Tales of the Headless Valley

Via Wikipedia

Many wilderness areas have disconcertingly ominous names: "Devil's ____," "Death _____, "Skull ____," "Lost _____,"etc., etc., etc.  Pretty ordinary, really.  But when you come across a place that has acquired the nickname of "The Headless Valley," it's worth sitting up and taking notice.

And maybe canceling that camping trip.

The Nahanni Valley is located in Canada's Northwest Territories.  It is a beautiful area, boasting waterfalls, hot springs, a whitewater river, and impressive forests.  It is also very remote, (parts of it are still virtually unexplored,) very hazardous, and--if even a quarter of the legends about the place have any basis in fact--very, very creepy.

It's not too often that you find a place where the presence of Bigfoot is the least strange thing you can say about it.

The most notorious story associated with the valley began--as so many awful things in life begin--with a hunt for wealth.  One summer day in 1900, an Indian named Little Nahanni walked into Fort Liard, Yukon Territory, bearing a satchel filled with gold nuggets.  After a bit of coaxing, he revealed that he had made his find in the valley of the South Nahanni River.

As much as everyone in Fort Liard longed to strike it rich, they sincerely wished Little Nahanni had found a different place to do so.  The Nahanni Valley was a tough, inhospitable region with a remarkably sinister reputation.  The natives believed ghosts of dead warriors stalked the land alongside magical lost tribes and giant man-eating beasts.  Although the white visitors professed to scoff at such tales, few of them showed any desire to test the truth of these legends for themselves.  The area was largely avoided.

Although a close watch was put on Little Nahanni, in the hope that he would lead someone to the exact source of his windfall, he never returned to the valley.  After his gold ran out, he went back to trapping.  For reasons he kept to himself, he did not care to make a second tour of the Nahanni Valley, which really should have told everybody something.

In 1903, a second native appeared at the fort, also bearing an impressive number of gold nuggets.  He was close friends with Murdoch McLeod, the factor at the Hudson Bay trading post, and to him the Indian confided where he had found the gold: Bennett Creek, a tributary of the Flat River in the South Nahanni Valley.  McLeod's three young-adult sons, Willie, Frank, and Charlie, were all experienced outdoorsmen eager for adventure, not to mention wealth.  They resolved to mount an expedition to the valley and find some of this gold for themselves.  In January 1904, the McLeod brothers set off on the long, arduous trek to the Nahanni Valley.  By the spring of that year, they had arrived at the Flat River and set up a sluicing operation, where they found modest success, enough to encourage them to try again the following year.  Charlie McLeod, fortunately for him, declined to make this second journey.  In his place, Willie and Frank enlisted a Scotsman--whose name has been lost to history--and the trio set off for the valley.  They were never seen alive again.

The fate of the three men remained a mystery until 1908, when the remains of the McLeod campsite was discovered upstream from Fort Liard.  Nearby were the skeletons of Frank and Willie.  It was believed they had been shot to death.  Accounts differ on what became of the Scotsman.  Some stories claim he fled to Vancouver, carrying a suspiciously large amount of gold.  Others state that his body was found not far from those of his companions.  Rumors that all the bodies were found decapitated soon gave the area the charming nickname of "Headless Valley."

In 1910, a prospector named Martin Jorgenson chose to ignore the valley's increasingly evil reputation, and went alone into the area to hunt for gold.  The next anyone knew of him was two years later, when his skeleton was found near his burned-out cabin near the mouth of the Flat River.  He had been shot and decapitated.

In 1928, a venturesome woman named Annie Laferte made her own solo trek into the valley.  She never returned.  Her body was never discovered, so it is unknown what happened to her.  However, the natives told a story of seeing a naked woman running up the mountainside, screaming.  "The spirits had taken her," they explained.  Around that same time, a man known as "Yukon Fisher," who had found success prospecting in the valley, also disappeared.  His bones were eventually discovered near Bennett Creek.

The following year, one Angus Hall ventured into the valley and never came out.  All that was ever found of him was one boot print.

In 1931, a fur-trapper named Phil Powers made the questionable decision to go hunting in the valley.  The following spring, four RCMP officers found what was left of Powers in the burned remains of his cabin.  It was never known who killed him, and why.

A few years after Mr. Powers' fiery end, two men named J.H. Mulholland and Bill Epler ventured into the valley hoping to find gold.  It's anyone's guess what they discovered, but it could not have been good, as no trace of either man was ever seen again.  However, during a search for them, the body of another man was discovered.  Lacking his head.  This luckless person's identity remains a mystery.

In 1946, a man named Walter Tulley went to the police stating that while he was in the valley, he had stumbled upon the corpse of a missing prospector named Ernest Savard.  The body was in a sleeping bag, with the head nearly cut off.  As it turned out the corpse was not that of Savard--he turned up alive and well in Yellowstone.  So, who was this latest victim of the Nahanni Valley?  We will never know.  By the 1960s, it was believed that over forty people had vanished in the area.

This was hardly the only weirdness associated with the valley.  It has been said to be home to Bigfoot, as well as a carnivorous bear-like creature scientists believe went extinct in the Pleistocene era.  Some years ago, an ice cave was discovered containing the skeletons of over 100 sheep dating from around 2500 B.C.  (The cave is now known as "The Gallery of Lost Sheep.")  The valley is also reputed to be a hotspot for UFO activity.

The string of gruesome murders and disappearances has led to a host of differing theories about who might have been responsible.  Did a single serial killer stalk the valley for over forty years?  Were UFOs to blame?  Or Bigfoot?  Or ghosts of Indians, determined to protect their land from intruders?  Were all these fatalities completely unrelated?  Or, could the Nahanni Valley simply be, as many still assert, cursed?