The Headless Valley

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Today's story is considered by many to be one of the spookiest stories I've ever told.

This episode is the remastered audio from The Valley of Headless Men, which is a very popular video on my YouTube channel.

There are distressing sequences in the story.

As such, listener discretion is advised.

But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do.

And we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

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Okay, let's get into today's story.

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Located in the far northwestern section of Canada is the aptly named Northwest Territories.

It is a massive swath of land that virtually nobody lives inside of.

To make that point crystal clear, consider the following.

The country of Germany has a population of 83 million people, give or take.

The Northwest Territories is four times as large as Germany, but only has a population of about 50,000 people.

In addition to being this huge and mostly unoccupied space, the Northwest Territories are almost completely wild.

Think dense forests, huge mountains, massive rivers and lakes, and lots and lots of really big animals.

Even for highly experienced outdoors men and women, the Northwest Territories can be a truly hazardous place.

And within this truly hazardous place, there is one part that is the most hazardous, and it's right in the middle of the Northwest Territories.

And it's this 11,000 square mile stretch of just pure wilderness that's called the Nahani Valley.

In 1976, the Nahani Valley was made into a national park.

But don't let that fool you.

This is not some family park that anybody can go to.

There are no tourist accommodations, so there's no hotels, there's really nothing inside of it, and there are no roads that lead into this park.

The only way you can get inside this valley is by plane or by boat or by very stressful and difficult overland hike.

But for those who are able and willing to make the effort to get inside of this valley, you have the opportunity to explore one of the most beautiful places on the planet because this section of the world is almost completely untouched by man.

It is really nature at its purest form.

However, there is a catch.

This valley is said to be haunted.

Over the last 10,000 years, the handful of native tribes that have attempted to settle inside of the Nahani Valley have all either suddenly disappeared without a trace, like the Naha tribe, that literally overnight just was gone, leaving behind their shelters, their food, their supplies just gone.

No one knows what happened to them.

Or the tribes have abruptly fled, claiming they were being terrorized or stalked by creatures lurking in the forest, like these white demons and these large wolves they called Wahilas.

Now, of course, this just sounds like folklore, and it might very well be that that's all it is, folklore.

But starting in the early 1900s, some very strange things started happening in the Nahani Valley that were not folklore.

These things happened and they were horrifying.

These were horrifying real events.

And they might, depending on your viewpoint, give credit to some of the theories that the native tribespeople have about this valley, which is there's something evil lurking out in this forest, but we just don't know what it is.

In 1904, three brothers, Willie Frank and Charlie McLeod, who all lived in the Northwest Territories, decided they wanted to go looking for gold in the Nahani Valley.

They figured because so few people had ever been inside of this valley that if there was gold to be found, then certainly it had not been found yet.

And so after a very long and arduous journey using sled dogs and trains and homemade boats, they finally slipped into the valley and found themselves on what's called the Flat River, which runs right through the center of the Nahani Valley.

Now, the Flat River is kind of ironically named because it's anything but flat.

It's actually more like a rapid at certain points.

But either way, the three brothers, they're on their boat, they're making their way up the flat river, and at some point they pull off onto the riverbank and they set up camp.

And then once their camp is set up, they go down to the river and they put their gold sluices in the water.

A gold sluice is this long skinny box that's usually made of wood and it has a strainer on one side.

And gold miners will put it in the water submerged and they will kind of shovel the sediment on the bottom of the water into this little funnel and the big stuff will get stopped by the strainer and the dirt and the water will just kind of flow out the side.

And so the idea is you can trap gold nuggets inside of this sluice.

And so the three brothers, they get their sluices up and they start looking for gold and right away they hit pay dirt.

There is tons of gold in this river.

And so all day, all night, they get all this gold.

The next morning, they do the same thing.

And by the time all their containers are literally filled to the brim with gold, they decide, you know, hey, let's go back and turn this in, get some money for it, and then come back out here.

And so they pack up their tent, they pack up all their supplies, and they put everything back in their boat.

