foreign the complete abandonment of a town is no small thing you generally assume that there are natural reasons for people to just up and leave a certain area in some ways things like work in the area drying up can lead to a populated Region's downfall in other ways chemical spills rendered a small area of a larger portion of a town uninhabitable forcing out the locals and in some other instances a fire inadvertently started in a coal mine underneath the ground had been burning for decades which forced the government to issue a ruling to get people
out of there and destroy the way back to the town to keep out curious investigators for their own safety all of these even if horrendous by their very nature are still very natural events there is still even something more past that stranger reasons for leaving an area one of the strangest ones that I can think of at least off the top of my head which my main Channel and subsequently this one are named for is The Disappearance of the Roanoke colony in North Carolina like way back in the day they found the word Croatoan carved
into a tree outside of the settlement and everybody was pretty much gone but it seems like it may have really just been the name of the game back in the day disease could run through a settlement destabilizing it to the point that people would have to abandon the town in order to survive but what seems to make these even more unnatural at least in the way of looking at them is the lack of information which tends to make our minds run wild with ideas and theories as to what really became of everyone however that's with
information like in its absence what happens if you have the information as to why people left but it appears even Stranger than what you would originally think to be a naturally occurring event and what if this really didn't take place all that long ago the abandonment of portlock Alaska is something that is incredibly disturbing because of the very idea of something lurking just beyond the Woodline waiting for a local to make a misstep as it brutally rips them apart this is something we would consider to happen like well back in the 1700s because back then
you had a bunch of new people in a completely wild area with very little separating you know the animals that lurk from the peoples that live in town with portlock Alaska however its abandonment would fully take place between the 1940s until finally the last person would leave in 1951 one year after being the only person left which my man was really committed to his post office job good Lord but the question is what was going on that was bad enough to scare an entire town of people away from their homes and livelihoods well let's discuss
that in today's episode over the abandonment of portlock Alaska so first a bit of history for you because trust me it's always relevant to know about the history of an area because the funny thing is typically before stories started circulating about a certain spot on the map something was already known about it because a group of people were likely already there to begin with and because of that they've already experienced the state of odd occurrences and basically like yeah no I'm good and just left it or just passed a warning to their people about what
could be found there portlock Alaska is an area that resides in the southernmost area of the Kanai Peninsula this area opens up Alaska to the Pacific Ocean and in theory had it been developed would have been a pretty good way to get trade goods across the rest of Alaska using this as an entry point due to Alaska being separated from the actual continental United States getting Goods there it either has to go through like some pretty staunch Wilderness of Canada or be flown there directly or taken by boat either way this was always kind of
leaving Alaska with like an air of being untouched it had been slower to develop than the rest of the country and less people overall reside in the state in fact to try to boost people settling the land the United States government would essentially give people a stipend for living there but for the most part the state itself is having difficulty the population estimate of Alaska is around 736 556. that said people are typically moving out of the state rather than moving into it in fact most alaskans that move out tend to choose Texas to move
too and it sort of develops the idea that a specific type of person has chosen to live there nothing disparaging but probably someone who likes their privacy likes her land and may distrust certain organizations that uh preside over the land hmm anyways the people that lived there before portlock became a town were known as the aluit and they were well versed in something in that area that Disturbed them as well this large hairy Bigfoot type Yeti monster they referred to as not knock or just big hairy creature and it would stalk the area and was
a direct threat to any human that it came across it should be noted there is some pushback on this saying that the word had been purposely changed to fit a narrative after the concept of like Sasquatch or Bigfoot began to develop so just keep that in mind but that said these people would avoid the area themselves because they weren't trying to end up six feet under the dirt disrespect for whatever was in the woods persisted amongst these people as they went through like storytelling for apparently like thousands of years they also said the creature itself
stayed alive for at least hundreds of years as well which is a little odd but if something was really out there that might more or less suggest that maybe it's not the same creature but something reproducing as it had an established population which would actually track with what other people would say that they would see this area would not be settled by the loots despite that much time having passed possibly because of the result of this then in 1786 landfall would be named by a man named Nathaniel portlock this British ship captains arrival officially basically
started the camp in this area because it had abundant salmon so Cannery would be established to take advantage of the natural resources there are a few discrepancies with like how everything happened some Reports say that he actually went further to the north in the peninsula to Cook Inlet and really made landfall there but it really doesn't matter at all because the town itself would be established in 1921 when the United States post office opened in town during the town's first push to develop they would be settled by Russian elutes and I'm pretty sure it's pronounced
