Strange Universe: The Lake Anjikuni Disappearance

The haunting disappearance of a large Eskimo settlement near Canada’s Lake Anjikuni is a decades-old staple oddity. Not unlike the US story of the unsolved vanishing of colonial Roanoke Island, this Eskimo incident in Canada’s icy Northwest Territory has remained one of the most conflicted and controversial. Around 1930, a village ranging from 1000-2000 people simply departed this world, and only tottering buildings were discovered soon after by observers. A traditional account of the happening usually goes like this:

In November, 1930, a fur trapper named Joe Labelle made his way on snow shoes to an Eskimo village on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in northern Canada. Labelle was familiar with the village, which he knew as a thriving fishing community of about 2,000 residents. When he arrived, however, the village was deserted. All of the huts and storehouses were vacant. He found one smoldering fire on which there was a pot of blackened stew. Labelle notified the authorities and an investigation was begun, and which turned up some bizarre findings: no footprints of any of the residents were found, if they had vacated the village; all of the Eskimos’ sled dogs were found buried under a 12-foot-high snow drift - they had all starved to death; all of the Eskimos’ food and provisions were found undisturbed in their huts. And there was one last unnerving discovery: the Eskimos’ ancestral graves had been emptied.

Or so the story goes. In other cases, a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman or even multiple officers are said to witness a strange blue light, unlike Aurora Borealis, settling over the area around the time of the incident. The use of the RCMP is interesting, since the official website of the Canadian authority denies the incident altogether, trumping it up as a creation of American author Frank Edwards, who used it in his book, Stranger Than Science, a collection of paranormal incidents. Despite this, the story lives on and is an oft repeated unsolved mystery across the internet.

So far as I’m concerned, it is also an interesting anecdote to the parallel literary development of weird fiction. The frigid territories of North America have always harbored strange legends, catalyzed by some of the most creative minds in supernatural literature. Algernon Blackwood’s Wendigo (Available in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories), August Derleth’s wind walker, Ithaqua...Tekeli-li!

-Grim Blogger