They get out onto Flat River.

And at some point, very early on in their journey back, the boat capsizes and the boat actually breaks apart from the strength of the rapids of Flat River.

And so the boat actually just sinks and much of their supplies sink, including all of their gold.

But the three brothers are able to grab some of their supplies, like the rifle and some lumber and some of their mining supplies and they swim it all to shore.

So they catch their breath.

They're totally devastated at the loss of the gold, but they're alive.

They have enough supplies to survive.

And so they figure all they could do is maybe try to go back to their original site, try to get some more gold because they did still have a sluice, and then try to get out of there and then, you know, regroup and come back another time.

And so using some of the lumber they recovered from their broken boat and then also by cutting down some trees, they literally fashioned another boat and then hopped back on the flat river and they went back up to that site where they had found gold earlier.

They set up their sluice, they set up their camp again, and this time they didn't find any gold.

So all day, this very disappointing day that they've already lost all their gold, now they're not finding any more gold.

And so that night when they went to bed, they decided that the next day they were just going to leave.

And so the next day, they get up, they pack up, they hop back on the flat river on this new boat they built, and they're able to make their way out of the valley and get back to their homes.

As soon as they get back home, the two younger brothers, Willie and Frank, start talking about how they want to go back into Nahani Valley and go get more gold because now they know there's gold out there.

It's not a question, yeah, we didn't find it that second time, but we know it's out there.

Charlie, the older brother, he wanted to get the gold, but he felt like, you know, hey, that was a close call with the boat flipping over.

I don't know if it's a good idea, so I'm actually not going to go.

You guys can go.

I'm going to stay.

And so several months go by, and Frank and Willie have been doing all this preparation for this additional trip into the valley.

And finally, in 1905, they're ready.

And so Willie, Frank, and a third man called Robert Weir, who was a friend of theirs, he was going to replace Charlie.

The three of them, they make their way up into the valley.

Now, they didn't tell anyone how long they were going to be gone for.

And so, when they didn't send any word and no one had heard from them in weeks, Charlie was actually not that concerned because he knew there was lots of gold to be had out in the Nahani Valley.

And so, he figured they must have struck it rich and now they've decided to live out there long term, or at least maybe through the summer or maybe the next year.

And so, he wasn't concerned.

And because he wasn't concerned, nobody else was concerned about these three men.

And so, weeks turned into months, turned into a year, and still no one's heard from these three men.

No one's heard from Willie, Frank, or from Robert, but still Charlie maintains that nothing can be wrong because there's three of them out there.

They're incredibly experienced.

There is a ton of gold out there.

I'm sure they're just killing it and they're just acquiring all this gold.

And we're going to see them in the next couple of months, maybe, and everything's going to be just fine.

But a whole other year would go by.

So they've been out there for two years and no one has heard from them.

And at this point, Charlie thinks to himself, okay, you know, I have to go out and see if they're okay.

And so he rounds up four other people from his town and he mounts an expedition to head back into the Nahani Valley to go find his two brothers and find Robert Weir.

Charlie and his search party eventually, after yet another long and arduous journey, they get into Nahani Valley and they get onto the Flat River.

And so they start making their way upstream along Flat River.

So it must have been a very treacherous journey getting through the rapids of this river.

And the whole time, they're scanning the left and the right side, hoping to see some sign of life.

They're looking for any indication that these three men are out here and just fine, but they didn't see any sign of them.

And so they finally made their way all the way up to the very end of Flat River, or I should say the very beginning of Flat River, where it breaks off from a much larger river called the South Nahani River.

And once they turned onto the South Nahani River, they began going downstream.

And again, they're looking on either side for any sign of these three men.

There's no sign of them.

And then the river they're on takes a very sharp turn.

It's actually called the Big Bend.

And it's about a 45 degree turn and as soon as you make that turn it dumps you into this 10 mile stretch of river called Second Canyon.

Now along South Nahani River which is about 350 miles long there are these four canyons that the water passes through and they're labeled 4th Canyon, Third Canyon, Second Canyon, and First Canyon.