dilutes because of the Aleutian Islands but anyways for a time not much was really reported to have happened in that area prior to the town's creation except for one event in 1905 likely there were a bunch of peculiar things happening which will kind of go on to really discuss when it really ramped up here in a moment but it seems like ever since the British captain arrived there the first like 120 years nothing was really happening and everything was just kind of turning up Milhouse eventually a mine would also be open because the discovery of
chromium there was also gold in the area as well and this brought in miners but not as much as you would think typically to live in this town you had like one of three jobs either you worked as a lumberman cutting down trees and exporting Timber you worked as a minor digging out chromium and gold in the ground or he worked as a fisherman there was really a special bonus job also and that's when you were just a Sasquatch as the town continued to thrive to a degree due to these small operations it would really
not attract that many people overall in fact there was a census conducted in the 1940s and then subsequently again in the 1980s that would show only around 31 people were still living there which is a little odd because like the 1980s where do they come up with that information because of what we're going to talk about here in a moment in 1905 the first strange event would be reported but people had already been on edge around this time anyways as I'm assuming based on their responses around this time all of the Cannery workers would begin
to leave their job citing that something mysterious was bothering the camp when asked about what it was they couldn't really give a description but decided that they were going to leave the area for a year before Anything Could Happen further they would wrap up early that year and then head out which people had already been living in town apparently the people that were there wanted them to stay as if there were more people around the safer they felt this would culminate into a full-blown panic later when the miners would start up and leaving prior to
this those workers at The Cannery would come back the following year and find that the strange interactions would still continue these strange interactions however would start to take a turn for the worse around the time of the 1920s and 1930s around this time and into the 1940s people would start going missing specifically sheep Hunters that would venture out into the woods that just didn't show back up so spear had a multitude of events that brutal occurrences that would cause everyone to sort of just abandon the town after Hunters who entered the woods began to go
missing it was considered you know probably a little strange because these people would have been armed and with that their safety should have been assured it's possible that an interaction took place that would start the rest of the brutalizations because let's say for argument's sake that there was something out in the woods but came across a hunter and the hunter was scared and took a pot shot at it who then learned that those things that look like us are violent possibly something was angered to the point that it began hunting down humans in that area
in order to make it safer I mean really it wouldn't be that any different than what humans do if something takes out one of our own we tend to try to find that thing and end it to secure our own lands this is actually also exhibited in other mammals as well in fact there's a story of a tiger that was wounded by a hunter after he was sent to take care of it because it was known as a man-eater after finding it he winged it but it was able to escape and elude him for quite
some time until finally the hunter was forced to call off the hunt only for the tiger to start tracking him the whole time waiting for him to let his guard down before ultimately showing up at his camping spot I believe the outcome was that he actually took it out at that point because otherwise how would we have this story but the point is animals not just humans appear to seek what is considered Vengeance or some trespass anyhow Hunters began to go missing to the point that while exceedingly alarming hearing stories about another missing person in
the woods was just sort of horrifically commonplace things past this point will start to become even worse for the people living in this town see the town itself like every other town in existence was lifted by people who worked in the area and with their families why did I just take time to explain that I have no idea so the workers weren't really there to go out hunting or do anything along those lines unless it was sort of for pleasure but uh probably not for survival but they still had to venture up to the mines
out to the streams and Bay or salmon and at some point or another they had to leave the relative safety of the small town itself this is when people started to get got just by existing it was not around this time that miners working the mines were having issues of their own just like pretty much everybody else was that went in the woods as people would show up for work and head into said mines they would eventually need a break for the day or go eat lunch or even just had to show up in general
one such person was nearby at Port Graham when he went off for work and he just never came back this will put a strain on the small mining operation because when somebody goes missing like that and there's no evidence of to where they went this kind of starts to freak people out a little bit these disappearances would eventually cause the miners to try to abandon the operation entirely which the town would then go on to plead for them to remain open by some accounts armed guards would have to be implemented to ensure the safety but
it would ultimately close down when the town was officially abandoned the miners would not be the only ones contending with issues prior to the end of Andrew camluck a man by the name of Albert petka would actually end up meeting his end but he was able to tell what happened before taking his final breath he states that he was out with his dogs at the time that he ran into some large large hairy creature he didn't know what it was but he would go on to say that it was definitely not a bear at all
