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.
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SOURCES
TIME MAGAZINE – Canada: Northwest Territories, Home of Devils? (Jan 19, 1947!)
Legends of Nahanni Valley by Hammerson Peters. Published 2018.
Nakanni: The Wildmen of the North - excerpt published online by Peter’s.
The Haunting History of this Canadian national Park
The Romance of the Alaska Highway by Philip Godsell. Published 1944.
Contemporary Folk Beliefs of a Slave Indian Band by June Helm MacNeish. Published 1954, Journal of American Folklore. Accessed via JSTOR.
Poole Field’s Letters. Accessed via JSTOR.
https://thenorthernreview.ca/index.php/nr/article/download/1163/1337/2901
Ancient Origins – Valley of Headless Men: Mysterious Decapitations in Canada’s Nahanni Valley
https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/pfcocafrl-spotlight-the-valley-of-the-headless-men.6817/
Waheela
https://mysteriesofcanada.com/nwt/waheela-the-great-white-wolf-of-northern-canada/
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/waheela-folklore
Horesay and Hardisty disappearance
Angus Blake Mackenzie
RCMP Report – March, 1963, “Interesting Cases” (Mackenzie bit begins on page 63)
Summary blog: https://www.explorenorth.com/library/aviation/cffyn-crash-nwt-1962.html
Diary of a Mystery by Edward Romaine: 1, 2, 3. Sept. 21, 1963
https://uphere.ca/articles/secrets-nahanni
TRANSCRIPT
There's a stretch of wilderness in Canada's Northwest Territories that almost nobody has ever set foot in. Nahanni Valley. Its Eleven thousand 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 nearly twice the height of Niagara — before carving through canyons with walls thousands of feet high.
And here's the thing about the Nahanni: it isn't empty because it's unreachable. People have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years — they’re called the Dene. twenty-one tribes of them, hunted and traded across these lowlands long before any European drew a map. They know this land better than anyone alive.
And they don't go into the valley.
For as long as anyone can remember, the Dene have kept to the edges. sure,Timber wolves and grizzly bears roam the valley floor — but those aren't what their stories warn about.
The Nahanni is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in the 1970s.
But It might also be the only one that's haunted. And perhaps there’s something to be learned from the people who wont go inside. Because those who enter, often never come back out.
On January 5th, 1962, a filmmaker named Angus Blake MacKenzie was preparing to head into the Nahanni River Valley for a documentary he was making.
He knew how beautiful the 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 go near it.
The native tribes, or Dene, saidy there’s two things that come for men in those woods
Either you’ll be infected by a madness so visceral you’ll never survive it. Or the creatures inside will find you. Creatures that few men have lived to tell the tales of.
They even called it “Headless Valley” because sometimes the bodies of the missing were located, but usually, it was without their skulls.
Mackenzie was headed into the valley with his camera to see what was really going on, If there really were creatures in there, he was going to film them
The film that MacKenzie & Langdon set out to make, tentatively titled Nahanni – The Lure of Gold, was going to retell a series of disasters that befell prospectors who tried their luck traveling up the Nahanni river, into the largely uninhabited wilderness beyond. At least 20 men had died or vanished in the attempt
And the vanishings made sense. this area is also completely isolated. The closest city is Yellowknife, 310 miles away. If anything were to happen to you inside those woods, it was unlikely you’d ever be found.
But still, That cold, winter day, Mackenzie took off in a small cessna plane towards Nahanni to meet the other filmmaker on the project, John Langdon.
That day, John awaited his friends arrival, But, he waited and waited and waited, and Mackenzie never showed up.
Now, not knowing what to do, and not really having anyway to get ahold of his friend, John went ahead and started the documentary. Thinking maybe Mackenzie had just been delayed and he 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. When all of a sudden, his camera caught something. Something metallic reflecting in the sun. It was a crashed plane. His friend Angus Mackenzie’s Cessna.
John called it in and Soon, a search party was swarming the mountain.
And maybe they thought they’d find a crashed plane and Angus’s body. But I don’t think anyone was prepared for what they actually saw….
There was a makeshift camp erected near the plane. And not only that, but A tree beside this tent had fifty-one notches in the bark, as if Mackenzie had survived and had counted 51 days They found both Mackenzie’s notebooks — the ink had washed off in the spring thaw, but a forensic team was able to lift the contents of the diary.
They read that A little ways into the flight, he made a mistake, turning too soon and almost flying straight into a mountain in the clouds. He attempted to pull up, but a tree sheared off the Cessna’s left wing and sent him plummeting into the slope.