And these canyons are massive.

These sheer cliffs on either side of the river shoot up up to 3,000 feet above the water.

And in some parts, the water is actually just as deep, thousands of feet deep.

And Second Canyon is unique because the cliff faces are as sheer as you're going to get.

And the cliff faces almost butt up exactly up against the water.

So there's really very little shoreline on either side.

So once you're in this 10 mile stretch, you're basically boxed in.

You have thousands of feet of water below you.

You have these massive cliffs on either side.

And there's really nowhere to go.

You need to get through this section of the river before you can effectively get onto the shoreline and take a break from being in your boat.

And along these cliffs are these openings you see high up all over the cliffs on both sides that are openings to these massive cave systems inside of these thousands of feet tall cliffs.

And because of how difficult it is to not only get to Nahani Valley, but also to get up to these different cave openings, nobody's gone inside of them.

We don't know what's inside of these caves, you know, save for the few that are down low enough that people can explore.

So as you're passing through Second Canyon, it's almost like you're being watched because there's all these openings, but you can't see into them and you're just forced to go down this 10 mile stretch and you can't really go anywhere and whatever's watching you, it's watching you.

As soon as Charlie and his search party entered into Second Canyon, it would have immediately gotten darker because that's another part of being in Second Canyon.

These huge cliff walls of this canyon obscure the sunlight.

And so they would have entered into this canyon, it would have gotten darker and it's very windy inside of Second Canyon.

So the winds would have picked up so it's dark.

Very strange setting for them to be in and they would have been looking on either side at these little strips of shoreline on either side barely big enough for a boat to be.

They would have been looking for any sign of life, but they didn't see anything.

If you're anything like me, you love a good story that has twists and turns and moments that make you stop and think, like, how is the story even real?

That's why I want to recommend the podcast, Crime Junkie.

Every week, amazing host, Ashley Flowers, unravels stories about missing people, murders, and mysterious deaths.

These strange, dark, and mysterious cases range from stories ripped straight from the headlines to cases you really won't hear anywhere else.

It's binge-worthy, true crime storytelling that is thoughtful, well-researched, and always leaves you wanting more.

Discover why Crime Junkie has such a loyal community and dive into your next mystery today.

Search for Crime Junkie wherever you're listening right now.

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Why are there widgets on Reese's peanut butter cups?

Probably so they never slip from her hands.

Could you imagine I'd lose it?

Luckily, Reese's thought about that.

Wonder what else they think about?

Probably chocolate and peanut butter.

As they're making their way down this 10-mile stretch, as they're getting closer and closer to actually entering into First Canyon, which is the next canyon you would enter into, the sides of the river start to get slightly larger where you could actually beach a boat.

There's some trees.

And on the hand side right before exiting second canyon they notice there is actually a tent perched within some trees and so the search party naturally goes right over to the shoreline they hop out but as soon as they step foot on land and they have a clearer view of this tent and what's outside of it they notice there is a body clearly lying on the ground outside of the tent And so Charlie and the search party, they run over and as soon as they're up close, they can tell this body is missing its head.

And they see the clothes on this body are totally charred and burned.

And whoever this was, they were reaching with their right arm when they died.

And right outside of the reach of their right arm was a rifle that was propped up against a tree.

And so they walk around this one body and they go around towards the backside of the tent where the opening to this tent is, and they find another body, another very badly decomposed body.

And it's positioned kind of halfway in the tent and halfway out of the tent.

And there's a blanket kind of partially obscuring this person's body.

And when they move the blanket, they see this body too is missing its head.

So Charlie and the search party they continue to search around the camp in hopes of finding the heads of these two people to try to figure out who they are but they never find the heads.

However, they do find some personal effects both in the pockets of these two bodies and then also inside the tent that would confirm these are Charlie's brothers.

As for the third man that had been with them, Robert Weir, he was not at the campsite.

And in fact, he would never actually be found officially.

