the southern-most tip of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula there once was a thriving little community named Port Chatham. Through the centuries, the village had offered friendly hospitality to strangers. When Captain Nathaniel Portlock visited the place on his 1786 Alaska expedition, he and his men were made to feel welcome.
In the mid-1930s, strange and terrible things began to happen to the people of Port Chatham. The Nantiinaq (“big hairy creature” in the native Sugt’sun) had become bolder and had begun to terrorize the villagers. Sometimes they would even come into the village and hurt people. Some witnesses swore that the Nantiinaq were led by the spirit of a woman dressed in flowing black clothes who would materialize out of the cliffs and summon the Nantiinaq.
A logger was killed instantly when he was struck from behind with a piece of log-moving equipment.
A gold prospector who was working his claim disappeared one day and was never seen again.
A sawmill owner saw a Nantiinaq on the beach, tearing up the fish traps that had been set.
By about 1936, the people of Chatham left the village en masse. They abandoned their houses, the school, everything, and vacated their once peaceful town to move to Nanwalek.
In the mid-1930s, strange and terrible things began to happen to the people of Port Chatham. The Nantiinaq … had become bolder and had begun to terrorize the villagers.
In the early 1900s, the town of Portlock, named for Captain Nathaniel Portlock, was established as a small cannery town. In 1921, a U.S. post office was opened, and the town appeared to be prospering. The population was made up largely of natives of the region who were mostly of Russian-Aleut heritage and who had lived in peaceful interaction for decades.
Sometime in the early 1940s, the same kind of strange occurrences that drove people out of Chatman in the past began to happen in Portlock. Men who worked at the cannery began to disappear. Some would go hunting for Dall sheep or bear and never be seen again.
Reports of sighting the Nantiinaq became common. So did the reports of mutilated and dismembered human bodies floating in the lagoon.
Hunters tracking signs of moose would suddenly find the tracks of the great animal overlaid with giant, human-like tracks over those left by the moose. Signs of a struggle in the snow were mute testimony that a giant human had slain the huge moose. Then the only tracks remaining were the monstrous, manlike tracks heading back toward the fog-shrouded mountains.
As with the people of Port Chatham before them, the residents of Portlock moved en masse, leaving their homes, the school, and the cannery. In 1950, the post office closed.
Naomi Klouda of the Homer Tribune (October 26, 2009) interviewed Malania Kehl, the eldest resident in Nanwalek, who was born in Port Chatham in 1934 and who remembers how the entire village left everything behind to escape the Nantiinaq. It was her uncle who had been killed with the piece of logging equipment. Once the people of Port Chatham left their community, Malania said, the Nantiinaq stayed far away from them and left them in peace.
According to Sugt’stun culture, the Nantiinaq may once have been fully human, but now, through some events not understood, he is a different kind of creature—half-man, half-beast.
BLACK DOGS THAT HERALD DISASTER
According to an old story often told in England, there was a terrifying thunderstorm that descended on Bungay on Sunday, August 4, 1577. The storm transformed the day into a darkness, rain, hail, thunder, and lightning beyond all imagining. Fearing the worst, a number of the townsfolk had gathered in St. Mary’s Church to pray for mercy.
As the lore tells it, it was while the people knelt in fear and prayed for deliverance, that a large black Hell Hound manifested suddenly in their midst. Without any challenge from the cowering congregation, the massive black hound charged many members of the church with its terrible claws and large fangs. According to a verse taken from a pamphlet published by Rev. Abraham Fleming in 1577: All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew… . And passing onward to the quire, he many people slew.
After the Hell Hound had finished ravishing St. Mary’s Church and chewing up a good number of its members, tradition has it that the creature next appeared in Blyth-burgh Church. Its appetite for human flesh had merely been whetted by its attack on the people of Bungay, for it viciously mauled and killed more churchgoers at Blythburgh.
According to the accounts of the Hell Hound’s attack at Bungay, the beast used more than its teeth and claws to kill. Fleming testified that in some instances, the monster wrung the necks of two churchgoers at the same time, one victim in each of its paws as it stood upright.
At Blytheburg, the Hell Hound burst through the church doors, ran into the nave, and then dashed up the aisle, killing a man and boy. In addition to leaving bodies strewn about before it departed the church, the monster left numerous scorch marks about the church—marks, which people swear, can still be seen to this day.
Tales of Black Hell Hounds seem to abound in the British Isles. Below, popular author and researcher Nick Redfern recounts a number of ghostly dogs that haunt British woods. Redfern can be contacted at his blogs: http://www.ufomystic.com and http://monsterusa.blogspot.com.
BY NICK REDFERN
In his definitive book Explore Phantom Black Dogs, English author and researcher Bob Trubshaw wrote: “The folklore of phantom black dogs is known throughout the British Isles. From the Black Shuck of East Anglia to the Mauthe Dhoog of the Isle of Man there are tales of huge spectral hounds ‘darker than the night sky’ with eyes ‘glowing red as burning coals.’ The phantom black dog of British and Irish folklore, which often forewarns of death, is part of a world-wide belief that dogs are sensitive to spirits and the approach of death, and keep watch over the dead and dying. North European and Scandinavian myths dating back to the Iron Age depict dogs as corpse eaters and the guardians of the roads to hell. Medieval folklore includes a variety of ‘Devil dogs’ and spectral hounds.”
And while the image that the devil dog or phantom hound conjures up is that of a sinister beast prowling the villages and towns of centuries-old England, it is a little known fact outside of students of the phenomenon that sightings of such creatures continue to surface to this very day.
According to the accounts of the Hell Hound’s attack at Bungay, the beast used more than its teeth and claws to kill.
Interestingly, one area that seems to attract more than its fair share of such encounters is a sprawling mass of dense forest in central England known as the Cannock Chase—a strange and eerie location that has also been the site of numerous encounters with UFOs, Bigfoot-like entities and strangely-elusive “Big Cats.” Indeed, among the folk of the many small villages that sit on the fringes of the Chase—or that, in some cases, can be found deep within its wooded depths—tales of the diabolical hounds of hell are disturbingly common.
Late one evening in early 1972, a man named Nigel Lea was driving across the Chase when his attention was suddenly drawn to a strange ball of glowing, blue light that slammed into the ground some distance ahead of his vehicle, and amid a veritable torrent
