If Canada’s abandoned buildings could speak, they’d have some incredible – and horrifying – tales to tell. From hospitals that bore witness to the nation’s deadly tuberculosis epidemic, to abandoned mines that give us an insight into gold and silver booms, these abandoned sites are like little puzzle pieces in Canadian history. On top of that, their decay is hauntingly beautiful too.

In the late-1800s, the discovery of coal at Cascade Mountain in Banff National Park led to the establishment of the Bankhead coal mine. A town quickly sprung up, and in its heyday in the early 1900s, it was home to around 1,000 people. In fact, Bankhead was pretty affluent for its time, benefitting from innovations including streetlamps, electricity and a sewage system long before other nearby towns. The Lamphouse Building, pictured, played a crucial role in miners’ safety: at the beginning of each shift miners were given a lamp, and at the end these were returned and counted to check no-one had gone missing.

Following a decade of labour strikes and money troubles, the mine became unprofitable and had to close in 1922. While many of the buildings were moved to Canmore, Banff and Calgary, the town came under protection from the National Parks Act in 1930 and its structures have been preserved. Today, people can visit Bankhead and see its remains, including a welding warehouse (pictured), a power house (which provided the town with electricity), a boiler house (where coal was burned to heat water) and several disused mining rail cars. 

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Located on the outskirts of Kamloops in British Columbia’s Interior region, Tranquille Sanatorium started life as a tuberculosis hospital in 1907. Patients were taken to facilities like this one for a “rest cure”, which involved getting plenty of fresh air and eating a healthy diet, and was the main treatment option until antibiotics were developed in the 1950s. Tuberculosis had an especially devastating toll on First Nations people: around one-third of the entire Inuit community was infected in the 1950s.

With beds for 360 patients, Tranquille Sanatorium was one of the province’s leading treatment hospitals. But after the arrival of anti-tuberculosis drugs in the 1950s, such facilities were no longer needed, so the sanatorium ceased operations in 1958. It served a brief stint as a psychiatric hospital before closing for good in 1983, and since then it's been left to decay. With its boarded-up windows and peeling paintwork, the decrepit sanatorium casts a haunting silhouette against its picturesque surroundings. 

Back in 1831, a group of German missionaries arrived in a remote part of northern Labrador with a plan to evangelise local Inuit communities. They set up Hebron, a settlement which included a church, mission house and several other interconnected buildings. But they also brought European diseases, which the indigenous people had not been exposed to or vaccinated against, and many of them were tragically killed.

For around 130 years, there were an estimated 200-250 Inuit people living at Hebron Mission. Yet in 1959, a combination of factors including tuberculosis and poor living conditions led the settlement to be officially closed, forcing First Nations people to be uprooted. Hebron Mission soon fell into a state of disrepair. Since 2009, there has been a monument at the site bearing an official apology from the provincial government, as well as an adjacent plaque bearing the Inuit community’s acceptance of that apology. 

Found on the slopes of Tagish Lake in the southern Yukon, the remains of the former Venus Silver Mine serve as a reminder of the region’s history as a hot spot for the precious metal. In the early 1900s, silver was mined higher up the mountain, before being transported down to a mill on the lake’s shore.

After peaking between 1905 and 1906, its heyday was short-lived, and the mine closed in 1915. Since then, its fate has been left to the elements – and human beings. In October 2020, a local citizen alerted the government that they had spotted a man stealing historic artefacts from the site. Fortunately, police were able to track down the man and recover the items, returning them to the hauntingly beautiful spot. 

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Most associate Whistler with world-class skiing, but tucked away in the forests nearby there’s an eerie abandoned logging town. Named Parkhurst after the family that built it, the town was once a successful logging outpost which was home to around 70 workers at its peak.

Yet after the logging industry fell into decline in the mid-20th century, the town followed suit, and was completely abandoned in 1966. Today, just a few graffiti-sprawled buildings like this one remain, though they alone are more than enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine.

The history of Trinity Loop is multifaceted. It started life as a stretch of the Newfoundland Railway, built between 1910 and 1911. But, decades later in 1984, it was closed down and was then bought by a businessman who turned it into a theme park, known as Trinity Train Loop Amusement Park.

Since shutting in 2004, the trainline-turned-amusement park has turned into another kind of attraction: a ghost town. There’s plenty here to spook visitors, from deteriorating railway carriages (like these) and broken tracks to faded murals – there are even the remains of a mini-golf course. 

