One of the coolest souvenirs I brought back from a recent Alaskan vacation is a thirty-page booklet called The Strangest Story Ever Told. It came from Parnassus Books & Gifts in Ketchikan. I would assume the book's title is a riff on The Greatest Story Ever Told except that it predates that movie by a decade or so.
The book is the equivalent of "found footage" movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. These purport to be documentaries, hence the use of shaky camera angles and lots of faux-impromptu dialogue. In literature, fiction that tries to pass itself off as real goes by various names, including fake memoirs and predatory journals. I prefer "found text" because it implies that the author is not trying to commit fraud but rather to provide a sense of verisimilitude in the storytelling. Think of the story-within-a-story setup, where a character discovers a manuscript and then turns over the narrative to that manuscript. Edgar Rice Burroughs did this often with his science-fiction and fantasy novels. Even a book like Dracula, obviously a work of fiction (or is it? 😉), uses an epistolary (letter-writing) style to provide realism. (Jonathan Harker, early in the book, talks of needing to send a recipe back home, and what can be more mundane than that?)
The Strangest Story Ever Told, written by Harry D. Colp, plays its cards close to the vest, which is the most appealing aspect of the booklet. It never claims to be a work of fiction or nonfiction, a position it stakes in the Preface and never relinquishes. A note to the readers from Virginia Colp, apparently the author's daughter, says that the manuscript was written in "the early thirties" and then filed away, forgotten, until 1953. A note to the second edition, dated 1966, says that "with the advent of the Alaska Ferry system," more people became interested in this story.
"Story" is a loaded word. It can mean something real or imaginary. I could tell you the story of my recent Alaskan travels and they would be factual. Or I could tell you a story of my recent Alaskan travels and make up a bunch of stuff. Both are still stories, right?
Similarly, the events of this booklet appear perfectly pedestrian — until they aren't.
The unnamed narrator — are we to assume it's Colp himself? I think so — opens with the story of four prospectors, including the author, seeking gold in Alaska in 1900. One man, Charlie, has a hot lead, and the other three agree to stay behind in Wrangell while he explores the area, near Thomas Bay, forebodingly known as "the Bay of Death."
Months later, Charlie returns, exhausted and broken, with a fantastic story, which the manuscript shares in his own words (see the story-within-a-story setup). I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say the tale may involve a group of hairy hominids that have stomped with their large feet into folklore and cryptozoological fame.
Subsequently, the narrator is involved in a series of attempts to return successfully to the Bay of Death, sometimes by financing another party and once by going in person. Each journey provides more instances of strange goings-on. The account ends in 1925, leaving far more questions than answers.
Damn, I like this sort of thing. The writing is pedestrian and uneven, which only adds to the sense of verisimilitude. The fact that the author provides no resolution also adds to the creepy factor. Is the whole thing a product of Colp's imagination, designed to fool the audience? Or a product of his daughter's imagination, using her father's name to add that extra layer of verisimilitude?
Is Colp even a real person? Maybe the entire product is a fabrication, created by an anonymous author to raise a few hackles and sell a few souvenirs without worrying about who deserves the credit.
I did some googling when I came back home that didn't clarify anything. This blog retells the story, seems to take its validity at face value, and provides a wild theory of its own. I found an online copy of The Strangest Story Ever Told on the Bigfoot Encounters website, where Virginia Colp's introduction has been modified to make explicit reference to "hirsute homins [sic]."
Another big part of what makes the story fun and effective is the format. If I stumbled across this in a horror anthology, it would lose a great deal of power. But finding it in what appears to be a privately funded booklet provides an extra layer of "what if" plausibility. The provenance of the piece, if the book itself is to be trusted, dates back to an Exposition Press (New York) first edition (minus a copyright notice, apparently). Later editions—seventy-nine in all— from Pilot Publishing and Lind Publishing, all bearing a 1953 copyright by Virginia Colp, according to the verso page. On the back cover of my edition (otherwise blank) is a notice that it was printed by Commercial Signs & Printing, Juneau, Alaska. I also had the bookseller hand-stamp the back cover (see below).
I guess each reader will have to decide for themselves what's going on here. Minus any corroborating evidence, I say it's a work of fiction, albeit an effective one, made more effective by the circumstances where I found it and the way it is presented.
If you're ever in the Juneau area, stop by and visit Parnassus Books and pick up a copy. You can also visit virtually on Facebook. Tell 'em Sasquatch sent you.
