Headless Valley

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It bore the reputation of being a country into which many men went, but few returned. The Nahanni National Park Reserve, more than 11,000 square miles in remote northwestern Canada. Gold lying in a creek, which was supposed to have been a secret Indian mine, was the magnet that took prospector after prospector into these mysterious hills in the old days, and man after man disappeared.

Until men whispered around their campfires, the country was haunted by some evil spirits which guarded the gold. Funeral Range, Hell's Gate, the Valley of Headless Men. Dozens of people have vanished in this spectacular wilderness since 1908. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are quick to say that it's just no place for the casual visitor, and that those disappearances are down to the fact that nature is cruel and indifferent to the poorly prepared tourist.

Which is a fair point, but... Only the more superstitious believe this legend. Nevertheless, once the skeletons of the McLeod brothers were found around the ashes of their old campfire, few cared to venture into these mysterious hills. And they got a small game of life, didn't they? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Yeah!

True weird stuff. Thousands of years ago, a mysterious people known as the Naha settled in the Mackenzie Mountains in the country that we now call Canada. The Naha were said to be fierce and warlike. Some tales describe them as hairy giants. For the Dene people of the lowlands, the Naha were an enemy to be feared. The Naha would descend from their mountain stronghold in the Nahanni Valley and raid the Dene settlements that were clustered around the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers.

These were bloody incursions, devastating to the Dene, who had occupied these lands for more than 10,000 years. The people were afraid, not just of the Naha warriors, but of the place from which they came. The Nahanni Valley was as shrouded in dark legends as it was a dense, clammy fog. Whispers of malevolent spirits, of evil forces.

It was unclean. It was bad medicine. And at the same time, it was the most pristine and breathtaking wilderness. Rivers and streams choked with fish. Forests prowled by wild game, including deadly predators like the timber wolf and the grizzly bear. Acres of lush soil fed by wild springs. An explosion of edible plants and seeds.

In lean times, even the wisest Dene hunters could be tempted into the Forbidden Valley. Even as they knew, they might never return. Because that was the simple truth. Very few who ventured into the valley came back. And the ones who did, they were shaken. Telling stories that sounded impossible. Stories about an evil spirit whose furious shrieking ricocheted off the steep canyon walls.

Stories about a band of headhunters led by a white woman as pale as a ghost. Stories about caves dotting these canyons. Caves in which giants dwelled. Giants who feasted on human flesh. The Dene named the valley for the enemy who occupied it, Nahanni. Meaning, the river of the land of the Naha people. The fear of the Naha is all over the oral history of the Dene.

Stories of these violent marauders who stalked generations of Dene for centuries. It's said that eventually, a party of Dene braves decided that there was no choice but to become the aggressor. It was decided that the Dene would mount a raid on a Naha encampment. A small group of scouts headed out. The scouts made their careful way deeper and deeper into the Nahanni Valley.

Eventually, they spied a cluster of tipis. A Naha encampment. The scouts backed away, returning to the lowlands to fetch their warriors. Weapons in hand, the Dene warriors swarmed the settlement. To their shock, it was empty. Not a soul to be found. It was clearly an active camp. Everything was in its place. Fires smoldered.

Sleeping pallets were laid out. Yet, there were no people. None. An eerie silence hung over the place. But there was no peace to be found in that silence. The Dene war party was uneasy. The first prickle of fear shuddered through the group. They'd had a lifetime of hearing legends about evil spirits walking this land.

About the giant cavemen who craved the taste of human meat. Whatever had happened to the residents of this Naha camp, whatever caused them to disappear, the Dene knew better than to linger. The decision was made to leave this place at once. Though time slowed to a crawl and their limbs felt heavy as stone, the Dene managed to get away.

And the Naha? They were never again seen or heard from. It was as though the Naha people had never existed. It took hundreds of years for the white man to find the Nahanni Valley. Fur trappers and traders were the first to make their way to that remote corner of wilderness. An outfit called the Northwest Company established a pair of trading posts.

Fort Liard on the Liard River and Fort of the Forks on the South Nahanni River. The Dene were good partners for the traders. Many were now living in permanent settlements near the trading posts. And their knowledge of the place was deep and ancient. It was from their Dene counterparts that the fur traders learned of the valley's strange and fearsome history.

What the traders made of the legends hardly mattered. There was so much money to be made. And greed may have blinded them to the risks. In 1823, the Northwest Company merged with its biggest rival, the Hudson Bay Company. The population of both trappers and would-be settlers began to swell. But the land was no less forbidding than it had ever been.

Trappers ventured into the Nahanni, never to be seen again. Nothing strange about that, you might be thinking. Rushing rivers, hungry grizzlies, impenetrable forests. And yet, eventually, prospectors joined the fur traders in this most wild of places. It seemed like the whole world then was in the grip of gold fever. Thousands of would-be gold miners set their sights on the Yukon frontier.

Any person who contemplates going into the Yukon territory should make very careful inquiries as to the length of time it will take to go, and as to the means he will have of sustaining himself after he gets there. The amount of provisions that can be taken into that country at the present is extremely limited. It was a battered steamship called the Excelsior that kicked off the madness for gold in the part of northwestern Canada called the Klondike.

Well, not the ship herself, more like her cargo. The Excelsior docked in San Francisco on July 14th, 1897. Her passengers filed off the gangplank. Shockingly thin men and women. The men with unkempt beards and sun-ravaged skin. The women wild-haired with rough hands and cracked lips. Each lugged a heavy burden. Suitcases, buckskin sacks, metal canisters.

It didn't take long for a curious crowd to gather. Who were these poor people who looked like they'd not slept in a bed under a roof in longer than anyone could imagine? Those people were prospectors from the far north, and they'd struck it big. In one sack alone, owned by Mr. D.S. Lippy, there were over 200 pounds of the precious metal.

And as it is valued at $17.50 an ounce, the owner can be considered a well-to-do man. As the prospectors dragged their haul to the nearby Selby Smelting Works, the news raced through the city. The Excelsior had steamed into San Francisco carrying literal tons of raw gold mined by her weather-beaten passengers. The offices of the Alaskan Shipping Company were swarmed by would-be gold miners trying to book passage on the Excelsior's next run.

We can't take your money as much as we'd like to. We can't take any more people upriver with the amount of provisions we're trying to get in. These were among the things that Louis Sloss said again and again from morning to night yesterday. Amid the citywide talk and excitement about the Yukon gold fields, it's impossible to measure the extent of the actual exodus from this city.

Thousands and thousands want to go. It would be amazing to hop in a time machine and land at the docks in San Francisco just as these ships carrying prospectors were steaming in and out of port. Onlookers gathered to see them off, shouting cheers, and then to welcome them home. The Selby Smelting Works ran day and night.

The Excelsior alone was said to bring in a half million dollars in gold every time she docked. The typical Klondiker, with bags of dust and nuggets stowed away or sold somewhere, is a horny, fisted, and brawny fellow who smokes a pipe regardless of his ability. The lucky ones have all bought new clothes since arriving, and most of them have added new gold watches to the adornments they have acquired.

As more and more gold miners pushed deeper and deeper into the frontier, it was inevitable that some would make their way to the remote Nahanni Valley. It was 1904. The brothers Frank and Willie McLeod, accompanied by a Scottish mining engineer named Robert Weir, departed from Edmonton in the province of Alberta, Canada, for the peaks and rivers of the wild Nahanni Valley.

The trio stopped at the Hudson Bay Company trading post at Fort Simpson, the new name given the old Fort of the Forks. They were well supplied for the expedition. It was noted that the men carried significant ammo for the purpose of hunting. They were counting on plentiful wild game to sustain them over the harsh winter that was rapidly approaching.

The three men set off to make their fortune, the light snowfall filling their tracks as they moved deeper and deeper into the valley. Five years went by. That no one had seen or heard from the McLeod brothers or Robert Weir wasn't all that alarming. They'd elected to stake their claim in a patch of wilderness so extreme that even the native people gave it a pass.

