Canada’s 'Blair Witch' Case: The Disturbing Vanishing of 4 Students

The families of four young men asked us to make this recording. They wanted people to hear what's on the camera we recovered. It's March 2012. I'm Russell Hutchins, a detective constable with the Ontario Provincial Police. On Friday, October 7th, four students from the same university in Sudbury drove up Highway 129 north of Thessalon to start a four-day hike. Their names are Shane Kozak, Colin McKinnon, Garrett Halverson, and Dustin Tibado. All four were 21. They told their families they'd be home on Monday for Thanksgiving dinner. They didn't come home, and on Tuesday 11th, they were reported missing. Garrett had driven them up in his pickup. It was still at the trailhead where he'd parked it, locked. We searched the route they'd left with their families and the bush on both sides of it. We searched the logging roads, the lakes and the shorelines, the hunt camps, and anywhere else a lost hiker might get in out of the weather. There were tracking dogs, the helicopter, the OPP emergency response team, and about 120 volunteers, a lot of them people who drove up from Sudbury on their own time. For eight days, we didn't find a confirmed trace of any of them. On the ninth day, October 19th, a search and rescue team found a log cabin about six kilometers from the nearest marked trail. It's not on any ministry of natural resources, Matt, and there's no land use permit for it, and so far we haven't found anybody who can tell us who built it or when. Inside there were three packs and some sleeping bags and a camcorder on the floor at the foot of the stairs that go up to the attic. The camcorder is Shane's. It's a small cannon with a light that clips onto the top for filming in the dark. The memory card has six hours and 51 minutes of video on it recorded over three days. This is what we're asking. If you were anywhere near that part of Highway 129 over the Thanksgiving weekend from October 7th to the 10th, hunting, fishing, driving the logging roads, and if you know anything about that cabin, if you know who built it or who uses it, we'd like to hear that as well. You can call the OPP directly or Crime Stoppers if you'd rather not give your name. What's on that card is the last recording of the four of them. Most of the card is an ordinary trip video. What you're about to hear is Shane in the order he recorded it. Viewer discretion is advised. The Thessalon Forest Cabin Recordings My name's Shane Kozak. I'm 21. I'm in 3rd year at University in Sudbury, its Friday, October 7th, day 1. We got to the trailhead off Highway 129 north of Thessalon at 1140 in the morning in Garrett's truck. Garrett Halverson is in engineering. Dustin Tibidot was from Hurst and he was swearing in French at the zipper on his pack before we'd even left the parking lot. Colin McKinnon has been my best friend since grade 9. Garrett weighed every pack on a luggage scale he'd brought from home before he'd let anybody start walking. Dustin's came in at 21 kilos and Garrett told him that was stupid for four days. Colin didn't say much that morning. He'd had a bad year. His little sister Alyssa went through the ice on the lake behind their house in February. She was 16. Since then he'd hardly come out of his room. This trip was my idea. Because I thought four days in the bush with us would do him some good. If anybody's going to be blamed for us being out here, it's me. When I pointed the camera at him in the parking lot, he said, "Sorry, I didn't sleep much." He had the paper map in one hand. The first few hours were exactly what I wanted. He had lunch on a flat rock over a small gray lake. The rain started a little before three. It came in hard and it didn't stop. None of our phones had a signal. At 440 we came to a fork in the trail. Colin had the map out under his jacket and he said we should go left, down to the low ground out of the wind. Garrett checked the compass on his zipper and said that was southwest and the road was the other way. Colin said, "Sorry, I know, it's just lower down." We had about an hour and a half of light left and he wasn't spending it standing in a puddle so we went left. We came into a clearing a little after six where the trees opened up. Somebody had tied a strip of orange flagging tape around a branch and Garrett said hunters do that so they can find their way back in. There was the clearing, there was a log cabin with a porch along the front. We shouted hello five or six times. When nobody answered, Garrett tried the door and it wasn't locked, it was one room and it was dry. There was a stone fireplace with firewood stacked beside it, a table, two sets of bunks and a shelf of canned beans and soup. I turned one of the cans over for the camera and read out the date on the bottom. Just before December 2013, it felt like the luckiest thing that had ever happened to us. On the back wall there's a steep narrow stair, more like a ladder with a rail that goes up to a plank door into the attic. Garrett climbed up and tried it, he lifted the latch and pushed and it didn't move. He said the wood had swollen in the rain. We got a fire going and eight beans out of the cans. Garrett sat with his boots off and his socks steaming on the hearth and said, "Honestly, getting lost is the best part of the