Mackenzie was lucky. He climbed out almost completely uninjured. Both his thumbs were sprained and he had a wrenched back, but otherwise he was fine. There was constant wind and snow, it was the dead of winter, but he had reason for optimism. He had plenty of food, a hunting rifle, and an ax to cut firewood. He couldn’t be more prepared to survive in the wilderness.
The diary said that he spent the next couple of days building a shelter near the downed aircraft, calling for help using the aircraft’s radio. Using a pen and a small notepad, he kept a careful journal of his daily activities and plans for survival.
By January 21st, two weeks and two days since the accident, he’d made up his mind: He would hike for a cabin that he knew was in the area, because it was a cabin that he had heard legends about. One that was supposed to be featured in his documentary.
Starvation cabin.
One of the stories MacKenzie wanted to explore had happened barely two years earlier — and it was still an open wound.
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 were prepared to hunker down for the winter.
But that fall, they made a mistake. They shot moose and caribou without a hunting license — and when the authorities found out, they confiscated the meat. All of it. Officials checked that the men had enough store-bought food to last until the January supply plane, and then they left.
The January plane never came.
The men waited. January became February. February became March. Their food ran out, and something else started to run out with it. On March 17th, 1960, one of the men — Alex Mieskonen — walked out of the cabin, into the woods, carrying the group's dynamite. He never came back. The others heard the blast.
After his death, two more of the group set out through the snow to find help. They were never seen again.
When rescuers finally reached the cabin, they found the last two men — barely alive, starved down to skin and bone. The log structure where they'd spent that winter got a new name: Starvation Cabin.
Now, He wasn’t low on food or supplies, but a better shelter would ensure that he could survive until the snowmelt. And plus, it was only 10 miles away, which he could make in about a days time if he prepared.
He spent much of the following week blazing trails and preparing to set out.
But he’d never make it, and the stories we have from his diary over the week he spent preparing to go, add to the mystery of what happened to him.
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 his signal flares. But then the plane passed overhead, and 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 150 days, and he attempted to signal for help again, mentioning that many times he saw rescue planes flying overhead. He lit signal flares, spelled out a giant “SOS” in the snow…
… but somehow, none of the passing planes saw him.
By February, his toes had turned black with frostbite, but he managed to treat them. The worst toll seemed to be psychological. Like the madness the Dene wrote about. At one point, he wrote,
“I heard voices, and then I discovered I was talking to myself.”
That entry was from only three days in. By day 46, he was losing hope. He stopped seeing rescue aircraft overhead, and fatigue seemed to be setting in.
The diary abruptly cuts off after the 20th of February. He wrote “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 what was strange to those who were looking for him, was it didn’t add up that he left to go to Starvation cabin. His body wasn’t there, it wasn’t anywhere. Ok, so 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. He hadn’t taken any of his food or supplies. The only things missing were his rifle and ax. Otherwise, it was as if he simply vanished.
If he’d been attacked by a bear or a wolf at the camp site, the ax and the rifle would still be there. And if he’d finally gone for Starvation Cabin, he would have brought his diaries and more food supplies.
In a quote for the newspaper, Mrs. MacKenzie said that her husband was prone to sleepwalking. He’d walk for hours in his sleep if not led back to bed. She wondered if that’s what happened to him.
But to the people who knew this valley the 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 1900’s.
In the early 19th century, there were only two ways into the valley: Travel through intense, whitewater rapids, or travel overland acrossover impossibly steep mountains. Either route could be just as fatal as it was beautiful.
Most men steered clear, but those that did make the journey went for one reason: Gold.
In 1897, a small group of men — maybe five or six — 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. Perhaps these men felt they had better chances striking out where there was less competition. Or maybe it was a shortcut to the real treasure in the Yukon.
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 they’d erected along the river for shelter.
Their disappearance started a pattern that continued for the first half of the 20th century. When men went into the Nahanni Valley, it seemed to swallow them whole.
Or if the valley didn’t, something that resided there did.
In the spring 1907, an empty canoe was found drifting along the south Nahanni river. It had been washed theresouth by the yearly snowmelt, the only evidence of yet another expedition gone wrong.
This canoe belonged to Willie and Frank McLeod, a pair of men who went upriver sometime between 1904 and 1905. They were both Metis – 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 find them. The following spring, he traveled upriver with five other men, including his brother Danny and Poole Field, the frontiersman who ran one of the trading posts.
