Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, How the Wind Does Scream, we ventured into the mysterious wilds of the Nahanni Valley in Canada's Northwest Territories, which in the early twentieth century was the scene of a number
of strange and unsettling deaths. Roughly twenty years after the death of the McCloud Brothers, whose story we explored in the episode, news broke again from out of the Northwest Territories of yet another beguiling mystery that was striking fear into the hearts of any who had reason to find themselves in the area at the time. It is known today as the story of the Mad Trapper of Rat River.
The man was first said to have been sighted sometime in the afternoon of August twenty first, nineteen twenty seven, at the Ross River Trading Post, located at the junction of the Ross and Peley Rivers in southern Yukon, appearing as if from nowhere, wearing the standard coarsely material trappers garb, and carrying only a backpack and a hunting rifle. He promptly set up camp on the outskirts of the rudimentary settlement.
The following day, having not said a word to anyone, the man, who was five ft ten with thick brown hair and piercing icy green eyes, stepped into the posts. Taylor and Drury Trading store in sight trapper Otto Poulson and store clerk Roy Buttle had been deep in conversation when the sudden appearance of the man caught them off guard. The man, they later said, had an undeniable presence, hard and resolute, and those eyes when they looked at you, as Poulson later said, made you feel as though ice
water had just been poured down your back. Saying nothing, the man walked up to the counter and handed a note to Buttle, on which was written a short list of items, including tea and bacon, and six boxes of kidney pills, amongst other things. Unable to stand the awkward silence any more, Buttle asked the man cheerily where he was from, to which he replied simply nowhere. After bagging
up the items as quickly as he could. Buttle then asked the man for forty nine dollars, at which he then pulled out two enormous wads of cash from his pockets somewhere in the region of six thousand dollars, pulled out a fifty dollar note and placed it on the counter. Just then, two seven year old First Nation boys ran into the store, brandishing a nickel, which they'd likely found in the dirt outside. The stranger watched as they dashed excitedly over to the sweet counter. Buttle called out for
him to take his change. The man slowly turned back, pointed a finger at the coins on the counter, and then pointed to the two young boys, and with that he took his things and left. In a community as small as Ross Rivers, word inevitably spread about the unsettling Lona who'd set up camp in their mists with piles
of cash in his pockets. A few days later, local Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal Clawed Tid, who'd been away on patrol duty, arrived back to find his community deeply troubled by the man's arrival, and vowed to speak to him to find out what he was doing there and just how he'd come into so much money that afternoon he headed out to the man's camp to do just that,
only to find it was deserted. Over the next few years, there was only one recorded sighting of the man, from when he stayed a few days in fras Of Falls, about a hundred and thirty miles northwest of Ross River. He gave his name to the owner of the cabin he rented as Albert Johnson, and is said to have spent most of his time there lying alone in his bunk, staring up at the ceiling. In his absence, people began
to talk. Any One who lived or trapped in Yukon or Northwest territories, where the man was mostly thought to rome, was worn to stay clear of him, while some claimed that he had a nasty habit of stealing gold teeth from the mouths of men dead or alive. In spring nineteen thirty, the so called Johnson was alleged to have shown up in fought Reliance, close by to the camp
of two trappers, Emile Bode and yan Olsen. A few months later, three miles south of the Thelon River, he is said to have arrived at a cabin belonging to one Steve Bradley, a man he knew to be a friend of Bode and Olsen's. According to Bradley, Johnson claimed to have some important business to settle with the two trappers and asked Bradley if he knew where they were. Thinking nothing of it at the time, Bradley informed him that they were camping out in Granite Falls, about sixty
five miles away. Johnson thanked him for the information and then disappeared once again. Now a word from our sponsor Better Help. It can be tough to train your brain to stay in problem solving mode when faced with a challenge in life, but when you learn how to find your own solutions, there's no better feeling. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, making it easy to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small.
