Hey Thoughty2 here.
If you're travelling in the vast wilderness of British Columbia, along the wild Alaskan
border, you'll come across a gigantic and most impressive fjord, in the middle of nowhere.
At the very tip of that fjord you'll find a seemingly beautiful, quaint little town
called Kitsault.
Hundreds of miles from anywhere, you look over at the remote town, nestled within beautiful
surrounds and you observe that all the lights are on, windows emit a warm glow of life.
There must be people home, this seems like quite a lively community, you would think.
But as you walk closer you come across a large, locked gate and a sign warning off trespassers.
You start to realise that not all is as seems and there is in fact something odd and rather
eerie about this estranged settlement.
It's completely empty.
Kitsault is a ghost town, its hundreds of homes, shopping mall, sports hall and shops
are all completely deserted.
Yet the lights are still on, power still runs to the town, homes are lit and tables are
set just as if the entire town upped and left at a moments notice.
Because that is exactly what happened.
Kitsault was built in 1979 to house the families that worked at the nearby Molybdenum mine.
Molybdenum is a metal that was in very high demand by manufacturing industries and Kitsault
was a promising new start for many people, offering a well-paid job at the nearby mine
and a beautiful new community, built at a cost of $43 million, to live amongst.
Kitsault was home to 1,200 residents and offered a hospital, sports centre, shopping mall,
restaurants, theatre, grocery store, library and of course local pub.
Life was perfect, until one day, just 18 months after the town had been built, the price of
Molybdenum crashed and the mine was shut down, depriving over a thousand people of a job.
With no reason left to continue to support the town financially the owners of Kitsault
evicted everyone.
Pretty much overnight the entire town's residents were forced to leave their lives behind and
move, never to return.
But many residents left lights on at home and in public buildings and the power to the
town was never turned off.
The owner also paid for the entire town to be cleaned and maintained every year to maintain
its appeal to potential buyers.
So for over 30 years Kitsault has stood, frozen in time, life looks the very same as the day
it was evacuated, electricity and all.
There's just one thing missing, the people.
But the owner's plan worked, because in 2004, the entire town was sold to an Indian-American
businessman for $5.7 million.
He initially claimed he was going to refurbish the entire town and turn it into a paradise
community for highly intellectual individuals, where they could collaborate on inventive
knew projects and push the boundaries of science, amongst the stunning scenery.
The entire town would be refurbished out of his own pocket and he wouldn't seek to make
any profit from it.
But unfortunately that turned out to be a complete lie, it was recently announced that
Kitsault is being turned into a Liquified Natural Gas plant to export highly valuable
and profitable natural gas.
The whole intellectual retreat thing was a big cover story.
So what's the lesson here?
If a stranger approaches you offering to buy your abandoned mining town you best be sure
of their intentions first.
If you are passing through Bogota in Columbia and dare to venture 20 miles south into the
unforgiving wilderness near the spectacular Tequendama Falls, you will see an old, imposing
building precariously perched on a cliff edge.
Welcome to Hotel Del Salto, built in 1923 by an architect, its goal was to attract wealthy
tourists.
But pollution from the Bogota River took hold and began to quickly eat away and erode the
foundations of the building, it was quickly deemed too unsafe to continue hosting guests
and in the early 90s it was completely abandoned.
It has sat there rotting ever since.
But this old ruin has a twisted agenda.
During its operational days as a world-class hotel for the upper echelon of society, the
hotel was the location of many freak suicides.
There is a local legend that the indigenous peoples used to jump from Tequendama Falls
to avoid being captured by the Spanish Conquerors.
According to the legend the natives would transform into an eagle halfway down the waterfall
and fly away to safety.
Hotel guests must have taken this legend a little too seriously because throughout the
years many such guests have thrown themselves off the cliffs and off the hotel's balconies.
Sadly for them, they didn't turn into eagles.
The hotel was also reported to be haunted by several tabloid newspapers but it's hardly
surprising, I mean look at the place.
This melancholy story has a somewhat happy ending though.
In 2011 the National University of Columbia restored the building to its former glory
and made it into a museum for the public called Tequendama Falls Museum of Biodiversity and
Culture, celebrating the national heritage and environment of Columbia.
A mine closing down and haunted hotels is one thing but what could cause an entire town
of 1,500 people in India to disappear in the middle of the night?
Deep within the Great Indian Desert lies a once thriving community called Kuldhara.
This medium-sized village has driven historians and the Indian community crazy for over 200
years, because these mysterious ruins hold a dark secret that so far, nobody has been
able to explain.
Kuldhara was first settled in the 13th century by the pioneering Paliwal people from the
nearby city of Pali.
The population grew and by the 19th century there were over 1,500 residents in Kuldhara,
mostly farmers, bankers and agricultural traders.
The Paliwal people were known for being business-minded and the village was prosperous.
Until one fateful night in 1825 the village was suddenly deserted.
In the middle of the night the entirety of the settlement's residents abandoned their
homes and disappeared into the darkness.
Sure, many settlements have been abandoned throughout history due to plagues, famine,
drought and natural disasters but most are abandoned slowly over time.
What's so eerie about Kuldhara is that every single resident left all together at the same
time, and furthermore, in the dead of the night, as if they were hiding from someone
or something.
To add more fuel to this bizarre fire, there were no reports of 1,500+ people looking for
refuge in nearby towns and cities the following day, or the following week or the following
month for that matter.
Nobody actually saw them leave the village and nobody has found any trace of where they
went.
They simply disappeared, never to be seen again.
To this day nobody knows what happened that night at Kuldhara to cause the disappearance.
But local legends claim that before they left the Paliwals imposed a curse on the village
that anyone who stepped foot in it would experience paranormal activity and death, so that nobody
could ever re-occupy it again.
And thus the village has gained a reputation in Rajasthan for being haunted.
In 2010 Gaurav Tiwari, a paranormal investigator from the Indian Paranormal Society along with
his team of 12 other people spent a night in the abandoned village.
They claimed to have heard creepy voices and screams and seen talking spirits.
Incidentally Tiwari died under mysterious circumstances at his home only a few years
after visiting Kuldhara.
Some have said this village was deserted in the dead of night due to some evil paranormal
force whilst some historians claim a powerful local tyrant called Salim Singh fell in love
with the daughter of the village's chief.
Singh gave the villagers a deadline of two days for the chief's daughter to marry him
or he would massively raise taxes on the village's residents that would economically cripple
to community.
And so they fled in the middle of the night out of fear and to avoid further persecution
by the unforgiving Singh.
There are many such theories but none have been proven.