What Really Happened in Portlock, Alaska?

Missing people, gruesome murders and a mysterious presence in the woods? It’s a classic tale featuring cryptids, dodgy sources and, of course, a reality TV show.

The Mystery

Let’s gather round the campfire and spin a yarn about a little old place called Portlock, Alaska.

The Kenai peninsula of Alaska is still largely a wild and natural place, known for spectacular glacier fjords, lush forests and great salmon fishing. There are plenty of cities and towns on the peninsula, however, with the United States Census Bureau reporting a population of 58,799 people in April 2020. Not contributing anything to the population total any more, though, is the small ghost town of Portlock.

Sitting on the southwest tip of the Kenai peninsula is Portlock, which was also known as Port Chatham after the bay on which it lies. Once a thriving little place with a canning factory and even a post office, the whole town was abandoned, seemingly overnight in 1949. Weird things had seemed to plague the area, which the native Alaskan people had always steered clear of.

It wasn’t until the late 18th century that anyone started settling in the area and after the cannery was opened in around 1900, the settlement grew and the post office was established in 1921. But bad things seemed to happen in Portlock. The residents had many stories to tell of a strange, malevolent presence in the woods.

Parties of men had gone on hunting trips and disappeared, never to be seen again. In 1931, a man called Andrew Kamluck was found dead with heavy logging equipment no human could lift as the murder weapon. In the 1940s, dismembered and hideously injured bodies had been found floating in the lagoon or in rivers.

Some sources have quoted up to three dozen deaths happening over a period of around 20 years. Occasionally, incredibly large bi-pedal footprints had been found in the woods, near death scenes of large animals such as moose whose carcasses had also disappeared. The cannery workers had upped and left at least once before their final exodus due to the strange occurrences and mounting death toll but had always been persuaded to return to work shortly afterwards.

People who grew up in Portlock remember being told to stay away from the lagoon and the forest as that was where the “Nantiinaq” (pronounced Nun-TEE-nuk) lived. From the glimpses and experiences of the residents, it was agreed that this was a huge half-human, half-beast creature that walked on two legs, making it the Alaskan equivalent of the sasquatch or Bigfoot. One resident, Tom Larson, came face to face with the creature but lost track of it after running to fetch his gun.

Trees had been uprooted and stuck back in the ground upside down, a calling card of the sasquatch. And the Nantiinaq wasn’t the only paranormal game in town. Malania Helen Kehl who is possibly the oldest living former resident of Portlock, also told newspapers such as the Homer Tribune that there was a white-faced woman who would appear by the cliffs wearing a black dress that was “so long she would drag it”.

This apparition would scream and moan, then disappear back into the cliffs. As well as the screams of this ghost woman, other howls and eerie sounds could frequently be heard emanating from the forest.

By the time 1949 rolled around, the residents of Portlock had had enough of living in fear of the Nantiinaq and other spirits and abandoned the town wholesale to move to safer places up the coast. The postmaster remained there by himself for a while before the post office was officially closed in 1950 or 51. Now, all that remains of Portlock is a couple of rotting buildings and a sense of tension in the air.

The area has been explored by people since the abandonment and it’s been common that they experience a feeling of unease and of being watched. A group of hunters in the 1970s, for example, came back with tales of something having stalked around their tent on two legs for three nights in a row. In December 2021, a tv show set out to explore the ghost town of Portlock and see if they could uncover the truth of what lurked in the forest.

But first, let’s break down the urban legends surrounding Portlock and see where that leaves us.

Here be Monsters

What cannot be denied is that Portlock definitely was a busy town whose inhabitants upped sticks and moved away pretty much en masse. Was it these disappearances and grisly murders that was the catalyst for them to do so, though? Hmmm, probably not. If you read any articles about Portlock, a few repeat stories crop up and, as usual, they provide vague details and you end up with more questions than answers.

So let’s go through some of the strange events surrounding the town and see if we can get to the bottom of any of it.

