Things to find in Canada
26 legends, 8 gem & mineral ground, 6 haunted places, 4 caves, 1 fossil ground on the free Club 49 adventure map
What the map holds here
- Angikuni Lake Legend
The story says a trapper named Joe Labelle walked into an Inuit village on this lake in 1930 and found it empty, shirts still on needles, food over the fire pits, seven dead sled dogs and a grave disturbed. Emmett E. Kelleher...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Bancroft, the mineral capital of Canada Gem & mineral ground
Bancroft calls itself the Mineral Capital of Canada and earns it: the pegmatites and marble of the region hold more than 1,600 mineral occurrences, blue sodalite, green amazonite, red garnet, apatite, and the town throws the...
Open it on the map - Bay of Fundy amethyst Gem & mineral ground
The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth, up to sixteen metres, and twice a day they scour the basalt cliffs of the Nova Scotia shore and drop amethyst, agate and zeolite crystals onto the beaches. The shore around...
Open it on the map - Bonanza Creek and the Klondike Legend
On 16 August 1896 Keish (Skookum Jim Mason), Kaágoo (Dawson Charlie) and George Carmack found coarse gold on Rabbit Creek, renamed Bonanza, and within two years a hundred thousand people had set out for the Yukon. Most never...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Bonanza Creek, the Klondike Gem & mineral ground
The richest placer creek in the history of the world. When George Carmack and his party struck gold on Bonanza (then Rabbit) Creek in August 1896, they set off the Klondike stampede, and the Klondike gold was so concentrated that...
Open it on the map - British Columbia jade Gem & mineral ground
Canada is the largest producer of nephrite jade on Earth, and nearly all of it comes from British Columbia, from the mountains around Dease Lake, Cassiar and the Fraser, where boulders of deep-green jade the size of cars are...
Open it on the map - Château Frontenac Haunted place
The great copper-roofed castle-hotel on the cliff above the St. Lawrence at Quebec City, the most photographed hotel in the world, and haunted, they say, by the Comte de Frontenac himself and by a “Lady in White,” a bride who...
Open it on the map - Cobalt, the silver in the streets Gem & mineral ground
The silver of Cobalt was so rich when the railway cut through in 1903 that men picked native silver, wire and sheet and slabs of it, right off the rock; a nugget the size of a stove lid was pried from a lake bed. The great Cobalt...
Open it on the map - Fort Henry Haunted place
The great stone fort above Kingston, built after the War of 1812 to guard the Rideau canal and the naval yard, and used later as a prison camp. Restored as a living-history site with its garrison in red coats, it is also one of...
Open it on the map - Franklin’s lost expedition Legend
Sir John Franklin sailed in 1845 with 129 men to force the Northwest Passage and every one of them died. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were beset in the ice off King William Island; the crews abandoned ship and walked, and the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Giant Mine and the arsenic under Yellowknife Legend
Giant Mine produced more than seven million ounces of gold beside Yellowknife between 1948 and 2004, and roasting the arsenopyrite ore to get it out left 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust stored in chambers underground. It...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Horne Lake Caves Cave
A set of limestone caves on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in old-growth forest, ranging from two you can explore on your own with a headlamp to guided trips deep into crystal-lined passages and down to an underground...
Open it on the map - La Chasse-galerie Legend
The flying canoe. In the classic Quebec telling, lumberjacks stuck in a winter camp far from home make a pact with the devil so their canoe will fly them back for New Year, on conditions: do not speak God’s name, do not touch a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Oak Island and the Money Pit Legend
The most famous treasure hunt on Earth. Since 1795, when three boys found a saucer-shaped depression under an old oak on this little island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, people have dug for whatever lies at the bottom of the “Money...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake Legend
The most famous lake monster in Canada lives, they say, in the deep, cold, 84-mile trench of Okanagan Lake in the British Columbia interior. The Syilx (Okanagan) people knew it as N’ha-a-itk, a spirit of the lake to be respected...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Sasquatch, the wild man of the woods Legend
The Pacific Northwest’s giant has its heartland in the wet, immense coastal forests of British Columbia, and the name we use, Sasquatch, is an anglicization of a Halkomelem word, sásq’ets. The Sts’ailes people and many other...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Shanawdithit and the Beothuk Legend
The Beothuk were the people of Newfoundland, and they are gone. Squeezed off the coast and away from their food by European settlement, hunted, and hollowed out by tuberculosis, their numbers collapsed through the 1700s....
Open it on the map · Read the story - Signal Hill and the first transatlantic signal Legend
On 12 December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi, flying a kite antenna 150 metres up in a gale on this headland over St John’s, said he heard three faint clicks through the static: the letter S in Morse, sent 3,400 kilometres from...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Slumach’s lost creek gold Legend
British Columbia’s great lost mine. Slumach, a Katzie man, was hanged in New Westminster in 1891 for murder, and in the decades after his death a story grew that he had been bringing coarse gold out of a hidden creek somewhere...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Bonnechere Caves Cave
Limestone caves in the Ottawa Valley near Eganville, cut by an ancient tropical sea and full of fossils, open for tours since 1955. You walk the passages the water bored through the old seabed, with the shells of...
Open it on the map - The Burgess Shale Fossil ground
Cambrian, ~508 mya
Open it on the map - The Cariboo & Fraser gold Gem & mineral ground
British Columbia was built on two gold rushes. The Fraser Canyon rush of 1858 brought thirty thousand miners north; the Cariboo rush that followed reached the fabulously rich creeks around Barkerville, where the gravel of...
