Article content

It was easily one of the most unearthly and chilling visions that had ever struck the land that would soon become Canada.

Eight or nine lurching figures: Their eyes vacant, their skin blue, unable to talk and barely alive.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or ‘They’re not human’: How 19th-century Inuit coped with a real-life invasion of the 'walking dead' Back to video

It was sometime before 1850 at a remote Arctic hunting camp near the southwest edge of King William Island, an Arctic island 1,300 km northwest of what is now Iqaluit, Nunavut. And these “beings” had seemingly materialized out of nowhere.

“They’re not Inuit; they’re not human,” was how a woman, badly shaking with fright, first reported their arrival to the assembled camp.

They were all gathered in an igloo. The men of the camp were away seal hunting, leaving only the women, children and one old man.

As the group tried to process the terrifying reality of what they’d just heard, the crunching footsteps of the strangers got closer.

“Everyone got scared. Very, very scared,” was how the Gjoa Haven shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq described the encounter to historian Dorothy Eber in 1999. The story was included in Eber’s 2008 book Encounters on the Passage.