Stepping into the dense rainforest of Southeastern Alaska,
one can’t helping feeling a strange sort of presence, as if something unknown
and unseen were watching from the trees. Is this sensation merely a construct
of the mind? The human tendency to anthropomorphize nature? Or is it possible
there are ancient spirits and unknown beasts lurking among the dripping spruces
and shadowy hemlocks?
Around 1900 a gold prospector named Harry D. Colp wrote a
story of an alleged encounter between one of his companions and a pack of
unknown entities in the Alaskan wilderness.
Colp had been lodging with the man, Charlie, along with a few other
prospectors in a shack near the city of Wrangell. Charlie had heard about a deposit of
gold-bearing quartz in the nearby Thomas Bay area. Packing three months of supplies, he set off
alone to investigate the site, only to return less than a month later badly shaken
and with neither supplies nor gold.
Charlie told Colp that upon arriving in Thomas Bay, he’d gone
in search of a half-moon shaped lake where the gold could supposedly be found.
After several days of searching, he finally locating the body of water at the
foot of a glacier. He had only just gotten his bearings when he was horrified
to see a pack of hairy “devils” swarming towards him from the shore.
Charlie described these beings as looking halfway between
men and monkeys. They were “entirely sexless, their bodies covered with long,
coarse hair, except where the scabs and running sores had replaced it.” The
stench of the creatures made Charlie ill, and their screams and cries made him
delirious. The beings chased him all the way back to Thomas Bay, where he
passed out and woke up hours later floating in his canoe in the middle of the water.
Several decades after Harry Colp’s death, his daughter,
Virginia, published the manuscript of the story under the title “The Strangest
Story Ever Told”. Over the years this tale has become a popular piece of folklore
in Southeastern Alaska.
Some have suggested that the beings Charlie encountered may
have been kushtaka- shape-shifting otter-men from the folklore of the Tlingit
people. Stories depict these creatures as malevolent tricksters who lure
fishermen and hunters into the wilderness, only to drown them or transform them
into more otter-men. They are often used as boogeymen to scare children aware
from the dangers of the ocean. Yet, like shapeshifters in many cultures,
kushtaka can be mercurial in behavior, and may occasionally save lost travelers
from dying in the freezing cold (often, again, by turning them into kushtaka
themselves). In at least one tale recorded by the Smithsonian Institute, an
otter-man is depicted as the reborn spirit of a dead man who returns to aid his
impoverished family.
While Harry Colp never refers to the creatures in his story
as kushtaka, the otter-men have become closely linked with “The Strangest Story
Ever Told” in Alaskan folklore.
Other people have allegedly also seen the hairy devils
around Thomas Bay, though Colp’s story is the only one widely known. These
sightings have led locals to dub the area “Devil’s Country”. Thomas Bay is also
known as the “Bay of Death” by the Tlingit people because of a landslide in the
1700s that wiped out a village.
SOURCES
Full text of "The Strangest Story Ever Told", from bigfootencounters.com
A story about a more benevolent encounter with a kushtaka
An article from the Juneau Empire with more details about Harry Colp
"Kushtaka", a short film created by Cameron Currin about the monstrous Otter-Men
