191. Mysteries of Nahanni Valley: Canada’s Cursed National Park

In Canada's Northwest Territories, Nahanni Valley stretches across eleven thousand square miles of pristine wilderness, and it's been swallowing people whole for over a century. From the headless remains of prospectors Willie and Frank McLeod in 1908 to filmmaker Angus MacKenzie, who survived a plane crash and then vanished without his supplies, the valley's death toll has never stopped growing. The Dene people have always known to stay away but, the question is what keeps claiming the men who don't. Love true crime, horror, folklore, and the unexplained? Join us in the Rogue Detecting Society on Patreon. Start for free to stay up to date on all things HSP with our newsletter, bonus content, and more. If you want to dive deeper into a community of fellow darkly curious listeners, upgrade for ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes with topics voted on by members, merch perks, and Patreon-only group chats. High Council members also get Footnotes, our weekly after-show where Kaelyn dives deeper into the episode, recent true crime news, theories, and other scary stories from around the internet. Join free or go paid: https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today, I want to take you on a spooky journey with me through the most cursed piece of land in all of Canada, Nahanni Valley. Maybe you've heard of it before. Sometimes it's referred to as the Valley of Headless Men because of all the skeletons that have been found without their heads inside. But the truth is, that is just scratching the surface of this place, and there are way more mysteries to uncover deep inside. We're going to talk about a guy who went to film a documentary about this place and vanished, leaving some very eerie and confusing clues behind, as well as the most recent unexplainable deaths that happened inside the park. But before we dive in, I just wanted to remind everyone that if you want to get deeper into the Heart Starts Pounding community, the Rogue

• 0:45Kaelyn Moore?

  Detecting Society, I do have two fun things for you all. First up, our book club pick for the spooky season is Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker. The book follows Cora Zhang, a crime scene cleaner in New York City's Chinatown, who starts finding dead bats at every job, right as the Hungry Ghost Festival opens the gates of hell. A very spooky pick for a very spooky season. Grab a copy and then join us on the free tier on Patreon where we're going to talk about the book next month. And also, if you're a paid subscriber on Patreon or on Apple Podcast subscriptions, make sure you listen to the bonus episode that we did last month on Midsummer Folklore and Festivals. It was voted on by the High Council tier on Patreon, and I thought that it was a perfect way to close out our dark summer. Lots of ghost stories, creatures that live in rivers and come out during

• 1:29Kaelyn Moore?

  the summer, as well as midsummer magic rituals that you yourself can perform each summer. All right, lots of good stuff for you all. And with that, let's dive in. There's a stretch of wilderness in Canada's Northwest Territories that almost nobody has ever set foot in, Nahanni Valley. It's 11,000 square miles of forest, canyon, and mountain wrapped around a river called the South Nahanni. And the whole thing is breathtakingly beautiful. The river runs 350 miles, plunging over Virginia Falls, a waterfall that's nearly twice the height of Niagara, before it carves through the canyons with walls thousands of feet high. And here's the thing about Nahanni. It's not empty because it's unreachable. People

• 2:14Kaelyn Moore?

  have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. They're a local tribe called the Denai. 21 tribes of them, actually. They hunted and traded across these lowlands long before Europeans drew a map of it. They know this land better than anyone alive. And even they don't go into this specific valley. For as long as anyone can remember, the Denai have kept to the edges of it. Sure, timber wolves and grizzly bears roam the valley floor, but those aren't what they warn each other about. Nahanni Valley is one of the most beautiful places on earth. UNESCO even made it a World Heritage Site in the 1970s. But it's also the only one that's haunted. And perhaps there's something

• 2:55Kaelyn Moore?

  to be learned from the people that won't go inside of it, because those who enter often never make it back out. On January 5, 1962, a filmmaker named Angus Blake Mackenzie was preparing to head into the Nahanni River Valley for a documentary that he was making. Now, he knew how beautiful this area was, but Mackenzie wasn't going for the beauty. No, he had heard haunting stories of this place for years. He knew that even though it was beautiful, no one would ever go near it. And the native tribes, the Denai, said that there are two things that come for men in the woods of Nahanni Valley. One, either you'll be infected by a madness so visceral that you'll never survive it, or the creatures

