Ipsum Arcanum

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Story 1.

The Village That Vanished

History is littered with instances in which large groups of people disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

In most cases, some form of explanation for what happened has eventually been accepted, but with a precious few, the facts are so inexplicable that no convincing hypothesis has ever been agreed upon.

In this story, we examine one such occurrence: the village that vanished.

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The sun had not long risen when Joe Labal had packed the last of the equipment into his canoe and then set off downstream.

Whilst the previous evening had been cold, this November was actually far milder than many others he had experienced during his years trapping in Canada's Midwest territories.

Instead, rather than the low temperatures, It was the lack of sustenance that now spurred him on the latest leg of his journey.

This expedition into the wilderness had thus far produced little in the way of bounty for the seasoned hunter, offering few opportunities to supplement his existing supplies.

Thankfully, from previous expeditions, he was aware that there was a friendly Inuit village lying just a little further along the shores of Lake Anjacuni.

With luck, they would accept the furs he had managed to acquire in exchange for food and provisions.

After an hour of travel, Labelle finally spied a thin plume of dark grey smoke curling up into the sky from the shoreline.

With a wry smile, he adjusted his course accordingly and began to paddle towards the small collection of sheds and huts that came into view.

Moments later, his canoe made contact with the frozen shoreline and the trapper made his way into the village.

The lack of activity was at first not particularly concerning to Labelle.

It was still relatively early in the day and it was possible that the bulk of the village's inhabitants were off hunting away from the settlement.

But it quickly became apparent that every single one of the structures was completely empty.

Fires were still burning and freshly prepared food had been left out ready to cook.

But of the villagers themselves, there was no trace.

Perplexed, LeBelle resolved to investigate further.

On the outskirts, he found the remains of the village's huskies, all of which had seemingly perished due to malnutrition.

More worrying still, the graves of the inhabitants' dead relatives had been dug up, leaving icy voids where the buried remains should have been.

With an uncomfortable feeling rising in his gut, the trapper began to consider what his next move should be.

As the day progressed, he could find no clue as to the fate which had befallen the villagers and no indication that they were due to return.

Worse still, precious hours of daylight were burning away.

Labelle did not relish the prospect of travelling through the night, and he had no desire to spend an evening in the deserted village, so he began to collect as many items of food as he could carry.

With the skies beginning to darken, the hunter hurried back to his canoe and cast off.

Navigating into the main channel, he looked over his shoulder, catching one last glimpse of the abandoned settlement.

Bizarrely, It now appeared to be illuminated by a strange bluish glow, which was emanating from somewhere beyond the horizon.

With a grunt, LeBelle began to paddle faster, determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and the unsettling scene, before darkness forced him to once again stop and set up camp.

In the first week of January 1931, A small detachment of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers departed from their barracks in Manitoba and set off on a gruelling 560-mile ride across country towards Lake Anjacuni.

They were led by Sergeant Jay Nelson and had been dispatched in relation to a garbled and confusing telegram which had arrived at their outpost several weeks before.

The journey was lengthy and arduous, but passed largely without incident until the Mounties finally neared their destination.

Keen to test the validity of the puzzling communication they had received from Joe LaBelle, Nelson ordered his men to conduct discrete inquiries with any hunters or local tribesmen they encountered along the way.

Their investigations first led them to a local hospital, where an Inuit trapper named Saumek was recovering from the effects of extreme frostbite.

He had been found by another group of hunters, alone and unconscious, lying in a snowdrift with his legs so badly frozen that he still had yet to recover any feeling in them.

The constables questioned him at length, but other than a few feverish comments about an evil spirit known as Tornrock, they could make little sense of his replies.

Unable to elicit anything useful from the hunter, the Mounties were then directed to an Inuit village, located roughly 150 miles from their destination.

It was alleged that the tribe there had adopted a 10-year-old boy, who had wandered into the settlement one evening in the the middle of a snowstorm, which occurred two months before.

The village elders confirmed this to be the truth, adding that the child had not spoken a word since his arrival, and that none of the surrounding tribes had any idea where he came from.

But it was the testimony of a local trapper, Armin Laron, that most troubled Nelson.

The hunter explained that for the past few months, he and his two sons had witnessed strange and bizarre bluish lights in the night sky, which had followed them.

