In November 1930, fur trapper Joe Labelle headed for an Inuit village located on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in Canada hoping for a warm and safe place to get in out of the cold for the night. Labelle was quite familiar with the little village, but what he found there that evening was rather disturbing.

The village was normally a bustling hive of activity, but when Labelle called out a greeting, the only response that he heard was the echo of his own voice dancing across the lake. Labelle immediately sensed that something was terribly wrong. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys, no voices to be heard in the distance, not even the barking of the sled dogs that resided in the village.

Labelle checked all of the shacks in the village, expecting to find that the villagers had packed their belongings and left. Instead, he found that food, weapons and personal belongings had all been abandoned. In some cases, Labelle even found meals prepared but left uneaten as well as half-finished chores that seemed as if they had been suddenly discarded. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere.

Even though he was cold and tired, Labelle exited the village and headed to a telegraph office located several miles away. He later admitted that the empty village frightened him and that he was concerned that he too would disappear as the villagers had.

Labelle sent an emergency message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who immediately made their way to the village. Along the way, they stopped to chat with a local trapper who informed them that he had recently seen an unusual gleaming object in the sky that seemed to be headed right for the Anjikuni village. Once they arrived at the village, the Mounties not only confirmed Labelle’s account, they made even more bizarre discoveries.

Every tomb in the village burial ground had been opened and emptied, with the marker stones stacked in two orderly piles. Things continued to get more disturbing. The Mounties discovered the bodies of the village sled dogs, dead of starvation.

After an investigation, the Mounties came to the conclusion that the villagers had disappeared approximately eight weeks before Labelle’s arrival based on berries found in a cook pot. Other than an approximate time of the disappearance, the Mounties weren’t able to determine anything else, including where the villagers went.

So what happened to the missing villagers? Several theories have been tossed around, including alien abduction, angry ghosts, curses, and even vampires. The Mounties have since discredited the story as a legend, but there are simply too many accounts about the event to simply dismiss it.