• 3:37Kaelyn Moore?

  inside will find you, creatures that few men have lived to tell the tale of. The Denai even called this area Headless Valley because sometimes the bodies of missing men were located, usually without their skulls. Mackenzie was headed into the valley with his camera to see what was really going on out there. If there really were creatures ripping off heads of skeletons inside, he was going to find them and he was going to film them. The film that Mackenzie and his partner, John Langdon, set out to make was tentatively titled Nahanni: The Lure of Gold. And it was going to retell a series of disasters that befell prospectors who tried their luck traveling up the Nahanni River into the uninhabited

• 4:17Kaelyn Moore?

  wilderness beyond looking for gold. At least 20 men had died or vanished in the attempt. And the vanishings made sense. This area is so completely isolated. I mean, the closest city is Yellowknife, which is 310 miles away. If anything were to happen to you inside of those woods, it was unlikely that you would ever be found. You would be extremely lucky if someone came upon your body. And still, on that cold winter day, Mackenzie took off in a small Cessna plane towards Nahanni to meet John Langdon in the wilderness. Now, later that day, John waited for his friend's arrival, but he waited and waited and waited, and Mackenzie never showed up. Now, not really knowing what else to do and

• 5:01Kaelyn Moore?

  not having any way to get a hold of his friend, John went ahead and started the documentary himself. He thought maybe Mackenzie had just been delayed and would join him eventually, but days passed, and there was no sign of his friend. Seven months later, in early August, John Langdon was fully just making this documentary alone after Mackenzie never materialized. And one day, he was flying in a spotter aircraft over the mountains, collecting footage for B-roll, when all of a sudden, his camera caught something, something metallic reflecting the sun. It was a crashed plane down below, his friend Angus Mackenzie's

• 5:41Kaelyn Moore?

  Cessna. John called it in, and soon a search party was swarming the mountain. And maybe they thought that they would find a crashed plane and Mackenzie's body, but I don't think anyone was prepared for what they actually found. Now, there was a makeshift camp erected near the plane, and not only that, but a tree beside this tent had 51 notches in the bark, as if Mackenzie had survived the crash and had counted 51 days on this tree. They also found both of Mackenzie's notebooks. The ink had been washed off in the particularly wet spring, but a forensic team was able to lift the contents of the diaries. They learned that a little ways into the flight, he made a mistake, and he turned too soon

• 6:23Kaelyn Moore?

  and almost flew straight into the mountain. He attempted to pull up, but a tree sheared off the Cessna's left wing and sent him plummeting into the slope. Mackenzie was very lucky, though. He climbed out almost completely uninjured. Both of his thumbs were sprained, and he had a wrenched back, but otherwise, he was fine. There was constant wind and snow. I mean, it was the dead of winter, but he had reason for optimism. There was plenty of food in the plane that he had. He also had a hunting rifle and an axe to cut firewood. He honestly could not have been more prepared to survive in the wilderness. The diary went on to say that he spent the next couple of days building a shelter near the downed aircraft. He called for help using the aircraft's radio, which was still working.

• 7:06Kaelyn Moore?

  Using a pen and a small notepad, he also kept a careful journal of his daily activities and his plans for survival. By January 21, two weeks and two days after the accident, he made up his mind. He was going to hike for a cabin that he knew was in the area. And he knew about this cabin because he had heard legends about it. And it was actually a cabin that was supposed to be featured in his documentary called Starvation Cabin. One of the stories Mackenzie wanted to explore in his documentary had happened barely two years earlier. In September of 1959, five prospectors from Yellowknife went into the valley to look for gold near McLeod Creek. They had a cabin, they had supplies, they

• 7:46Kaelyn Moore?

  were prepared to hunker down for this winter. But that fall, they made a mistake. They shot moose and caribou without having a hunting license, and when authorities found out, they confiscated all of the meat, literally all of it. Officials checked that the men had enough store-bought food to last until the January supply plane, and then they left. And that January plane never came. The men waited. January turned into February. February became March. Their food ran out, and something started to run out with it. On March 17, 1960, one of the men, a guy named Alex Meeksonen, he walked out of the cabin into the woods,

• 8:28Kaelyn Moore?

  carrying the group's dynamite. He never came back, but the men inside the cabin heard a loud blast in the distance. After his death, two more of the group set out through the snow to find help, and they were never seen again. When rescuers finally reached the cabin, they found the last two men barely alive, starved down to the skin and bone. The log structure where they spent that winter got a new name, starvation cabin. Now, Mackenzie wasn't low on food or supplies, but he felt like a better shelter would ensure that he could survive until the snow melted. And plus, this cabin was only 10 miles away, which he could make in about a day's time if he prepared accordingly.

