Portlock

Portlock, Arrulaa'ik in Sugpiaq, is a ghost town on Port Chatham bay at the southern edge of the Kenai Peninsula, about 16 miles south of Seldovia. People lived on the bay from the 1700s as fishermen, lumbermen and miners, mostly of Russian and Alaska Native descent. The town is named for the British captain Nathaniel Portlock, who is thought to have sailed there in 1786, though his own published account puts his anchorage elsewhere on Cook Inlet. Around the turn of the 20th century an American company brought in a fleet of fishing boats and built the Portlock Cannery, mostly for salmon, a post office opened in 1921, and a chromite mining camp called Chrome worked nearby.

The town emptied in the 1940s. Most families moved to the Native Alaskan villages of Nanwalek and Port Graham, and the post office closed between 1950 and 1951. Alaska Route 1 had been built along the other side of the peninsula, and towns there, with a road to mainland Alaska, drew people away from the ones without one.

The other explanation is the nantiinaq, a forest creature often filed alongside Bigfoot. An Anchorage Daily News feature of April 15, 1973 retold rumours from the early years of World War II: hunters who went up into the hills after Dall sheep and bear and never returned, mutilated bodies swept into the lagoon, and man-like tracks over 18 inches long. The Redoubt Reporter later told the story of Malania Helen Kehl, born at Port Chatham on Jan. 25, 1934, whose parents left, she said, because of the nantiinaq. A Skeptoid investigation went looking for corroboration in the scanned newspapers that Alaska's Digital Newspaper Program has given the Library of Congress. The search turned up several hundred stories from Portlock, almost all about commercial fishing, and a single reported death, a man who died in an accident in 1920.

Nanwalek still owns Portlock, and the community has considered re-establishing it as a village. In the spring of 2021 Discovery+ filmed the series Alaskan Killer Bigfoot in the ruins.