Every Town - Alaska Has The MOST Missing Persons Cases Of Any State By Far - Here's Why

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

To put in context, In Alaska since 1988, more than 16,000 people have dissappeared which is a huge number. For every 100,000 people, 164 of them have gone missing which is far higher than any other state by a long shot as the 49 states average out to around just 6 people missing per 100,000. Those figures aren’t skewed for effect for the sake of this episode, it’s a fact and so the question becomes….what exactly is going on in Alaska? 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries 🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 💀 Exclusive Videos, Podcasts & Perks: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries  👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Everytown has a dark side. Having an open mind is important, and in my opinion, as well as according to the research, it is a tell-tale sign of intelligence. When someone's open to ideas, as I'm sure you are if you're listening to this, usually means of the type of person who actually listens when you talk and can engage in real, meaningful conversations. They don't lose their temper if they disagree with something. They think about it and take in the information. They can admit when they're wrong and apologize. And all of these open, mindful traits I bring up because really it boil down to one thing. Having the understanding to know that you don't know everything.

And despite many, many people pretending like they have it all figured out, well, that's just an act. We're human, and so by default, I can assure you, we don't know a whole lot of things. I mean, just go back to the year 1900, we're still using horses and donkeys as our primary means of transportation. The first motion picture, and one of that guy riding a horse had only been invented 10 years earlier. The Wright brothers were still three years away from flying, while we've certainly come a long way since then, we still have really far to go. It's in our nature to like to think we have the answers to the world figured out. a real sense of comfort there. However, any intelligent person knows we have a lot of work left to do. And so today, we're talking about some of those things that appear to be happening, and yet

we have no answers for. Specifically, honing in on the great state of Alaska. There are countless stories of unsolved mysteries occurring up in the Great North, missing people and planes, creatures, any stories of shapeshifters, so what gives? You might think that a lot of the legends or strange encounters may just be stories and folk tales, but oddly that doesn't appear to be the case and the hard data shows this. To put it in context, in Alaska since 1988, more than 16,000 people have disappeared, which is a huge number. For every 100,000 people in Alaska,

164 of them have gone missing, which is far higher than any other state by a long shot, as the 49 other states average out to just around six people missing per 100,000. Those figures aren't skewed for effect for the sake of this episode. It's a fact, and so the question then becomes, what exactly is going on in Alaska? Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in today for another episode of Everytown. I really appreciate you being here. So I know what you're thinking,

but of course Alaska has the most missing person's cases. It's the harshest landscape, and the terrain and weather is so unforgiving that it makes sense. Well, I agree to a certain extent. It seems like a person every other day of the year just up and vanishing is quite a lot. It feels like that's a bit abnormal. Well, you may not be sure how to feel about it exactly,

The people who agree, the ones that think there's something else much stranger going on in this place, are the ones we should probably be listening to. And that's the natives of Alaska. People have lived on this rocky and icy patch of land going back 14,000 years, and through the generations they've experienced the same things we see today. And people went missing back then, as they do right now. The ancestors have had strange encounters and stories to tell. same as many people do now.

And while today we can sort of turn a blind eye to the reality of what's happening in Alaska, because we can fill the void with all the other information in the world, back then they couldn't do this. They had to face things head on, and from that came their tales of creatures and beasts and demons. They weren't just making up these stories for no good reason. It appears they were actually telling the truth. At 3 o'clock this morning, the steamship Portland from St. Michael's for Seattle passed up,

Puget Sound with more than a ton of gold on board and 68 passengers. That was a headline from the Seattle Post newspaper back in 1897 that set in motion the great Alaskan gold rush that would continue on for roughly the next decade. And people from all around the world flocked to the state in a bid to strike it rich, and a man named Harry D. Culp was one of them. As his story goes, Harry was living in a lodge out near the city of Rangel, Alaska, with a man named Charlie as they tried to find their gold. But aside from a few small claims,

for the most part, they were striking out and needed to widen their range. And Charlie had gotten some intel about a possible gold deposit out in the Thomas Bay area, which was around 50 miles north of Rangel. Without many options, he decided to pack up some supplies and set out to go find it. He had planned on being gone for around three months, but just a month after leaving, he abruptly returned. Invisibly shaken, with no gold or supplies, he told Harry why he came back. Once Charlie had made it out to Thomas Bay, he searched for the half-moon-shaped lake he was told about where the gold supposedly was. Near the base of a glacier he found it.