• 9:11Kaelyn Moore?

  So he spent much of the following week blazing trails in the snow and wilderness and preparing to set out. But he would never make it. And the stories that we have from his diary over the week he spent preparing to go add to the mystery of what happened to him. So on January 28th, he wrote in his diary that he saw an approaching aircraft. He waved at the oncoming plane, certain that someone had seen him. The plane just passed overhead and it moved on. He wrote in his diary, quote, "I went back and sobbed the story into the radio, but no one heard." By that point, he still had enough food to last him 150 days, and he attempted to signal for help again, mentioning that many times he saw rescue planes flying overhead.

• 9:53Kaelyn Moore?

  He lit signal flares that he had in the plane and he spelled out a giant SOS in the snow. But somehow, none of the planes passing overhead saw him or the flares or the SOS sign. By February, his toes had turned black with frostbite, but he did manage to treat them. The worst toll seemed to be psychological, like the madness that the Denai wrote about. At one point, he wrote, quote, "I heard voices and then I discovered I was talking to myself." Now, by day 46, Mackenzie was losing hope. He stopped seeing rescue aircraft overhead and fatigue seemed to be setting in as well as losing a little bit of his mind.

• 10:38Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, the diary abruptly cuts off after February 20th. His last entry is, quote, "The sooner I get there and tramp out a big SOS in the snow, the better. Maybe I'll be seeing you before June. It's not snowing now and I need wood. So long for a while." And after that, the entries stop. But that was on day 46, and there were 51 notches in the tree. What was strange to those who were looking for him was none of this really added up. It didn't add up that he left to go to starvation cabin because his body wasn't there. It wasn't along the way. So there's a chance that maybe an animal got to him on his way to the cabin. But there wasn't even evidence that he left to go to the cabin in the first place. He hadn't taken any of his food or supplies.

• 11:24Kaelyn Moore?

  The only things that were missing were his rifle and an axe. Otherwise, it was as if he simply vanished. Now, if he had been attacked by a bear or a wolf at the campsite, the axe and the rifle would still be there. And if he had finally gone for starvation cabin, he would have brought his diaries and more food supplies. And also because of the amount of food that he had on him, it didn't make sense that he went out to hunt for caribou or wolves or something that was in the woods. In a quote for the newspaper, Mrs. Mackenzie, his wife, said that her husband was prone to sleepwalking. He would walk sometimes for hours in his sleep if he wasn't led back to bed. So she always wondered if that's what happened to him one night. But again, would he have taken his gun in his sleep?

• 12:10Kaelyn Moore?

  These are all just theories, but we'll never truly know because no trace of Mackenzie was ever found. And to the people who knew this valley best, this was a tale as old as time. People had been vanishing from the valley for generations. And now, Mackenzie was another man on the ever-growing list that started being kept in the early 1900s. In the early 19th century, there were only two ways into the valley. You could travel through intense whitewater rapids or travel overland across impossibly steep mountains. Either route could be just as fatal as it was beautiful. And most men chose to steer clear. But those that did make the journey went for one reason and one reason only, and that was gold.

• 12:55Kaelyn Moore?

  In 1897, a small group of men, maybe five or six of them, ventured into the Nahanni Valley to find gold. We don't know much about them, but they're the first prospectors recorded vanishing in the area. This was during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush out west. So perhaps these men felt like they had a better chance finding gold where there was just less competition. Regardless, they were never seen again. And their disappearance is barely a footnote in local history. The only evidence that they'd ever existed were a series of cabins that they'd erected along the river for shelter. Their disappearance, though, started a pattern that continued for the first half of the 20th century. When men went into the Nahanni Valley and seemed to get swallowed whole.