Which makes you wonder, did the men pay any attention to any of the old Dene legends about the Nahanni? Or did they dismiss it all as ignorance and superstition? Just stories told around the fire? Frank and Willie McLeod had another brother, Charles. He was a skilled outdoorsman and a successful prospector himself. And it just so happened that Charles McLeod was hired as a guide by a party of prospectors who were eager to get at the gold in the northern wilds.

The group was about 150 miles up the Nahanni River when they made the discovery. It was early evening and they had just set up camp when one of the men saw something unexpected. A tree that had been blazed, meaning marked. In this case, carved. And under the tree was a ring of ashes. The remains of a long ago campfire.

Curious as to who might have preceded them in this northern fastness, Charlie McLeod deciphered the inscription and found that it bore the date of 1905. While beneath it, in rudely carved letters, were the initials of his brothers. It might seem like the odds of Charles McLeod stumbling upon this exact spot were extremely poor.

But there were a handful of old trails that wound through the forests and canyons of the Nahanni. And it made sense to use them. Easier on horses and mules and people. From that time on, they followed directly on the trail. And at each camping point found a blazed tree of similar character. When about 90 miles up the river, one of the men cut his foot.

And the rest of the party pushed on for a few miles while he remained behind. After he had dressed his wounds, he caught up with the main party. And reported that in the brush underneath a large tree, he had found the skeletons of two men. Charles McLeod had a sinking feeling. Each marked tree they'd found had been blazed with the initials F.M. and W.M. And now, this grim discovery.

Fearful lest it might be the remains of his brothers, Frank and Willie, Charlie McLeod immediately hit the trail and in an hour's time came upon the remains. What Charles McLeod saw were a pair of human skeletons lying in the brush. There were a few tattered scraps of rotted fabric that might have once been clothing.

Worst of all, neither skeleton had its head. The men fanned out and searched the area, finding a watch and a ring that had clearly once belonged to Frank McLeod. Charles squatted by the wind-scoured bones and speculated that perhaps the heads had been taken to make identifying the men impossible. And what if the third man who had been traveling with the McLeod brothers, the engineer Robert Weir, if he too had been killed, they were unable to find his body.

And if he had survived this attack, his whereabouts were unknown. Charles McLeod paced, frantic to find a clue. Then he spotted it, another blaze tree. The carving was scarred and barely legible. But from it, Charles was able to make out four numbers, a date. Frank and Willie had been lying here dead for three years.

One of the skeletons had the breastbone shattered, and appearances indicated that the man had been shot with a rifle while reclining on a pile of blankets. Near the base of the tree were the carved words which would have meant a fortune to the relatives of the men had they been able to decipher them. These words related to the location of some valuable mine.

But the murderers had taken care not only to remove every article of value from their victims' clothes, but also to blaze the tree in such a manner as to render most of the writing illegible. When Charles led his party of prospectors into the Nahanni, he might have been hoping for word of his brothers, but he couldn't have imagined that he'd find their headless remains.

It was a hard, hard blow, and McLeod wanted answers. Lucky for him that he crossed paths later that day with a Dene man he knew from prior expeditions in the region. Charles was fluent in the Dene language. McLeod gleaned from him that the murdered man had established a cache of moose meat at a post some three miles distant.

The Dene man told Charles that the bodies of the men were found not long after they'd been killed. When the Indians found the bodies of the men, they searched further and found near the cache of moose meat a blanket and a tin cup which had originally belonged to Robert Weir, but nothing regarding the man's fate was learned.

And something else was found at the scene, according to the Dene man, a small notebook belonging to Frank McLeod. It was something he'd always carried with him. He was known to jot everything from his thoughts to the day's weather in its pages. The notebook had been destroyed, though, by one of the people who'd discovered the bodies.

The Dene didn't know the name of that person, but told Charles McLeod that his people had argued against destroying the book. Charles was frustrated and grieving, and knew that even an investigation by the Royal Northwestern Mounted Police was unlikely to solve the mystery of the two decapitated miners. News of the find rippled through the entire Nahanni region.

It was the talk at every trading post. There were two basic theories floating around. The first was the Dene knew of a fabulously rich vein of gold, and when the McLeods and Weir discovered it, the three were murdered. Not so much to keep them away from the gold, but to prevent the stampede of other prospectors to the area once the news got out.

Remember, these were sacred ancestral lands for the Dene, and they'd learned from the fur trade just how calamitous the frenzy of greed can be. The Indians of this section of the north, while friendly to the whites, are loath to see what they consider the last lands of their race, overrun by white men, and may have chosen to put the men out of the way, rather than allow them to give out their secret.

Now the other theory went just as hard on murder, but with a different perpetrator. Some white man learned of their discovery and murdered them, that he alone might reap the golden harvest of the discovery. It reads like fiction, like a cheap paperback adventure story. Intrepid explorer stumbles across the headless remains of his own brothers, and their companion missing.

Drunk on cop movies, TV shows, and true crime, we're over here yelling, Robert Weir did it! It's so obvious! But that is not how Charles McLeod saw it. He told friends that in his conversations with the Dene, he'd heard nothing but conflicting stories. He wasn't accusing the Dene of killing the two men. It was more that he just couldn't make sense of what he was being told.

Were the Dene deliberately trying to mislead McLeod to cover for one of their own? Or were they trying to say that the land itself was alive and aware, and as the Dene had learned over eons, seething with malevolent power. It was expected that Weir's body would be found nearby. The young Scotsman was known for two things, his skill as an engineer and his complete ignorance of the wilderness.

Doubtless in the last despairing effort, he wandered out of the camp, but that he too gave up the fight, there can be no doubt. Without knowledge of the country, 300 miles north, east, west or south of the nearest post, in a situation that would appall the hardiest pioneer, a green hand wouldn't have a chance. This unfortunate young immigrant, whose adventurous spirit carried him into the grim embrace of the frozen north, within a couple of months of his arrival in Canada.

Bottom line, if Weir did do it, it was the perfect crime, since absolutely no one thought the man capable of surviving even a week on his own, much less masterminding a double murder and gold heist. Nine years went by with no answers. Charles McLeod resigned himself to the mystery, and continued to insist that the Dene people were blameless in the deaths.

But the Nahanni, the Nahanni wasn't content with taking just those three lives. In 1915, a prospector by the name of Poole Field, and his party of seven headed into the Nahanni Valley. The group consisted of Poole, his wife and daughter, his wife's brother, his brother's wife and cousin, and another trapper and prospector by the name of Clausen.

They made camp for the winter about 55 miles up the Nahanni River. Not one thing to know about Poole Field, he wasn't some city slicker with dreams of striking it rich in the gold fields. Field was a former Mountie, and he'd been part of the investigation into the McLeod brothers' murder. He knew the territory about as well as any man could.

He was a practical guy, not easily spooked by anything, much less by superstition. With the spring thaw, Field's group moved camp another 25 miles upriver, in the place now called Dead Man's Valley, or sometimes Headless Valley, the scene of the McLeod brothers' murder. And then, something strange and terrible happened.

Mrs. Field's sister, Annie Laferte, suffered some sort of mental breakdown. Mrs. Field's sister became insane and ran away from the camp and was lost. The party searched for her until July, following her 50 miles further up the river. They then found that she had turned downstream. They made a moose-skin boat and searched all the way downstream to their original camp, but she was never found.

An Indian reported that he saw her with a devil in her, running naked up the side of a hill. The group continued downriver to the nearest trading post, and they reported the tragedy to the police. Ten days later, they returned to the Nahanni. On their way back to the spot they'd established as a winter camp, they found surface gold in a tributary of the South Nahanni River and decided to stay.

By late spring, word had gotten out, and the spot was flooded with more than 200 other prospectors staking claims. So Field and his party moved on, stopping at an Indian trading post at the junction of the Ross and Pelly Rivers. A Dene who'd come to trade spied Field and gave him a letter he'd carried out of the Nahanni.