There are some names mentioned in the stories bandied about between websites. In fact, there are generally only 3 people named: murdered Andrew Kamluck, Nantiinaq eye-witness Tom Larson, and old former resident Malania Helen Kehl. I started looking for more information about Andrew Kamluck but most of the places where his name crops up are just repeating the same story of him having been hit in the head with some logging equipment.

Apparently it was a 10 foot pole or log or piece of machinery that could not have been moved with human hands. And that’s all there is. There’s no other news trace of the story of an Andrew Kamluck dying prematurely or under mysterious circumstances.

The only Andrew Kamluck I found was actually born in 1931 when this person was supposed to have died. Sure, maybe it was the deceased Andrew’s son but it seems a bit weird that there’s no mention of the dad anywhere especially if the death was related to cryptid lore. So what can we deduce here?

I’m thinking this Andrew Kamluck was not a real person or his name was attached to someone else by accident. This other person may have had an accident or been murdered but if he was, it was elsewhere and I don’t think it was the Andrew Kamluck of the legend.

The other potential lead is Tom Larson. He comes into the story as a fisherman who happens upon the Nantiinaq on the beach, runs off to get a gun, then returns either to find it gone, or just chickens out and lets it leave, depending on which story you read. This is just a word of mouth anecdote that’s been hanging around for a few decades with no other evidence or proof so I don’t really know how much time or credence we can devote to it. The other repeat name in this story is Malania Helen Kehl, but we’ll save her for a bit later on as there are some extremely interesting additions to her story.

Some people have mentioned the Alaska Triangle in relation to the Portlock tale. The Alaska Triangle is the younger and more socially awkward sibling of the Bermuda Triangle, a triangular area over Alaska where people go missing at twice the usual rate for the rest of the country. It’s not hard to see why as the Alaska Triangle covers a huge area of the state, rife with inhospitable terrain, ranging from dense forests to icy mountains so if people are going to go missing, it’s in an area like that as rescue becomes harder the more remote the place. There’s also been paranormal links to the Alaska Triangle with alien activity and cryptid sightings in the area but take a quick look at it on a map and you’ll see that the Kenai Peninsula does not fall inside the supposed lines so we can at least rule that out as a reason for all the weirdness, unless the triangle is bigger than it’s current recognised boundaries.

So what of all the other missing people and the mutilated bodies that washed up all over the place? Surely that would spook anyone enough to believe in the supernatural or at least that there was a truly psychotic serial killer in the midst of the town. Alaskan historian, Brian Weed, went on the record with radio station KINY in 2018 to state: “We know that there are reported murders in the area. They called them murders, but they also included people that just went lost in those reports.

We’re not talking about a dozen people. We’re talking like three dozen people. If we have a serial killer in the area at the time, they took out a lot of people in the course of say 20 years.”

Woah, that’s a lot of deaths. Except…they don’t appear to have actually happened. Now, I’m not sure where old Brian was getting his information from but there has been no news coverage of any of this kind of thing coming out of the Kenai peninsula at the time we’re talking about, say the 1920s to 1950 or, actually, ever.

You would have thought that if a large group of people had disappeared or if this was a regular occurrence then there would be some record of it somewhere. There was a factory, school and Post Office at Portlock, it wasn’t as though it was completely devoid of communication with the outside world. And even though the 1920s was a century ago now, newspapers and magazines were in full swing and the radio had started broadcasting to the public so big stories would have been out there for people to see or hear.

Luckily, other people with more dedication and willingness to subscribe to newspaper archive sites have already combed through the Alaskan papers for any hint of deaths, disappearances or murders in Portlock or Port Chatham for decades leading up to the 1950s and have found not a sausage. No dismemberments, no disappearances, not even an Andrew Kamluck to be had. Only one death was reported as coming out of Portlock and that was described as “an accident”.

Was this Andrew Kamluck? I don’t know, there were no further details given. In fact, given that most of the people working in Portlock were fishing, mining, logging or canning, one accidental death in a few decades seems almost unbelievably low.

