Ghost Town
Nanaimo is thriving. Nanaimo is dead.
It's an old city (for BC), and no amount of teal-coloured paint will conceal the rot at our wharfs. Nanaimo has a Pacific Northwest Gothic thing — you know, that thing with tugboats and ravens and a cloudy sky. It's palpable as you walk downtown, or explore the beaches and forests.
Another reason to call it a "ghost town" is because we're no longer digging millions of tons of high-grade coal out of the ground. There were ridiculous amounts of money moving around in those days, and the streets of Nanaimo were packed by a much denser population. It must have been very cool, to be in a city like Nanaimo in the days before television and cars.
The expansion of the city northward, with big-box stores and huge malls every few blocks along the highway, has drained the old, interesting part of Nanaimo of its crowds. Many people never even come Downtown. We're hoping to change that.
Ghosts in Nanaimo?
Nanaimo is also a ghost town on account of its...ghosts. Whether or not you believe in the paranormal, you must be sensitive to the massive historic legacy everywhere you look: dilapidated buildings, old bottles poking out of colourful dirt, shorelines piled with shell middens of the first peoples. Strolling around Newcastle Island in particular, the imagination is aware of human activity spanning a thousand years and more; the island was a longtime home for large villages of native peoples, then was crawling with Europeans and Chinese and Japanese between the 1850's and 1940's.
Many people are certain that there are real ghosts here. Hundreds of miners died underground in various explosions and accidents, fueling decades of labour disputes, and some people think their ghosts keep Nanaimo cursed.
This was also a great meeting place for aboriginal nations, and the site of battles and massacres. At least three Chinatowns have burned to the ground here, too, and our visitor information centre, Beban House, is nationally recognized as a haunted site.
- Nanaimo Haunted Places on our forum