trip. Dry cabin, firewood, food, 10 out of 10 and for a minute or two the only sound was the rain on the roof. At 10 after 11 with everybody in their bunks I did my usual end of the daybit to the camera whispering so I wouldn't wake anyone." Saturday, October 8th, day 2. Colin was up before any of us. When I woke up he already had the fire going. Colin asked us to sit down. He said he had something to tell us and he wanted to do it while we were all together. "Okay, so I hope you guys don't get mad but I brought us here." We laughed. Garrett said, "Yeah, no kidding, Colin, you had the map." He meant here, this cabin, he'd found it in August. After the funeral he'd started going on long hikes on his own without telling anybody where. He got lost in the rain up here the same way we had and came out into this clearing. The cabin was here and the door was open. There was a book on the shelf. In September he came back alone. He brought the cans and stacked the firewood and he tied tape on the trees all the way in from the trail so he could bring us here. So everything that had felt lucky on Friday was Colin. The dry wood, the food, the orange tape on the branch that Garrett said was hunters. It was all him. He said he wanted Alyssa back. He said that's what the book was for and it needed people who'd known her. Last night was the first of three nights and we'd already done the first part. The memory, the names, the things by the fire. Garrett stood up. He said, "You got us lost in the middle of nowhere to play ghost hunter?" Best part of the trip, right? He laughed but he looked like he wanted to hit somebody. Then Dustin asked if he could see the book. It's a notebook, a thick one with a cover made of that stiff waxed cloth like an old kitchen tablecloth all dark and worn where people have held it. It's all handwritten. The first half is English and one person's writing. The second half is French and somebody else's. Colin had read the English part. He doesn't read French, Dustin does. He's also been into this kind of stuff for years, online, old spell books and the things people used to write down on farms. He's always said none of it's real. He read the rules while I filmed the whole thing. When he was done he closed the book and told us what it said in English slowly. He said there are three nights. The first night is the naming. Everybody who's calling says the dead person's name and leaves something of their own by the fire. The second night is keeping the house. From dark until first light you stay inside. You don't open the door and you don't answer from it, whatever calls. The third night is the walking. You put out every light except one candle on the floor in the middle of the room. The collars stand in the corners, and one corner's left empty for the one you're calling. You walk along the wall to the next corner, you touch the shoulder of whoever's there, and you stay, and they walk on. If you get to a corner that's empty, you say the name into it, and keep walking. When the round stops breaking, the one you called is in the room. Then you put out the candle, and wait for the arrival. When Dustin said there were two more things. The first one was the price. One of the ones who called was taken in exchange. The second one was a warning. Once the naming's done, if the collars leave the house before the third night is finished, it takes all of them. It's old, and some of the spellings are wrong, or it's just how they spelled it then. I don't know. Then he looked at Colin and asked him if he'd known about that part. Dustin said he knew there was a price. He said it was supposed to take one of the ones who called, and he was going to make sure it was him. That was the plan the whole time. He'd do it, and Alyssa would come home, and we'd walk out with her. He didn't tell us, because he knew we'd never come. Dustin said, "It doesn't say you get to pick." Garrett was already packing. "Forget this, I'm out." He rolled up his sleeping bag and did up his pack, and when Colin stood up, Garrett walked over and took the paper map out of his hand. He said, "You don't need this, you've got your tape." He checked the compass on his zipper and said the road was east. He said the book said if anybody left before the third night it took all of us, and Garrett had done the first night so he couldn't go. Then I'll see you at the truck. I asked him to wait an hour so we could talk about it properly, and he said he'd waited long enough. He put his hood up and left. It was about 130. I followed him to the edge of the clearing with the camera. He walked in between the trees, heading east, and I kept filming until I couldn't see the orange of his pack cover anymore. The rest of Saturday afternoon was slow. Colin sat out on the porch. Colin hadn't had the book open and read the same pages over and over. I made us eat something because nobody else was going to. I kept saying Garrett would be at the truck by dark. He'd drive out to the highway and come back with somebody, and Colin could explain himself to the police. Around six, Dustin read us one line out of the book again with his finger under it. The one about the second night. Don't open the door and don't answer from it, whatever calls. They got dark at about seven. Dustin shut the door at seven, and it stayed shut, even