However, a little ways down the river, another partial skeleton would be found several months later that was attributed to Robert.

However, that was not 100% confirmed to be Robert.

The only other interesting thing that was found at this campsite was a carving in a nearby tree.

And it just said, we have found a fine prospect.

indicating that Charlie's brothers had found gold.

But there was no gold either on them or in their camp or in the river nearby.

Nothing.

There was no gold.

Charlie and his search party would leave the valley and get in touch with the mounted police who would come out to the site where the brothers had been found.

They would launch an investigation and ultimately they would come to the conclusion that all three of these men, the two brothers and Robert, had starved to death.

And then after they had perished, animals had taken them off, which is why Robert was found so far away and why the skulls were missing from the two brothers.

Now, Charlie did not believe that.

He believed they had been attacked by native tribes in the area, but the police were not buying that.

They said this was a natural thing.

This was an accident.

And so that's that.

When the story of these two decapitated men made the news, people went crazy about this.

People were very divided about what they thought really happened.

There was a percentage of people that believed that partial skeleton that was found, that was not Robert Weir.

He had not died.

He had murdered the two brothers, decapitated them, and then made off with their gold.

The other percentage of people believed that all three men, the two brothers and Robert, had been attacked by a person, a group of people, an animal, a creature, something.

There was some sort of attack.

And that's why the two brothers were in those positions that indicated they had encountered something horrifying with one brother reaching for the gun and the other appearing to have leapt from his bed before he ultimately died.

But regardless of which side you fell on, pretty much everybody at the time who heard about the story became terrified of the Nahani Valley.

Specifically, they became terrified of that stretch in Second Canyon where the two brothers had been found.

And so actually that stretch got renamed the Headless Valley.

And from that point forward, that's all it was known as.

And so even though there were obvious gold prospects in the Headless Valley and all along the South Nahani River and the Flat River, people after this story broke were just not prepared to risk going in there and potentially becoming another victim.

And so people kind of stayed away from Nahani Valley.

Eight years later, though, in 1913, a gold prospector named Martin Jorgensen decided, you know what?

I'm not going to let some scary stories about some headless men and, you know, ghosts and killers on the loose.

I'm not going to let any of that get in the way of me taking gold out of Nahani Valley.

So all on his own, Martin makes the arduous trek inside of Nahani Valley.

He makes his way up Flat River and he finally finds a spot about 70 miles upstream of where Headless Valley was.

And he actually built a one-room cabin because he was going to stay there through the winter.

And then the plan was he would meet up with his partners the following summer.

And so right after he got there, he set up his sluices and he started mining for gold.

And apparently he found a lot of it because he sent word back to his partners outside of the valley that he had made it rich.

And so his partners were really excited to meet up with him the following summer and see how much he got because they planned on going back into the valley with him that summer.

So that summer rolls around, his partners go to the meeting spot right outside the valley, but Martin doesn't show up.

And so his partners, they stay outside at this meeting space for several days until finally, you know, when he doesn't show up, they decide, you know, we have to go in there and see if he is okay, because at this point, he should have been here.

There's no excuse.

And so they end up going into the Nahani Valley.

They make their way up Flat River and they go roughly to the area where they knew he was staying based on the message he had sent earlier.

He had described where he was staying and they actually found his cabin, or I should say they found what was left of his cabin.

His cabin had been completely torched, burned to the ground, and laying on the ground next to the burned out cabin was the burned out remains of another headless corpse.

And this corpse belonged to Martin Jorgensen.

The police did a thorough investigation, but they were never able to determine what actually killed him.

The police did not connect Martin's death with the two McLeod brothers' deaths, even though they were all decapitated, they were in roughly the same area, and it happened within a few years of each other, and they looked very, very similar, even though that all was true the police said nope these are totally separate martin died for some reason and then animals took parts of him away and that's why his skull is missing martin's skull was never located and the gold that martin claimed to have struck it rich with was also not at the cabin not on him there was no gold anywhere in the vicinity When Martin's death made the news, people went crazy, and despite the police assuring everyone that his death was not connected to the McLeod brothers' deaths, Even though the police were saying that, the public didn't see it that way.