Charlie knew that Willie and Frank had been on the trail of Nahanni gold for almost 5 years. In 1900, they’d unearthed nuggets of gold by panning in the riverbanks. What they found was known as ‘placer gold’; it’s the gold that breaks away from rock thanks to erosion and weather patterns.
Willie and Frank had gone out on another expedition with a steamboat engineer they had met named Robert Weir
And Nobody had seen or heard from any of them since 1905, and then their empty canoe was found in the spring of 1907.
In May 1908, Charlie McLeod’s company found some evidence of an encampment in a valley beyond the Nahanni river’s First Canyon. By the side of the river, there was a small manmade 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 pencilled into it. It read:
“We have found a fine prospect.”
The handwriting on this board belonged to one of the McLeod brothers.
They continued upriver, toward the very tip of the valley. 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 was going to find. He pulled them away revealing two skeletons.
One was lying there peacefully, as if they had died in their sleep, the other was different. It’s reaching an arm toward a spruce tree… where his rifle was propped, 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 both of them were missing their skulls
Based on a ring and a pocket watch, Charlie McLeod identified the remains of Willie and Frank. But, where was Robert Weir, the third man in their expedition.
The section of the river where the McLeod brothers had been found became known as ‘Deadmen Valley’. And the ‘fine prospect’ they’d written about? Even though no gold was found on or around their bodies, locals became convinced that they’d left behind a gold mine in the mountains, just waiting for someone brave enough to find it.
After burying his brothers, Charlie sent word to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or “Mounties”. 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? And also, how had they been beheaded? The decomposed nature of their bodies made it hard to tell, but some retellings of the story would maintain that it seemed as if the heads had been torn free of the bodies, rather than severed by an axe or blade.
And then, in 1909, a local Dene man reported an unidentified skeleton, three miles south of Deadman Valley. The Mounties assumed that this was 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’d lost their canoe, and the three men had separated to find their own ways to safety, all starving along the way. They closed the case.
The public – especially Charlie McLeod – found this resolution deeply dissatisfying. Three dead men, two missing heads, and one skeleton reaching for a rifle. No, charlie said, something happened to these men, some sort of attack. Though from what, he couldn’t say. There was no animal he knew of that would have only taken the skulls.
Though, according to Charlie, the story didn’t end there….
In 1926, he was visiting a fur trader in Edmonton. He stuck up a conversation with another customer, mentioning the deaths of Willie & Frank. The stranger confided in him that he was the man who killed them. Could it be? Was this man really Robert Weir? Charlie McLeod revealed his true identity and the man fled.
Eventually, Charlie tracked him down to a farm in Alberta. When the man who said he was Weir saw him coming, he fled into a barn. All Charlie heard was one gun shot, and then the sound of hay catching fire. The sparks from his pistol ignited the hay inside, and burned the whole barn down around him.
So, we never got the answer to the story. If that was Robert and he did kill the two, where did their heads go? And who the hell was the other skeleton they found?
And if it was Robert, and the men were killed in an isolated fit of greed or jealousy, then why did veteran frontiersmen keep disappearing up in the Nahanni Valley under strange circumstances?
In researching this story, the most recent mysterious Nahanni deaths I could find were in 2005. And unlike the prospectors and the trappers, this one isn't a frontier legend. The people who lost someone are still here. They're still asking questions.
On June 12th, 2005, two men from Fort Simpson ; David Horesay, sixty years old, and his friend Frederick Hardisty, went out to stay at a cabin belonging to their friend Rod Gunderson, about seventy-five miles northwest of town, near the North Nahanni River. Both men were experienced bushmen. This was their country. Rod saw them at the cabin that day, before taking off on a trip of his own.
Four days later, Rod came back.
Smoke was still rising from the chimney. There were small fires burning nearby. The cabin was locked. It was fully stocked with food and firewood. And inside, the men's firearms were exactly where they'd left them.
It was the picture of two people who had JUST been at the cabin. And yet…David and Freddy were nowhere to be found.
Now, Two lifelong woodsmen do not walk into this valley without their rifles. Whatever happened in those four days, it happened fast — fast enough that neither man took the one thing 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. From that point on, it was residents of Fort Simpson and the men's own families walking the bush, looking for them.
And eventually they found something.
June 27th, in thick brush, about two miles from the cabin, they found David. He had burns on his hands and arms that no one could explain.
However, The coroner ruled that he died of hypothermia, though his family just didn’t buy that. David was experienced. He had a fire back at the cabin, why would he have died of hypothermia in June?
Freddy was found a few weeks later on July 8th — floating in the North Nahanni River, twelve miles from the cabin. He had drowned. And here's the detail that stays with the searchers: he was found in a stretch of river they had already covered. Multiple times. By canoe and on foot.
