This is an article from Alaska Magazine regarding Port Chatham"
FEATURED
Something’s Afoot in Port Chatham – Century-old Rumors Persist of a Terror in the Mountains
beast
Port Chatham, a bay on the southern tip of the Kenai and a former village of the same name, hardly seems like a setting for inexplicable terror and fright.
But a series of mysterious disappearances and deaths where the Kenai Mountains narrow before plunging into the North Pacific gave birth to rumors that began in the 1930s and continue to this day. And the rumors all point the same thing: Something’s not right around Port Chatham.
Take for instance Andrew Kamluck, who had gone out logging in 1931. He was found dead in the woods from a blow to the head; a piece of log-moving equipment nearby may have been used as a weapon. Around the same time, elder Simeon Kvasnikoff of nearby Port Graham (present-day Nanwalek), said that a gold miner headed out for the day and just disappeared. No sign of the prospector was ever found.
Sometime later, Tom Larsen went out to chop wood for fish traps when he saw something large and hairy on the beach. He ran back home for his rifle. When he returned to the water’s edge, the thing just stared at him. Larsen never could explain why he did not fire.
Then in 1973, an Anchorage newspaper ran a piece on a retired schoolteacher who had taught in Port Chatham during World War II. She told of cannery workers who went into the mountains to hunt Dall sheep and bear but never returned. Search parties found no trace of them. Then rumors spread that a mutilated body, torn and dismembered in a fashion that didn’t resemble wounds from a bear attack, had been swept by rains down the mountain and into the lagoon.
Other rumors include specifics of the beast’s features. Hunters following signs of a moose came across manlike footprints that exceeded 18 inches in length. As they closed on the moose, they realized that they and the owner of the big feet were tracking the same animal. The hunters soon came across matted-down grass that held indications of an apparent life-and-death struggle. Beyond the grass, the hunters found no moose tracks, but the large manlike footprints continued upward into the cloud-draped mountains.
The history of human habitation around Port Chatham is relatively short even though the crook of her sheltering bay offers protection from a turbulent ocean. Capt. Nathaniel Portlock, a member of the British Royal Navy, found sanctuary here in 1786 during his Alaska expedition and praised the site. Around 1900, an American firm brought in a fleet of fishing boats and built a cannery to take advantage of the calm waters and the healthy run of salmon. The Russian-Alutiiq village of Port Chatham grew around the cannery, and by all accounts, it was quaint, tidy and in a beautiful setting, nestled between the sea and vistas of snow-covered peaks. By 1921, residents established a post office.
In an interview that ran in the October 2009 edition of the Homer Tribune, Nanwalek elder Malania Helen Kehl, who was born in Port Chatham in 1934, gave insight into the demise of her hometown. She explained that her parents, along with the rest of the village, grew weary of being terrorized by a creature the Alutiiq called a Nantiinaq, meaning half-man, half-beast. She said that many of the residents refused to venture into the surrounding forests, and over time, abandoned their homes and the village school, and moved up the coast to Port Graham. Only the postmaster remained in Port Chatham, but the post office closed in 1950.
Earlier records made by Portlock cannery management showed that the site had been vacated once before. The cannery supervisor noted in 1905 that all the Native workers evacuated the area because of “something” in the forest, but they returned to work at the cannery the following year.
The stories did not stop with the abandonment of the village. A goat hunter in 1968 claimed to have been chased by a creature while he was hunting in the area. In 1973, three hunters took shelter there during a three-day storm and claimed that each night something walked around their tent on what sounded like only two feet.
In 1990, an Anchorage paramedic was called out to aid a 70-year-old Native who had suffered a heart attack but was incarcerated in the Eagle River jail north of the city. While treating the man, the paramedic happened to mention he had hunted in the area of Port Chatham. The elderly man suddenly sat up, grabbed the medic by the shirt and asked “Did it bother you? Did you see it?”
The mystery continues.
Here is another article from the Homer Tribune newspaper:
Port Chatham left to spirits
• ‘Nantiinaq’ sightings and spirits led to desertion of Alaska village
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune
HOMER TRIBUNE/Naomi Klouda - Malania Kehl, the eldest resident in Nanwalek, knows many traditional stories that pass along pieces of history, as well as cultural knowledge. Recently, she told of how her birth village, Port Chatham, was deserted after strange haunting by a Nantiinaq, which is reportedly similar to a Sasquatch.
HOMER TRIBUNE/Naomi Klouda - Malania Kehl, the eldest resident in Nanwalek, knows many traditional stories that pass along pieces of history, as well as cultural knowledge. Recently, she told of how her birth village, Port Chatham, was deserted after strange haunting by a Nantiinaq, which is reportedly similar to a Sasquatch.
Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek’s eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.
Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock’s ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.
What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?
“We left our houses and the school, and started all new here,” Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt’stun through translator Sally Ash. “There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach.”
What had frightened Malania’s parents hadn’t been a single event. Over a “long period of time,” a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.
“Her dress was so long she would drag it,” Malania said. “She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs.”
Map of Lower Kenai Peninsula
Map of Lower Kenai Peninsula
The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.
Malania isn’t the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.
“This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold,” Kvasnikoff said. “He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him.”
Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and “the thing looked at him,” Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.
In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.
The story is told:
“Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting.”
According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.
“Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains …”
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.
Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven’t stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story online at
http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”
En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut” from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.
“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said “No. ..Did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”
In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.
“We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in,” Ed wrote.
The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn’t a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.
“In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet. It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there.”
Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt’stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn’t always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.
Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn’t discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he’s never seen one.
“I think there’s something to them,” he said.
Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn’t follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.
Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.
Contact the writer
Posted by Newsroom on Oct 21st, 2009 and filed under Feature, Headline News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Topic: Port Chatman, Alaska (Read 29928 times)
