10 Most Dangerous Ghost Towns in Canada.. (Never Come Here)

On a tiny island in Lake Superior — 540 square feet of rock — engineers once ran the richest silver mine on the planet. Then in the winter of 1884 a coal shipment didn't arrive, the pumps stopped, and the lake came in through the shafts. Today people sleep in cottages directly over those flooded workings. That's not even the worst place on this list. In this video, we explore: → A company town tucked 4 kilometers from Banff that four million annual tourists walk right past, with unmarked coal mine shafts hidden in some of the densest grizzly territory in Canada → Val-Jalbert in Quebec, where a pulp mill town was locked and left in 1927 and just stayed there for nearly a hundred Quebec winters — the heritage perimeter is safe, the mill ruins past it are full of early-1900s asbestos and waterfall-undercut foundations → Sandon, BC, the "Monte Carlo of North America" with 23 hotels and 28 saloons in 1898, finished off by two catastrophic floods, a fire, and a valley geology that hasn't changed since the last flood swept through in 1955 → A northern Ontario town of 989 people still living next to arsenic-laden tailings from over 100 silver mines that operated a century ago — confirmed by peer-reviewed studies in 2019 and 2025 to still be poisoning local lake ecosystems → A fully modern 1980s company town in northern BC with a shopping mall and rec center, where lawns are still mowed and lightbulbs still get changed, but no utilities run and no emergency response exists for hours in any direction → Anyox on the BC coast — 25 years of continuous copper smelting in a contained inlet, no environmental controls, no road in, never formally remediated, soil specifically loaded with arsenic trioxide, lead, and cadmium → Clinton Creek in the Yukon, a town built for one purpose — pulling chrysotile asbestos out of the ground — sitting on the only road to another ghost town, with no warning signs and exposure consequences that don't show up for 20 to 50 years → Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan, where 5,000 people were airlifted out in a single 1982 evacuation and 73 residents now live among waste rock piles totaling 2.7 million cubic meters, with radioactive decay products that persist for thousands of years → Cobalt, Ontario, where lakes near the town carry arsenic levels substantially elevated compared to water upstream — and children have played near those tailings piles for generations because the contamination looks like ordinary small-town Ontario → A flooded silver mine extending 1,250 feet beneath one of the largest freshwater lakes on earth, with untapped silver veins still down there and a cottage community built on the artificial island above And at number one: a 25-square-kilometer mine complex in the Yukon holding 70 million tonnes of tailings and 320 million tonnes of waste rock — the company walked away, went bankrupt, and the federal government has been running a care-and-maintenance program for over 25 years with no projected end date, no endpoint, and a cleanup bill that has already crossed a billion dollars and keeps climbing. Subscribe for more of Canada's hidden and hazardous history. #GhostCanada #GhostTowns #CanadianHistory #AbandonedCanada #HiddenCanada #DangerousPlaces #ForgottenPlaces #AbandonedMines #ToxicTowns #CanadianMining