On one occasion, they also caught sight of a large cylindrical object hovering above them, which had transformed into a bullet-like shape, before heading off at speed in the direction of Lake Anjakuni.

Eventually, the party reached their destination.

finding it largely as it had been described by Joe LaBelle.

The settlement settlement was small, with the population there believed to have been no greater than 30 people, and was completely deserted when they arrived.

Ordering his men to spread out and begin searching the perimeter, Nelson continued alone into the centre of the village, taking notes as he did so.

As he walked between the empty huts, He took in the remains of unattended meals spoiled and welded to the sides of their cooking pots, the fires below them having long since died away.

Inside one of the structures was a child's coat, which seemed to have been discarded halfway through being repaired with a needle and thread.

The frozen remains of the huskies were also lying exactly where Labelle had described, skeletal in appearance due to apparent starvation.

Joining his officers at the village's burial site, Nelson found several empty depressions in the ground, each roughly the length and depth of a grave.

The ice around these holes was still frozen hard and smooth, with no signs that they had been dug out using a hand or tool.

The headstones were stacked neatly in two piles nearby, seemingly refuting any act of nature or animal predation.

After spending several hours in the village, Nelson ordered his men back to the horses and set off on the long journey back home.

Upon his return to Manitoba, he reported that he had found nothing of note at the village.

He could not explain how or why the people had left, and neither could he find any indication of criminal activity.

One thing that Nelson did note, however, was that La Belle did not appear to be as seasoned a hunter as he had purported, having only applied for his first trapper's licence during the previous year.

He had also since sold his story to the Halifax Herald, a local newspaper notorious for its tall stories and inaccurate journalism.

With his report filed, Nelson moved on to his regular duties.

with no further official investigation into the matter ever taking place.

While Sergeant Nelson's report and investigation are as thorough as can be expected, given the resources he had to work with, they contribute nothing in terms of an answer as to the fate of the missing villagers.

His findings differ little from the initial account provided by Joe LaBelle, and do not offer any real explanation for the disappearances, save that it was not a criminal act.

The fact that fires were still smoldering in the village when LaBelle arrived would indicate that whatever took place did so very recently.

There were no obvious signs of a disturbance or that an altercation had taken place.

It was as if the people living there had just stopped what they were doing and walked away from the village en masse, leaving their sleds and kayaks behind.

But this scenario does not account for why they had left their huskies.

or indeed why these animals had not been fed for some time and had not eaten any of the food or supplies which were now lying unattended.

To interfere with the remains of a departed loved one was the height of disrespect to the Inuit people and the graves did not appear to have been exhumed by any method known to man.

Sergeant Nelson's observation that Labelle had only recently applied for a trapping license does not necessarily indicate deceit.

It is perhaps more likely that he had spent many years operating without one before finally being forced by the authorities authorities into getting one.

His account is also not overly indicative of someone who tells tall tales.

It was backed up by the findings of the subsequent police investigation, with no embellishments or exaggerations detected.

So what could explain the sudden and unexpected disappearance of 30 people from their homes, leaving very little behind in the way of evidence?

Very few rational explanations are to be found.

It is possible that the villagers abandoned the safety of their settlement for fear of some looming tragedy, such as a disease or the threat of violence from a neighbouring community.

And yet, this seems highly unlikely.

It is easy to dismiss the claims of mysterious lights in the sky reported by Armin Leron as simply being the Aurora Borealis, but this does not explain the mysterious flying craft he and his sons described to the investigating officers.

As an experienced hunter and trapper, he would have been perfectly aware of the northern lights and whether something different was taking place in the skies above.

For many years after the event, rumours swirled that the Mounties had seen mysterious blue lights shadowing them from above during their journey.

but that the RCMP had ordered the members of the detachment to remain silent about what they had witnessed.

Could the explanation for the disappearance be one of alien abduction, the villagers and their dead beamed out of the village by a passing extraterrestrial craft?

And what are we to make of the testimony of the injured Inuit hunter, Saumek?

The being he described to the officers was a vengeful spirit from Inuit folklore.

This creature was an oversized man with large tusks protruding from the sides of its mouth, who was believed to have the ability to control nature and to create lethal and terrifying snowstorms.

For many years, there has been mention of various monsters living undisturbed in the vast and unexplored areas of North America.

