Kitsault: Canada’s most peculiar ghost town
The uncanny valley is a concept first hypothesised in the world of robotics about the limits of what we, as human beings, can relate to. Put simply, we can connect to something clearly inhuman, and we can relate to something clearly human, but there’s a bell curve in between, a valley if you will, where something is just human enough to recognise but not human enough to connect with emotionally. The sense of disgust you feel, like something inhuman is trying to pass itself off as human, is called the uncanny valley, and right in the middle of an uncanny valley, surrounded on all sides by unscalable cliffs, should lie fabled ghost towns.
After all, on the surface, they are the least threatening thing of all: a living space. The darkness comes in when you realise that they lack the thing that makes it relatable. Humans themselves. Have you ever been to a school after dark when no one else is around? Think that feeling, but everywhere.
Yet, tourism to ghost towns is a thriving trade, and right there, deep in northern British Columbia, it is one of the most intriguing of all of them. Whereas most ghost towns are relics, sometimes centuries old, Kitsault was abandoned in 1983, and it’s still almost perfectly preserved from then to the extent that all the buildings there still have power.
Plans for the town were conceived in 1979. Several companies had been mining the surrounding area for decades, but the American mining company Phelps Dodge were the first to discover valuable veins of molybdenum there. Seeking to strike while the iron was hot, Phelps Dodge immediately started building a town to house the staff of the newly proposed mines in the area.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, $50million had been spent to make a thriving town. Seven apartment buildings, 200 residences, restaurants, banks, shopping centres, and even a movie theatre were in place. In 1982, disaster struck, and they lost the one thing that kept the town active: demand for their molybdenum. The market crashed, and the families that had snapped up apartments and jobs in the area mere months earlier had to move on, leaving Phelps Dodge in charge of, essentially, a life-size game of Sim City.
For two decades, all the company could do was quite literally keep the lights on while they tried to find a buyer. They finally found one in 2004, striking a deal with healthcare supplies magnate Krishnan Suthanthiran for $5.7m. He immediately renamed the town Chandra Krishnan Kitsault in a tribute to his deceased mother and set about trying to fix it up. He hired over a dozen caretakers to maintain the town on a day-to-day level and began pitching ideas to rejuvenate the area.
20 years and as many millions of dollars later, nothing has stuck. The town has remained a surreal monument to the early 1980s, frozen in time. Even more so because Suthanthiran has established a strict perimeter around the town, so those looking to explore on their own terms are out of luck. There is still the occasional tour, though, so if you do want to see the town up close and don’t mind paying for it, the possibility is there.
