191. Mysteries of Nahanni Valley: Canada’s Cursed National Park
episode
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
43 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 10 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What makes Nahanni Valley known as the “Valley of Headless Men”?
Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today, I wanna take you on a spooky journey with me through the most cursed piece of land in all of Canada, Nahanni Valley. Maybe you've heard of it before. Sometimes it's referred to as the Valley of Headless Men because of all the skeletons that have been found without their heads inside. But the truth is that is just scratching the surface of this place. And there are way more mysteries to uncover deep inside. We're going to talk about a guy who went to film a documentary about this place and vanished, leaving some very eerie and confusing clues behind, as well as the most recent unexplainable deaths that happened inside the park.
But before we dive in, I just wanted to remind everyone that if you want to get deeper into the Heart Starts Pounding community, the Rogue Detecting Society, I do have two fun things for you all. First up, our book club pick for this spooky season is Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker and The book follows Cora Zhang, a crime scene cleaner in New York City's Chinatown, who starts finding dead bats at every job right as the Hungry Ghost Festival opens the gates of hell. A very spooky pick for a very spooky season. Grab a copy and then join us on the free tier on Patreon, where we're going to talk about the book next month. And also, if you're a paid subscriber on Patreon or on Apple podcast subscriptions, make sure you listen to the bonus episode that we did last month on Midsummer Folklore and Festivals.
It was voted on by the High Council tier on Patreon, and I thought that it was a perfect way to close out our dark summer. Lots of ghost stories, creatures that live in rivers and come out during the summer, as well as midsummer magic rituals that you yourself can perform each summer. All right, lots of good stuff for you all. And with that, let's dive in. There's a stretch of wilderness in Canada's Northwest Territories that almost nobody has ever set foot in, Nahanni Valley. It's 11,000 square miles of forest, canyon, and mountain wrapped around a river called the South Nahanni. And the whole thing is breathtakingly beautiful. The river runs 350 miles, plunging over Virginia Falls, a waterfall that's nearly twice the height of Niagara before it carves through the canyons with walls thousands of feet high.
And here's the thing. about Nahanni. It's not empty because it's unreachable. People have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. They're a local tribe called the Dene. 21 tribes of them, actually. They hunted and traded across these lowlands long before Europeans drew a map of it. They know this land better than anyone alive. And even they don't go into this specific valley. For as long as anyone can remember, the Dene have kept to the edges of it. Sure, timber wolves and grizzly bears roam the valley floor, but those aren't what they warn each other about. Nahanni Valley is one of the most beautiful places on earth. UNESCO even made it a World Heritage Site in the 1970s, but it's also the only one that's haunted.
And perhaps there's something to be learned from the people that won't go inside of it, because those who enter often never make it back out. On January 5th, 1962, a filmmaker named Angus Blake McKenzie was preparing to head into the Nahanni River Valley for a documentary that he was making. Now, he knew how beautiful this area was, but McKenzie wasn't going for the beauty. No, he had heard haunting stories of this place for years. He knew that even though it was beautiful, no one would ever go near it. And the native tribes, the Diné, said that there are two things that come for men in the woods of Nahanni Valley. One, either you'll be infected by a madness so visceral that you'll never survive it, or the creatures inside will find you.
Creatures that few men have lived to tell the tale of. The Diné even called this area Headless Valley because sometimes the bodies of missing men were located usually without their skulls.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What makes Nahanni Valley known as the “Valley of Headless Men”?
0:01–16:18
2
How did filmmaker Angus Blake McKenzie disappear after his plane crash?
16:18–31:52
3
What clues did the search team find at McKenzie’s crash site?
31:52–42:05
4
Why were the McLeod brothers found without their skulls in 1908?
42:05–43:29
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
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