These include Sasquatches, giant humanoids and terrifying dinosaur-like creatures residing within waterways such as Lake Anjacuni.

Could whatever creature the Inuit came to know as Tornrock be yet another entity to be added to this growing gallery of strange beings?

There are also suggestions that the region may be home to a series of rifts or breaches between dimensions.

Over time, a significant number of aircraft and ships have vanished, with some believing that they and their occupants had disappeared through weaknesses that separate our reality from neighbouring ones.

Throughout the years, the story of the missing Inuit village has been revisited by various authors, and the RCMP have been asked to provide more detail of their investigation into the matter.

They maintain that no crime took place, and that the story is at best an exaggeration, and at worst, a deliberately staged fabrication.

Examining the various accounts surrounding the event does seem to add some weight to this argument.

Since the original newspaper article which was published in 1930, various embellishments from Labelle's account appear to have been added by subsequent publications.

Sometimes the number of graves that had been disturbed varies.

In others, the nature of the structures encountered by Labelle have been altered, with a suggestion that they were in fact tents rather than permanent buildings.

If it truly was makeshift accommodation that Labelle saw at the side of the lake, this would offer a more realistic explanation for the incident.

What he stumbled across may have been the remains of a seasonal or temporary camp, with the inhabitants simply moving off onto a new or permanent settlement somewhere else.

In search of money for his story, perhaps the trapper did exaggerate the encounter, or stage some of it for the Mounties to find.

As with many of the events that we have examined, it is unlikely that the truth will ever come to light.

Too much time has now elapsed, and there is no obvious source from which any further evidence may be forthcoming.

This mystery, like so many others which have taken place in the Canadian wilderness, will forever remain

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Story 2

Who was the Isdal Woman?

In the closing weeks of 1970, the badly burned remains of a female victim were discovered lying on the side of an isolated Norwegian valley.

Her true identity has continued to elude the authorities right up until this very day.

In this story, we ask, who was the Isdalwoman?

The historic city of Bergen, lying on Norway's western coast, is situated at the centre of a mountain chain known locally as the Seven Mountains.

The largest of these features is Mount Ulrichen, which lies to the southeast of the city, rising to an imposing 643 meters.

Of the many well-known hiking trails threading their way across its slopes, the most popular is situated in the Isdalan Valley, which runs along Ulrichan's northern face.

It was here that on a bitterly cold November evening in 1970, A solitary hiker descending the mountain encountered three other people travelling up the path.

As the figures slowly approached from the opposite direction, he was taken aback by how out of place they looked amidst their rural surroundings.

Pacing slightly ahead was a middle-aged woman, quite well dressed, but clearly feeling the effects of not wearing any protective outer garments.

Behind her walked two imposing men.

both dressed in dark clothing, but also ill-prepared for the conditions, wearing only lightweight jackets and casual footwear.

As the distance closed between them, the hiker was struck by her beauty, though something of a haunted expression dominated her features.

As she neared him, she slowed her pace and reached out as if to take his hand.

One of the two men then moved swiftly to her side, and she was brusquely hurried along without managing to say anything.

The hiker stopped and watched as the three figures continued along the path until they passed out of sight.

She had needed his help, that much was clear, but he doubted he could have handled the two men on his own.

Quickening his pace, the lone hiker continued his journey, resolving to report the matter.

The following morning, he arrived at the local police station and related the encounter to the desk officer.

His efforts were met with little more than a shrug and a sigh and instead he was questioned as to why it was any of his business.

Resentful of the policeman's disinterested tone, the young man left the station and put the matter behind him.

Five days later, he would receive a brutal, unwanted reminder of the encounter.

There,

emblazoned across the front page of his morning newspaper, was a headline announcing that the remains of a woman had been found mutilated on the windswept slopes of Mount Ulrichon.

The Isdalan Valley already had a dark and grisly past, even prior to the discovery of her corpse on the morning of November the 29th.

Known colloquially as Death Valley, The region had long been a popular location for suicide attempts, with more than one frozen corpse having to be manhandled down its flanks by mountain rescue workers.

The victim on this occasion had been discovered by a man walking with his two teenage daughters.

As the family had proceeded along the main trail, they spotted what looked like a suitcase full of clothes painstakingly laid atop one of the nearby boulders.

almost as if it had been ceremonial in nature.

