What happened in Kitsault, BC, Canada’s most perfect Ghost Town?

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Jordan I want you to close your eyes for a second and picture a ghost town abandoned for 40 years. What does it look like to you? Is it ramshackle, rundown houses rotting, collapsing, nature taking over? How big is it? I don’t know about you, but for some reason when I picture a ghost town, it’s always a one-street town. A couple of hundred people at best. The kind that’s dotted across the prairies or northern Ontario or other remote places in Canada. What we don’t tend to think of as a ghost town is Kitsault, British Columbia. It’s been empty for 40 years, but it’s not collapsing. It is perfectly preserved, ready for the missing townsfolk to walk through the doors of houses and kick off their shoes. It’s remote, incredibly remote even. But it’s not a one-street town. This is a town with room for more than 1,200 people. It has a mall, it has a bowling alley, it has a public swimming pool, all sitting ready for people to return. But they never have. So what happened in Kitsalt? How did the town remain so perfect for decades after its people left? And if it is so perfectly preserved, why isn’t it being used for anything? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Justin McElroy is the municipal affairs reporter for CBC Vancouver, but his fascination with Kitsault is a personal project. You can read about it on his website. JustinMcElroy.com. Hey Justin.

Justin McElroy Hello Jordan.

Jordan First, for those of us not in BC and not from the area, where is Kitsault?

Justin McElroy So there are a few ways you can answer that question. It’s about 1000 km north of Vancouver. It’s about 18 hours drive there. If you were to do it that way for most people though, you would fly to Terrace Community, about halfway up the province near the coast. Then you would drive about an hour and a half down a normal highway. Then you would go and start driving down a road that isn’t even classified as a logging road. It’s that remote and that poorly maintained. You would go down that for about 2 hours, going sometimes 30 km an hour, sometimes less. And then you would get to the end of an inlet, and at the end of that inlet is Kitsault, which has remained basically the same for the last 40 years.

Jordan Okay, so what is Kitsault?

Justin McElroy Kitsault is essentially a fully preserved ghost town. And when people hear about ghost towns or look at them now, you generally think of, well, a few rotting buildings, some foundations, nature fully taking over things, right? That’s not what happened here. This was a company town created in the early 1980s by a mining company. Now there had been attempts to mine the mountains north of this and left for a century at this point. But this company decided that they were going to go big and build an entire town to try and get young families there and for the long haul from schools to hospitals to a community center. And then after a year and a half, basically, they decided to no longer make a go of it. And they said the mine is shutting down. And after another six months of sort of being suspended for the future, they ordered everyone to leave town and to go back to where they came from. And at that point, you would imagine, well, the town would slowly start to rot. But the company maintained the buildings for the next 15/20 years in case the price of molybdenum ever came back, up to a point where they were like, we’d like to do full-scale operations. It never did. But then they decided to sell the town. And the person who bought it has essentially put hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million dollars each year into maintenance, into heating, into everything that would allow these buildings that are covered in snow four or five months of the year to still be in good condition.

Jordan Right.

Justin McElroy So there it sits, a curiosity, something that you don’t really see anywhere else in Canada, and yet it’s very real.

Jordan I want to get into some of the things you just described in particular, why this town was built so far away from anywhere. You mentioned it was a mining company. Who was it? What were they looking for? And why so far from civilization?

Justin McElroy So today, people know about work camps. It’s when you have sort of a bare-bones operation where people can sleep and eat and maybe do a little bit of socializing in temporary housing in the middle of nowhere, where people go to mine or for oil or for natural gas or any sort of resource that you’re wanting to exploit. Back in the day, though, for most of Canadian history, that wasn’t how we exploited natural resources because it was simply too prohibitive or impossible to fly people in and out every week like they do now for work camps. Instead, what would happen is you would create a company town where there wouldn’t be a mayor and council, but people, virtually everyone in town would either work for the company or for the surrounding sort of ancillary things to keep the town going. And the town would provide the housing and all the amenities necessary. And that’s what happened with Kitsault. It was the American Metals Company. A big conglomerate. And they saw the price of molybdenum back in the 1970s was much higher than it had been in the past, and they thought that would last. And so they bet big on creating this entire operation dedicated to extracting that mineral from the mountains north of Kitsault. They spent $200 million overall, $50 million of which went into the production of creating a town. Five or six apartments, over 100 permanent homes, about another 100 temporary homes, a community center, a gym, a school, a recreation hall, a hospital. It was all there.