• 13:38Kaelyn Moore?

  In the spring of 1907, an empty canoe was found drifting along the South Nahanni River. It had been washed there by the yearly snow melts, and it was evidence of yet another expedition gone wrong. The canoe belonged to Willie and Frank McLeod, brothers who went upriver sometime in 1904 or 1905. They were both Métis, men of mixed Native and Caucasian ancestry, and they were convinced that there was gold to be found in the mountains. Their younger brother Charlie heard that their canoe had been found, and he started gathering a search party to go find them. The following spring, he traveled upriver with five other men, including his brother Danny and a frontiersman named Poolefield.

• 14:19Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, Charlie knew that Will and Frank had been on the trail of Nahanni Gold for almost five years. In 1900, they had unearthed nuggets of gold by panning in the riverbanks. And what they found was known as placer gold. It's just the gold that breaks away from rock thanks to erosion and weather patterns. It's very easy to get. So Willie and Frank went out on another expedition, this time with a steamboat engineer that they had met named Robert Weir. And nobody had seen or heard from them since 1905. And then their empty canoe was found in the spring of 1907. In May of 1908, Charlie McLeod's company found some evidence of an encampment in a valley beyond Nahanni River's first canyon.

• 15:02Kaelyn Moore?

  By the side of the river, there was a small man-made clearing among the trees. The party stepped out of their boats onto the riverbank to investigate. If there had been a campsite there, it was long gone. Besides the cut trees, the only evidence remaining was a plank of wood with a short message penciled into it that just read, "We have found a fine prospect." The handwriting on this board was confirmed to belong to one of the McLeod brothers. They continued upriver towards the very tip of the valley. And just before they would have reached the second canyon, they found an old campsite. There was a long burnt-out campfire and a pair of rotting woolen blankets. Charlie stepped forward and grabbed the blankets, afraid of what he would find underneath.

• 15:47Kaelyn Moore?

  He pulled them away and revealed two skeletons. One was lying there peacefully, as if they had just died in their sleep. But the other one was different. Its arm was reaching out towards a spruce tree where his rifle was, now long rusted over. Was he trying to grab the rifle to shoot at something? But strangest of all, the skeletons were perfectly intact, except that both of them were missing their skulls. Now, based on a ring and a pocket watch, Charlie McLeod was able to identify the remains as his brothers Willie and Frank. But where was Robert Weir, the third man in their expedition?

• 16:30Kaelyn Moore?

  The section of river where the McLeod brothers had been found became known as Dead Men Valley. And the fine prospect that they had written about, you know, even though there was no gold found on or around their bodies, locals became convinced that they had left behind a gold mine in the mountains, just waiting for someone brave enough to find it. After burying both of his brothers, Charlie sent word to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the Mounties, and they opened a murder investigation, believing that the two brothers had been killed for their gold. But even so, certain details never were quite right about this story. If it was a simple murder for greed, why had they been beheaded?

• 17:12Kaelyn Moore?

  And also, how had they been beheaded? And where were their skulls? The decomposed nature of the bodies made it really hard to tell, but some retellings of the story would maintain that it seemed as if the heads had been torn off the bodies rather than severed by an axe or a blade. And then, in 1909, a local Denai man reported an unidentified skeleton three miles south of Dead Men Valley. The Mounties assumed that this was Robert Weir's body, since there was no gold on him. They were content to say that it wasn't a robbery after all. An accident had befallen the expedition. They had lost their canoe, and the three men had separated to find their own ways to safety,

• 17:55Kaelyn Moore?

  all starving along the way. And then they closed the case. The public, especially Charlie McLeod, found this resolution deeply dissatisfying. Three dead men, two missing heads, and one skeleton that was reaching for a rifle. "No," Charlie said. "Something happened to these guys. There was some sort of attack." Though, from what, he just couldn't say. There was no animal that he knew of that would have only taken the skulls. Though, according to Charlie, the story didn't end there. Years later, in 1926, he was visiting a fur trader in Edmonton. He struck up a conversation with another customer, mentioning the deaths of his brothers Willie and Frank.

• 18:39Kaelyn Moore?