On closer inspection, they discovered the corpse of a woman, concealed between the large rocks and having apparently been burned to death.

Recoiling in horror, the man grabbed hold of his children and hurried off to call the police.

The attending officers were appalled by the extreme efforts which had been taken to hide the victim's identity.

As they approached, the air had been thick with the sickly stench of burned human flesh.

The victim's facial features were totally destroyed, reduced to a charred mess.

On closer inspection, the tips of her fingers had been abraded by a tool of some kind, in an apparent attempt to render her fingertips unrecognisable.

Except for her lower back, which had been resting on the ground, and where her shoulders and upper arms had been wedged tightly against the rocks either side, the rest of the body and its clothing was entirely burned and blackened.

One of the officers had paused to pick up a brown fur hat which lay nearby and discovered that it smelled strongly of petrol.

It appeared as if the deceased had been soaked with the accelerant and then set alight.

In addition to items of jewellery and a broken umbrella, There was an empty bottle of cheap liqueur, an empty packet of phenomenal sleeping tablets, and a few water bottles which were half full.

Any documentation that might have identified her, such as a passport or identity card, seemed to have been removed.

Sickened and bewildered by what they saw, the officers set about recovering the body for further examination.

The results of the subsequent post-mortem did little to assist the police inquiry.

Whilst livid bruising was found and photographed at the base of the victim's neck, indicating she had been violently incapacitated, this was determined not to be the cause of death.

Instead, it was found that she had been poisoned as a result of ingesting at least 50 of the sleeping pills.

The coroner was unable to determine if she might have still been alive when she was set alight.

It was also discovered that any brand labels and identifying features from the clothes she wore had been cut away, making it impossible to trace them back to a point of sale.

For several days, the detectives assigned to the case made little headway, until a breakthrough occurred when partial fingertip samples, removed from the body during the autopsy, were found to correspond with two suitcases that had been found discarded on the platform of one of Bergen's busy central train stations.

The cases had clearly been searched and tampered with.

Some skin lotion with a prescription was recovered, but the section that would have identified the medical practice and doctor it originated from had been cut away.

Two different sums of money were concealed in the lining of the case, 500 German Deutschmarks and 130 Norwegian kroner.

There was also a postcard from an Italian photographer who lived and worked in the city.

When officers tracked this photographer down, they were sure he would be able to shed some light on the woman's identity, but this again turned into a dead end.

He admitted to having met the woman and taken her to dinner, during which she had told him she was from Johannesburg and was on a six-month visit to Norway's most popular tourist locations.

He had never seen her again after the meal, and when contact was made with the South African Consulate, it was determined she had lied about her nationality.

With no leads generated from appeals for information in the Norwegian press, photos and sketches of the woman were circulated to European news agencies and various branches of Interpol.

Eventually, this wider appeal led to a flood of information in relation to the case, though none of it ever managed to verify the victim's identity.

Prior to arriving in Norway, it was discovered she had travelled to a host of other European countries, utilising a variety of manufactured passports and identities wherever she went.

The list of nine fake names included Genevieve Lancier, Claudia Scheldt, Vera Schlossenek and Claudia Nielsen.

Witnesses stated that the woman was fluent in several different languages, including German and Flemish, and had also used fake wigs and hair dyes to further alter her identity.

She had offered the people she interacted with various backstories, including that she was an antiques dealer and a travelling salesperson.

Eventually, after several fruitless years, The case was closed by the Norwegian police, citing a suspected suicide.

From time to time, public interest would be revived by articles in the national media, only to subside again when no new leads were generated.

Neither the woman nor the two men she was with on that fateful November evening have ever been identified.

The official suicide verdict, which was recorded by the Norwegian coroner, has never been fully accepted, either by the general public or anyone closely connected to the case.

Whilst it is conceivable that the Isdahl woman concealed her identity before overdosing on prescription medication, it would have been impossible to later wedge herself between the rocks and then self-immolate, given the incapacitating effects of having taken so many sleeping pills.

This suggests that another party must have been involved in the attempt to destroy her remains, most likely one or both the unknown men who were last seen with her.

The first and most sinister scenario is that she was taken there by them against her will, with her last desperate attempt to speak with the young hiker thwarted by her captors.

She was then forced to consume the sleeping tablets before being felled by a blow to the back of the neck, then tucked into the rocks and set ablaze.

