The story says a trapper named Joe Labelle walked into an Inuit village on this lake in 1930 and found it empty, shirts still on needles, food over the fire pits, seven dead sled dogs and a grave disturbed. Emmett E. Kelleher printed it in the Danville Bee in Virginia on 27 November 1930, putting 25 people missing from six tents. Sergeant J. Nelson of the RCMP looked into it in January 1931 and reported no foundation for the story at all: he doubted Labelle, found that one of the photographs dated from 1909, and noted that Kelleher had a reputation for colourful copy. The RCMP calls it an urban legend and has no record of anything unusual there. It spread mainly through Frank Edwards’ 1959 book Stranger than Science. Kivalliq Region, Nunavut.
Kivalliq, Nunavut, Canada
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