The letter was from a prospector named Martin Jorgensen. Jorgensen was convinced that he'd found a rich gold strike and invited Field to come. Detailed instructions on how to find Jorgensen's camp were included. It took months to reach Jorgensen and involved nearly 100 miles of river travel. They came upon a cabin built by Jorgensen where he had left a map and a message for them.

The message said they had found gold at the mouth of Flat River and also on a creek that entered the Nahanni from the east. Field's party set out following the map, and when they reached the mouth of Flat River, they discovered a second cabin, but this one was burned to the ground, and lying 60 feet away were the bones of Martin Jorgensen, his skeleton missing its head.

And again, just as in the case of the McLeod brothers, there were no clues, no suspects, and no answers. Jorgensen's death faded into memory, and that rich gold strike he'd talked of? Field never found it. In 1928, the bones of another decapitated body were found. This corpse earned the nickname the Yukon Fisher. 1931 brought another sinister find.

The charred bones of Prospector Philip Powers found in the remains of his burnt-out cabin on the Flat River. It was concluded that Powers had probably been murdered, though there was no way to prove it. Not a single clue to be found in that pile of ashes. 1945, yet another body found, this time a minor from Ontario, dead in his sleeping bag, decapitated.

Myths and stories and tall tales and legends, dozens of missing people, human remains, headless bodies. You'd think that'd be enough mystery for one 200-mile stretch of rugged, forbidding, and nearly inaccessible wilderness. You'd be wrong. Beginning in the early 1900s, Prospector's chasing gold fever came back from the Nahanni telling some very peculiar tales.

They told these stories at trading posts and in saloons, and many of these stories revolved around a vast and mysterious tropical valley that was somehow thriving in the middle of a vast northern wilderness. Now comes Frank Perry, mining engineer, with a story of a tropical valley in the heart of the frozen north, near the Yukon boundary, boiling rivers so heat the surrounding country that rose bushes grow to the height of trees, veins of precious metals run side by side to mountains of coal and fierce bubbling springs of oil.

Perry explored the valley for a year. In the valley were hundreds of mountain sheep and goat, caribou and moose, with bears and all other fur-bearing animals, almost square-shaped from fat, and they were so tame that he had been able to walk among them and could almost touch them as they fed. Perry explained that the native people knew of the valley, knew it to be a hunter's paradise, but still never visited.

The reason, Perry said, could be found in the fossilized imprints of some enormous three-toed beast that the native people insisted still roamed the country. These were monsters, they declared. The valley never saw even an inch of frost, Perry swore, not even in the dead of winter. As for precious metals, he'd found veins of gold 40 feet wide and 150 feet long, and you could laugh it off as a hustle.

But Perry was far from the only prospector to tell this tale. An American Army captain named Samuel C. Scott spent three years in the valley. His report of what he found was published in 1924. 430 miles inland, almost inaccessible, contains abundant game. Grass, hay, berries, and wild fruits grow in profusion. I encountered several species of wild animals never seen before.

The most curious was a large white deer weighing about 600 pounds. It had a horn on one side of its head. Captain Scott proposed that an abundance of hot springs in the nearby foothills accounted for the weirdly balmy climate of the valley. Those springs, he claimed, were scouting in winter, but ice cold in summer, which is, like, not a thing that hot springs can do.

Today it's thought that Scott mistook the differences in air temperature for differences in water temperature, which, okay, that's science. But Scott was a trained military survivalist, so I have to give the man the benefit of the doubt, because he was no fool. Then, in 1925, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel named Scott Williams led the first prospecting mission by air in British Columbia's history.

That country is the garden of the world, proclaimed Colonel Williams. Mountains of gold, silver, and coal. Colonel Williams described hot springs, trees and plants of amazing size, giant tulips, spectacular runs of raspberries and wild currants. He told of enormous and strange animals, including an albino moose and a large white bear.

As for the location of this majestic and otherworldly valley, just like Frank Perry, he placed it near the Liard River, beyond the Liard Trading Post. And there were others who claimed to have journeyed through this mysterious tropical valley. A pair of prospectors named Hank Russell and Jack Lee, they theorized that the geysers and springs were proof that the valley was actually the crater of a vast ancient volcano.

Like the others, Russell and Lee told of herds of fat caribou, moose and deer feeding on grass that nearly towered over them. They saw bears, enormous black bears and grizzlies, wandering lazily in fields of colorful wildflowers. And, like Frank Perry, they described finding strange tracks in the soil ringing the lake they camped by.

Tracks that were 18 inches in diameter, perfectly round, with three tolic indentations in the front. Even as they knew better, even as they knew how crazy it all sounded, Russell and Lee said they could have sworn that those tracks had been made by a mammoth or possibly a mastodon. In 1947, a 29-year-old explorer named Walter J. Tully traversed the full 200 miles of the Nahanni Valley, and he lived to tell.

He called it the most wonderful sight you have ever seen, and that includes his discovery of the nearly decapitated body of yet another doomed prospector. Tully offered up this theory. We believe that he, like many of the others, died of a mixture of scurvy and starvation, Tully said. Hunger made him tired, so he crawled into his sleeping bag and died.

The coyotes couldn't get to the body, but they gnawed away at his head. This may be the solution to the mystery of the headless bodies that have given the valley its grisly name. It's, you know, a good hypothesis, right? Except that no other skeletal remains found showed any sign of tooth marks, which would be expected had carnivores snacked on the bodies.

Only one dead prospector was found in a sleeping bag. The others were in the open. Were these Nahanni coyotes, or maybe wolves, such picky eaters that they would decline every morsel of human flesh except for the head? Tully's description of the valley itself matched what other earlier explorers described. Vegetation was immense and lush, but the thing that struck the party most was the unutterable loneliness of those 200 miles, the almost complete absence of living creatures, save a few coyotes howling outside the camp at night.

It was so desolate, you've never seen anything like it, Tully said. There was not a sign of any human being, until they found the dead man's body by the side of the river. Even today, now, the Nahanni National Forest Reserve is fiercely inaccessible. The only way to really explore it is by air. What human eyes can't see, human imagination fills in.

Not many people have ever even heard of Nahanni, vast as it is, a national park the size of the country of Belgium. In 2018, only 1,800 people visited the park. Now compare that to Canada's much more famous Banff National Park, which clocked over 4.5 million visitors that same year. The South Nahanni River is a big draw.

More than 330 miles of water winding through canyons and forests. Mountain climbers from all over the world are drawn to Nahanni, hoping to conquer the cluster of peaks and sheer granite walls called the Cirque of the Unclimbables. If that's not your thing, you could always take a shot at the vampire spires, rugged towers of granite carved in the last ice age, and some of the highest in the whole Northwest Territories.

You will have to charter a plane to get there. This national park isn't for the casual tourist. Only the Dene people can navigate this world with any ease, because their history has been intertwined with this wild place for hundreds of thousands of years. And what about the Naha, that mysterious tribe who, the Dene say, simply vanished without a trace, their tipis intact, their campfires still smoldering.

True? Or just one more myth? There's some speculation that when the Naha left that part of Canada, left the Nahanni Valley for reasons unknown, they slowly migrated to the southwestern United States. Could the Navajo people be the descendants of the Naha? It's interesting that both tribes share very similar origin stories, and the Naha language also has striking similarities to Navajo.

The legends of the Naha tell of giant mountain warriors, of cannibals and killers, of devils and monsters and ghosts. What could frighten such a people enough to make them run? Whatever caused the Naha people to flee their own ancestral paradise is a mystery that's never been solved. Like the mystery of what happened to Frank and Willie McLeod, to Robert Weir and Martin Jorgensen and Annie Laferte, and so many more people who headed into the Naha never to be seen again.

Small as the world has become and as determined as human beings are to dominate every square inch of land, it might just be that there are places that aren't meant for us. To stand before the 315 foot tall Virginia Falls in the Nahanni National Park, the few who've seen it call it the most beautiful waterfall on earth.

