{"id":56,"slug":"charleys-village-alaska","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Charley's Village took its name from Chief Charley, leader of a band of Hän Gwich'in Athabaskans whose winter village stood near the mouth of the Kandik River on the Yukon, in what is now Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. He enters the written record in the 1871–76 journals of Anglican missionaries Robert and Kenneth McDonald; in 1879 trader Jack McQuesten passed through and declined Charley's offer to host a trading post; the next summer explorer Ivan Petrov counted forty-eight inhabitants, and in 1883 Lt. Frederick Schwatka described five or six small pole houses holding about fifty people.","The village emptied and refilled with the gold rushes — the band left for the Fortymile country in the late 1880s, and Judge James Wickersham found it reoccupied in February 1901. The 1910 census counted twenty-five; Hudson Stuck counted a dozen, then seven. In the spring breakup of 1914, a Yukon flood swept the village away entirely."]},{"heading":"Relocated by archaeologists","paragraphs":["The site's later history is a study in how a documented place can still be lost. Historical accounts disagreed on its exact location, and the early river maps did not record Native villages; a 1974 survey for the proposed preserve failed to find it. It took until 1992 for NPS archaeologists, working from Melody Webb's oral-history-based identification, to confirm artifacts eroding from a cutbank near the Kandik mouth as the village's remains.","The river has not finished with it — a 2010 condition assessment after the 2009 flood found the site actively eroding, and the NPS allows that very little may remain to study. The file records a village twice-lost: once to the flood of 1914, and once to the maps, until archaeology and the Hän record — Mishler and Simeone's Han; People of the River — put it back on the page."]}],"name":"Charley’s Village","aliases":[],"type":"FORMER_VILLAGE","type_label":"Former Village","cats":["ABANDONED_SETTLEMENT"],"groups":["ghost-towns"],"desc":"Former Hän Gwich’in village near the Kandik River mouth.","full_desc":"Charley’s Village is a former village in Eagle, Alaska. Former Hän Gwich’in village near the Kandik River mouth. HauntHunt files it with abandoned settlements. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Eagle","county":null,"state":"Alaska","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":64.781271,"lon":-141.197781,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":1914,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass; historical, geographic, and access enrichment remain queued. Confidence describes source provenance, not supernatural reality.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":49.3,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.35,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"The Yukon River settlement was documented in the nineteenth century, reoccupied around 1900, and destroyed by a 1914 flood. Archaeologists identified remains in 1992. Charley’s Village's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer beneath whatever lore attaches. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Charley’s Village History'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Charley’s Village History","url":"https://www.nps.gov/yuch/learn/historyculture/charleys-village-history.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Charley’s Village History","url":"https://www.nps.gov/yuch/learn/historyculture/charleys-village-history.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}