There is no longer any food in the supermarket. But the shelves are still on the walls, and the shopping carts at the entrance can be used again immediately. But they won’t, because the Canadian Kitsault has not been shopping for almost 40 years. Or lived. The city in the west of the country is a ghost town.
It is not uncommon in human history that people have left their homes again and again. But the scary thing about Kitsault is the unbelievable everydayness that this place still exudes – decades after the residents moved out. There are armchairs in carpeted living rooms, the beds in the bedrooms are properly made, books are neatly lined up on the library shelves, even the lawn in front of the houses is freshly mowed. Nothing falls into disrepair here, the city seems to be waiting for its residents.
The secret behind the ghost town of Kitsault
The secret of the mysterious ghost town is molybdenum, a metal that is used to harden steel, in the manufacture of electrical components or as a lubricant. Molybdenum occurs there in the region – but even in the past century it was not very attractive for miners to live in makeshift accommodation to mine it. The Amax Canada company had a brilliant idea: They had an entire small town reached for the miners. Houses, schools, a supermarket. When the mine reopened in 1979, workers came to town. With their families. Up to 2000 residents found a home on the Alaska border.
But it didn’t go as the company had wanted. The price of the special metal fell, the mine was closed. And the residents left the village. But Amax Canada did not leave the city to the wild, but employed a guard who tends the lawn and makes sure that it is in order.
Kitsault’s future is uncertain
In 2005, the US company Krishnan Suthanthiran bought the city, which they own to this day. For a fee, the city can be visited accompanied by the guard who still works there. How it will go with Kitsault is uncertain. Until there is a future for the mining town, Kitsault will likely continue to look like a journey back in time to the early 1980s.
There are more pictures of the city in our photo gallery or at flickr.com.