The Ghost Town of Bankhead, Alberta

In August of 2025, I took my daughter on a week-long trip to Alberta to see the usual sights, and a few not-so-usual ones. One of those stops was the ghost town of Bankhead, Alberta, just a 20-minute drive up the mountain from our hotel in Banff. Bankhead was a Canadian Pacific Railway coal town built in 1903 at the base of Cascade Mountain. At its peak, nearly 1,000 people lived here, and the town had electricity and sewers before Banff did. Coal from Bankhead fueled CPR locomotives and helped heat the Banff Springs Hotel. It was a modern, well-funded industrial town that looked like it was built to last. It didn’t. By the early 1920s, a combination of difficult mining conditions, brittle anthracite coal that crumbled into dust, and repeated labour strikes pushed the operation to the breaking point. After a major strike in April 1922, the mine was sealed and never reopened. Instead of being left to decay, Bankhead was dismantled. Houses were lifted off their foundations and moved to Banff, Canmore, and Calgary. Even the church was cut in half and hauled away. What remains today is mostly concrete foundations, industrial remnants, and the Lamphouse. Walking the site with historic photos on my phone completely changed how it felt. On its own, it barely looks like a ghost town. With context, it becomes a place that was deliberately erased.