The official findings raised more questions than they answered, especially for the families. David's stepbrother Joe was part of the search party, and he says what they found at the cabin never made it into the official report, but there were bullet marks everywhere, including a gunshot hole in the floor. When he went back to the RCMP and asked them to keep investigating, he says he was told 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 Freddy's brother Robert says the family found Freddy's shirt afterward, with a large hole torn through it.
David's sister Rosemary put the whole mystery in one sentence: "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 didn’t just wander off and die of misadventure, and that someone knows something. In 2018 — thirteen years later — the families were still petitioning to have the case reopened.
“Nahanni Valley” would have regular victims over the following decades.
In early 1922, a trapper named John O’Brien built a cabin for himself in the south Nahanni valley. He set up a trap line and prepared to harvest fur for the winter. On January 27th, he left his cabin to check the trap line and 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’d been flash-frozen. While the cause of death in this case was fairly obvious, no one could understand how O’Brien could have been caught unawares by the weather.
In 1932, a woman named Ms. Swensen arrived at Fort Liard in great distress. She told the Mounties that she was supposed to meet her fiance Phil Powers that spring to get married. He’d spent the previous winter fur trapping in the Nahanni Valley, and had never returned.
The Mounties went upriver, looking for his cabin. Poole Field joined them along the way, helping guide them through the area. Along the river, they found a series of animal corpses caught in traps that had never been harvested.
Following the neglected trap line, they found the remains of a cabin that Phil Powers had built., it had burned to the ground. There 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 among the bones. It might have turned to ash in the fire.
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 any scavengers that passed through. Nailed to one of the support poles was a piece of wood with a message penciled on it:
“Phil Powers — his finis Aug. 1932”
The message made no sense. By the state of the remains, the fire must have consumed the cabin in the winter of 1931. Either Powers was predicting when he’d be finished with his work… or someone wrote that message for him.
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 further upriver. In spring of 1936, their cabin was found burnt to the ground. No bodies were found within.
In 1945, Ernest Savard was found dead in his bedroll, with his head partially severed.
June 1946, 55-year-old prospector John Patterson split from his party and vanished without a trace. In the fall of that year, the body of John Shebbach was found in his cabin, torn to pieces by local wildlife. His journal showed that he’d spent 43 days without food.
The Nahanni Valley has a magnetism to it — it draws men seeking adventure and riches. And not all of these men die or disappear. Some people, like Poole Field or Albert Faille, spend much of their lives near the Nahanni without incident.
Perhaps it is just nature taking its toll on unprepared people. Inevitable accidents that happen when you’re alone in the elements, separated from civilization?
Or maybe the real answer has been here the whole time.
The Dene people have always known that the Nahanni Valley was dangerous. If the prospectors had listened to their warnings, maybe they would have kept their heads.
We’ve talked a lot about the prospector’s experience of the Nahanni valley. For lack of a better term, an outsider’s perspective.
Dene oral tradition stretches back centuries into the past… before the first outsiders set foot in the valley. Some theorize it goes as far back to the stone age. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, the Dene inhabited the lowlands near the Nahanni Valley, but never the valley itself.
The valley was the home of the Naha. They were the first tribe in the area – aggressive and dangerous to their neighbors. They conducted regular raids on the other tribes, striking and vanishing back into caves in the mountains. In the Dene language, the Naha are variously referred to as ‘the Enemy’, ‘the People Over There Far Away’, ‘The People of the Setting Sun’ or ‘the People Who Speak Like Ducks.’
Every summer they attacked, and eventually the Dene decided to fight back. They gathered a war party to take the fight to the Naha. They ventured north into the valley, deep into Naha territory. The longer they walked, the stranger their expedition seemed. They didn’t see a single enemy.
Finally, one of them spotted smoke from a campfire. The war party converged upon the campsite, and found one of the Naha villages… but it was completely deserted. The Naha had simply vanished without a trace.
By the time European colonists arrived in the early 19th century, the Naha were a distant memory. A Hudson’s Bay Company clerk wrote in January 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 of the Naha.
There are many theories about what happened to them. Some say they might have been massacred or died off during a particularly harsh winter. Others say they migrated away; one theory holds that they traveled south to the great plains and became the Navajo people. This theory is based on linguistic evidence — apparently Navajo and Dene languages are pretty similar.
Whether they left or whether they disappeared… they weren’t the only ones living in the valley, if local folklore is to be believed.
And the other inhabitants seemed far older and far more dangerous.