  And the stranger confided in him that he was actually the man who killed him. Now, could it really be? Was this man really Robert Weir? Charlie McLeod revealed his true identity, and the man just turned around and fled. Eventually, Charlie was able to track him down to a farm in Alberta. And when the man who said he was Robert Weir saw him coming, he fled into a barn. All Charlie heard was one single gunshot and then the sound of hay starting to catch fire. The sparks from his pistol had ignited the hay inside, and it burned the entire barn down around him. And so, we'll probably never get a true answer to the story. If that really was Robert and he did kill the two brothers,

• 19:24Kaelyn Moore?

  where did their heads go? And who the hell was the other skeleton that they found? And if Robert did kill the men in an isolated fit of greed or jealousy, then why did veteran frontiersmen keep disappearing up in the Nahanni Valley under strange circumstances?

• 19:47Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, when we were researching the story, the most recent mysterious Nahanni deaths that me and researcher Rob could find were in 2005. And unlike the prospectors and the trappers, this one is not just a frontier legend. The people who lost someone are still here and they are still asking a lot of questions. So on June 12th, 2005, two men from Fort Simpson, David Horsey, who was 60 years old, and his friend Frederick Hartzesty, they went out to stay at a cabin that belonged to their friend Rod Gunderson. It was about 75 miles northwest of town, near the North Nahanni River. Both men were very experienced bushmen. This was their country. It's where they would go out and hunt and explore and spend the weekend. They knew this land very well.

• 20:32Kaelyn Moore?

  And Rod saw them arrive at that cabin that day before he took off on a trip of his own. Now, four days later, Rod came back. Smoke was still rising from the chimney. There were a couple of small fires burning nearby, like little campfires. Rod noticed that the cabin door was locked. When he went inside, he saw that it was stocked with food and with firewood. And the men's firearms were exactly where he saw them, placed them as they went inside the cabin when they arrived. It was the picture of two people who had just been in the cabin. And yet, David and Frederick were nowhere to be found. Now, two lifelong woodsmen don't just walk into this valley without their rifles.

• 21:16Kaelyn Moore?

  So whatever happened in those four days must have happened really fast, like fast enough that neither man took the one thing that you never leave behind. The RCMP joined the search two days later, on June 18th. And then, on June 23rd, five days in, with both men still missing, the Mounties stepped back from leading it. And from that point on, it was just the residents of Fort Simpson and the men's own families walking into the bush, looking for them. And eventually, you know, tragically, they found something. June 27th, in the thick brush about two miles from the cabin is where they found David. He had burns on his hands and arms that no one could explain.

• 21:58Kaelyn Moore?

  However, the coroner ruled that David had died of hypothermia, but his family just didn't buy that. David was really experienced. He had a fire back at the cabin. How would he have died of hypothermia? And also, this was June. His family was so confused how he died of hypothermia in June. Now Frederick was found a few weeks later, on July 8th, and he was floating in the North Nahanni River, 12 miles from the cabin. He had drowned. But here's the detail that really stayed with the searchers. He was found in a stretch of river that they had already covered multiple times, both by canoe and on foot. The official findings seemed to raise more questions than they answered, especially for the families.

• 22:43Kaelyn Moore?

  David's stepbrother Joe was part of the search party. And he said that there were things that they found at the cabin that never made it into the official report, like bullet marks everywhere. He said there was even a gunshot hole in the floor. And when he went back to the RCMP and asked them to keep investigating, he said he was told that they couldn't because the scene had been contaminated by the search party. The search party that was only out there because the police had stepped back. And Frederick's brother, Robert, says that the family found Fred's shirt afterwards, and it had a large hole torn through it. David's sister, Rosemary, put the whole mystery into one sentence that we found.

• 23:26Kaelyn Moore?

  She said, quote, "How could two men in one weekend both die? One in the river and one in the bush?" Nobody has answered her, but their families still believe that something happened at that cabin, that those two men just didn't wander off and die of misadventure. And they really believe that someone knows something. In 2018, that's 13 years later, the families were still petitioning to have this case reopened. And hopefully, one day, we'll have an answer. Now, Nahanni Valley would have regular victims over the following decades from the turn of the century. In early 1922, a trapper named John O'Brien built a cabin for himself in the South Nahanni Valley.

