We cover a lot of mysterious disappearances on this channel,
each one just as strange and bizarre as the next.
But what happens when not just one person or even a group of people but an entire village
just disappears off the face of the earth with no explanation that makes any kind of sense?
How could something like this possibly happen?
With a person or a couple of people, there is always the possibility of an explanation in the
form of some sort of human element; the person or people had an accident and just haven’t been
found yet or there is a human being responsible for abducting the person or people involved.
Who could be the blame or what could the reasoning possibly be for an entire
town’s worth of people to seemingly be here one minute and gone the next.
As always we may not ever have the exact answer or the right one,
but we can’t just ignore these strange and remarkable events as though they never happened.
Today we bring you the vanishing of the entire village of Angikuni Lake.
Under the light of a full moon on a freezing cold November night in 1930,
a Canadian fur trapper named Joe Labelle decided to stop and take shelter in a
local village where he had stopped and done the same many times before.
Joe knew this particular village would be filled with the delicious smells
of hot meals and the welcoming faces of friendly townspeople.
Anjikuni Village is located at the shore of Anjikuni Lake in Kivalliq Region, Nunavut, Canada.
When he had wandered into the village previously he had estimated about two
thousand to twenty-five hundred residents living there.
He visited many local shops and places to eat and
also made friends with many of the lodgers and residents in general.
It was a friendly village all in all and Joe was looking forward to taking a short respite there.
However, as Joe entered the village he immediately knew that something was wrong.
Joe saw that there was no activity at all.
No smells or sounds and most of all, he noticed there were no people.
Nobody welcomed him or insisted he come in and sit down and eat as was usually the case.
There was nothing at all moving or making a sound in this usually busy little town.
Joe decided to look around and see if he could figure out what in the world was going on and
every hut he went into was stocked with winter provisions and food supplies.
Each house was filled with the normal belongings of the residents like clothes
and bath supplies and recreational materials like books and games for the children.
The men of the town normally kept their rifles stacked up against the doors to
either the front or the back of their homes and in each home, that’s exactly where they stood.
Everything in the town seemed to be perfectly normal,
except that it was completely devoid of actual people.
Even stranger than everything he had already witnessed was the fact that in some of the homes,
there were pots of food still hanging over where a fire had long since gone cold as though the women
of the homes were preparing supper for their families when whatever happened…. Happened.
The kayaks were still out in the backs of all of the homes so it wasn’t like
the entire town all decided to hop in their kayaks and go on a whole town trip.
As strange as that would have been, it would have at least been some
kind of explanation as to what could possibly be going on with this town.
Where were it’s residents and how long had they been gone?
There weren’t even any footprints in the snow, aside from his own,
anywhere in the town to indicate where the Inuits had gone either.
There were no clues at all, as far as Joe could ascertain and
nothing about the scene before him made any sense.
Most likely in some sort of shock and not really knowing what else to do, Joe went to the nearest
telegraph office and sent a message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP for short.
The police arrived and did their own thorough search of the village.
What their investigation uncovered was not only bizarre and shocking but absolutely
horrifying as well. Every single grave in the town’s burial site was empty.
There was no trace of what had happened to the corpses or where they ended up.
Witnesses did come forward during the investigation and claimed that the
earth around the grave was frozen: “as hard as rock.”
These reports also suggest that the marker stones had been stacked in two, neat piles
on either side of the graves, confirming that this was not the work of animals.
They found seven sled dogs who had died from starvation,
buried under the snow, just outside of the town limits.
How did dogs of any kind starve to death when there were huts all around them filled with food?
Did the Inuits purposefully starve to death these dogs who were invaluable to
them and their very livelihood? Why would they do such a thing?
If they hadn’t done it, then what in the world happened?
Many subsequent investigations were conducted but there really wasn’t much to go on.
The only clue they received came when a few of the Mounties stopped on their way to conduct another
investigation at a shanty that was occupied by a man named Armand Laurent and his two sons.
When asked if he or his sons had noticed anything out of the ordinary lately and also after
explaining they were on their way to the Aniyuki village to investigate “a sort of a problem”, the
trapper and his sons recounted an amazing story that they said happened about two months prior.
All three of the men claimed they had spied a bizarre gleaming object
soaring across the sky just a few days before.
Laurent claimed that the enormous, illuminated flying “thing” seemed to change shape before
their very eyes, transforming from a cylinder into a bullet-like object.
He further divulged that this unusual object was flying in the direction of the village at
Anjikuni. Officers at the scene saw things in the sky that were similarly very strange and unusual.
Many of them reported that while they were in the village conducting their investigations,
they saw “odd, bluish lights” pulsating on the horizon right above the village.
They watched in shock and awe until the lights disappeared into the ether,
as it seems the Inuits themselves had done.
Upon questioning every single one of the officers who saw this contested
claims that they were in fact only witnessing the aurora borealis.
The teams at the time which we would today refer to as forensics, or at least the best
they had back then that would most closely resemble them, reported that the town had been
abandoned a full two months before Joe Labelle had come across it that fateful November night.
How is this possible if Joe Labelle found food still burning over dying embers?
It seemed to him like the food was abandoned while being cooked and
the fire was burnt out on it’s own from nobody tending to it.
If it was in fact the case that this entire village full of people had been
missing for two months, then who or what was cooking over their stoves?
Nobody ever found a single trace of these Inuits.
Joe Labelle later would talk to reporters about this horrifying ordeal and state, “I felt
immediately that something was wrong…In view of half-cooked dishes, I knew they had been disturbed
during the preparation of dinner. In every cabin, I found a rifle leaning beside the door
and no Eskimo goes anywhere without his gun… I understood that something terrible had happened.”
Despite many naysayers coming forward and claiming that Joe Labelle was new to the area and had
never stepped foot in this particular village before, nor had he known the population of it,
it’s documented fact that the Mounties did find the Aniyuki village completely deserted, with
clothes in the homes and food hanging over fires which had gone cold, as was originally reported.
The facts of whether or not Joe had ever been there or knew how
many Inuits lived there seem irrelevant to most.
Considering an entire village did, as a matter of fact, disappear all in the same night,
and at the same time, the Laurents claimed to have seen this strange phenomenon in the sky.
Canada boasts the second largest country by mass
but has a population of less than 40 million in the entire country.
This number was a little more than ten million for the entire country in 1931,
just a year after all of this had happened in the Aniyuki village.
That means there was much more land which was uncharted;
isolated and completely uninhabited back in 1930.
Lake Anjikuni is located in the province of Nunavut, which is home to the most northern,
continuously inhabited place in the world.
The settlement of Alert is only 500 miles away from the North Pole.
The fact that something so terrifying and mysterious could happen in a place
so isolated from not only the rest of the world but from the rest of its own
country shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to this community.
To this day there are no updates as to what happened to these
Inuits though theories abound, as they always do.
There are no factual documents or scientific evidence that claims
without a shadow of a doubt what really happened to these villagers.
So what do you guys think happened to these villagers?
Be sure to let us know in the comments down below!
But please keep it friendly and respectful!
I'll talk to you in our next video!
Thank you!