On July 20th, 2024, a disturbing deathbed confession appeared on the ‘Politically Incorrect’ discussion board of the website 4Chan.com describing a chilling ritual that takes place every year in northern Canada. Contrary to my better judgement, I’ve decided to republish that confession here.
4Chan is an anonymous forum notorious for the elaborate hoaxes and fictional narratives generated by its users, and the vast majority of the posts made thereon – despite the gullibility of the mainstream media which sometimes take the bait – are not to be taken seriously. In fact, the website’s unofficial motto once was: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” Nevertheless, every once in a while, political, corporate, medical, and military whistleblowers use this roguish outlet to make stunning disclosures which are later proven to be true. In October 2012, for example, an Australian government employee leaked a classified Defence Australia intelligence report on the website, citing inspiration from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In August 2019, an anonymous 4Chan poster reported on the mysterious death of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein nearly an hour before the news was officially broken by the press. And as recently as November 5th, 2024, a user of the infamous imageboard released esoteric details about an upcoming video game called ‘Pokemon-Legends Z-A’, some of which have since been corroborated by a press release.
Although I typically try to reserve judgement on the stories that I tell, I feel compelled in this case to state that I’m personally skeptical of this one, in large part because of the medium by which it was told. At the very least, however, it makes for a good campfire story which may deserve a place in the growing compendium of modern Canadian folklore. And perhaps, as is so often the case with urban legends, there may be a kernel of truth at its core.
The anonymous original poster, or OP, began his thread with the words: “I’m dying soon, and I want to tell all of you something.
“I am part of a group of First Nations peoples living in the country known as Canada. This group of roughly 500 men from across the land hunt people in the deep north twice a year. I have been partaking in the hunt since I was 27 years old, at first as a scout and [labourer], and eventually as a hunter myself. I have been part of 57 hunts over the years and personally killed 24 people. I was also involved in the kidnapping and transport of hundreds of people, including the ‘lost boys of Pickering.’”
The poster ended his initial report with an invitation to ask him anything, declaring that he would take a lethal dose of a certain opioid in three hours. Attached to the post was a photo of a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, which the poster claimed he used for 90% of the hunts in which he participated.
In response to questions fielded by other anonymous users, the OP disclosed that he was 68 years old, bedridden, and living in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was suffering from very painful terminal cancer, and wanted to get this dark secret off his chest before he died. Throughout the thread, he left a scattering of replies which paint a fuller picture of the alleged ritual, and the history of his involvement in it.
“We are all from wealthy tribes,” he wrote. “Our money allows for the abduction of anyone anywhere in the country.” He described how, twice a year, the hunters arranged for the kidnapping of random victims from across the country. Most of the abductees were immigrants, whose disappearances, he claimed, were less likely to spur serious investigations. Newcomers to the country were also relatively easy to control on the long drives or float plane rides to the North Country. Another demographic the hunters preyed on were female hitchhikers, allegedly accounting for the many cases of missing Native women who have famously disappeared from Canadian reserves. “We stay away from addicts and the feeble,” the OP wrote, “because they are not sporting.” For the same reason, children were never targeted.
“To be very frank,” the poster continued, “it is all very degenerate. There is no order to it. We gather and drink and release ten at a time, and move out in groups according to seniority. Sometimes we gather the strongest ones in one group and give them basic implements, and… hunt them first several hours before the rest.” Some of the participants he knew had brought home victims’ hearts and skulls for use in arcane rituals, although he himself had never taken any trophies. “Mostly it is very cold and methodical,” he wrote. “No ceremony.”
The OP claimed that he first learned about the hunt from his brother, a violent man whom he described as an “addict and a loud mouth.” One day, his brother introduced him to the organizer of this gruesome event and sold him into his service, accepting payment for the OP’s participation as an assistant in an upcoming hunt. This job proved to be extremely dangerous, leading the OP to suspect that his brother made the arrangement in the hope that he would be killed.
This fratricidal desire, the OP believed, stemmed from an event that took place years earlier. When he was in his early twenties, he explained, his older brother killed a man in front of him, and he had helped dispose of the body. For years, the brother feared that the OP would let slip the details of the crime and incriminate him. Perhaps he had introduced him to the hunt in an effort to silence him forever. If so, his plan backfired, as the brother lost his life on that very hunt.
