le Pas department investigated the alleged vanishing in the
wake of the story’s circulation and submitted his report on January 5th, 1931. Twelve days later,
RCMP Commissioner Cortlandt Starnes made Nelson’s report public. Although this author
has been unable to locate a copy of the report, Colombo republished excerpts of it in his book.
According to the report, Nelson’s investigation consisted of speaking with a trader named
D. Simons, who operated an independent trading post on the shores of Windy Lake,
about 150 miles south of Lake Angikuni. Simons had not heard any reports of a vanished village from
the reliable white and native trappers with whom he did business, and expressed doubt that such an
event had taken place. Nelson then determined that the photo of the caribou skin tents displayed in
Kelleher’s article did not depict abandoned lodges at Lake Angikuni, but had actually
been taken back in 1909 in Fort Churchill, Manitoba, by an ex-Mountie named P. Rose.
Although Nelson did not visit Lake Angikuni himself, nor interview any of the Inuit in the
area, he was sufficiently confident to conclude his report by declaring that the story was,
to his mind, a work of fiction, adding that “Mr. Kelleher is in the habit of
writing colourful stories of the North, and very little credence can be given to his articles.”
Although Sergeant Nelson’s investigation was arguably far from thorough, it was enough for
the RCMP to close the case on the vanished village of Lake Angikuni. The Mounties’ official position
on the story has been borne out by the responses received by several researchers who have made
formal inquiries into the case over the years, including Ronald G. Dobbins, who was told that
the RCMP could not find any mention of the case in their records, and Dwight Whalen, who included
his own debunking of the Lake Angikuni story in his article “Vanished Village Revisited,” which
was published in the November 1976 issue of the magazine Fate. Today, the RCMP has
a short paragraph on the mystery of Lake Angikuni on their official website, declaring flatly, “The
story about the disappearance in the 1930’s of an Inuit village near Lake Anjikuni is not true.”
Despite its official debunking, the vanished village of Lake Angikuni,
as mentioned, has been repeatedly presented as a genuine historical mystery in both print and
television, often acquiring new details with every retelling. In his 1959 book Stranger Than Science,
for example, American writer and radio broadcaster Frank Edwards wrote that one of the tents
which Labelle examined contained a child-sized sealskin garment in the process of being mended.
The ivory needle used to do the sewing was still embedded in the skin, as if the Inuit
seamstress had hastily abandoned her work. Other supplementary details included a two-week on-site
investigation by the Mounties, who determined that the Inuit had abandoned the village two
months prior to Labelle’s visit “based on the type of berries found in some of the
cooking pots,” and formal autopsies conducted by Mountie pathologists on the dead sled dogs,
all seven of which proved to have died of starvation. Edwards, incidentally,
would later resurrect another controversial tale of the unexplained set in Steep Rock,
Ontario, which some readers may recall from my 2019 book Mysteries of Canada: Volume I.
Subsequent retellings of the story were less conservative in their use of artistic licence.
In some of the many iterations of the tale that have since transformed Kelleher’s article into an
urban legend, Joe Labelle’s discovery coincided with the sighting of a mysterious bullet-shaped
light heading in the direction of the village, reported by trapper Arnauld Laurent and his son;
pots filled with fish were found hanging over long-dead fires, as if they had been abandoned
in the midst of cooking; and the settlement at Lake Angikuni graduated from a camp of 25 to an
Arctic metropolis of 1,200 or 2,000 souls. Sensational embellishments like these make
it easy to accept the official narrative that the tale of the vanished village is
nothing more than a far-flung fable which, as Dwight Whalen put it in his article for Fate
magazine, “an inexperienced trapper told to an imaginative and not too conscientious newsman.”
Nevertheless, in this author’s opinion, at least, the case is not quite as open-and-shut
as the RCMP would have us believe. It is not at all inconceivable that 25 Inuit, compelled
to hastily abandon their camp on account of some extraordinary circumstance, might have lost their
way and perished in the vast Keewatin Barrens. As mentioned, 82 years before the publication
of Kelleher’s article, Captain Francis Crozier and 105 survivors of the disastrous Franklin
expedition, a voyage of artic exploration conducted for the purpose of discovering the
Northwest Passage, vanished without a trace in that very same stretch of wilderness.
It is also not beyond the realm of possibility that news of such an isolated tragedy, which,
by its nature, would lack primary witnesses, had not made its way into the trading room of
D. Simons, 150 miles to the south, at the time of Sergeant Nelson’s investigation.
Even in the 1930s, many Canadian Inuit lived the traditional way, speaking little to no English,
occasionally meting out their own intra-national justice without recourse to the RCMP, and avoiding
conversation on controversial subjects with white men they did not completely trust. The only detail
which casts serious doubt upon the veracity of Kelleher’s story is his description of a
diligent RCMP investigation, which Nelson’s lackluster report inadvertently belies.
Whether merely a Northern yarn or a genuine report overlooked by and understaffed and underfunded
RCMP detachment, the tale of the vanished village of Angikuni Lake remains an excellent campfire
story, and its more imaginative derivatives some of Canada’s greatest urban legends.