his dogs would reportedly attack and scare off the creature but not before Albert had received a blow to the chest that would break ribs and injure him to the point that he was able to tell this story but he would succumb to his wound shortly after while these interactions continued hunters and fishermen had reportedly again gone missing from earlier would be found sometimes in Creeks that ran through the hills what was found was a fairly grisly sight it was said that their limbs would be shredded in their torsos having brutal damage While others were just
completely dismembered they would then be washed Downstream further and then some were even found in the lagoon washed into that this however appears to be more in line with the hunters that went missing over a period of time and not some large group that got wrecked it also should be noted that most people just went missing and were never seen again the event that would actually cause the people to flee the town is something that appeared to literally be ripping people apart in the woods which while inconsistent with a human doesn't mean that something else
couldn't have been doing it which I'll talk a little bit more about like the natural reasons at the end this luckily enough there was a spotting that actually did not result in the mutilation of the person and this man would go on to tell everyone what he saw while down near the Cannery a man named Tom Larson saw a large hairy beast on the beach which he said was walking on two legs at the time he would run back to his home to get his equalizer and then return with the creature still there it apparently
looked at him and he had it in a standoff it then turned and walked into the woods leaving behind the fish wheels that were completely destroyed bro take the shot are you kidding me see this is kind of what bugs me you have something in the woods that is apparently shredding people to pulp and you have it lined up and you basically have like it to the point that you could end this whole issue and you just let it walk off of course shock can't be rolled out but still another man who's a logger apparently
had a run-in that could not be explained but I'm gonna explain it and it is said that he was working on something when it looks like he got hit over the head with a piece of huge logging equipment his name was Andrew kamluck apparently this was way too large for any one man to lift so neither he nor someone else could have been able to lift it nor I guess anyone working with them and it would take several men to lift this piece of equipment so he would have had several people wanting to take him
out and pass that there were way easier ways to end someone rather than using this specific piece of equipment then they found them and there was blood on the equipment itself indicating that it had been used in some capacity to result in this guy getting bodied and he was found 10 feet away from it so it's not like he could have slipped and fell and hit his head and then moved him beat it looked like someone had picked it up and smashed it over his head shortly after this happened I have no idea why Hunters
would still be going in and attempt to hunt in the woods but I mean I guess the reasoning here could be because how remote the town was it's possible that they needed to hunt in order to actually eat as you might imagine it's a pretty good motivator the hunters have been tracking a moose which being in the southeast of the United States we really don't have moose down here but let me tell you about them real quick so you can get an idea of what they would have to do to bring this thing down it
is said that people that live in areas that are endemic with moose would rather meet a bear in the wilderness than a moose the Moose is the largest of the deer family and male moose can actually stand up to six feet tall from hoof to shoulder which is about 1.8 meters top of that they can weigh upwards of 1400 pounds or 635 kilograms this thing has got an attitude to match that size as well moose are considered to be extremely ill-tempered and if you happen to be near one they will Gore you and pretty much
turn every bone into your body into a nice powder before walking away from you these things on the regular fight Bears while still being the prey of bears in the area there have been instances where a bull moose has outright killed in attacking bear with a well-placed kick or by using its antlers they essentially stomp down on the Bears as well rake them with the Hooves causing internal injuries and hemorrhaging as well as use antlers to spear the bear basically a moose is just nothing to play with especially since we're a lot smaller than them
and they can easily throw their weight around and turn you into a hashtag while this group was tracking the moose they eventually stumbled across an absolutely grisly Battleground apparently the area was covered in blood and fur the Moose had gotten into a confrontation with something in that area that the hunters came across a flattened spot where the Moose must have been forced them but what's more odd is there was no moose body to be found whatever it was had the strength to carry the Moose away rather than just eating it there now there are two
things to know about the moose bear relationship in terms of predation bear will typically choose younger moose to eat because they're less experienced and less likely to put up effective fight also the neck of a moose is relatively weak in terms of forces that would be enacted on it from say a bear paw swipe which has resulted in things like decapitation or severing of the cervical spine if it lands just right so it's actually fairly common for a bear if it comes across a moose in the woods it could take it out dragging it away
especially not in the general vicinity is a little more difficult for a regular bear with the larger the Moose gets what's even more odd is the tracks that they found these tracks did not appear to be Bear Tracks and actually resembled a human foot with plant-grade structuring that we have Bears also have plant-grade structuring as well but obviously I mean I don't need to explain that a human footprint definitely is a unique shape compared to a bear track the other thing that was noted about the footprint was the size the foot was over 18 inches
