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Topics: Property, News, World News
Gerrard Kaonga
A peculiar ghost town was has been abandoned for decades and its initial residents lived there for less than two years.
Most people don’t come across ghost towns because... well, most people live where other people live, in well-inhabited communities.
So, there is always something a little bit eerie about completely deserted towns that, at one point, would have been bustling with life.
But one town in the remote area of British Columbia, has been abandoned for decades.
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The town of Kitsault was initially built as a mining town and cost a reported $50 million, only to be abandoned in 18 months.
Back in 1979, the town seemed to pop up out of nowhere in order to mine the sought-after metal called molybdenum.
The town’s website actually details the community's rapid growth and sudden death (not literal).
The town’s website said: “In 1978 the building boom began. There was a modern hospital and a shopping centre, restaurants, banks, a theatre and a post office.
“For entertainment, there was a pub, a pool, a library and two recreation centres with jacuzzis, saunas and a theatre.
“Families settled into the single-family homes and singles moved into the apartments. The Knight & Day restaurant opened up and people started to open up accounts at the Royal Bank.
"The school opened its doors and the kids made giant cardboard cutouts depicting swimmers clad in goggles and fins to be hung from the ceiling of the swimming pool.”
So things all sounded pretty grand, but the town's heyday was incredibly short lived.
The same radical shifts in molybdenum supply and demand that had sent prices soaring were now causing prices to crash. The pressure from the 1982 recession also contributed to the issues.
The town’s website added: “People were out of work, and convoys of moving vans began to work their way in from Terrace. The brand new shiny town where people had just moved in full of hope and excitement was a ghost town and the big gates at the entrance to the town were padlocked.
Yikes, sounds like an awful experience for all involved.
So what happened to the town?
Well it has essentially been locked to the public ever since, and is a time capsule of the rural community.
“Today, the only inhabitants are a caretaker, who looks after cutting the lawns, a family of foxes and the occasional grizzly bear that wanders in to scavenge fallen fruit,” according to the website.
In 2005 the land was put up for sale and bought by a single investor and the new company, Kitsault Resorts Limited.