But if there was a big cover-up, why didn’t it then make the papers after everyone left and wouldn’t have felt so inclined to keep the secret anymore? How do we even know about these events in the first place? Unfortunately, there’s no definitive source for the start of these alleged deaths and disappearances which leads you to believe that they are conflated and misremembered events at best, and just downright fiction or lies at worst.

But there had to be some reason for people to start believing in this Nantiinaq, right? Bigfoot sightings in North America are highest on the west coast, with Washington and British Columbia being two popular spots so why not the densely forested and sparsely populated Kenai peninsula? There are many anecdotes originating from former Portlock residents or their relatives (or friends of relatives of residents etc) that agree that there was something weird in them thar woods.

It’s cool to think that there might be, but no convincing story or evidence has come out of this area. We have decades-old word of mouth tales about catching a glimpse of something, or some bad smell, or a missing animal carcass with big ol’ footprints beside it but with no visible trail to follow. Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s because these forest beings are supposed to live actually inside the trees.

How do they fit in there? What? And what about that upside down tree I mentioned near the beginning?

That is totally inexplicable, right? Well, sorry but a bit of a reddit dive brought up sheepish explanations of backhoe drivers and construction workers who would do this to mark places or even just to mess around, so while we can’t discount the activity as having been carried out by a cryptid, real life humans have already admitted to doing it. Logging was carried out in the forests around Portlock — remember the possible death of Andrew Kamluck? — so maybe someone on that crew did it.

Former residents who were children when Portlock was still alive claim that they were always being warned to stay away from the forest because of the “Nantiinaq”. This has since been alleged to mean “half man half beast” in the local dialect but apparently this is not the case. It’s actually derived from a similar word “nant’ina” which means something more akin to a people-stealer.

It’s more likely for people to warn their kids that a child-catcher will get them if they stray too far than some sort of paranormal forest wildman. But as folklore and legends grow, meanings get altered, relevance gets put on the wrong things and now a basically made-up word is believed to mean the Alaskan sasquatch. And how long are these things supposed to live?

People are visiting Portlock even now to try and get a glimpse of the fabled Nantiinaq but would it be the same one as from the original abandonment?

As I’ve broached the subject, I guess it’s time to talk about the show, subtly named Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. And no! it’s not a History Channel thing, it’s on Discovery plus. This is a very recent show, with the first episodes being aired in December 2021. A group of men set off on an expedition to Portlock to try and unravel the mystery of the Nantiinaq and, ostensibly, to see whether Portlock can be resettled but you know it’s really only for the Bigfoot stuff. Before they go, a village elder sends them off with the news that the being killed 3 dozen of his ancestors and he believes it’s still there. “Stay away from the woods, stay away from the forest,” he warns, but then, what’s the point in them going? If they don’t venture into the woods at least a little bit, it’s going to be a pretty dull show. There are other clips from former residents saying they were told to “stay away from the lagoon area” which I guess when you’re an unattended child is probably common sense but if you’ve got to stay away from the forest and the lagoon, there ain’t much of Portlock you can really go to. The nearby mine? Also probably not a great idea. Anyway, these intrepid explorers have given themselves 40 days to check out Portlock which is a very long time if you ask me. A week would probably have been enough, it’s not a very large place! Do they find evidence of a Bigfoot, Nantiinaq, Sasquatch or “squatch” as those in the know like to call them? Well, I don’t know as I previously admitted I haven’t seen the whole show but I’m going to go with “no”. As well as there just not being anything to find, they act in a contradictory manner when some possible thing does occur. For example, they’re stumbling around in the woods one night and one with a torch says “I saw eye-shine”. Oh, great, a potential sighting. What to do, chaps? Get the night vision equipment out and keep rolling the cameras so the world can get a look at a real honest to god cryptid? No. The next thing they do is say “let’s get out of here!” and with the producer yelling at them in their earpieces to get away, they hotfoot it out of the woods, not chased by a giant hairy man. There’s also some sort of forest guide who looks like the Alaskan Crocodile Dundee — seriously, he has the hat and everything — who comes out with pearls like “these beings, they can energize inside a tree” with the most impressive thing being that everyone manages to keep a straight face. OK, enough time dedicated to this tomfoolery but I thought I’d mention it as it shows that the story of Portlock is still alive and kicking right up to the present day.