It was just too easy to connect one decapitation with two other decapitations that have happened close together in a relatively short timeframe.

And so a lot of people assumed there must be a killer on the loose somewhere in Nahani Valley.

Seven years later, in 1921, the rumors of a killer on the loose were still alive and well when gold prospector John O'Brien and his partner decided, you know what?

Despite the rumors of the so-called killer or whatever's going on in the Nahani Valley, let's go in to the Nahani Valley and try our hand.

Let's try to get some gold.

And so the two of them made their way into the valley and they set up camp in Headless Valley, not far from where the McLeod brothers had been found decapitated.

So they set up their camp and they're there for a couple of days.

They're doing well.

They're finding gold.

And then at some point, John tells his partner that he's going to go out and check all of their traps along the river and he'll be back in about eight or nine days.

And so his partner waits eight or nine days and John doesn't come back.

And a couple of days after that goes by and now John's past due.

And so the partner decides he has to go out looking for him.

And so there was another gold prospector in the area.

And so this partner contacted him and the two of them went to the river and began walking upstream until they found John.

And he had frozen to death, but it was very interesting the way he was positioned.

He was sitting in front of this obviously previously lit campfire.

He wasn't hunched over.

He didn't look like he was in pain.

He looked like he was just enjoying the fire.

There was nothing on his face that indicated discomfort or pain or fear.

He was even holding the matchbook in his hand.

It was like he was just sitting there enjoying the fire when something caused him to suddenly freeze.

In fact, witnesses would say, John looked like he had been flash frozen, as if it had happened in a matter of seconds, because it didn't look like he had reacted properly to freezing to death.

And the police, when they came out, they would say, you know, this is odd.

This is odd the way he's positioned.

But ultimately, he died because he froze to death.

And so there's no foul play here.

And so no further investigation is needed.

Five years later, in 1926, a hunting party that included a young woman named Annie Lafferty was camping out along the flat river inside of Headless Valley.

And so that night, they're all kind of joking around the fire.

And then at some point, they decide to all go to sleep.

And then the next day, when everybody gets up, Annie is no longer in camp.

And there's no sign of where she went.

And so they begin by yelling out and walking around the immediate vicinity to see maybe if she stepped away for a minute, but Annie's just gone and no one knows where she went.

And so the hunting party spends the rest of the day looking for Annie, but there's no sign of her.

They ultimately leave the valley, they tell police, police come out, there's this huge search, but Annie's never found.

Several months later, a man named Charlie, who happened to have been out near Flat River, near this hunting party when they were out there, but Charlie himself was not in the hunting party.

He didn't know Annie.

He was just in the vicinity.

He overheard someone talking about a member of that hunting party, specifically a woman, going missing.

And when he heard that, he knew he had to tell police what he had seen that night out near Flat River.

So he goes to police and he explains that that night when he knew there was this hunting party over there, he could hear them.

He knew they were over there.

He said at some point he went to bed and then he woke up when he heard the sound of rocks falling into the river in front of him.

He was sleeping along the river's edge.

So he sits up and he looks looks out across the river.

It's totally dark, but there's some moonlight and he's kind of looking around wondering what's causing the sound, but he can't see it and then he hears it again and he can tell it's off to his left.

And these are not huge rocks.

These are like medium to small size rocks, like rocks you could just pick up and throw.

And so he's looking and all of a sudden he sees maybe a couple hundred yards away through some sparse trees, he sees a naked woman, a white naked woman, running on all fours up this mountainside.

And as she's running up the mountainside, her feet and her hands are knocking little rocks into the river down below she's right on the edge of this cliff and as she's running up this hill she stops and she turns and he gets a good look at her face and charlie would say he was so taken aback by her face it looked like she was possessed there was something wrong with her face and so charlie instinctively ducked down and chose not to follow her even though he knew anybody running naked anywhere in the wilds is doomed but he felt like he could not go near this woman.