when somebody needed to go out and pee, which by about ten o'clock was its own problem. We kept the fire going and sat close to it. For a while, it was almost normal. Around eleven, I said Garrett had to be at the truck by now, probably halfway to the highway. Nobody answered me. A little before midnight, I put the camera on the table, pointed at the room, and left it running. I told the others it was in case Garrett came back with somebody, so there'd be a record. From the table, it could see the front door on one side of the room, and the stairs on the back wall. Just before one in the morning, somebody shouted from the trees, "Guys?" It was Garrett's voice. It came from out past the clearing, from the east, the way he'd gone. And it said, "Come on, I found help." I had my hand on the latch. Colin got there before I could lift it, and he put his hand flat over mine and held it down. He said, "Don't." Dustin said the same in French first, and then in English, so I didn't open it. I stood there with my hand under Collins and listened. The voice said it had found people on the logging road. It said they had a truck, and it said, "We should come out now, all of us, and follow its voice, and it would walk us out." Then it started over from the beginning, the same words, and the same order. "Guys?" Here's what was wrong with it. Garrett talks in short bits, a number, a swear word, done. "Come on, I found help." This just kept going. It would call for a minute, more than a minute, one long run of words, and there was never a gap where a person takes a breath. "Come on, I found help." And every time it got to, I found help. It said it exactly the same way, with the same lift at the end, like a piece of tape being played over. I said, "Maybe he was hurt. Maybe he'd hit his head, or he was in shock, and that's why he sounded like that." Dustin was sitting on the floor by the fire with the book on his knees, and he said, without looking up from it, that Garrett had left at 130. To be out there now with help, he'd have had to walk 11 kilometers out in the rain, find somebody on a logging road on the long weekend, and walk them 11 kilometers back in the dark, and Garrett had a headlamp. I pulled the curtain back at crack at the window. There wasn't a light anywhere in the trees, sometimes it was far off back in the trees. Then it would be close, right outside the wall by the bunks, and I could hear it through the logs. It called each of us by name. Colin, Dustin, Shane, it said it was cold. It said it couldn't believe we'd leave it out here. Then it got angry, and it said, "Stop messing around. Open the door." Colin sat down on the floor where he was standing with his back against the door. Dustin put his hand up to his neck, where his grandmother's metal usually is. He started saying something under his breath in French. I think it was a prayer. He kept his hand at his neck the whole time. It went on until a bit after two. Then it stopped. We waited, and there was nothing at all for half an hour, maybe more. Just the rain, I'd almost talked to myself into it, being over. At about ten after three we heard it on the porch. Shoes on the boards, slow from one end to the other. When the latch lifted and dropped and lifted again, Colin was sitting right under it with his hands in his lap. He twisted around to look up at it, and then he moved away from the door on his hands, back to where Dustin and I were. The voice spoke right at the door, close enough that it sounded like it was in the room with us. "I know you're in there." After that it stopped, no more calling, no more boots. I didn't find out about the next part until the morning when I played back the night on the camera. At twelve minutes after three, about a minute after it spoke at the door, the attic door at the top of the stairs opened. On the footage it was a black gap behind us at the top of the stair. The three of us were right there in the picture on the floor, looking the other way. At eight minutes to four it closed again, and none of us ever turned around. I told myself old doors swing open on their own, but that door didn't move when Garrett put his weight on it on Friday. It took Colin lifting it by the latch and shoving it with his shoulder to open it at all. The battery ran out a little after four. I sat there in the dark until it got light. Sunday, October 9, day three. At about 720 I put in my last spare battery and opened the curtain an inch. We were outside before eight, calling Garrett's name. I filmed the three of us walking the edge of the clearing. The porch was empty, the clearing was empty. The rain had stopped at some point in the night, and there was nobody. The clearing was soft mud that showed everything. Our own boot prints from Saturday were all over it. Garrett's were there too, one line of them going east from when he left, all the way to the tree line. The voice had come from out past the clearing, then from right outside the wall by the bunks, then from the porch. Dustin walked every bit of it. Under the wall by the bunks, the mud was smooth. On the porch there was nothing but our own dried mud from Friday. Somebody had walked the length of those boards at ten after three in the morning, and there wasn't a mark on them. Dustin said nobody stood there. He was right there, we