In addition, I am genuinely sorry for crapping all over the tv show and the stories of the Nantiinaq in general. I like to believe that there is room for unexplained things, I enjoy magic and mystery and really, deep-down, I would love to have some sort of non-scary encounter with a being that cannot be explained. It just hasn’t happened yet and the stories I read for this piece have not convinced me any further that this being exists.

I also went down a rabbit hole of peoples’ experiences with similar things in other places near Portlock and again, just not convincing enough. There’s a lot of “I wish I’d taken a picture” and things like that which, I suppose, might not be at the forefront of your mind when coming face to face with a large hairy creature but we have the technology to make this happen. My own neighbourhood has set up night vision motion-activated cameras in some wildlife areas around and you see all kinds of cool stuff.

All the tales from hunters describe general feelings of unease, strange noises that they’re too scared to investigate and things moving outside their tents which again, they are too scared to investigate. This leaves us with a big fat nothing. Nantiinaq aside, there are some big animals on the Kenai Peninsula including brown bears, black bears, wolves and moose which can grow to be enormous.

These animals are probably also the sources for any weird noises coming from the area. I mean, if you’ve never heard one before and then you hear a fox screaming outside your window at night, you are going to shit yourself. It’s so scary.

I listened to one story of a camper who heard movement outside his tent and then heard female voices speaking in his language but he couldn’t understand them. This was accepted as proof of female Nantiinaqs. To my mind I thought “oh, it was just a couple of women outside.

Maybe hunters themselves.” There are different dialects even on the Kenai Peninsula and if you’re scared and bundled up in a tent, you may not have been able to make sense of it even if it was in a language you are familiar with but yeah, when you get into these stories you’re entering into Confirmation Bias City as any detail is accepted as positive proof of sasquatches.

Going back to the named sources in the Nantiinaq mythos, here’s the most significant one. The other person who crops up frequently in the Portlock story is Malania Helen Kehl. Malania Kehl was interviewed by the Homer Tribune in 2009 and spoke through a translator named Sally Ash, who was also her cousin.

While there are no specific direct quotes from her in the piece to confirm it, it strongly implies that the reason everyone left Portlock was because of their fear of the Nantiinaq. Because this was published in a paper, it seems that it was enough to be held aloft ever since as definitive proof of the existence of the large, hairy, murderous creature. But what gives, Malania?

Could it be that she was actually just pranking everyone? In a piece published on the Anchorage Press’s website in April 2021, journalist and self-proclaimed Bigfoot enthusiast, Darren “HarpDaddy” Smith, did some digging and went to a first-person witness of the Homer Tribune interview, the translator, Sally Ash. Sally did confirm her belief that there was some sort of bigfoot-esque creature in the woods around Portlock and that the place definitely had a creepy vibe to it.

Her mother had told her stories as she was growing up and her brother had apparently had a close encounter with a hairy man-thing that smelled really bad and looked “really scary”. To conclude this story, she said: “He wasn’t sure if it was a bigfoot, but there was a horrible smell.” With such compelling proof as this, it’s such a mystery why this creature has remained undetected to the wider world for so long.

Although, in this case, I’m thinking maybe it was someone living rough in the woods who just really needed to take a bath. Anyway, there was a reason we were talking about Sally Ash. When asked about the interview her cousin Malania had given, she basically rips the complete shit out of it.

Kudos to HarpDaddy for reporting this as it directly contradicts any faith he might have had in the original article. Sally told him: “Malania kind of made up a story, because she was getting tired of people asking if this (story) is true. She made up this story about how Bigfoot was killing people.