“There has never been a hunt that I know of that at least one of our group hasn’t died,” the poster later explained. “There are rivalries among us, and it is known that partaking in the hunt means you are also fair game. There [have] been several deaths from the prey killing the hunters over the years, but it is exceedingly rare.”
When asked if any of the human prey had ever escaped, the OP wrote, “Yes, many got away, but it never mattered. They are out there barefoot wearing basic clothing many hundreds of km from anything resembling civilization.”
When asked if he felt any guilt about his participation in the ritual, the poster wrote, “Everyone experiences moments of doubt and shame when they’re young, but you learn to bury it or let go, because hesitation and vocalized misgivings will see you dead in the woods alongside the sport.” When asked whether he enjoyed the hunts, he wrote, “I once did, but later it became a matter of participate or else. The ‘or else’ comes in the form of direct threats to your family.”
“We have all seen things…” the poster wrote in response to a query regarding any uncanny experiences the hunters have had northern wilderness. “The only thing we all agree on is that we have all, at some point, seen what the white man calls Sasquatch – tall hairy men walking upright, shadowing us for days.”
The last of the OP’s lengthy replies was a description of what he considered his most memorable hunt. This event took place in 1989 near Kanaaupscow, Quebec, an abandoned Hudson’s Bay Company post which once stood on the northern shores of the Grand River east of James Bay, at the mouth of the Caniapiscau River. “That was an enormous undertaking,” he wrote, “that took months to plan and huge amounts of capital. Nine planes and forty-five prey and nearly a hundred and twenty hunters. All were men between 18 and 55, strong and well fed. They were flown in and housed in a large cabin we purpose built for the event. They were given adequate clothing and food and allowed to live in the cabin for three days to rest and make ready. They were given knives and hatchets, and told exactly what was happening. A few went catatonic and were killed before the release to prove our resolve to [the] rest. They were released all at once, and told they had one hour to get as far as possible.
“We used a pack of 12 dogs bred specifically for this hunt. They weren’t meant to guide us to them, they were [simply] released to hunt as they saw fit. This hunt lasted nearly three weeks and spanned nearly 500 km. Some were never found. The dogs got a few. The dogs attacked some of us. Some dogs came back wounded. Some men were found close to death from being mauled. Two men miraculously managed to make their way to a fire watch tower and barricaded themselves in. We burned them alive.”
The OP’s last post in the thread was an invitation for those skeptical of his story to attempt to verify the events to which he alluded. “There is ample evidence of all of this in the locations I’ve discussed,” he wrote. “Go look.”
The only location which the poster mentioned textually was Kanaaupscow, Quebec, at which he alleged a massive hunt took place in 1989. Eerily, the poster’s claim that two men were burned alive in a fire watch tower during that event accords with a historic wildfire which ripped through the boreal forest east of James Bay in the summer of that year, beginning on July 2nd and consuming more than 20,000 hectares of timberland. Contemporary newspaper articles indicate that the wildfire was deemed such a threat that several hundred residents of the nearby village of Radisson, Quebec, and employees of the La Grande-2 Dam were forced to evacuate the area, being flown to the cities of Val-d’Or and Montreal.
Although he made no mention of it textually, the OP included a Google Earth screenshot of Kitchie Lake, Ontario, in a reply describing how, when hunts were conducted in especially remote locations, the human quarry were flown in by float plane. At the end of the reply, he included geographic coordinates for Kitchie Lake, an extremely remote body of water located at the edge of the Ontario barrens about eleven miles northwest of the Muketei River, the latter being a tributary of the Attawapiskat which drains into James Bay. This author was unable to find a single news story set on the shores of this desolate pond in either of the two newspaper archives to which he is subscribed.
Before we continue, it might be worth our while to clarify a statement made by the original poster. In his opening post, the OP mentioned that the victims of the dark hunting club to which he belonged included the ‘Lost Boys of Pickering,’ six young men from the city of Pickering, Ontario, who lie at the heart of one of the province’s most baffling mysteries.
Pickering is a city on the northern shores of Lake Ontario, sandwiched between the metropolis of Toronto and easterly Oshawa. On the night of Friday, March 17th, 1995, six Pickering teenagers, who ranged in age from 16 to 18, left a house party in high spirits, apparently with the intention to commit some light-hearted mischief at the Frenchman’s Bay Marina. They were never seen again.