Open it on the map - The Cobalt silver rush Legend
In 1903 men working on the new railway through northern Ontario noticed metal in the rock cut. It turned out to be some of the richest silver ground ever found: veins of native silver you could cut with a knife, sheets of it, and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Cremation of Sam McGee Legend
The Yukon’s folklore was written in verse. Robert Service, the “Bard of the Yukon,” worked in Whitehorse and Dawson in the gold-rush years and turned the country into ballads that every Canadian schoolchild still learns: The...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Cypress Hills massacre Legend
In June 1873 a party of American wolf hunters, having lost horses and having been drinking, attacked a camp of Nakoda people in the Cypress Hills and killed something over twenty of them, mostly as they fled. It was violence of a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Dungarvon Whooper Legend
New Brunswick’s best-known ghost. The story from the Miramichi lumber camps is that a young cook on the Dungarvon River was murdered for the money in his belt, buried in the snow by the crew, and that ever since a scream comes...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Falcon Lake incident Legend
Canada’s most physically documented UFO case. On 20 May 1967 Stefan Michalak, an industrial mechanic prospecting for quartz near Falcon Lake, said he approached a landed craft, was hit by a blast of hot gas from a grid of holes...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse Haunted place
The oldest lighthouse on the Great Lakes still standing, lit in 1808 on the Toronto Islands, and the source of Toronto’s oldest ghost story: its first keeper, John Paul Radelmuller, vanished in 1815, murdered, the tale says, by...
Open it on the map - The Grotto, Bruce Peninsula Cave
On the tip of the Bruce Peninsula, where the Niagara Escarpment meets the impossible blue of Georgian Bay, a sea cave called the Grotto opens at the waterline with a submerged tunnel to the lake, over water clear as glass. Above...
Open it on the map - The Halifax Citadel Haunted place
The star-shaped stone fortress on the hill over Halifax has guarded the great harbour since the 1700s, and its long dark casemates and powder magazines are among the most reputedly haunted military ground in Canada, a soldier who...
Open it on the map - The Hopewell Rocks and the Fundy tides Legend
The Bay of Fundy moves more water twice a day than every river on Earth combined, and the tide here runs up to sixteen metres. At Hopewell the sea has cut the cliff into free-standing flowerpot stacks with trees on top: at low...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Keg Mansion Haunted place
A grand 1868 mansion on Jarvis Street in Toronto, once home to the Massey family, now a steakhouse whose staff and diners have reported a maid hanging in the stairwell, a child upstairs, and doors that open themselves for over a...
Open it on the map - The Lost Lemon Mine Legend
The best-known lost mine in Alberta. The tale runs that two prospectors, Lemon and Blackjack, struck rich gold in the Crowsnest country in 1870, that Lemon killed his partner at the camp that night, and that everyone who later...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Nahanni and Headless Valley Legend
The South Nahanni cuts canyons more than a kilometre deep through the Mackenzie Mountains, and drops over Virginia Falls at twice the height of Niagara. The name that stuck to one stretch is Headless Valley, after the McLeod...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Nova Scotia gold belt Gem & mineral ground
Nova Scotia had real gold rushes. From 1861 the Meguma slate-and-quartz belt along the Eastern Shore gave up over a million ounces at camps like Goldenville, Sherbrooke and Waverley, worked from quartz veins and the streams below...
Open it on the map - The Ottawa Jail Hostel Haunted place
The Carleton County Gaol ran in Ottawa from 1862 to 1972 in grim conditions and hanged its prisoners in the yard, among them Patrick Whelan for the assassination of a Father of Confederation. It is a backpackers’ hostel now, and...
Open it on the map - The Screaming Tunnel Legend
A limestone drainage tunnel under an old rail line near Niagara Falls, Ontario, with a stubborn legend: a girl fleeing a fire, or a murder, died inside it, and if you stand in the middle at midnight and strike a match, her scream...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The St Louis ghost train Legend
For decades people drove out to an abandoned rail grade near St Louis, Saskatchewan, to watch a white light come up the line and swing, with a smaller red light behind it, exactly as a brakeman’s lantern would. It is one of the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Thunder Bay amethyst Gem & mineral ground
The north shore of Lake Superior is amethyst country, and amethyst is Ontario’s mineral emblem: the Thunder Bay Amethyst Mine Panorama, the largest amethyst deposit in Canada, is a public fee-dig where you pick deep-purple...
Open it on the map - The Vikings of Vinland Legend
Five hundred years before Columbus, Norse sailors from Greenland landed in North America and built a settlement of turf houses at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. It was long only a saga story, until a Norwegian...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Warsaw Caves Cave
A cave-and-kettle country on the Indian River near Peterborough, where the meltwater of the last ice age drilled deep round kettles into the limestone and opened seven caves you can scramble through. A conservation area with...
Open it on the map - The Wendigo Legend
The Algonquin and Ojibwe peoples of the northern forests have always warned of the Wendigo, a gaunt, ravenous spirit of winter and starvation that possesses those who turn to eating human flesh to survive the long cold, and grows...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The petroforms of the Whiteshell Legend
On the flat granite ridges of the Whiteshell, Anishinaabe people laid out boulders into the shapes of snakes, turtles, fish and human figures, some of them tens of metres long. Estimates of their age run to a few thousand years....
Open it on the map · Read the story - The phantom ship of Northumberland Strait Legend
For two centuries people on both shores of the strait, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, have reported a three-masted sailing ship burning on the water, sometimes with figures moving in the rigging, that vanishes when boats...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Tom Thomson and Canoe Lake Legend
The painter Tom Thomson, whose work helped found the Group of Seven and Canadian art itself, drowned in Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park in July 1917 in circumstances no one has ever settled: a strong swimmer, found with fishing line...
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Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
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