A ghost town nestled in rural Canada is only accessible by air or water, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming a haven for dark tourism.
Anyox, on the edge of British Columbia, was once a bustling mining town with around 3,000 residents at the peak of its trade in the 1910s.
Largely cut off from civilisation even then, the cluster of shops and facilities, including a hospital, were served by ocean steamers – with no road or rail links to the rest of the province.
Surrounded by green hillsides, the town was particularly vulnerable to forest fires – and while it was nearly wiped out by a series of blazes in 1923, surviving townspeople built it up again and trading continued.
Once Anyox’s economic activity began to decline, the motivation to rebuild and persevere took a downturn too. The Great Depression weakened the demand for copper, which locals mined in rich lodes from the nearby mountains, and they were left with great piles of stock that they were unable to sell.
After the mine closed in 1935, the last few people moved to more densely populated areas, and a further series of forest fires in the 1940s has left the town in a derelict and half-collapsed state ever since.
The appeal of secluded and abandoned hamlets is a peculiar quirk of humanity – driven by a curiosity to tread near-uncharted ground and access a unique vantage point into the past.
Explorers such as Dave Conlon, who features abandoned locations around the world on his YouTube channel Freaktography, is one such so-called dark tourist who documented his journey to Anyox in July.
He charts his exploration of a dilapidated power plant, a spookily quiet general store and the town’s graveyard – also finding remnants of the past including rusted car parts and bedframes scattered about the woodland.
Adding even more to the eeriness of the abandoned town, most of its graves are unmarked and Dave suggested that: “Many of the deaths in Anyox were stillborn babies and infants, largely due to the toxic emissions from the smelter and cyanide waste.”
The sweeping casualties brought by the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 also contribute to Anyox’s sense of mystery and stasis, with its translated indigenous name, meaning “hidden waters”, only adding to the effect.