An alternative scenario has the men destroying her body at her own request, after she had committed suicide.

It is possible that whatever secret she had gone to such lengths to conceal was one that she wanted to take to her grave, and her escorts on that day were there to assist her in this.

A third, more outlandish theory is that given the meticulous manner in which her belongings were removed from her body and laid out, the death was some form of ritual sacrifice, containing a hidden meaning that could only be known to those involved.

It has long been suggested that the Isdal woman may have been an international spy, given that the incident occurred at the height of the Cold War.

Norway was a hotbed of espionage activity during the conflict, as it sat directly on the border between the Western powers and the neighbouring Soviet bloc.

The fact that she had easy access to a host of new identities and matching fake passports indicates she must have been associated with a well-controlled and financed organisation.

One of the other items found in the two abandoned suitcases by the investigating officers was a small diary filled with handwritten coded entries.

Whilst the actual messages have yet to be deciphered, There seems to be some correlation between the dates entered and the woman's movements throughout the country that year and the testing of a new missile system called the Penguin.

This idea is supported by the testimony of a local fisherman who contacted authorities during the appeal for information and stated that he had seen her near the northern city of Stavanger at the same time a large military exercise was taking place there.

The circumstances surrounding the death of the Isdal woman are strikingly similar to another mysterious death that occurred in Australia, known as the Tamam Shud case.

On the morning of the 1st of December 1948, the body of an unidentified male in his 40s was found slumped against the sea wall at Somerton Park Beach in Adelaide.

Whilst the Summerton man's cause of death was never fully ascertained, it bore all the hallmarks of a poisoning.

Once again, Labels had been removed from the clothing he was wearing, and a suitcase abandoned at a nearby train station had been similarly searched and stripped of any possible identifying features.

He was also in possession of papers containing handwritten coded notes and was suspected to have been operating in the country as a spy at the time of his death.

In 2017, Following further speculation and discussion about the case in online internet platforms, the Norwegian police decided to instigate a cold case review of of the Isdal woman's death.

To date, the DNA samples taken from her body nearly 40 years ago have still failed to correlate with anything on the Interpol database, but a new analytical technique carried out by the University of Bergen did manage to uncover further evidence about her origins.

Previous analysis of the handwriting samples taken from the woman's diary suggested she had been educated in a Western European country, with France being the strongest possibility.

The staff at the university then analysed the isotopes in the teeth that were removed from her body, hoping this would hold some insight into where she may have lived during her younger years.

What they discovered was that she had most likely been born and raised in Germany in the 1930s, with the data favouring Nuremberg as her town of origin.

As an older child, she had moved out of Germany to a neighbouring country, which is believed to have been either France or Belgium.

There was also evidence that at some point in her life, she had undergone expensive dental surgery in a non-European location, such as South America or Asia.

This suggests that the Isdahl woman grew up in Nazi Germany and would have been repatriated to one of the victorious Allied nations at the conclusion of World War II.

Following the outbreak of the Cold War, she may have lived on the western side of the Iron Curtain.

In her older years, she had then ended up working for an employer who had sent her to faraway and exotic locations, potentially a Western intelligence agency.

Whichever side she worked for as the conflict continued, Her duties would have taken her through unoccupied European countries, where it appears she spent time observing and documenting events for her employers.

In due course, her actions garnered unwanted attention, prompting someone to deem her a significant threat, which necessitated immediate intervention.

We may never know if it was her enemies that went to such great lengths to hide her true identity, or indeed her employers when they found she had been killed.

All we do know is that her life was ended in a cold and clinical manner, hidden away from prying eyes.

On the 5th of February 1971, she was given a Catholic funeral and buried in an unmarked grave.

But what is staggering is that even if she didn't have any immediate family, It is almost inconceivable that another relative of hers has not had their DNA entered on record somewhere during the subsequent years.

One reason for this, especially if the Isdal woman did grow up during the horrors and upheaval of the Second World War, is that her entire family and the records of their existence were wiped out.

Another is that her identity might well be known to the powers that be, but because the level of espionage she was involved in was so secretive, it has been covered up and hidden from the public.

Whatever her beliefs and motivations were, the manner in which this helpless soul was killed is truly saddening.

It is our hope that one day her identity will become known, and that her full story can finally be told to the world.

Beddock is already.