To listen to the roaring music of all that tumbling water, surrounded on all sides by steep canyon walls and towering forest. It would be easy to feel like the only person left in the world. And maybe it's just that simple. We just don't belong there. Maybe the Nahanni is one of those few places left where nature closes ranks, blocking us in the way the body will block an infection.

Nature keeping herself safe from the one predator that threatens her existence most. Us. Next week on True Weird Stuff, we're going to play an old episode from before we started doing a discussion afterwards. So we're going to play an old episode with a new discussion afterwards. That's what we're going to do next week with True Weird Stuff.

And special thanks to our voice talent on this episode, Don Morgan. Sherry, I am not at all familiar with this story. I have not heard any piece of this story before. So this was endlessly fascinating. And what I was wondering as I was listening to you narrate it is, how did you come upon it? I have an absolute obsession with cases of people going missing in national parks and on public lands.

And so the Nahanni National Reserve is one of the most obscure. You know what? Let me rephrase. It's probably the most obscure national park in North America on the continent. I mean, nobody seems to know it exists. In part because it's so inaccessible. And if you're not a mountain climber, it's not anything that would maybe come up for you.

This isn't a casual place where people bring in their campers and spend the weekend trout fishing. This is a remote and forbidding wilderness. There are so many urban legends and mysteries and strange things that happen on public lands. And there's a whole paranormal dimension to it, right? It's all over. You can go on Reddit and just lose yourself in a rabbit hole of these staircases that are just out in the middle of nowhere.

It's impossible that anybody could have gotten the materials out there and built them. But there you are hiking or deer hunting or whatever and there's a staircase. And what you never want to do is put a single foot on a single stair. You see a staircase in the forest? No, you didn't. You turn around and get the hell back to safety, right?

There are people who disappear in these places, parks and public lands. And their bodies will be found, say, nine months, two, three years later, fully dressed, intact, no signs of decomposition or weather or any of those things. Just inexplicable. So I am always, always, always... That is what the bait to put on the hook for me to get my attention.

I'm fascinated by this. And so I was looking around at some of the more obscure national parks and with everything that's happening right now in the U.S. of A., with our national parks and our public lands, I was extra upset. And so I'm doing a deep, deep dive in some of the parks that I don't know as much about because that's what we do every summer.

My family, we go to national parks. That's our thing. And I started reading about this park in Canada. And like you, I had never heard of the Nahanni National Reserve. I knew about Banff. Everyone's heard of Banff. But this, it is so absolutely impossible. And so then I started going deeper. And I'm like, wait a minute.

Absolutely no freaking way that this place has all these legends and myths and mysteries and deaths and murders. And no, I've never heard of it. And so it was just a rabbit hole that I fell down. The thing about the Nahanni National Reserve that is so interesting is all the stories are true. It's the reasons for the stories that we don't know.

I mean, over a period of decades, people were found decapitated in this place. That's not like, ooh, got a scary ghost story. That's facts, right? Even this so-called tropical valley is real. So it was one of those rare instances where the woo-woo stuff matched the reality. And it's all unexplained. We still have no idea.

So the Headless Valley, was that named by the Dene? Did they name it that? Or was that something that people came in as prospectors and they decided to call it the Headless Valley? It kind of got the nickname. It earned the nickname the Headless Valley or the Valley of Headless Men in the wake of the McLeod brothers' remains being found.

So there were the names that the Dene people gave various places in the valley. And then there were the names that prospectors gave it and the names fur trappers gave it. So what's really interesting, and we haven't talked, I think this may be the first time on True Weird Stuff we've ever even talked about trappers and fur traders.

Because in some ways, they were the first into the frontier. In many ways, they were the first in the frontier. This was before America was, even the United States of America. We had fur trappers in here before the Revolutionary War. And so the fur trade was booming in that part of the world because of the demand for beaver pelts to make hats, which has always tripped me out.

And then the fur traders heard all the legends and many of them disappeared into the valley not to return. But that was kind of the deal with being a fur trapper. It was dangerous. If you're going to be trapping animals, they're not downtown at the saloon. They're in the freaking wilderness. And you're up against the elements and weather.

I mean, it wouldn't take that serious of an accident or incident and you're all alone out there and it's winter. People died. People disappeared all the time. And it was just assumed that they had hit something unlucky or unfortunate. So there were plenty of fur trappers that vanished into the Nahaini. But it was the kind of thing where, well, yeah.

I mean, it's January in Vancouver, in British Columbia, of course. Of course you're at risk of not coming back out. The prospectors, that was a different story because the fur people, the fur trappers had some wilderness savvy about them. They had some wood crafting. That was what they did. But you had prospectors who were like, I'm working at the hardware store in Chicago and I think there's gold in them bar hills.

So a lot of the people that got caught up in the gold rush were not suited for this kind of hardcore wilderness living. They just weren't. And so, of course, the fatality rates went up and many, many, many disappeared and didn't come back. And people didn't really raise the alarm because it was kind of understood when they set out that they were going to need a guardian angel because they just didn't have what it took to winter over in such a forbidding and extreme landscape.

Whatever was taking the heads off people aside. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So when they first said giants, you know what went through my mind was Bigfoot. But typically Bigfoot are not aggressive. They are some instances. There's one where the we've talked about this before on an episode where these people were hunters and they were in a cabin and the Bigfoot were throwing boulders or something at the cabin.

So that is one instance where they were. But generally they're kind of shy creatures. So I'm thinking that whatever is going on here that it's not Bigfoot. The three-toed part of this is kind of fascinating. And I don't know any explanation for what kind of a creature would have three toes unless that is just the part of the foot that was leaving an imprint.

Do you see what I mean? So the thing about the footprint around 18 inches in diameter with three distinct indentations that they assume were made by whatever this creature's toes were. I was really intrigued by that, like you, because there were multiple reports across multiple time periods of seeing that. So I looked up a mastodon print, like an image of a mastodon, because they exist, and that's a five-toed thing.

And then the mammoth prints that I was able to see, they're definitely large and plate-like, but they didn't really match the description given by these witnesses. So I don't know that it was a mammoth or a mastodon, although I read something just recently and it won't get out of my head, which tells me that we're probably going to end up doing a story about it.

But there was a period of time in Alaska where you could have a mammoth steak at a restaurant because whole mammoths were preserved and frozen, flesh frozen, which is going to be part of another episode too. And there's this frozen mammoth, well, waste not, want not. Can you imagine going into a restaurant and ordering a mammoth steak?

I can't stop thinking about it. I'm hoping it's an urban legend. Maybe it's true. I don't know. We're about to find out. But I couldn't shake that either. And neither a mastodon or a mammoth track that I was able to find matches the description. So the whole business with the heads, the fact that it was the heads that were taken off, that leads me to believe that it's not an animal doing this, that this is humans.

Because in the Amazon, that's where the whole shrunken head thing was, where they were decapitating people and they were taking the heads and then shrinking them. So this leads me to believe that perhaps this was maybe some part of a ritual. Well, I wanted to tell you one more thing about those tracks. Oh, okay. So we recently did an episode of Two Word Stuff called The King's Rhinoceros.

Right. And if you'll remember, one of the things we talked about in that episode was how once upon a time, the rhinos were so abundant and they roamed North America. And you were surprised, remember? Right, I was. That rhinoceroses had ever – well, a rhinoceros has a large three-toed print. And I'm just going to put that out there as a possibility.

And rhinoceros are not friendly creatures. No, not a bit. Elephants can have personalities and be friendly creatures. Well, they can be – they can be awful creatures that we've discovered in Two Word Stuff too. But rhinoceros are generally not friendly creatures. So it's not too far of a stretch to think that they might have been doing – killing and – There are very many animals who have a three-toed print.