in length and because it was human-like there were no claw marks at the end of its toes this is largely where the idea of a sasquatch hunting the forest at this time comes from see this was bad enough to make people want to leave right I would have probably looked at this been like yeah I'm good I'm getting out of here but these apparently were some pretty hardy people they would continue to stick it out even after all these events took place but every few years more people specifically Hunters would continue to go missing in
those woods and then some of them would show back up in pieces and streams and lagoons other strange things that would have been seen in the trees in the area was that they were pulled up from the ground and then shoved back in upside down over time this did cause people to sort of like leave this cursed town and head towards nearby towns that didn't have people going missing on the reg which was probably a good move those that chose to stay and continue working however didn't believe this or they just believed it to be
a large bear but they would report that something else was happening like yeah this is actually like a three for this towel was absolutely cursed there were two other things going on that scared the absolute hell out of people which people then believed was an actual haunting Cliffs resided above the town a little ways off and occasionally at night a woman with a pale face could be seen moving through the cliffs she wore a long black dress so long actually that she had to carry it as she walked along she would let out a whale
before disappearing back into the Cliffside itself nobody appears to have gone missing specifically because of this but I imagine looking up at night and seeing a woman out there uh just wailing and then Vanishing probably a little alarming for those that remained the third thing plaguing the area also might suggest there could have been an established population of something out there related to the bigger creature these were apparently several smaller creatures running around hunting in a pack these things were said to be on two legs as well and would run people down give them the
chance but I mean what what in the name of all this holy is that they were said to be covered in hair and basically referred to as Little Devils basically make it that what you will as time passed and more and more people kept missing eventually everyone would have had enough of this and by the way the amount of people that went missing is like over 36 the town itself had 31 people so it would show that like one guy though as the rest of the town like continued to flee this guy had balls of
steel in the 1940s after several doll sheep Hunters again went missing and their bodies were torn apart like many others in the Stream this seemed to be the final straw that broke the camel's back everyone would leave the town never to return however the postmaster or just the alpha chat of the group decided that he would stay in town for one more year likely believing the people would return he stated that a lot of strange things continue to happen in the town after its abandonment and in 1951 he officially skipped town as well the people
that fled portlock moved to the nearby Native Alaskan Villages of non-walk and Port Graham the village of non-walk still maintains private ownership of portlock today and in recent years apparently they're thinking about re-establishing the portlock village once again okay well good luck guys as of the 1990s however this town has officially dissolved according to the government due to nobody actually living there to this day you can still get out there but you have to understand it is exceedingly remote and you are truly on your own once you get out there so as your lawyer I'm
required to advise you against it so what could this thing actually be well it's clear like with most folk tales and lore Humanity comes up with it could be a mixture of like actual truth storytelling and warnings see there were still younglings in this town because it was families as well as workers because of this it's pretty clear that warnings about the forest would be commonplace now your Offspring to steer clear of a very real and very present danger such as moose Bears wolves snakes and just the elements in general considering that while the summer
may be pretty mild the winters are still pretty brutal there so it would be quite advantageous for their survival if you warn them these stories would be told to warn everybody and then those would be passed around now the thing about humans being social creatures is we tend to trust what others say so as a result when someone mentions a woman on the Cliffside wailing at night all it would take is for like a cougar or a mountain lion or some sort of Screech out in the darkness for the minds of people to play tricks
on them and make them think that they saw something that they really didn't add to this the concept of people actually going missing and being torn apart they're very normal situations in which this can happen if someone was stalking the forest which given the remoteness of the town really they could do very little about it besides Roundup of Posse but if any like person wanted to take out another interference from law enforcement would be minimal if even present at all that may have just been like a hunting ground for someone who was taking out others
who then entered the forest after doing so there happens upon the carcass and proceeds to tear apart the person if they were dumped near a stream they would end up further Downstream other situations can be explained such as with the man who got hit in the chest by something and then he recounted what happened the reality is this damage to the chest likely did a few things if it compromised his lungs which would sound like it did the brain would become starved with oxygen when this happens hallucinations can begin while alive as the brain tissue
begins to die off this can cause an issue that can present in two ways either a hemothorax which will fill the pleural space between the ribs and lungs putting pressure on the lungs to kind of fill up with blood which causes the lungs to expand less and less the more blood that gets in between those until eventually you can't even take a breath or it was a full pneumothorax which happened which allowed air to enter the rib cage causing the lungs to collapse preventing him from breathing either way oxygen starvation was assured and as a
result I would imagine he began to hallucinate and even possibly misremember what attacked him it actually could have been a regular bear but as his mind started to go he began to explain it in bizarre ways and that's actually incredibly common for people to do right before the Inn the man who was apparently hit with a piece of logging equipment might of possibly even been explained in a way that you know it was too heavy to lift and he was 10 feet away from the equipment when his body was found how could this have happened
