What Canada’s spookiest disappearance reveals about Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Peoples
Throughout its history, Halloween has always been a holiday interested in folk tales and the supernatural. The celebration of what is known today as Halloween is connected to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain when people believed that the boundary between the living and the dead was weaker. Halloween today has little in common with those roots, but through horror movies, true crime podcasts, ghost stories, and costume parties, we’ve kept our fascination with the mysterious and macabre alive.
Though so many people are fascinated with Halloween, not many know the story of Canada’s most tragic—and spooky—modern disappearance. Thirty-four years ago, the Indigenous Jack family of British Columbia vanished without a trace. In the summer of 1989, Ronald and Doreen Jack (both 26 years old) and their two sons Russell and Ryan (nine and four respectively), left their home in Prince George, BC. They intended to move to a logging camp nearby that offered them jobs: Ronald as a woodcutter and Doreen as a cook’s helper.
The family had been living on welfare due to a back injury that Ronald had suffered—the job offer seemed almost too good to be true. The man who called them about the job even promised daycare for their young sons. Because the Jacks didn’t have a car, the man offered to drive them that night to the job site, thought to be about 40 kilometres from Prince George. The family of four was last heard from on August 2, 1989, when Ronald called his mother in the early hours of the morning.
They were last spotted leaving for what was supposed to be a two-week trip, entering the man’s dark-coloured pickup truck. The family was never seen again.
While the Jacks were officially reported missing on August 25, 1989, the only significant tip about their disappearance would come nearly a decade later. On January 28, 1996, an unknown man called the Vanderhoof police with a short but startling message: “The Jack family are buried in the south end of … ranch.”
The voice of the man, which was later analysed by the University of British Columbia, has never officially been identified. The call itself was only a small facet of the investigation. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) engaged in hundreds of interviews and reviewed thousands of documents of evidence. Public interest in the case re-ignited in 2019 when a search for the Jack family, including ground-penetrating radar equipment was used. Still, to this day, no trace of the family has been found.
For the relatives of the Jack family, this case is more than a spooky part of Canadian history. It’s a testament to the lack of care in Canadian institutions for Indigenous peoples. In 2017, Marlene Jack testified about her sister’s disappearance at a hearing that was part of the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
In her testimony, she revealed that the lack of substantial coverage of the unique Jack family case was deliberate. According to Jack, authorities informed her that if she spoke to the media about her sister’s case, police would stop giving her updates on it. Jack, a survivor of abuse at residential schools, is still profoundly affected by her sister’s disappearance.
The lack of coverage surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous peoples is only beginning to be recognised by the general Canadian population. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada advocated for a national public inquiry into the disproportionate victimisation of Indigenous women and girls, which Marlene Jack testified in 2017. Their final report was completed and released to the public in 2019.
The results pointed to a widespread lack of institutional care for missing Indigenous peoples. While the RCMP claimed in a 2014 report that there have been over 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women between 1980 and 2012, Indigenous women’s groups assert that there have been over 4,000.
The mysterious disappearance of the Jack family might be Canada’s spookiest story. But they are one of the few Indigenous families whose tragedy was actually documented. What’s more haunting is the countless more stories like theirs that have been lost to history.