There was something wrong with this woman.

And so the police, they take take this story down and they say, hey, you know, this is what Annie looks like.

And Charlie would say, I mean, I think that's her.

I think that matches her description.

And so universally it's believed this woman galloping up this hillside in the middle of the night naked was Annie.

Police ultimately would not investigate Annie's disappearance any further because at the time Charlie was telling them this piece of information, she'd already been gone for months and the assumption was she was dead.

Four years later, in 1931, another gold prospector decides to try their luck in Headless Valley.

A man named Phil Powers, he makes his way into the valley, he finds a spot off of Flat River, he builds a cabin, and then shortly thereafter, his cabin burns to the ground with him inside of it.

Now, his skeleton was intact, but the strange thing about his death is based on the origin of the fire, which would have been on the roof, he should have had an opportunity to climb out of the cabin before it burned down.

giving rise to the theory that he was actually dead before the fire started.

However, the police said this was an accident caused by Phil doing something with the stovepipe that led to it catching on fire, and this was just all one big accident.

But the vast majority of people that have followed along to this point with all of these strange deaths, they were just not buying it.

Five years later, in 1936, two more gold prospectors, William Epler and Joseph Mulholland, they entered the Headless Valley to try their luck.

And shortly after arriving and getting set up, they went missing.

A search party came out to look for them and they found their cabin and just like Phil Powers, it had burned to the ground, but William and Joseph were not in the ashes.

They were not anywhere nearby.

In fact, they were never found.

No one has any idea what happened to them and no one knows what caused the fire.

Nine years later, in 1945, yet another gold prospector named Ernest Sabard entered the Headless Valley to go looking for gold.

And then when he did not leave the valley for an intended rendezvous with some of his partners, his partners went looking for him and they would find him inside of his sleeping bag, laying down, decapitated, right along the Flat River inside of the Headless Valley.

And so the police would come out, they would do an investigation and they would call this an accident where, you know, he starved to death or he died of hypothermia.

And then after he was dead, animals must have come in and removed his skull and that's why we can't find it.

And so the police did not, at least not publicly, connect his death to all of the other decapitations in that small area.

One year later, in 1946, another gold miner named John Patterson went into Headless Valley and he went missing.

And so, a search party went in looking for him.

John would never be found.

But on one of the last nights that the search party was in the Headless Valley, they were camping out near Flat River.

Some native tribespeople came into their camp and they warned them about some white figures that were walking around the valley that night.

They're down near the river, they're out in the forest, they're kind of all around here.

And so, you really need to be careful.

You don't want them to see you.

And then these tribespeople just left.

And so the search party is absolutely horrified.

They know about the rumors of this place.

They're out here looking for someone that's gone missing in this place.

And all night, all they hear are distant howls and screams that they hadn't heard in the previous nights.

They're hearing these wailing sounds coming from all around them, like these things that are out there were intentionally trying to scare them to get them to leave.

It felt like they were not supposed to be there.

The next day, first thing when they got up and they left, the leader of that search party would say he just felt like the whole valley was totally sinister and that constant wailing they heard the night before, he said he will never forget.

From the mid-1940s onward, there have been far less strange incidents reported inside of Nahani Valley, but one could attribute that to the fact that far less people have been going into Nahani Valley ever since the 1940s.

And in recent times, huge segments of the park have been permanently closed.

The park has said the reason they're doing that is to protect that segment of the park.

But other people have speculated that at least part of the reason why they're closing these segments, many of which are right near the headless valley, is because they're trying to protect people from getting anywhere near whatever it is that's lurking inside of that park.

But regardless, it is still a fact that over the last century, there have been dozens and dozens and dozens of people that have either gone missing or who have died under very mysterious circumstances inside of this valley.

And the truth is, nobody knows why.

Also, please subscribe to the Mr.

Ballin podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Google, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

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So that's going to do it.

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Until next time, see ya.

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