An Alberta-based film company wants to dig up the body of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, and solve one of the greatest mysteries of the North.

Johnson was buried in Aklavik, N.W.T. in 1932 after dying in a shoot-out with police, following a five-week manhunt through the rugged Richardson Mountains in the dead of an Arctic winter.

Fifteen years ago, Yukon author Dick North proposed exhuming the body to determine Johnson's true identity, but the community ruled against it.

Now, Myth Merchant Films has raised the issue again for a documentary it is making about Johnson. The film is currently in development.

Using DNA samples taken from the corpse, the company wants to confirm the tenacious trapper's identity once and for all.

But Aklavik elder Annie Gordon, who has lived in the Mackenzie Delta community all her life, is against the idea, saying it's bad luck to disturb the dead and Johnson should be left to rest in peace.

Residents have mixed feelings

Besides, she doesn't think Johnson's body is the only one located in the area where the gravemarker is, she told CBC News Tuesday.

"It's not only Albert Johnson there," Gordon said. "I don't know how many of them are all in that area."

However, resident Colin Gordon said he'd like to know who the mystery man was.

"After I read of the tracking of the Mad Trapper, that one Dick North wrote, that got me curious," Gordon said. (The book is called The Mad Trapper of Rat River: A True Story of Canada's Biggest Manhunt ).

"But elders say, 'let him rest in peace, leave him alone, don't bother him anymore.'"

There have been other books, plays and films made through the years about the trapper.