Jordan Wow.

Justin McElroy All set up with the intent of lasting for a long time. And it attracted about 1500 people to move to the town in 1980 and by 1982 it was shut down.

Jordan What happened?

Justin McElroy The price crashed. It’s a pretty simple story for most ghost towns, right? Right. Why did people come here to mine the thing, to log the thing, to take the thing out of the ground or the sea? Why did it no longer exist? Because it was no longer profitable to do so. And as soon as it’s no longer profitable to do so, you’re left with people living in the middle of nowhere with no possibilities for a job. So you look at the sort of company newspapers for the 18 months that the town was in operation. One month, the front page headline was the mall has opened. And at the very bottom of the newspaper, there’s a note saying it’s sort of like an extra where the mine is going to suspend operations temporarily for three weeks in September. That temporary shutdown then turned into another temporary shutdown and then they announced it was indefinite. A few hundred people stuck around the town hoping that things would perk back up again. But after six months or so, the company said, we’re no longer maintaining anything here, we’re turning off the power, you have to leave. And that was it for the history of people living there.

Jordan I’ve seen the photos on your blog and we’ll link to that in the show notes so people can take a look at them for themselves because it is pretty eerie, like they’ve kept it in basically like people just left yesterday looking conditions.

Justin McElroy Yeah, it’s an interesting mix because the grass grows wild, the parking lot, you can see weeds cropping up, the moss has overtaken sort of the curbs on the streets. But the houses themselves, they’ve been heated in the wintertime so the massive amounts of snow don’t rot the foundations, the roofs have been redone. Every summer there are about ten people that work in the town to maintain it, to clean it, to make sure that it’s as fully preserved as they could in 1980. You go into the homes, the ovens have been taken away in the microwaves, but otherwise, you could imagine coming in with a moving van that day, putting in your properties, putting in your possessions and suddenly you’re living in a 1981 home and being able to do whatever you want. And it’s one of those things when you enter into the town, it doesn’t feel normal per se, but you don’t sort of recognize the weirdness of it. It’s only when you spend a day or two in there and there’s no one around and there’s no noise and every home is empty, does the eeriness of it really seek in.

Jordan So paying us a picture of the motif of the town, I guess, because what fascinated me about the images is that they are all so much like of a particular era and they’ve been perfectly preserved. I don’t know if you’ve ever played the Fallout series of video games, but very much like that’s, the 1950s that’s suddenly been transported into the 21st, 22nd century and this is like it’s 1982 everywhere.

Justin McElroy Yeah, you could place this in any sort of middle-class town between, with at least five or 10,000 people, an expanding suburb perhaps, and it would fit in the mall is something that people really go, oh my God, this reminds me of my childhood because it is that sort of like brick tiling and low ceiling with the overhead lights that was so common in the area. The houses, it’s lush carpet, that’s burgundy, that’s orange, it’s wallpapers of the time, it’s sort of that golden colour for the appliances. It’s all stuff that was of pretty high quality in the 1980s and you’ll still see it in somewhat abandoned malls today and homes that haven’t been renovated. But it’s very particular of a place and it’s part of the reason why sort of its floor has only grown over time. A ghost town in 1990 that looks like 1980 is sort of interesting, but it holds no sort of like aesthetic appeal or fascination to people. Now, 40 years later, everyone in my comments when I posted this started talking about Stranger Things, right, of course, because of that time in such a distinct way that it couldn’t be anything else other than 1981.

Jordan I understand that you didn’t do this for the CBC. How did you come to visit this town anyway? And can anybody go?