There's a three-toed box turtle. They are not – a pygmy three-toed sloth, a tapir, and a rhinoceros. So sloths are in Australia? Is that the only place? I don't know where sloths – Sloths are in places, but sloths are not in that part of the Northwest Canada. This is – it's very – there are things in this story that have been reported on by multiple witnesses across multiple time periods where you go, Well, I mean the only thing – the only animal big enough to leave a print that large would be a rhinoceros.

And once upon a time, they did roam this continent. So is it possible that they left some tracks in the Nahanni National Reserve? Yeah, why not, right? Well, if – let's just say there was some sort of a climate change where these animals – let's just say they existed in Canada. And then the great – you know, the freeze, the ice pack, whatever it was called, happened.

But those animals still lived there but were able to survive because of those hot springs. Do you see what I mean? Or what have you, yeah, whatever caused that. Whatever was causing that, whatever happened. So it is possible. To me, the rhinoceros is the most – even though when you say it, if you don't know like the whole story of the rhino, you would go, Oh, girl, there's no way there was a rhinoceros in Canada.

Well, it's a rhinoceros or a giant mythical beast. And rhinoceroses are real and did exist in that part of the world at one time. So that's like an Occam's razor for me. And the thing is that so many of these places – Canada is such a vast country with so many areas that have been, you know, really unexplored. I mean it's been mapped but it hasn't been explored.

So it's possible that there are creatures that are existing that we just haven't discovered yet too. The point about like why would the coyotes – let's go with coyotes or timber wolves if you want to be sexy. Why would they only eat the head? Well, because they didn't. There was zero evidence of animal predator behavior on any of these remains.

And by the way, there was also zero evidence of predator behavior on the sleeping bag guy where they said the coyotes couldn't get to his body so they took his head. I just want to say as someone who grew up in the wilderness, coyotes can get into a sleeping bag, folks. It's a sleeping bag. A hungry or aggressive dog can get into a sleeping bag.

Max, I mean seriously, okay? What coyote is going to be like – Mojo can get into the sleeping bag. Here's a coyote and the coyote is like, I am hungry but it appears that dinner is sealed up in some sort of a bag. So I dismiss that. And that's not me saying it was a monster from a portal from another dimension. No. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be blaming coyotes and wolves for what I think is clearly the work of a human hand.

I think the headless part of this is human. And I point to what those tribes were doing down in the Amazon. I mean that's on this continent. So it's possible that there was some connection between the native people there and the native people who lived up there that that's how all this happened. I don't know. The Naha people are a mystery because they did exist.

There are signs. I mean there's archaeological evidence. They existed. They lived in that valley. That was their homeland for centuries until one day they got up and left. And the most widely held theory on the Naha is that they migrated and joined and became part of the Navajo Nation, which is interesting too all by itself.

That is interesting. And the similarities between the language, I also thought that was something that was kind of interesting as well. Because there's a tremendous geographical distance between the inland deep up river in the Naha Valley and the American Southwest. Is it possible that the chief of the Naha said, it's really freaking cold here.

Do you know if we go farther south, it's really a lot warmer and the climate's pretty good. It's dry. You know, we'll find some water down there. It sounds like you're suggesting that the Naha were North America's first snowbird retirees. I think so. But somebody went, oh, it's so cold. Well, you know, we don't have to live here.

Really? We don't? Yeah, let's go south. All right, let's go. One of the scouts said, my brother-in-law moved to Phoenix. He says it's amazing. They don't have to shovel snow ever. It's one of those things, you know, that we're never going to know. We're just never going to be able to solve the mystery of what happened to the Naha people.

We're never, ever going to know. Now, the Dene are still, you know, there. But they are not, they did not, the valley was bad, bad, bad. They are outside the valley in the lowlands. So you don't think the Dene could have been the ones, the Dene went in and wiped out the Nahas? No. Okay. No. In fact, the Dene lived in mortal terror.

Now, this is, you know, we're going way back now, right? Right. And this is all oral history, you know, passed down one generation to the next. But the Dene lived in mortal terror of the Naha people. The Naha were extremely aggressive, extremely warlike, according to the legends. And in the early days of white incursions into that part of the world, the Dene people were telling the fur trappers, heads up, my dude.

You probably don't want to go in there. Let me tell you, let me tell you what lives in there. And, you know, the trappers followed by the prospectors were like, oh, a bunch of superstitions, savages. And there you go. Is it possible that the Dene did all of this as a strategy to keep people away? Again, it's a really good theory.

But when you look at the kind of trading and mutually dependent relationship the Dene established first with the fur trade and then with the prospectors, and they were a very low key cooperative people. I just don't see it. I mean, that was my first thought. I keep a notebook next to me and I'm like, is it grizzly bears?

Is it the Naha? Are the Dene double dealing? Like they're trading and selling at the trading posts, but then they're going in under cover of darkness, murdering prospectors and stealing their gold. So the reason that I did not land on that wasn't just because the Dene didn't strike me as those kind of people, but because these crimes went on.

This wasn't just a burst of activity. It was 1905. It was 1914. I mean, they were still finding decapitated bodies into the 40s. And I just think it's unlikely that this was an organized effort on the part of the Dene people and they just got away with it. You know, I looked and saw that the first, if you want to go to this park, the shortest hike to arrive somewhere, I think it's the Virginia Falls, which you mentioned.

Oh, yeah. Is a seven to 10 day hike. I mean, this isn't like, you know, I do day hikes, Sherry. I like to I like to do a day hike because, you know, at the end of the day, I like to be able to go to a place that has a bed with clean sheets and some food and some food and some food. Hopefully that somebody else is cooking that I can sit down and eat.

And I but I'm looking at just how desolate this is. And there has to be a bunch of stuff that hasn't been discovered yet up there. I would guess completely it is. I mean, when I said fiercely inaccessible, I mean, fiercely inaccessible. You have to first of all, you have to go in by air. You just do. And once you're in there, you better know what you're doing.

This is not like a place for you or me, you know, to pitch a tent that we bought at REI. This is a place for people with like extreme wilderness and survival training. This is an unfriendly, hostile, wild environment. This is not for, you know, this is not for just any old person. And even the mountain climbers that go in there to try to go up, they're not the tallest in the world, but they are horrifyingly difficult.

You'll have climbers who prepare and train and go in on these expeditions to try to hit the circ of unclimbables. This is an extreme place. And we are creatures of not just comfort, but we are alive at a time when the wilderness has been commodified and packaged and presented to us as something doable for even a couch potato.

You know, like look at the people who try to summit Everest. I mean, they're being dragged up the mountain by Sherpas tied to ropes, walking single file in long lines. You've seen what the – you have people trying to summit Everest that really like would die if they didn't have such enormous support around them. But we think that, well, if I buy the right gear and hire the right people, then I too can stand on the rooftop of the world.

The Nahanni is not a place for regular people like us. It's just not. You can't go very far into that reserve before you're kind of in trouble. If you can't navigate, not just with a compass, but, you know, like by the stars and stuff. And you need to be able to protect yourself against not just wild animals, but wild terrain.

You want to break an ankle? You want to break an ankle when you are hundreds of miles and hours away from help? Not to mention the weather. And the fog. Yeah. Because I would imagine a lot of the year it's so cold that, you know, you could die pretty easily from exposure. It's a ferocious place. And it's kind of nice to know that there's a place in the world.

And, you know, for us living in the U.S., there's a place in the world that's pretty close to home where people don't belong and can't go and don't go because we can't get there and back safely. I kind of love that. I love knowing that there's that little tiny pocket. And there was a... There was a... Oh, my God. There was so much gold in the Klondike.

There was so much gold. People were lined up to get on these ships that would take them up so that they could, you know, take a swing at becoming unfathomably wealthy. And a lot of them became unfathomably wealthy. I mean, if you show up on the dock with 200 pounds of gold, do you know what that's worth? A lot. People risk their lives because the payoff made the risk seem worth it.