It wasn’t true. Everybody knows that, but it was not our place to say nothing. We all knew but we couldn’t just stop her.

We were brought up in a way where we can’t tell our elders they are wrong.” And a bit later she confirms again in case anyone was in any doubt: “There was me and my sisters and my cousins and we all just sat there. We couldn’t tell her, ‘Don’t say that Malania,’ because she might get mad at us.

We were younger than her and we were not allowed in front of her to say anything like that… Malania knew that we knew about her story that she made up and we all had a laugh about it with her.” Malania! What the heck!

In an effort to get people to stop asking her about it, she basically confirmed everyone’s wildest and incorrect beliefs. I think this means we can probably ignore that ghosty cliff woman as well.

The Abandonment

So if a bloodthirsty hairy man didn’t scare off all the residents of Portlock, what really happened? Well, as you may have expected, it was just the way of the world. Portlock was located way down at the bottom of the Kenai Peninsula which was great when ships were coming to and from the area with supplies and trade and what-not, but in the 1940s, the Alaska Route 1 highway was built which made it far easier to transport things to and from the peninsula.

The route didn’t make it all the way down to the quite inaccessible Portlock, so it and other small towns that weren’t near the highway were abandoned as there was no reason to stay there any more. Former residents just upped and moved a little further up the coast and started again from there as those towns were now doing really well thanks to the new transport links. The school and factory closed down and the postmaster stayed on, just him and whatever might have been in those woods, until he was finally given leave to shut up shop a year or so later.

Also, according to Alaskan census information, Portlock only reported 31 inhabitants in 1939. Presumably factory workers lived elsewhere and commuted into Portlock but the number of permanent residents was tiny so it wasn’t really a mass movement of people and they didn’t end up having to move very far. It also was probably done over a period of time, not everyone leaving on the same day. Because of the boom of these other places on the peninsula, it’s very probable that Portlock wasn’t the only small town that was abandoned in this way at around the same time.

Another quote from Sally Ash confirms once again that it was the prosaic rather than the paranormal that hastened Portlock’s decline: “People would see Nantiinaq, but that wasn’t the reason why people moved this way to Seldovia and Nanwalek. They moved because of the economy, schools and the church. There really was no killing of people.”

Thanks, Sal. I believe we can file this one away as having been thoroughly decoded but you can always go and check out the remains of Portlock for yourself and see if you can find anything big afoot.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kenai Peninsula known for?

The Kenai Peninsula is known for spectacular glacier fjords, lush forests, and great salmon fishing.

When was Portlock, Alaska abandoned?

Portlock was abandoned in 1949.

What was the population of the Kenai Peninsula in April 2020?

The United States Census Bureau reported a population of 58,799 people in April 2020.

What was the Nantiinaq according to local folklore?

The Nantiinaq was described as a huge half-human, half-beast creature that walked on two legs, similar to the sasquatch or Bigfoot.

What was the primary reason for the abandonment of Portlock?

The primary reason for the abandonment of Portlock was the construction of the Alaska Route 1 highway, which made other towns more accessible and economically viable.

What was the population of Portlock in 1939?

Portlock reported 31 inhabitants in 1939.

What was the significance of the Alaska Triangle in relation to Portlock?

The Alaska Triangle is an area where people go missing at twice the usual rate, but the Kenai Peninsula does not fall within its recognized boundaries.

What did Malania Helen Kehl reveal about the Nantiinaq stories?

Malania Helen Kehl admitted that she made up the stories about the Nantiinaq killing people to stop others from asking about it.

What was the role of the postmaster in Portlock after the abandonment?

The postmaster remained in Portlock by himself for a while before the post office was officially closed in 1950 or 1951.

What did former residents claim about the Nantiinaq?

Former residents claimed that they were always being warned to stay away from the forest because of the Nantiinaq, which was believed to be a people-stealer.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: What Really Happened in Portlock, Alaska?
• Hero image source by James Shelton32 / openverse, by-sa.