heard him. He just kept looking at the ground. It's when we decided to leave anyway. The book said if we left before the third night, it took all of us, and we'd heard what we'd heard. None of that mattered as much as getting out of there. We packed everything except what was on the stairs and left at about nine. The first strips were right where Collins said they'd be. Orange tape on a branch, then another maybe a hundred meters on, then another. Dustin walked in front, finding each one, and pointing to the next. For about twenty minutes it worked. Then there wasn't a next one. We spread out and looked for two hours, maybe more, calling to each other so nobody got lost. and we didn't find one strip. In the end, we walked back to the cabin. On the way back, the strips near the cabin were gone, too. The ones we'd followed out that morning. I'd filmed them on the way out, and there was nothing on those branches now. They were on the porch in a pile on the boards in front of the door. I said it was Garrett. He'd untied them on his way out yesterday to Strand Collins to pay him back. In last night, he'd come back and done the voice and they were to scare us. He was out in the bush right now, laughing about it. I still said it was Garrett. It had to be. Then I turned around to Colin, and everything I hadn't said since yesterday came out. That I'd talked everybody into this for him. That I'd sat with him all summer when he wouldn't talk. That Garrett was out there because of him. I was shouting. It took a while to sink in that he couldn't get us out either. That tape was the only thing Colin had that we needed, and somebody had left it on the porch. After lunch, I showed Dustin the attic door on the camera from the night. He watched it all the way through without saying anything. Then he said we should go up there while it was light. Dustin went first and lifted the door like Colin had, and it opened. The attic's too low to stand up in, just bare boards under the roof. There's an old mattress at the far end and a stack of newspapers against the wall so old and faded you can't read them. That's all there is up there. We came down. Dustin shut the door and I took one of the two chairs from the table and wedged it on the stair under the latch with the back jammed up against the door. I don't know what I thought a chair would do. It was getting dark again by six. We sat at the table with the book open in front of Dustin. Then I asked Dustin the only thing I wanted to know. I said, "Does the book actually say we're going to die?" I don't know, but I know enough about this stuff to know we shouldn't have started it. So that was it. No tape, no Garrett, and Garrett had the map and the compass on his zipper. Dustin said if Garrett walking out had counted, then it already had every one of us, and finishing it was the only part of the book we hadn't broken. We decided to finish it. It's about nine. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving. My mom's doing the turkey for five o'clock, so I want to say something to her and then I'm done. Mom. I was trying to help Colin, and I think I made it worse. Tell Dad, I love you both. Dustin says it's time. He's putting the candle down on the floor. Sunday, October 9, the third night. We started at two minutes to ten. We set it up the way the book said. There was one candle standing on the floorboards between the four corners, and everything else was out. Our headlamps were off, and the fire was down to nothing. I had the camera on the dark setting held against my chest. Dustin was in the corner by the fireplace, and Colin was in the corner by the bunks. The last corner was the one at the bottom of the stairs, and that one was empty. That one was for her. You walk along the wall to the next corner, and touch whoever's there on the shoulder, and you stay there. If the corner's empty, you say her name into it, and keep going. Colin started. He said her name and walked along the wall to Dustin's corner, and I heard him tap Dustin's shoulder. Dustin came along the wall to me and touched mine, and I walked onto the stairs. It was empty, so I said her name into it, Alyssa, and kept going. The bunks were empty too, because Colin had left them, so I said her name there as well. When I got to the fireplace, and Colin was there, I touched his shoulder, and he went. That was one round. It broke where it was meant to, at the empty corners, and whoever got to one, said her name into it. The second round was the same, and the third. The only thing anybody said was her name. Dustin's voice shook every time he said it, and Colin's got quieter and quieter. The candle got shorter, it got cold in there, cold enough that I could see my breath in the candlelight, and I could smell the lake. It smelled like the lake in the spring, right after the ice goes out. On the fifth round, I walked to the corner by the stairs. It was going to be empty, and I was going to say her name. There was someone in the corner. My hand was on a shoulder, and it was higher up than my head. It was wet. It was cloth soaked right through. I said, "Guys, I pulled my hand back. The rule was that when you touch somebody, you stay where you are, and they walk on, so I stayed there in her corner. Whatever I touched walked on. I heard it go along the wall, slow, every