But then you had even really experienced prospectors like Jorgensen. Martin Jorgensen, just cabin burned to the ground. He's dead. And nobody has the first clue how or why. And I would argue with you, Team Coyote. So not only can coyotes cannot get in a sleeping bag, but they can set a fire. We got a couple of coyotes standing around.

Shit. I can't get this meat out of that bag. Ken, burn it down. What are we doing here, people? Use your logic. I'm also fascinated with Charlie McLeod in this story. How awful must it have been for him to have gone down there and found out that his brothers had died, I guess, a couple, three years earlier? Five. Five.

It had been five years. So whatever remains they found must have been in really bad shape. I mean, it must have been difficult, first of all, to make sure, well, are these my brothers? And then once he did, all of the emotions that go with what had happened with that. I could not believe it was Shakespearean in a wilderness so vast, in a country so enormous, that Charlie McLeod would be hired to march a group of prospectors past the bodies of his dead brothers.

The odds of that, doesn't that feel Shakespearean to you? It does. Yeah, the odds of it are pretty astronomical. But as you said, people didn't go off trail. They pretty much stayed on the trail. The Nahanni Valley was sort of laced with a combination of game trails, which if you've ever been in the wilderness, animals also take the path of least resistance.

You'll find game trails all over forests and woods. So there were game trails and there were some old hunting trails that the Dene used, trails that other earlier fur trappers and prospectors had used. So it wasn't like you entered the valley into an impenetrable wilderness. There were some trails and everyone who came in and out of there took advantage of those trails.

So I guess in that way, it's not that shocking that Charlie McLeod would have stumbled across his brothers. He almost didn't. He almost didn't because it was one of the people in the party that he was leading. Charlie, this man had been hurt and he stayed behind and I'll catch up with you guys by the end of the day. So the man stays behind and he has the luxury of sitting still and taking in his surroundings and that's when he sees the blazed tree.

He investigates and sees the skeletons and gets on his horse and rejoins the larger group and he's like, I saw something back there. He describes it and Charlie McLeod has a sick feeling because no one has heard from Frank or Willie in five years. And this sounds as impossible as it seems, this sounds like it's them. And you know that he didn't believe it or want to believe it.

It was just too unlikely. But there are the initials W.M. Willie McLeod, F.M. Frank McLeod. There's his brother's watch. There's his brother's ring. And the McLeod mother is complaining. They never call. They never write that they forget about me. I think what a different world it was when you would kiss your brother or whatever goodbye and years would go by and you would just have to hope that he will come home because there was no way to know.

You just had to hope until you knew there was nothing to hope for. Can you even imagine what that was like? How hard because just going into the wilderness, let's just. I think we talked about the weather, the wild animals, the snakes, you could fall and hit your head, any one of a number of things that can happen to you that have no mystery around them that can just happen because you're out here in the wilderness.

I mean, it's not something that's terribly attractive to me. The note that I made when you did this was don't be a prospect. Yeah, it's a hard life. It was a note that I made. Now, as you say, if you say, well, there's all this money, but I don't know. I don't know that I want to risk my life in order to become rich. I'd like to work hard.

I wouldn't mind working hard, but I don't want to risk my life for that. Boy, thousands of people were willing. They were more than willing, whether they were adequately prepared for it or not. A lot of people died. A lot of people died chasing the dream, chasing that gold fever. And sometimes they died, you know, like the McLeod brothers in a mysterious way with their heads missing.

And sometimes there were just stupid accidents, drunken gunfights and disputes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, people. Or the group that went out with a woman, you know, as they say, went insane. I mean, we don't know. But, you know, I would think that being isolated and being out there might affect some people a certain way, whether it's a curse or whether it's just the fact that she just was not mentally and emotionally equipped to be in that situation, because I have to imagine that that would certainly would try you.

Well, I can tell you that one group of prospectors who were working in that part of the world and were back and forth to the two trading posts said that it was their belief that Annie Laferte went out of her mind from the mosquitoes. Because in the summertime on the rivers and creeks in the Nahanni Valley, apparently the mosquitoes are just a menace.

And this, of course, is back before there was any sort of mosquito spray, bug repellent, that people's bodies would be they would be like swollen and misshapen and bloody from the bites and the scratching of the bites, that people would be driven out of their minds by the mosquitoes. And so this group said, I mean, they found her naked, possessed by a devil and running up a hill.

And these guys were serious. They said, that sounds like a mosquito situation. Sounds like she tore her clothes off, scratching, itching and ran uphill in a desperate attempt to get away from like where the mosquitoes congregated by the water. Now, what happened next that she was never seen again and her body was never found?

Well, it is very, very easy once you step off the path in a forest to vanish just a few feet from where that path would have been. Oh, yeah. It happens today. How many times have we seen that, that somebody went missing and they went out and looked for them and the person was like, you know, 50 yards off the path? They weren't that far off the path.

So it's entirely possible that those guys were right that because they knew a thing or two about being driven so mad by the mosquitoes and the itching that you would tear your clothes off and rake your skin bloody. They know a thing about that. So I thought that their theory about Annie Laferte was that one rang really true to me.

Like take out all your monsters, paranormal, dimensional portals, Bigfoot, all of it and and listen to what those guys are saying. And all she had to do was get into the brush. And then now she's disoriented, wandering, dehydrated eventually. Right. Maybe not very long after that, because it was summertime when she disappeared.

It wouldn't take long for a person to succumb, would it? No, I don't think so. I mean, Annie Laferte is one of the only mysteries in this in this story that isn't that much of a mystery. I'd like to hike. But even even hiking up there at that, I mean, you know, the mosquitoes, the mosquitoes alone would be enough to have me not want to go there.

If I if I was a billionaire, I would be doing different things than today's crop of billionaires. If I was a billionaire, I would be putting together a team of the greatest everything, the greatest helicopter pilots, the greatest mountaineers, the greatest wilderness survivalists, the greatest trackers. And I would be like this summer, we're going deep into the Nahanni.

I want to find the Tropical Valley. I want to see giant tulips and albino moose and mammoths or rhinos or whatever the hell is walking around in there. I would not be doing what today's billionaires are doing. Would you in all seriousness, if money were no object? How many of these stories do we cover where you think, yeah, I would like to I'd like to see that?

I'd like to do that. Well, I mean, today's billionaires are about exploration, too. It's just in a different place. I mean, yeah, my wallet is. Yes, I would be fascinated to be able to find a way to get in there without having to actually hike in there and deal with all the elements. And there was a journalist for an outdoor magazine was given an opportunity and leapt upon it to be airlifted into the Nahanni.

And he was dropped by air into a meadow and had a few days and, you know, high summer. So, you know, your best chances for being able to put pull yourself through this. And just the description of I like I don't know that we can even fathom the silence of being in a place where no people are and very few people have ever been.

It's wow. It is wow. It's just it's just wow. This is this is a jewel of a place tucked away in the top northwest corner of Canada that nobody knows exists. And that's a good thing. That is a good thing. We do not need vending machines and charging stations everywhere on the planet. And I did expect as someone who's pretty convinced that they some shit going down in parks and forests.

I came away kind of feeling like I don't think there's anything paranormal here. But I think there's I think that the mystery is so complicated that we won't ever unravel it. I don't think it's as simple as coyotes or rogue bands of angry indigenous people. I think all of those things are the easy answer, but none of them hold up to scrutiny.

You know, I mean, I'd have to agree with you on that. I mean, there's an awful lot of clues for a lot of different things, but none of them point exactly to one thing. You really yeah, you're really forced to if you're going to go with the coyote hypothesis, you really have to say to yourself. Well, the coyote couldn't get in the sleeping bag.

We had a dog named Sadie. She was a boxer pit bull rescue from the kill shelter. That dog ate an armchair, Max, and there wasn't a delicious dead human inside. I don't know what to your point. Well, they couldn't get in the sleeping bag. That's that's I mean, come on. Come on. That that one. No one's buying. So, yeah, the coyote thing doesn't hold up.

