British Columbia's abandoned settlements range from fully submerged lumber towns to mining camps where the only current residents are grizzly bears. With spooky season approaching, it's a great time to map out a route through the province's strangest history. Here's what's out there.
The most surreal of the lot is Waldo, a former lumber hub in the East Kootenays that now sits entirely beneath Lake Koocanusa. The US government's Libby Dam in Montana, built through the 1960s and '70s, flooded the valley and swallowed the town whole. You can visit the lakeshore near Koocanusa Village, with the town below the waterline.
In the Slocan Valley — nicknamed the Valley of the Ghosts — Sandon was a silver boomtown with a genuine Wild West reputation: saloon brawls, brothels and fortunes made and lost fast. By the late 1950s it was derelict, and only a handful of people live there today. Nearby New Denver and Silverton on Slocan Lake are more alive, with heritage streetscapes and a century-old former Bank of Montreal building. New Denver's orchard stands as a sobering reminder that Japanese Canadians were interned here during WWII.
On southern Vancouver Island, Leechtown traces back to July 1864, when the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition found payable gold on the Leech River and triggered a mini gold rush. These days the draw is the trail network at Kapoor Regional Park, including the popular Galloping Goose Regional Trail. Sticking to the island, Victoria's Fan Tan Alley — once a gambling quarter in one of North America's oldest surviving Chinatowns — is now lined with small shops and galleries, and at under three feet wide at its tightest point claims the title of narrowest commercial street on the continent. Helmcken Alley nearby adds to the atmospheric walk.
If you want a ghost town that actually feels haunted, Kitsault near Terrace is hard to beat. Built during the late-1970s mining boom and abandoned within a few years, it's kept eerily pristine by ongoing lawn care — inhabited by one caretaker, silver foxes and grizzlies. Access is restricted, but Northern BC Jet Boat Tours runs custom tours.
Barkerville on Williams Creek is the family-friendly option: a living history museum with more than 125 original gold-rush buildings, period displays, museums, restaurants and shops. And if you'd rather earn your ghosts, Coal Creek near Fernie is reachable only on foot, with ruins from a coal-mining community of roughly 1,000 residents that existed between 1898 and 1958.
Why bother? These sites compress BC's entire boom-and-bust story — gold, silver, coal, timber — into a handful of road-trippable corners of the province. History buffs get genuine artefacts, hikers get trails with a backdrop, and anyone chasing Halloween vibes gets the real thing. Pair two or three on a Kootenay loop, or Vancouver Island's duo for an easy weekend.