• 24:11Kaelyn Moore?

  He set up a trap line and he prepared to harvest fur for the winter. On January 27th, he left his cabin to come check the trap line, but he never came back. A month later, other trappers in the area found his body crouched by a campfire, matches in hand. It was as if he had just been flash frozen. While the cause of death in this case was fairly obvious, no one could understand how O'Brien was caught so off guard by the weather. And then, in 1932, a woman named Miss Swenson arrived at Fort Lyrd in great distress. She told the Mounties that she was supposed to meet her fiance, Phil Powers, that spring to get married. He had spent the previous winter fur trapping in the Nahanni Valley, and he had never returned.

• 24:55Kaelyn Moore?

  The Mounties went upriver, looking for his cabin. Poole Field, who aided in the search for the McLeod brothers, actually joined them along the way, and he helped guide them through the area. Along the river, they found a series of animal corpses caught in traps that had never been harvested, as if someone had laid those traps but never came back to collect what they had caught. Following this neglected trap line, they found the remains of a cabin that Phil Powers had built. It had completely burned to the ground. There really wasn't much left in the wreckage, just ash, bones, and some porcelain dishware that had melted together in the fire. No one could locate his skull amongst all the bones they found.

• 25:39Kaelyn Moore?

  It might have just turned to ash in the fire, even though fires have to burn really, really hot for that to be possible. Some retellings say that his revolver was still clutched in his skeletal hands, and that every round had been fired. But most strangely of all, Powers had left a supply cache not far from the cabin. It had been untouched by the flame or by any scavengers that passed through. And nailed to one of the support poles was a piece of wood that had a message penciled on it. It just said, "Phil Powers, his finnis, August 1932." The message didn't really make any sense. I've read it a couple of times. I don't really know what it means.

• 26:19Kaelyn Moore?

  By the state of the remains, the fire must have consumed the cabin sometime in the winter of 1931. They think that maybe Powers was predicting when he would be finished with his work because it said August 1932. Or, you know, maybe someone wrote that message for him. And it didn't end there. Even the most experienced outdoorsmen seemed prone to going mad in Headless Valley. In late 1935, bush pilots Bill Epler and Joe Mulholland flew in to open their own independent trading post. Failing to catch enough animals for the fur they needed, they traveled even further upriver. In spring of 1936, their cabin was found burnt to the ground, and no bodies were found within.

• 27:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Then, in 1945, Ernest Savard was found dead in his bed with his head partially severed. In June of 1946, 35-year-old prospector John Patterson split from his party and then vanished without a trace. And then, in the fall of that year, the body of another man, John Shebeck, was found in his cabin, torn to pieces by local wildlife. His journal showed that he spent 43 days without food. The Nahanni Valley has this sort of magnetism to it. It draws men seeking adventure and riches. And not all of those men die or disappear. I mean, some people, like we've mentioned Poole Field, spend a lot of their time and lives in the Nahanni Valley without any incident.

• 27:43Kaelyn Moore?

  So maybe it is just nature taking its toll on unprepared people. I mean, inevitable accidents happen when you're alone in the elements, separated from civilization. Or, maybe there is an answer that has been here the whole time. And according to some, the truth is not just misadventure. The Denai people have always known about the dangers of Nahanni Valley. If the prospectors listened to their warnings, maybe they would have kept their heads. We've talked a lot about the prospectors' experience of the Nahanni Valley, but that's the outsider's perspective. Denai oral tradition stretches back centuries into the past, before the first outsiders even set foot in the valley.

• 28:25Kaelyn Moore?

  Some people think that their stories go as far back as the Stone Age, for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. The Denai inhabited the lowlands near the Nahanni Valley, but never the valley itself. The valley was the home of the Nahha. They were the first tribe in the area. They were described as being aggressive and dangerous to their neighbors. And they would conduct regular raids on the other tribes. We have oral tradition from those other tribes that have described this. They would strike fast and then vanish back into caves along the mountains. They were gone as fast as they were there. In the Denai language, the Nahha are referred to by a couple of different things, usually as "the enemy." Also, they're known as "the people over there far away,"

• 29:07Kaelyn Moore?