step wet. Then I heard it touch Colin's shoulder, and Colin made a small sound, and walked on too. The book said, "Keep going, so we kept going." From then on, there was somebody in every corner, every time around. I counted the taps, one, two, three, four, four taps, and there were three of us. Colin knelt over the candle and pinched it out, and it went dark. The only light was the little screen on the camera, and I had it turned into my jacket. We all stood still. That was the last part of it. The light for the arrival. Dustin was praying in French, the same few words, and Colin was breathing hard through his mouth. By the camera's clock, we stood there for a minute. Then something moved upstairs, a floor board. Then it walked, slow, one step, and then a gap, and then another one. The same as Friday night. It went toward the door. I heard the chair on the stair. It's great. The door opened anyway, and the chair fell all the way to the bottom. Colin was crying. He was laughing and crying at the same time. He said, "Oh, my God, it worked." Alyssa? And nothing answered him. It came down the stairs. It was bare feet. I could hear them, and every step sounded wet. I turned to the camera light on. I didn't care what the book said. There was a hand on the rail. It was thin with brown spots on it, like an old person's hand. Then the rest of it came down into the light. Alyssa? I said, "Colin, Colin, what is that thing? That's an old woman." She was too tall for the stairs. She had to bend right over to get under the ceiling, and her back was bent like a hook. The skin on her face was pulled tight, like there wasn't enough of it. Her hair was thin and gray, and stuck flat to her head. Her clothes were old, and they were wet, and over them she was wearing Alyssa's grey hoodie. It was too small for her. The sleeves only came halfway up her arms. Water was dripping off the bottom of it onto the steps. Dustin said, really quietly, "That's not what we called." She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at us, all three of us, one at a time. She looked at us like she knew us. Colin went toward her with his hand out. I told him to get back. She didn't look at him. She looked past him and walked right past him like he wasn't there. He turned around after her, with his hands still out, knocked into the table, and something fell off it. It was the book. I was against the wall, and I couldn't go back any further. She stopped in front of the camera with her face right in front of mine, and she stayed there looking into the lens. She was looking at me. I could hear her breathing. It rattled, and it smelled like the lake. I put the camera down on the floor, and I let her hold me. That's the end of what chain recorded. The camera kept running after he put it down. It was lying on its side on the floor with the light still on, pointed at the bottom step of the stairs. For the first few minutes, there's nothing on it but the step. Then, quiet enough that you need headphones to hear it, there's walking. It's slow, and it goes along the walls, all the way around the room. Nobody comes into the shot. It goes on until the battery runs out. Some of what's on the card we've been able to check. Colin McKinnon bought gas in Thessalon on August 14th, and again on September 24th. On September 23rd, he bought two rolls of orange flagging tape at a hardware store in Sudbury. His family didn't know he'd been up there. Garrett's pickup was never moved from the trailhead. It was still locked when we found it, and the keys have never turned up. Search and rescue reached the cabin on October 19th. There was a religious metal on a chain on one of the stairs, which Dustin's family said, was his grandmothers, and a watch on the floor nearby. One of the chairs was lying on its side at the bottom of the stairs. But on the bottom step there was a grey hoodie, the McKinnon family have identified it as a list of us. We didn't find a book, we didn't find any tape on any of the trees between the cabin and the trail. The dogs picked up Garrett's track, going east from the clearing and lost it about 400 meters into the bush. We haven't found any trace of the other three. We spent two days processing the cabin. On the second afternoon I was downstairs on my own, writing up the porch and the attic door at the top of the stairs opened. There was nobody up there. The Ontario Provincial Police isn't making any claim about what's on that card. What I can tell you is that in the final file, just before the camera goes down, a woman is seen in the cabin with Shane, Colin and Dustin. We don't know who she is. We've released a still from the footage along with this appeal. The ground search was scaled back on November 2nd when the snow came and the case is open. So I'll ask again. If you were anywhere near Highway 129 over the Thanksgiving weekend, we'd like to hear from you. If you know who built that cabin, and if you recognize the woman in the still, please call us. That's the end of our time together tonight. I'm Rex. Thank you for letting me be the voice in your ear while the world sleeps. If you haven't joined the nocturnal crew yet, hit subscribe and turn on notifications to stay locked in. I'm curious to read what you thought about this one. Stay safe and I'll be back before the sun comes up.