And there is not one shred of evidence against the denning issue. Not one. No, I mean, to nothing. And of course, the Naha are gone, gone, gone and have been gone for a couple of a couple of few centuries. So they're OK. Could it be a bear? Yes, it could absolutely be a bear. Why would a bear why would a bear not be able to get into a sleeping bag?

Oh, a grizzly bear. And there's probably grizzly bears up that way. There's tons. And they are and there are very aggressive. So they're not like these black and brown bears. You see, you know, I ran into a black bear in the woods and he was kind of like a big he was kind of like a big dog. He was like, well, how are you doing?

And there were people going, hey, were people trying to we're on the trail. And of course, he stopped all of us because he's there. And then some people thought, well, let's try to feed him. And I'm like, I said, what are you doing? Mr. Charles Darwin to the white. And then these poor people had like a German shepherd and the German shepherd was going out of his mind.

And of course, as we're all having to wait on the trail and more hikers are coming, it becomes this traffic jam waiting for whatever this bear is going to do. People are, you know, people are really. It's not just that we're stupid because we are, but we add a frosting of arrogance to that stupidity. And we think, well, I'm going to make friends with the bear.

It's just that's beyond just playing garden variety. Stupid. That's stupid and arrogant. Stupid. So you can't hear. OK, here's a theory. Here's a theory. There's a prospector who has gone into the valley and set up shop because a lot of these prospectors like Martin Jorgensen, they they went in alone. I mean, I want you to imagine the life that was right.

You're just alone in the wilderness for long stretches of time, dependent on yourself entirely for survival. But a lot of those a lot of those guys did that. So maybe one goes in there and statistically speaking, you know, sooner or later, you're bound to have a psycho. Maybe what we have is a serial killer before that term was even in existence.

Maybe what we have here is someone who gets off on taking a life. So this happened over the course of 40 years thereabouts where the headless at least. Yeah, I suppose that is possible. I mean, if you went in young enough and you somehow managed to survive by your wits for long enough. Because here's what we don't have. Here's what we don't have.

We have people that are killed and decapitated, but we don't have anybody emerging from the Nahanni Valley dripping in gold, stolen gold. You know, pillaged claims and, you know, hijacked shafts like we don't really have that, which makes you think, well, what was the motive to kill these people and cut their heads off?

I don't even think like one early theory on the McLeod brothers was, well, the killer took their heads so that their bodies would not be identified. OK, except for the part where the bodies are lying underneath the tree blazed with their own initials. And there's the watch and ring that the heads were take. I am convinced the heads were taken as some kind of trophy.

Yeah, it just doesn't like the whole ID thing doesn't feel right at all. So is there some kooky, psychotic hermit who lived in the Nahanni Valley who basically was a kind of a modern day headhunter? Honest to God, Max, that theory works as well for me as a coyote that can't shoot through a sleeping bag. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's possible that, you know, that the serial killer came from one of the native tribes, too.

We think when you said that, I was thinking loner, white guy. But then I thought, you know, the natives might have serial killers, too. I mean, it's possible. And one of them, you know, just kind of went rogue from the tribe and decided I'm going to do this easily. Right. It doesn't have to be a fur trader or prospector. It could be a rogue indigenous man.

I don't think, you know, one one theory that was floated a long time ago was that a remnant band of Naha stayed in the valley and they were known to be an extremely aggressive territorial people. But like, here's the thing. Were they immortal? Did they have some women with them? Were they were they reproducing and replacing their numbers as they inevitably died?

You see how that is right up there with coyote can't chew through sleeping bag? Yeah. So when you all of these theories are fascinating until you kind of step back from them and go, yeah, why? And I got to take all the wild animals out, because if your head is delicious, your thighs would be. Yeah, that's the thing about it. So I got to take all the animals out.

It's it's it's something that is definitely being done on purpose. It's not just some sort of random thing. And if they found if they ever found the body of Robert Weir, who, bless his heart, had no business being in the woods. Apparently, that boy went from Scotland to Canada, like he was like, bye, I'll be home soon.

Goes to Canada and immediately hooks up with the McLeod brothers and heads for the Mahoney. That he was wearing a kilt, playing the bagpipes and drinking scotch. And one day, I mean, Max, you and I know people who are kind, hardworking and have a can do spirit who would last a minute in that environment. Yeah, because you don't know what you're you don't know what you're doing.

So I went looking. I looked and looked and looked. If they ever found his body, it I couldn't I couldn't find it. I couldn't find any evidence that they ever found his body. That man just disappeared, like just walked off the face of the earth. And was never heard from again. So here's here. So I thought a lot about Robert Weir.

So the three Frank and Willie McLeod and Robert Weir there, that's their campsite. The bodies were found in a campsite with campsite evidence, fire rings, tree blazings, personal belongings, all of it. And even the DNA told Charlie McLeod that the person or persons had taken the journal that his brother was never without.

So did Robert Weir did something happen? There's an altercation or a confrontation and they're there at this campsite. Was Robert Weir able to make a run for it and got himself so hopelessly turned around and lost that he like Annie Laferte died just, you know, from exposure and dehydration? Yeah, because his body, yeah, his body is just in the brush somewhere. What do you think?

Yeah, I would say that that's very likely. And of course, he has no way if he is a total. What did you call it? Green, green, green hand. So if he's a total green hand out there, he doesn't know how to survive. And so, you know, I mean, he he probably if that was the case, he probably died a short while later. And as you say, ran off and got hopelessly lost.

Can you imagine how frightened you would be that your two companions are being murdered and you're running in a moment like that? We all like to think that we have it together, but in a moment like that, you're just running. And we don't know, was it in the daytime or the nighttime when this happened? It would be if you could if you could see this wilderness, you wouldn't have to run more than 30 seconds off of an established path before you would be turned around.

So now you're panicked. You're scared. Maybe it's dark. You really have no business being out there in the first place and you're you're chronically tired. You're chronically hungry, chronically dirty, like all of that. You know, it starts to chip away and now you're running for your very life. What are the chances? Yeah. I mean, by this point, like, is there anything left of Robert Weir that somebody could stumble across?

Oh, I'm sure. I don't know how long those bones would last. I don't know. I'm sure not, because animals will scatter bones when animals come. Yeah. You know, there's been different situations that have happened. Ted Bundy or one of these serial killers have put bodies in the woods and the animals scattered it. And it was always a problem because, you know. I'm really glad you brought that up.

So I want you to think about think about something for a second. Every one of the bodies that were found, which is not the same thing as every one of the bodies that is there because we don't know that. Right. Right. Every one of those bodies that have been found. Showed no signs of predator behavior, meaning there were no teeth marks and the bodies weren't scattered.

Now, that gives you pause, doesn't it? Because here's a perfectly delicious dead person for the taken. Well, you're saying they're delicious, perhaps, you know, they were filthy. Yeah. I mean, if I was if I was a timber wolf, I'd be like, I don't know if I want. But in all seriousness, what the heck? Bad juju would keep wild scavengers like a coyote, like a wild animal from eating something that's right there.

These were fully intact human skeletons, except for their heads. What, Max, explanation can you give me for that? I can give you no explanation for that, because you would think that that stuff would have been scattered some. And I know you'll say, well, of course, that's what happened with the heads. But I'll go back to the fact that the fact that those bodies were intact and the heads were the only thing that were missing and never found.

Something ain't right here. Something ain't right. So if you've ever heard some of the I don't want to use the word myths, because I don't think that's the right word. Some of the things people have experienced in the Appalachian Mountains, the Appalachians are very old. And the Smokies, these are old mountains that have seen things and know things.

People will tell you if you're ever hiking in the Appalachian Mountain range and you're just walking along, minding your business. And suddenly there's no sound, no bird noise, no insect noise. You're in trouble. You're in big trouble. And the other thing you want to be careful about is you're cruising along and somebody calls your name for help or calls out for help.