Shortly after settling in, he saw something terrifying, something he had never seen before. In his own words, he described what he witnessed out there on the frozen tundra as a hairy pack of devils. Charlie watched them for a few minutes trying to figure out what exactly they were. There's lots of different kinds of canines up in Alaska and, of course, bears, but these things were different than that. They looked to be some sort of a mix between a human,

and a monkey. Their bodies were covered in hair except for where they had large scabs and open wounds. And from what those were caused by, he had no idea. A sense of dread washed over Charlie and he quickly tried to pack up his gear to leave. He was taken down his tent before he could pack that up. They spotted him in unison like a pack of wolves. His little devils came charging for him, letting out screams and cries along the way that was so visceral. It made him to leave. Charlie took off running towards his canoe, and at one point they got so close he could actually smell them. The stench was so awful and foul and made him ill, but the adrenaline overpowered that. Charlie managed to make it to his canoe before they could catch him, shortly after pushing off the banks.

He passed out, willing to wake up hours later, floating in the bay at which point he just headed back to the home base down in Wrangell. And this story of what happened to Charlie has become fairly well known among those in Alaska, especially the ones down in the southeastern portion where the story took place. But of course, it's been met with a lot of skepticism over the years. But what's interesting about that skepticism is that it comes from people like you and me or those who are new to Alaska. But if you ask any natives, those whose generations have been on that land for thousands of years, they don't think it's a strange or fantastical tale in the slightest.

They very much know it's real, and in fact, they have a name for this creature that Charlie encountered. The Kustake, also known as an otter man or the slime man. The Kustaki gets its name from the Klingit people, whose territory covers southeast Alaska, which has mentioned just so happened to be in the very same area that Charlie and Harry were in. The ottermen are said to be shapeshifting creatures that can easily look like another fellow human being, but when alerted, shapeshift into large, hairy, humanoid figures that resemble something like a giant sea otter.

Charlie described what he saw as half monkey and half human, so could it be that he came face to face with a gang of Kushtaki, and what he really was looking at was half human and half otter. Most natives in the area, even today, will tell you that they, fear these creatures more than any other animal, more than bears or wolves, the simple fact that not only can they trick you, but also only intend to harm you. It's said that they can mimic the sounds of a baby or a woman's cry to help lure people straight to them. But if they see you first, they've been known to approach people in their human form to either offer assistance or pretend to need help themselves. In either case, they'll lure their prey further into the woods,

or away from their intended destinations, at which point we'll either rip them apart and devour them if they're hungry enough, or transform them into another otterman. If they do this, and that person can no longer reincarnate, their soul forever trapped as an otterman, which translates to our more modern ideas of what a demon or the devil does, just instead of trapping a person down in hell, the person is now trapped inside this tree. creature. There are lots of stories of people encountering shape-shifters, not just in Alaska, but really everywhere. For a lot of people, it's hard to take those stories seriously because, well, we're talking about creatures that can shapeshift, so no real explanation needed. But,

as I mentioned, if you keep an open mind, perhaps there is something to it. And while I was working on this story strangely, or perhaps serendipitously, I came across another story that was a a good example of what could be a shapeshifter, an otter man, or a demon. Whenever you choose to call it, this is a weird one, and it hits all the right points. It comes from a man who was on the podcast Radio Rental recently. If you haven't listened to Radio Rental, then you're a lucky dog because it covers some crazy true crime and strange stories as told by the people that experience them. Check it out when you can.

and you can hear the full version of this story over there that I'm about to tell you, which I do highly recommend you do. Now, other than the location, which comes from the northern part of Alaska, even though they don't mention it directly, it sounds like a crew of workers came across one of these Kushhtaki, and had they not been so lucky, one of them could have easily been hurt or killed or transformed. A storyteller explains that when he was in his early 12,

he did some work up along the north slope of Alaska for a wireline crew, which the guys who were in charge of maintaining oil rigs. In the area where they were, it was a place you could only access in the winter because from their base camp to the petroleum reserve, they needed to drive 60 miles across an ice road. And it was only in winter when the ice was hard enough for them to safely make the trip. So it was January, mostly dark up in those parts of the majority of the day. 15 degrees out, and then there was this road and not much of anything else. No settlements or towns. The trip took roughly three hours because you can't go more than 20 miles an hour on those ice roads.