Justin McElroy So I had, over the years, developed a sort of fascination with ghost towns in BC because there are many of them and they’re all products of unique circumstances. BC’s geography is so both vast, but also each place is distinct because we have so many mountain ranges and so many distinct bodies of water that no two small towns are alike and no two ghost towns are exactly alike. And Kitsault was the most famous one and is because of just how perfectly preserved it was. So I had written a couple of stories about it over the years and through that, I learned that there was this one man who organized ghost town tours throughout northwest BC and he had struck an arrangement with the owners of Kitsault and the caretakers every summer, take five or six groups, up of ten to 15 people to get to see the space for themselves. Now, the owner doesn’t want this as a tourist operation full time. He’s had dreams of turning this into a spiritual center, a wellness retreat. Now, his ideas are an LNG, none of that has come through, but he has never fully opened the doors to everyone. It’s just this one guy who used to organize these doors through a university. Now he does so independently. And so I’ve seen this and we all have these things as words coming out in some ways of the pandemic of going, what do you want to do when you can start to travel again? For me, I went, this is such a fascinating place and who knows how long it’s going to last. I would just like to go there. So I booked the tour with a friend of mine who lives closer to the area, stayed in Terrace overnight and took part in the overnight group with twelve random strangers as we all explore this town for a day.

Jordan Tell me about the current owner. You mentioned it briefly. What are his plans for it and what’s come to fruition and what hasn’t? He must have spent a ton of money. You mentioned he’s owned it for what, 15 to 20 years now keeping it up.

Justin McElroy Yes. Krishnan Suthanthiran. I hope I got that right. Bought the town in 2005. He was born in India, moved to Canada as a young man, has been an American resident and lives in America for many decades now. He made his money in health products, essentially. He bought it in, I believe, 2005. And like you said, every year, the amount of money to pay the hydro bills, to heat the places, to have four caretakers or so, twelve months of the year and ten or twelve caretakers during the summertime, you can imagine it’s a pretty significant amount of money. And so it’s this just weird confluence of factors where he wants to preserve the town. He has ideas of what could be done with it, but none of them have come to fruition at this point, from the wellness center to the plans for an LNG board. And so it persists, not really doing anything.

Jordan What could be done with it? And I’m not speaking specifically to the owner’s plans here, but we’re in a kind of a housing crisis in this country, certainly in BC. I realize it’s a million miles from anywhere, but it’s a substantial amount of property and living space that seems ready to go.

Justin McElroy It certainly is. And when I posted this story, the number of comments from people saying, couldn’t we send homeless people here, right, or couldn’t we make this an affordable housing center or do something with it, came up again and again. The reality is it’s very far away from anything, right? You can say, oh, wouldn’t this be nice? You would have to first spend tens of billions of dollars making the road habitable year-round, both to pave it, to get it up to standard, and then to clear it all the time. You know the government isn’t just going to do that goodness of their heart. Then you’re going to have to find people that want to live a three-and-a-half-hour drive from any significant community where you can do more than just basic banking or groceries. That’s not to say that couldn’t happen. It’s just the incentives for someone, a government to purchase it and put that money in is less efficient than putting it into a big city. Right. And I’m sure you could imagine a world where more tourism happens, that more sort of retreats do take place. Is there like a business model where you can get enough people paying enough money to make it work as a for-profit enterprise, given the amount of money that’s required to maintain it? I’m not sure because it is so far away. So it’s one of those things where part of your brain says, well, obviously it could be used for X, Y and Z, but if it was that easy, someone else would have tried that over the last 40 years that it’s been shut down.

Jordan Yeah, it seems like if it wasn’t so far away, it would make the perfect setting for God knows how many Stranger Things imitations.

Justin McElroy So many movies. And also if it was closer to anything too, you could imagine that people would move in and be squatters right, or vandalize it or all sorts of things. It is that distance and remoteness that allows it to be fully preserved. And it is just like I said, it’s such this confluence of unique factors that allows it to be in the condition that it is now.

Jordan It is certainly an amazing thing that I’m so glad that I know exists and I’m glad we were able to talk about it and everybody should go and take a look at some of your photography. Thank you so much for this, Justin.

Justin McElroy Hey, thank you.

Jordan Justin McElroy works for CBC Vancouver, but he wrote about Kitsault just for the thrill of it. That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN, email us [click here!], leave us a voicemail 416-935-5935 and as always, you can get The Big Story wherever you get podcasts, you can ask your smart speaker to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a great weekend. We’ll talk on Monday. Back to top of page