In November 1930, a fur trapper named Joe LaBelle stopped by Lake Anjikuni in the Northwest Territories of Canada. There was a small Inuit village next to this lake, one he had visited before, and where he knew he would be welcome. 

Expecting to be greeted as warmly the cold weather permitted, the trapper instead found this village completely deserted. Among other curious details, meat was left drying in the open air, the nearby burial grounds were dug open, and sled dogs—still tied to the sleds—had frozen solid.

At least, that’s according to an excerpt from Stranger Than Science, a 1959 book by broadcaster Frank Edwards, based on his popular radio show of the same name. There isn’t a lot of information about the fate of Anjikuni village—Edwards devotes less than three pages to the subject—which makes it hard to figure out what happened. 

According to Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast, the earliest mention of the Anjikuni mystery comes from a 1976 citation of an article from the Canadian newspaper the Halifax Herald that was originally published on November 29, 1930. 

The Lake Anjikuni Disappearance… Hoax or Truth?

An investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, released the following year, casts doubt on the account. As Dunning notes, the Mounted Police learned that, though LaBelle was a real person, he lived and worked in a different area. They also learned that the photograph that had been published alongside side 1930 article—showing an Inuit village—was not an original, but had been taken from the police force’s own archives. Ultimately, the investigation concluded that the “entire episode was a sensationalized hoax” made up by the article’s author.

Dunning, too, found contradictions. For one, the 1930 article describes kayaks “battered by wave action, ”an unlikely observation as, “in November, when average temperatures are 13°C degrees below freezing,” the lake would have been a “sheet of ice.” He doubts the presence of kayaks in general, as “this would be by far the farthest inland that the historical use of Iglulik kayaks would have ever been documented.”

The Halifax Herald would not have been the first newspaper to invent a sensational story from thin air. The early 20th century saw an explosion in journalistic hoaxes, giving rise to conspiracy theories that persist to this day, including bigfoot and UFO sightings.

The idea of an Inuit village vanishing is not just intriguing in its own right, but also because it calls to mind other historical mysteries like that of Roanoke Colony, the first attempted English settlement in North America, whose 116 inhabitants disappeared. Today, likely theories include hurricanes, famines, diseases, attacks from Spanish colonizers, and migrations to other areas.

If the vanishing of Anjikuni village isn’t a hoax—which it most likely is—perhaps its inhabitants met a fate similar to these early American settlers.

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