At the insistence of the boys’ parents, the Durham Reginal Police launched a delayed search and rescue operation in conjunction with the Metro Toronto Police, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and over a thousand volunteers, scouring Frenchman’s Bay and surrounding waters for any sign of the missing teens. Current with the boys’ disappearance were the vanishings of two watercraft from two separate local marinas, one of them being an imitation Boston Whaler – the original Whaler being a motorboat filled with polyurethane foam touted as “unsinkable” – and a water trike, or three-wheel paddleboat. After two days of searching without finding any clues as to the boys’ fate, the authorities inexplicably called off the operation, presuming that the teens had suffered an accident on Lake Ontario, and had gone down to its icy depths with the unsinkable boat they had presumably stolen.
In 2010, a private investigator named Bruce Ricketts – who, incidentally, is the founder of two websites that I currently run, one of them being MysteriesOfCanada.com – picked up the cold case, pursuing leads that the police had failed to follow. Ricketts came across evidence indicating that the boys may have met with foul play, the most tantalizing being the appearance of mysterious figures in surveillance footage taken at a Pickering marina, which had captured three of the lost boys entering the area twenty minutes earlier, apparently to steal beer from a boat. Bizarrely, Ricketts only managed to obtain this footage after making three formal requests to the Durham Regional Police, being initially told that the footage did not exist. Ricketts continued to investigate the case until his death in January 2024, publishing his findings in a 2022 book called ‘The Lost Boys of Pickering.’ I hope to make his findings the subject of a future piece.
While the original poster did not provide any proof for his claims, there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that his story might be a fabrication inspired by film and literature. The concept of a cabal of wealthy sportsmen hunting human game in the wilderness has ample precedent in fiction, first and most famously appearing in American novelist Richard Connell Jr.’s 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game. In this piece, an American big game hunter falls overboard during a voyage in the Caribbean and swims to a tropical island, inhabited only by an exiled Russian aristocrat and his manservant. Over dinner, the Russian informs the castaway that he hunts visitors to his island for sport, equipping them with food, clothing, and a knife, and giving them a three-hour head start, before setting after them with a pistol and his hunting dogs.
This motif has recurred in at least eighteen cinematic adaptations of Connell’s story, many of which have the same name. One rendition which bears remarkable resemblance to the OP’s story is the 1994 film ‘Surviving the Game,’ in which a homeless man played by Ice-T is flown to a remote cabin in the woods, where a handful of wealthy sportsmen have paid $50,000 for the privilege of hunting him. Another more recent film, an obscure independent production called ‘Death Hunt’, is set on a remote Canadian island, while a 2013 film called Frozen Ground, which has similar themes, takes place in the Alaskan wilderness.
Far more questionable than the parallels between the OP’s story and these works of fiction is the photo of his rifle, which he claimed to have used in 90% of his hunts. One of the anonymous thread participants subjected the photo to a reverse image search and discovered that it derived from an advertisement on the website GunPost.ca for a 1942 Lee Enfield, placed by a Toronto-based gun dealer with sterling reviews. When confronted with this evidence, the poster replied that he had sold the gun some time earlier. Barring the possibility that OP indeed sold his rifle to the dealer in Toronto and had found the resale advertisement, his use of the image puts the veracity of his story into question. Was the OP “larping,” or roll-playing, as charged by many of the thread contributors, or is there truly a secret sportsman’s club that hunts human beings in northern Canada? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Sources
https://Boards.4Chan.org/Pol/Thread/474993748
“Emergency Lifted in Radisson,” in the August 4th, 1989 issue of the Montreal Gazette
“Devastating Fores Fires Spread Across the Country,” in the August 2nd, 1989 issue of the Kingston Whig-Standard
“Wind and Heat Worsen Forest Fires,” in the August 2nd, 1989 issue of the Sun Times
“Fires Threaten Quebec Town,” in the August 1st, 1989 issue of the Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)
“Timber Workers Aid Fire Crew,” in the August 1st, 1989 issue of the Windsor Star
“Residents of Quebec Town Get Last-Minute Reprieve: Shifting Winds Blow Forest Fires Away from Town,” in the August 1st, 1989 issue of the Standard (St. Catharines, Ontario)
“Winds Hold Off Fire’s Advance Near Radisson,” in the July 31st, 1989 issue of the Montreal Gazette
“Evacuees Head Back to Northern Manitoba: Firefighters Still Desperate for Downpour,” in the July 30th, 1989 issue of the Ottawa Citizen
“Village Evacuated as Forest Fire Spreads,” in the July 30th, 1989 issue of the Montreal Gazette
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