  "the people of the setting sun," or "the people who speak like ducks." Every summer, the Nahha would attack. And eventually, the Denai decided they just had to fight back. They gathered a war party to take over and finally fight the Nahha. They ventured north into the valley, deep, deep into Nahha territory. The longer they walked, the stranger their expedition seemed, because they didn't see a single enemy. Finally, one of them spotted smoke from a campfire, and they realized, "This is it. We are headed into war." The war party converged upon the campsite and found one of the Nahha villages, but it was completely deserted.

• 29:47Kaelyn Moore?

  The Nahha, at least according to the Denai who would have understood the Nahha's migration patterns, had simply vanished without a trace. They should have been at this campsite. By the time the European colonists arrived in the area in the early 19th century, the Nahha were just a distant memory. A Hudson's Bay Company clerk wrote in January of 1807, quote, "This tribe has abandoned the country on account of the encroachments of its present possessors." This casual mention is the first written record that we have of the Nahha. And there are many theories about what happened to them. Some people say that they might have been massacred, or maybe they died off during a very harsh winter. Others say they've simply migrated away.

• 30:30Kaelyn Moore?

  And one theory holds that they traveled south to the Great Plains and actually became the Navajo people. This theory is based on linguistic evidence, actually, because apparently the Navajo language is very similar. Whether they left or whether they disappeared, they were not the only ones living in that valley, if local folklore is to be believed. And the other inhabitants seemed far older and far more dangerous.

• 30:59Kaelyn Moore?

  Dene legends tell stories about the Nahanni, which is a race of giants that live in the Nahanni Valley. They are dormant during the winters, but from the spring through the fall, they are to be feared. You know one if you saw one. They are enormous. They're described as being hairy with red eyes and these gorilla-like arms. It's kind of like a local version of Bigfoot. Now, we have a number of written accounts that tell us belief in the Nahanni was palpable and very present in the valley. Both Dene and the white explorers have reports of finding unnaturally large footprints in the region, and Dene tribesmen would sometimes move camp entirely to avoid encounters with what they described as wandering Nahanni.

• 31:43Kaelyn Moore?

  One trader mentioned a group of Dene firing muskets into the woods to ward off Nahanni that were passing too close to their encampment. And this belief is perhaps why, at least according to Dene language expert Alan Adam, the old native word for the Nahanni River, Nah-adi, means river of giants. And it's easy to write the Nahanni off as a primitive superstition. And that's what a lot of explorers in the area did. But what makes the Nahanni something more than just that is that their description remains very remarkably consistent throughout the Northwest Territories and beyond. Some of these stories of the Nahanni come from as far west as Alaska. Anthropologists tend to say that the Nahanni is just a boogeyman story like any other.

• 32:27Kaelyn Moore?

  Perhaps it was like a relic or a folk memory of hostile encounters with another tribe, which, you know, has maybe grown over time into tales of monsters in the woods. In this view, it would be even seen as a continuation of the Nahha legend. The long-lost tribe turned from a real group of enemies into a monster to be feared in the woods. But local legend blames the beheading of Willie and Frank McLeod on the Nahanni, creatures powerful enough to tear a man's head off of his shoulders. There's also a 1954 edition of the Journal of American Folklore that describes the native belief in something called the Naka. They say that they're humans who lived apart from other Dene, hiding underground during the winter months.

• 33:10Kaelyn Moore?

  The article says that there are no female Naka, only men, who steal women away from the Dene to become their wives. And they are also said to kidnap children. You know, since it's from the 1950s, that article is probably not the most carefully considered breakdown of Dene folklore. But it does show us the ways that these stories merge and change between tellings. The Naka could also be a version of the Nahanni, and it also could be a relic of the stories that were told about the Nahha tribe. But wild men are not the only culprit that we have for the disappearances and deaths in the valley, at least according to local legend. In 1965, a man named Frank Graves traveled into the Nahanni Valley, not for gold, but for a scientific expedition. Officially, he said that his purpose was to gather lichen

• 33:55Kaelyn Moore?

  and other plant samples from an uninhabited part of the wilderness. But really, he was there because of his lifelong obsession with Nahanni folklore. He wanted to find monsters. And we have his journal from his expedition. And hidden deep within the pages is a story of a sighting that he had in the valley while he was hunting with a Dene tracker. And it reads, "An enormous white thing that I at first thought must be a polar bear just sort of wandered out of the trees." It wasn't a bear. It looked more like a gigantic dog. It stood straight up on rather long legs, more like a dog or a wolf. I had seen plenty of wolves, and some of them are enormous enough up there.