well it's kind of important to remember that head injuries can do very weird things to your body if you were to say fall and hit his head what a lot of people don't realize is sometimes your body will like quite literally launch itself during a subsequent seizure it's actually been seen in soccer that a soccer player was hit in the head and they misattribute it saying that he was internally decapitated but that's actually wrong he got hit went into a seizure which caused him to LEAP up and actually backpedal for a few feet as well
as behave strangely and when he covered a certain amount of distance he then fell to the ground and that's when everybody realized that what just happened and that's why they misattributed because people aren't really sure what a seizure is but he's still alive to this day so that's the point sometimes you don't just hit your head and fall down and it's game over sometimes your body will continue to move due to signals it's getting from the brain personally what I believe to have happened is he likely fell or tripped over a rock hit his head
hard enough to cause bleeding and the blood on the equipment and had his muscles seized causing him to be found a way ways from the actual equipment which may have seemed like an impossible distance but it really wasn't as for bringing down the moose and carrying it away as well as the tracks I would like to bring something up Alaska has a man-eater of a bear known as a polar bear these bears are absolute behemoths in fact sometimes they say they can stand like 10 to 12 feet tall I think I mentioned it in my
last video but essentially these types of bears when they encounter man well they can pick you up a literal full-grown Man by the chest and carry them away like a dog does to a puppy they're notoriously difficult to bring down and given like a quarter of a chance they will rip you limp from limb polar bears are also unfortunately very curious of humans and as a result they are not afraid of the noises that we make nor our intimidation tactics that might work on other Bears remember that's like an important saying if it's black fight
back if it's brown lie down if it's white good night this is likely due to the environment that they live in in which prey isn't just going to come along every day so when they find something they need to take it out right then in order to eat with all that said though this does doesn't really match the description given by those in the area who saw the creature they always said it was sort of like a brown Shaggy fur well there is another type of bear as of late that we've actually seen mate with
polar bears due to overlapping territories in Alaska another bear known as the Kodiak bear and also brown bears that are in the air they're quite plentiful sometimes these Bears will actually run into polar bears and create young with a combination of two traits this could very possibly result in a polar bear-sized brown bear that lacks the white hair Bears also tend to stand up on their hind legs a lot and you know what they're probably going to be attracted to I'll give you a second fish Wheels to get salmon they also would not be opposed
to eating humans as they carry the polar bear genes to me these creatures seem like they could just be possibly The Offspring of a polar bear and a brown bear mating the problem arose when something very natural started tearing people apart and carrying away moose then when the tracks were found they thought it to be a human but Bear Tracks actually look somewhat like human Footprints as well and if you're looking at an 18 inch which this was 18 inches in length footprint you're not gonna think oh my God this is a bear track you're
gonna be like this is a giant human foot so it's not too far-fetched when you realize like also the average polar bear foot can be 12 inches long with outliers being larger and then take into consideration sometimes combining two species that can mate such as like a lion and a tiger that produces a subspecies that can be much larger than both parents and also they say 18 inches but did they have like a ruler on them at that specific point in time like how do they actually measure it because if you had a polar bear
mixed with a Kodiak bear you know sometimes larger polar bears have had like 14 15 inch feet so you kind of start to see how this thing might have been able to carry off a moose on its own so when people go missing rumors and fear began to take hold of the people still residing in town once that happened it was only fueled by you know weird but natural events taking place regarding some people not showing back up after they left for work or someone hitting their head on logging equipment however I don't believe these
people were wrong to flee the area if there is a hybridized bear walking around and already had a taste for human flesh at this point it's only a matter of time before it got brave enough to approach a human Town potentially I believe Humanity should have done what we always do organize a hunt for the creature but approach it without the Superstition and realize it for what it is a really big animal the extra things to me just kind of seem to be the consequences of being afraid people talk and then people's minds begin to
play tricks on them the only thing that is known with certainty about this entire event is that the people of this town saw fit to abandon their livelihoods to seek safety elsewhere and this means that they were in fact scared enough and took this as a real threat to themselves whether it was a large bear or something else to inspire that much fear means that something really was going on whether the far-flung future People Like Us believe it or not but I want to hear what you guys think because let's be honest The Haunting the
Bigfoot the Gremlins running around in packs it kind of just seems odd that all of these things were happening at once but the other side of that is I wasn't there and the reality is these people again were afraid of something if you enjoy then leave me a like and appreciate it and subscribing and hitting the notification Bell to get you notified when I post well all right that's gonna do it for me I hope everyone enjoyed and I'll see y'all in the next one