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What could be spookier than an abandoned prison? Burwash Correctional Center, located in a remote part of southern Ontario, has certainly borne witness to some horrors in its time. The prison opened its doors in 1914 and had capacity for around 1,000 inmates, who were mostly serving short-term sentences for low-level crimes. As well as the prison itself, there was a church, post office and farm on which vegetables for inmates’ meals were grown.

It was shut down in 1975 after the provincial government deemed it too costly to run. Now it’s been left to decay and become overrun by nature. Thick moss carpets the walls, large chunks of plaster have crumbled away from walls and ceilings, and rotted wooden beams poke out from the floor.

Its hallways look especially chilling in this atmospheric shot, where light leaks through cell doors and illuminates pools of water on the floor. Today the former prison remains private property, though it occasionally attracts urban explorers.

Just on the cusp of the US/Canada border, Boblo Island Amusement Park was a day out for Ontario and Michigan residents alike. The former theme park located on Bois Blanc Island (nicknamed “Boblo Island”) opened in 1898 and visitors arrived on ferries from Detroit and Gibraltar in Michigan, and Amherstburg, Ontario. Its prime attractions included the second-largest dancehall in the world, a Ferris wheel, zoo and carousel, as well as several roller coasters. Pictured here is the Old Theater Building.

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Despite being a popular family destination for decades, the amusement park failed to keep up with the times. In 1993, it was forced to close and its rides were moved to other amusement parks around the country. Nowadays, all that's left is a smattering of eerie, crumbling structures with smashed windows, including the especially chilling Old Theater Building.

This photograph was captured inside the Space Needle, the park’s tallest ride, which once offered views across Boblo Island and Amherstburg, Ontario.

The history of Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is one of ecological disaster. Gold was first discovered in the Yellowknife area, which was home to the Dene First Nation community, in 1896, but it was considered inaccessible at first. However, the advent of bush planes in the 1930s opened up the region to prospectors and the Giant Mine began operations in the 1940s, after the end of the Second World War. What ensued was one of the longest continuing gold mining operations in Canada’s history – but also one of the most deadly.

Up until 1958, Giant Mine was pumping out arsenic into the environment unchecked – around 237,000 tonnes of toxic arsenic dust has been produced by the mine in its history. The pollution devastated the local Yellowknives Dene community, impacting fish and animal populations on which they rely, and leaving traces of arsenic in the land within nine miles (15km) of the site. Since the mine was abandoned in 2005, it has cast a menacing shadow over the surrounding area. 

Opening its doors in 1904, the Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, British Columbia was seen as a progressive institution for treating mental illness in the early 20th century. By 1956, there were more than 4,300 patients being treated there. 

Yet patient numbers began to decline in the 1960s, in part due to the arrival of new “antipsychotic” medicines as well as new facilities opening in regional hospitals. Abandoned since 2010, the site is now a magnet for urban explorers, as well as a popular movie and TV filming location – it’s appeared in The X Files, Supernatural, Saw, Watchmen and Smallville to name a few. 

It’s also faced its fair share of controversy. The hospital and local government were criticised in recent years for the use of controversial electroshock therapy, while a group of former patients have alleged they were illegally sterilised between 1940 and 1968.

Named after Peter McNab, who arrived on the island with his family in the 1780s (it had previously been occupied by the Mi’kmaq indigenous people), McNabs Island is a 980-acre chunk of land off the coast of Halifax. There were a number of structures built here: military forts, homes, a lighthouse and even a Victorian garden, bearing witness to around 150 years of occupation. Pictured here is a Small Arms Store, likely used for defence.

Fort Ives was built on the northern part of the island, beginning in the 1860s, and it was used as a barracks for soldiers during the Second World War. Since then, the island has been left mostly abandoned, and the only way to reach it is by a small, local ferry from Fisherman’s Cove.

The history of Silver City begins in the early 1900s. At that time, there was a short-lived gold rush which brought prospectors to the region around Kluane Lake, in the southwestern reaches of the Yukon. Wooden buildings including houses, a police barracks, a roadhouse and farming pens such as this one quickly sprang up.

Today, these eerie structures remain, despite the fact that prospectors are long gone. Many of them have fallen victim to Mother Nature, with wildflowers blooming between tumble-down walls and rooftops in the former silver-rush town. Pictured are the remains of Jack Hayden’s Homestead. 

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