Dene legends tell stories about the ‘Nakani’ — 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’d know one when you see it – they’re enormous, hairy, with red eyes and gorilla-like arms. A local version of bigfoot.
We have a number of written accounts that tell us belief in the Nakanni was a palpable presence in the valley. Both Dene and white explorers have reports of finding unnaturally large footprints in the region, and Dene would sometimes move camp entirely to avoid encounters with wandering Nakani. One trader mentioned a group of Dene firing muskets into the woods to ward off Nakani passing too close to their encampment.
This belief is perhaps why, according to Dene language expert Allan Adam, an old native word for the Nahanni River – “Na’aahdee” – means “River of Giants”.
It’s easy to write the Nakani off as a primitive superstition, and that’s what most of the explorers in the area did… but what makes the Nakani something more is that their description remains remarkably consistent throughout the Northwest territories and beyond. Some of the Nakani stories come from as far west as Alaska.
Anthropologists believe that the Nakani is just a boogeyman story like any other. Perhaps it was a relic, or a folk memory of hostile encounters with another tribe, which has grown over time into tales of monsters in the woods. In this view, it could even be seen as a continuation of the Naha legend – the long lost tribe turned from a real group of enemies into a monster to be feared.
Local legend blames the beheading of Willie & Frank McLeod on the Nakanni – creatures powerful enough to tear a man’s head from his shoulders.
A 1954 edition of The Journal of American Folklore describes native belief in the ‘Naka’, but say they are humans who lived apart from the other Dene, hiding underground during the winter months. The article says there are no female naka, only men, who steal women away from Dene to become their wives. They’re also said to kidnap children.
This sounds almost like an urban legend, doesn’t it? Like only a step or two removed from gang members hiding under cars in parking garages and hook handed killers.
Since it’s from the 1950s, the article is probably not the most carefully considered breakdown of Dene folklore, but it does show us the ways these stories merge and change between tellings. The ‘Naka’ could be a version of the ‘Nakani’, it could also be a relic of the stories told about the Naha tribe.
But wild men are not the only culprit we have for the disappearances and deaths in the valley.
In 1965, a man named Frank Graves traveled to the Nahanni valley not for gold, but for a scientific expedition. Officially, he said that his purpose was to gather lichen and other plant samples from an uninhabited part of the wilderness. But really, he was there because of a lifelong obsession with Nahanni folklore. He wanted to find monsters.
We have his journal from this expedition. And hidden deep within the pages is a story of a sighting he had in the valley while he was hunting with a Dene tracker. 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; but this thing was twenty 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 twenty paces away and only partly screened by little bushes. I hit it with two barrels of ball-shot. 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 Indian 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 up river- real fast.”
Whatever that thing was, they were not equipped to capture it.
What he saw was called a Waheela, and it’s big in cryptozoology circles. It’s a kind of enormous arctic wolf, which appears in legends across the Northwest territories. The name is not of native origin – it was coined by biologist Ivan T. Sanderson in 1974. He gathered plenty of stories about men encountering the beast – from Nahanni all the way to Northern Ontario. In May of 2018, a Montana rancher claimed to have shot and killed a similar creature on his property.
Sanderson and others theorized the Waheela might be a prehistoric creature kept isolated by the Nahanni Valley.
But it was also not the only prehistoric being that Graves spotted during his 1965 trip…
On this same trip, Graves spent a lot of time with the locals, both Dene and veteran explorers, known as ‘sourdoughs’. His interest in cryptids led to them telling him stories of sightings, some as recent as 1964. Not of Waheela, though, but a similar creature to the Nakani: The one called the “Nuk-luk”.
Like the Nakani, Nuk-luk are some sort of proto-human, but short in stature rather than giant. The stories I’ve found of them tend to depict them as easily frightened and 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 weapons…” As his band approached the unidentified humanoid, it growled and fled.
Now, are these creatures responsible for the deaths and disappearances that happen in the valley? I think it depends who you ask, and which story you’re talking about. The Dene believe that the Nakani may have been responsible for the headless bodies found throughout the region, but the families of David Horsay and Frederick Hardisty think that they may have come across another person out in the forrest, and some sort of foul play happened.
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 there’s unknowable creatures deep inside, The park is littered with the names of dead men & women who couldn’t escape the curse of Nahanni:
McLeod Creek, named for the McLeod brothers… O’Brien’s Mountain, named for the man who froze to death…May Creek for a woman who vanished without a trace after catching the madness of the valley… Everywhere you go there is a reminder of the mysteries that the valley holds.