That might not be a person you're hearing. You've heard some of this stuff, too, right? Yes. And you hike in that part of the world. Yeah, and I have. I've hiked in areas, well, not desolate, but I've hiked in areas where there wasn't anybody around. I mean, my friend Ken and I went and we hiked one day and it was I don't know, it was like 10 degrees.

He's saying, why are you hiking in that weather? Well, we wanted to prove we could, but it was it was silent the whole time we were out there. And we saw two people the entire time, this this guy and his son. The son was looking at us with that look in his eye like, help, he made me come out here. But but when you hike and you're there and you don't hear sounds, it is very trippy.

You just want to be careful of the sudden silence. You know, you're just there you are. But and the sudden silence, there are some there are some amazing stories that people tell of things they've experienced in the Smokies, things they've experienced in the Appalachian Mountains. Like there are just there's dark, ancient, old stuff in those places, whereas like the Rockies and the Tetons, those are new, jagged, raw, youthful mountains with with a different kind of energy that radiates off of them.

There's an old kind of almost malevolent energy, they say, in some parts of the Appalachian Mountains and the Smoky Mountains. But of course, in the Nahanni Valley, the Nahanni Reserve, it's all unknown because so few people have done it. And it does make me even though I don't want to lean on like a like a woo woo or a paranormal explanation for what happened to these people, that forget the ones who disappeared and never came back.

You can come up with a million reasons how that could happen. You twist your ankle, you fall into a ravine, it gets cold, you can't make a fire, pretty soon you're dead, right? Yeah. But the ones that they found, the headless bodies with no signs of animal predation. That one thing is where you go, what the hell? What, what would have to happen to a big slab of meat to make a hungry wild animal?

Avoid it. What would have to happen, Max, for that? Well, as you said, not bathing for, you know, months on end, that might be one. Of course, my dog eats goose poop. So they seem to be not as discriminating, especially when they're hungry. There's something inexplicable. A chick goes foraging through the pine store looking for cat dung.

See? I'm cooking him his own food, and he's going to eat that. See? So, it does make you wonder. To get you, Babs, I got off track. No, it's very, um, it's very mysterious. And there's a, have you ever listened? There's a great podcast, Missing 911. It's a documentary on maybe Netflix, or I can't remember which. There's a man who has devoted his life to the weird goings-on in America's national parks.

And something that my husband and I like to do is go off the grid. And in the West, people, like the government, the Bureau of Land Management, owns gazillions of acres of land. And, you know, people like ranchers have leasing, grazing rights. And people are allowed to use these public lands unless it's otherwise posted, right?

And so, you can go, if you have like a vehicle that can go off-road, you can yank your steering wheel and go off the paved road or the interstate and just drive for miles and miles and miles. And the only voice you'll hear is your own. And there's a million stars in the sky and wild animals and very little or no cell phone service.

No one out there to hear you scream. No one out there to come to your rescue if you get into any kind of trouble at all. And those are lands within, you know, a few hours drive of a super Walmart. Now put yourself in the Mahoney National Reserve. And the only way in is by air. And the only way out is by air because you're not going to be able to get across the terrain and survive to walk yourself out.

Anything's possible. Anything could happen. We don't even know all of what lives there. Did you see this? It might have been in your news feed. A group of scientists, and I think it was Brazil, doing a census, a life form census in the rainforest, found like all these new species of animals, including a few that they thought had been extinct.

Isn't that cool to imagine? Well, we don't know. We don't know what's in there. We don't. One of the things that's happened in the Amazon, because of deforestation, they're finding that these civilizations lived there that they didn't know lived there and that they were very advanced. So isn't it fun how we think we know the world?

We're so cocky. We all we know exactly. We know everything. We know everything there is to know, and anybody that says otherwise is just a flake, right? We don't know. And we know almost nothing about the Headless Valley and the Nahanni National Reserve. We know very, very little. Only a handful of human beings, relatively speaking, have gone into the deepest part of that park.

So in 2018, 1,800 people visited the Nahanni National Reserve. That doesn't mean they went all the way in. It means they paid their fee and crossed past the gate. We have no way of knowing how many people have gone all the way through. And that tropical valley, we haven't really talked about it. That sounded like some bullshit, didn't it?

And yet, how many people? I've said that it's there. But if there's hot springs, you can certainly understand how that could happen. Have you ever heard of the Alaskan muck pit? The Alaskan muck pit? Is this where they found where there was, like, permafrost, and it thawed, and they found creatures in there? Yes. You got it.

Well, here's something interesting about that. And we have an episode coming up that kind of talks a little bit about the causes for that. I want to do a whole episode on those animals because there's something. And this image is going to stay with you and haunt you, right? So those animals were flash frozen. They didn't die over a long period of time.

They weren't all together, and then a bad storm came in, and they starved to death, and their bodies piled up. That isn't what happened. We're not sure what happened, but here's what we have. We have an extraordinary number and variety of different animals that died instantly, and their bodies were flash frozen instantly.

One of those mammoths had buttercups in its mouth. And I know you're going, buttercups on the tundra? Well, one theory is that on the day that that event happened, it wasn't the tundra. That there was some catastrophic seismic event, global seismic event. Like a meteor hitting or something? Or like some underground, like deep in the core of the earth eruption, what have you.

But basically some event that instantaneously changed the landscape and climate of that place. Because they can't figure out any other explanation for why a flash frozen mammoth died with a mouthful of buttercups. Is that not a haunting image? It really is. Yeah, yeah. And that's where I read about, for the longest time after that, people were hacking up and selling frozen mammoth steaks in restaurants.

That has got to be not true. I've got to find some proof of that, because that just seems like an urban legend. But it fascinates me to imagine that it's a sunny day on a grassy meadow. And you're just chomping buttercups and thinking your thoughts. And then, boom. And you're flash frozen. Flash frozen. Yeah. And we also, just recently, this was just recently in Science News.

They have this radar imaging that shows what's underneath Antarctica. And it's another continent that's been shoved up under and buckled. You saw that in your news feed. I did, yeah. So the world is alive. And sometimes you get the feeling that we're like fleas on its back. And every once in a while it wants to give it a good shake, knock us off.

Maybe that's what happened that day to those animals in Alaska. Which seems like it's off subject, but this is all in the same neighborhood. So in the tropical valley that these prospectors and explorers say that they've seen, they talk about animals, seeing signs of animals that technically should not have been there or alive at all.

But if that tropical valley, Max, was like a weird little oasis point, you could see. You could see how some creatures could make a home there and survive. I absolutely believe that it's there. So, man, that's what I'd be doing with my billion dollars. I would be like, I'd be like, I'd be calling my butler, Jeeves. Make sure that every child has breakfast and lunch at school.

And I'd like to go to the Nahanni National Reserve in a helicopter piloted by an experienced military helicopter pilot. All right, that's it for today's True Weird Stuff. And if you have ever been, if you're one of our Fine Canadian listeners or an adventurer, and you've been to the Nahanni, buddy, we would like to hear from you.

You can call us at 844-52-SHERI. Or you can shoot us an email through the trueweirdstuff.com website or DM us on the True Weird Stuff Instagram. Because I am dying to meet someone who's been into this place. Gosh, I would just like to know more. And if we can find one piece of hard evidence, we'll do a spooky case in the forest.

I just don't want to do something that's totally make-believe. We've got to find the true part of it. Right. But there are an awful lot. Awful lot. And I know that if I ever came upon a staircase in the forest, it would be so hard not to go up it. How about you? Yeah, it would be. But you know, I've known about these before and I think I'm going to stay away.

You think you're going to stay away. But you're not sure. I'll go back to the note. Don't be a prospector. Listen, if there's one thing that makes human beings delightful and gets human beings killed, it's our curiosity. Yes, it is. It is what makes us awesome and what makes us deceased. That's that for this episode of True Weird Stuff.

Coming up, our next new episode will be a fascinating case of, well, let me just put it this way. The last person you expect to take the stand in a murder trial is the victim. And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

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Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sutton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

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