• 34:37Kaelyn Moore?

  But this thing was 20 times the size of any wolf I had ever heard of. By a sort of reflex action, I fired at it, and it was less than 20 paces away and only partly screened by little bushes. I hit it with two barrels of ball shot, and it didn't even jump, but turned away from me and just walked back into the forest. I reloaded and fired again, and I know I hit it in the rear, but it just kept on walking. Shortly afterwards, my native friend bobbed up, asking what I had got. I didn't know what to say for a bit, but when I told him, we did another of our famous disappearing acts. And this time, we loaded the boats and pushed off upriver, real fast. Now, whatever this thing was, it sounds like they were not equipped to capture it.

• 35:22Kaelyn Moore?

  But also, can I just interject? If you're gonna go into a land that's not your own to study the folklore and the creatures, don't shoot at them. Now, what he had seen was called a Wahila, and it's very big in cryptozoology circles, I've learned. It's a kind of enormous Arctic wolf, which appears in legends across the Northwest Territories. It's not just Dene, it's not just Nahanni. The name is not of native origin. It was actually coined by a biologist, Ivan T. Sanderson, in 1974. He had gathered plenty of stories of men encountering this beast, from the Nahanni all the way to northern Ontario. And in May of 2018, a Montana rancher claimed that he actually shot and killed a similar creature on his property. These people need to stop shooting at this thing.

• 36:07Kaelyn Moore?

  Sanderson and others theorize that the Wahila might be a prehistoric creature that's actually being kept isolated inside of the Nahanni Valley. But, you know, this is also not the only prehistoric being that Graves spotted during his 1965 trip. On that same trip, Graves spent a lot of time with the locals, both Dene and also veteran explorers known as sourdoughs in the area. And his interest in cryptids led to them telling him stories of sightings, some as recent as 1964. Not of Wahila, though, but a similar creature to the Nahanni. It was one called the Nukluk. Like the Nahanni, Nukluk's are sort of proto-human, but they have short statures rather than giant.

• 36:52Kaelyn Moore?

  The stories that I have found of them tend to depict them as being really easily frightened, but also very peaceful. The man who saw one in April of 1964 said it was, quote, "A man-shaped creature who was rather strong and sported a long, dark beard. He wasn't wearing any type of clothing and carried no weapon. As his group approached the unidentified humanoid, it growled at them and then fled." So, a little bit like a gnome, it sounds like. But this all leads to the final question I have, which is, are these creatures responsible for the deaths and disappearances that happened in the valley? And I think it really depends on who you ask and which story you're talking about. The Dene believe that the Nahanni may have been responsible for the headless bodies found throughout the region.

• 37:37Kaelyn Moore?

  But the families of David Horsey and Frederick Hardisty think that they may have just come upon another person out in the forest, and some sort of foul play happened. But the unknowable nature of this valley keeps it at an arm's length from even our modern understanding of nature. Nahanni is the only UNESCO site that's supposedly haunted. And even with planes, helicopters, radios, and cell phones, it is still extremely dangerous to enter. And whether you believe that there are unknowable creatures deep inside, the park is littered with names of dead men and women who could not escape the so-called curse of Nahanni. There's McLeod Creek, named for the McLeod brothers. There's also O'Brien's Mountain, named for the man who froze to death.

• 38:23Kaelyn Moore?

  There's also May Creek, named after a woman who vanished without a trace after catching the madness of the valley, they say. Everywhere you go, there is a reminder of the mystery that the valley holds. But now, I turn it over to you guys. What do you think? What could really be lurking inside of Nahanni Valley? I'm so curious. You can reach out wherever you listen. I always love reading through your thoughts, theories, comments, feedback, all of that. I will be back here next week with another story for you all. And until then, stay curious.

• 38:57Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Stars Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Stars Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Rob Teamstra. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jurnigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstarspounding.com.