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Visit better help dot com. Slash unexplained one zero today to get ten percent off your first month. That's better help dot com. Slash unexplained one zero during a brief stop in Fort McPherson on the banks of the Peel River in the Northwest Territories in July nineteen thirty one. After once again unsettling the locals with his stern and solitary manner, the man was warned by local mounte Edgar Millan that he would need to buy a license if
he wanted to continue trapping in the area. Johnson moved on at the end of the month, having likely ignored Millan's request. A summer slipped inexorably from autumn then to winter, with all about then covered in ice and snow. It was sometime in December when four young gwitch in trappers turned up at the Canadian Mounted Police post on the Arctic Red River, about thirty five miles east of Fort McPherson to complain about a strange white man who'd been
throwing away their baked and sabotaging their traps. They believed the man's name was Albert Johnson. Two Mounties, Alfred King and Joseph Bernard, were quickly dispatched from a Clavic, the largest settlement in the region, about sixty miles to the north, to investigate. The following morning, on December twenty eighth, about fifteen miles up the Rat River, they came across a strange looking cabin covered in snow and sunk a good
few feet into the ground. It appeared to be more like the abode of some strange woodland creature rather than that of a grown human. Nonetheless, smelling coffee and bacon cooking from inside, it seemed reasonable to assume they'd found who they were looking for. King approached the cabin on his own and knocked on the door, but whoever was
inside simply ignored him. Realizing the man had no interest in playing ball, the officers had no choice but to return to a Clavic to get a search warrant, and so, after making the arduous one hundred and fifty mile round trip, they returned a few days later, accompanied by another two officers for back up. Once again, King knocked on the door only this time he made it clear that if the man didn't come out of his own accord, he would be forced to break down his door and drag
him out. A short silence ensued as Officer Bernard and his two colleagues watched on from about thirty yards away, when all of a sudden, a shot rang out from inside the cabin and King fell to the floor, clutching his chest. Bernard and the two other officers immediately opened fire on the cabin, but as shards of wood went flying and the smoke eventually settled, all of it was to no avail when another volley of bullets came straight
back at them from inside it. Realizing the cabin had been expertly made with this exact scenario in mind, complete with shooting holes dotted all around it, the Mountees were forced to retreat. Having returned to a clavic constable, King was treated for his wounds while the head of the Mounted Police for the region, Inspector Alexander Eames, pondered over the best course of action. In the end, he decided to go himself to the cabin, accompanied by four officers,
three trappers, and twenty pounds of dynamite. On January the ninth, nineteen thirty two. As Eames and its men approached the cabin, its door was kicked open, suddenly, revealing Albert Johnson standing in the doorway with two revolvers in his hands, and then he opened fire. For the next few hours, Johnson single handedly fought off the eight men until some time after three am, when Eames instructed two of them to
blow his cabin to smithereens. A few minutes later, Eames watched from the darkness as a huge explosion ripped off the cabin roof, believing the man, if he'd survived at all, would be seriously wounded. Eames and the others then advanced on the cabin, only to be pegged back once more by gunfire. By the time they were able to get
close to the cabin again, Johnson had disappeared. It was sometime in January when a trapper named Clark Croft working an area by the Thelon River, discovered two bodies frozen in the snow. The bodies were later identified as trappers Emile Bode and Yan Olsen, the two men whom Albert Johnson had been looking for back in July nineteen thirty
on account of having some unfinished business with them. By this time, Johnson had vanished again, but now he was a fugitive from the law, wanted for the attempted murder of a Mountie. After weeks spent searching for him, a four man team, which included Corporal Edgar Millan, who'd ordered Johnson a few years before to buy a trapping license, eventually tracked him down to the banks of a creek
close to the Northwest Territories and Yukon border. When they heard a man coughing from just inside the tree line next to the creek, Millan and his team shot blindly into the trees for twenty minutes solid, until finally a pained cry was followed by the sound of something heavy crashing down into the bush. After waiting the best part of an hour to make sure the man was fully incapacitated, Corporal Millan decided finally to head into the trees and
to pull him out. He had not made it five meters when a gun shot suddenly rang out from the trees in front of him. Then Millan spun around and fell onto the snow as the others watched on in horror. While two of the men returned fire. A third managed to pull Millan to safety, only to find that he was already dead. When the team then tried to find Johnson,
he was long gone. One night in early February, in a cabin by a creek just twelve miles east of Yukon, George Case, who'd crossed paths a few times with the enigmatic Johnson, was just preparing a pot of tea when there was a knock at the door. Kase opened it, startled to find his old companion, Albert Johnson, standing in the freezing cold outside, looking a little more tired and
thinner than he'd remembered. Having heard all the reports about him on the news, Kase thought it perhaps best to invite the man in, as George Case later recalled, according to one colorful account of the story written by Thomas Kelly, the night Johnson turned up at his door, the pair of them shared some food, after which Kase played some harmonica as Johnson sang a haunting, melancholic song with what Kase described as one of the finest baritone voices he'd
ever heard, and later he asked the impenetrable Johnson if all the rumors about him were true. Did he really kill men for their gold teeth, to which Johnson replied, with a little sparkle in those icy green eyes of his, that Case would have to work that one out for himself. Then coughing heavily into a bandanna, perhaps aware that his time on earth was steadily drawing to a close, the man became unusually talkative. By way of explanation for all
that had happened. He told Case that when he was twenty and his mother only thirty eight, she had been killed. Johnson described her as a wealthy and beautiful woman whom he'd loved dearly. Without going into too much detail, he said he'd exacted revenge on the person who'd killed her.
After that with his mother gone, life had seemed completely pointless, and that he'd grown to disdain virtually anyone who was alive, since it wasn't fair to him that anyone else should be allowed to live when she had had to die. Then Johnson finished his tea and went to bed. The next morning, he asked Case if he needed any money,
but Case claimed to have declined the offer. As Johnson left his cabin, he felt compelled to ask if the man would be okay alone out there, to which he replied that he was never alone, since he always had the spirit of his mother with him wherever he went. On February sixteenth, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police search party, aided by a search plane, managed to track Johnson down near the banks of the Eagle River, about twelve miles to the west of the Northwest Territories and Yukon border.
A heavy gunfight ensued, during which Johnson seriously injured another two officers, but was eventually pushed back and cornered behind a boulder on the banks of the frozen river. With officers approaching on all sides and the search planes swooping round overhead, the so called Albert Johnson had nowhere to go.
He died moments later in a hail of bullets. When police were finally able to examine his body, they found he was carrying almost two thousand, five hundred dollars in cash, a compass, some hunting equipment, a dead squirrel and a dead bird, as well as a jar of pearls and a jar of gold teeth. No identification was found or papers of any kind, meaning his true entity has never been established, with many suggesting that Albert Johnson had been
a name that he made up for himself. Tests conducted on the gold teeth revealed that they were most likely to have been his own. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do so via Patreon. To receive access to add three episodes. Just go to patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is
now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your
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