About halfway through the drive is when they caught something in their headlights. As they got closer, they could then see it was a guy, just shuffling along the road, staring blankly ahead. Once they got a good look, they could see it was a white guy. Meaning, maybe they could understand finding a native up there who was out and about. Possibly they had had a snowmobile accident, but this man was way out of place. On top of that, he didn't have the proper attire at all. He was wearing just sneakers, jeans, and a hoodie. And the other eerie thing was that he didn't look like he'd been out there in the elements all that long.

Almost like he teleported there, or, in our case, shape-shifted. They pull up to this man who isn't even acknowledging them, just staring ahead as they ask him if he needs help. With no answer, even though they saw no sign of an accident, they thought maybe this man was in shock. One of the stranger details was that this guy smelled awful, emanating this garlicky and acidic stench, which was especially odd since smell doesn't travel so much in cold conditions. The crew couldn't just leave him there. I mean, there was nothing for 30 miles in either direction. He'd certainly die, and so one of the passengers eventually reached out to pull him inside.

It was at that moment that the wandering man turned, grabbed the guy's forearm incredibly tight, and let out a guttural scream that the storyteller described as ungodly. He wouldn't let go and kept screaming, so they just peeled away as fast as they could until he released. They talked about going back, but it was a scary story. situation, so they decided just to forge a head and let the guards know so they could go check it out. The guards did eventually and found no sign of this person anywhere, no footprints, no nothing. And so, getting back to the Otterman and the similarities, here you have a person who looks in need of help, smells terrible, and lets out a guttural cry. All things the natives

described, as well as similarities from Charlie's story back in the 1900s. If those stories aren't enough to show you that something weird is most definitely going on in Alaska, then I want to hit you with some of the hard data. Because these facts aren't an anomaly in and of themselves. As I mentioned earlier, for no clear-cut reason at all, Alaska's missing persons rate is astronomical compared to the rest of the U.S. So for context, Massachusetts sits at the lowest end with 2.74 missing people for every 100,000 people. Followed by that on the low end is Rhode Island at 2.57, and then Iowa at 3.28.

On the highest end, you have the state of Hawaii with 16.68 people missing per 100K. Following that up is Oklahoma with 16 and Arizona with 14. Every other state falls somewhere in between except for Alaska, which has 173.5 people missing. So you have to ask yourself what exactly is that all about? That man from the oil rig specifically mentioned that he wondered if what they had encountered was some sort of demon. In October of 1972, a small private plane heading from Anchorage to Juneau, carrying four people on board banished without a trace. Despite a huge search effort because the occupants of the plane were government officials and congressmen,

nothing was ever discovered. Ultimately, that was the start of the talk surrounding the Alaska Triangle, which, much like the Bermuda Triangle is an area that covers a large chunk of Alaska, where people go missing and planes disappear without a trace. And people like to label these triangles as if the shape itself has something ominous about it, but really, it's not about the shape, it's just about defining an area where unexplained things happen. Some explanations that are attempted on why bad things occur here

are because of magnetic anomalies, aliens, otter people, and more broadly, the devil himself. But really, nobody knows for sure, and likely that's how it will stay. After all, who even said we were supposed to have the answers for everything? And really, if we did, wouldn't that take a lot of fun out of living? In essence, with the natives named Kustaki thousands of years ago, I believe is what we're calling the Alaska Triangle today. Yes, there are two completely different things, and that one is a mythical creature and one is a set of coordinates on a map. But they are the same thing. They're just names assigned to explain the unexplainable, and to give us context in order to wrap our brains around all the things that fall outside of our defined knowledge.

So, you call it what you will and believe in what you want. Remember, keep an open mind out there because these mysteries, regardless of what's happening, sure are fun to talk about. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you guys all enjoyed it. Remember, you can always watch this episode over on our YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries, which is also another podcast if you just want to listen. For exclusive content and a library stuff, come join us over at patreon.com slash scary mysteries,

where we have some more darker stories to tell. Thanks for tuning in today. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. As you never know, maybe your town will be next.