12 Mysterious Tunnels Under Canada No One Can Explain

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[00:00:00]Right now, somewhere beneath a quiet Canadian city, the ground is hollow.

[00:00:04]Not in the way ground is always hollow.

[00:00:07]Full of roots, >> [music] >> worms, and old rocks shifting around.

[00:00:10]This is a different kind of hollow.

[00:00:12]Deliberate, shaped, the kind [music] that takes human hands to make.

[00:00:17]Canada has a reputation. Polite people, hockey, poutine.

[00:00:22]But underneath that reputation, literally underneath it, are tunnels, passages, and underground rooms that no official [music] map has ever fully charted.

[00:00:33]Some were built to survive, some were built to hide, and some nobody can explain [music] at all.

[00:00:39]These are 12 mysterious tunnels under Canada that no one can explain. Before we go underground, if you're the kind of guy who likes digging into the stories Canada doesn't put on the tourism [music] brochure, hit subscribe. We do this every week, and it's completely free. Now, let's go down.

[00:00:57]Number 12. The Moose Jaw tunnels, Saskatchewan.

[00:01:02]Let's start somewhere most Canadians have heard of, but few actually understand. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, about 80 km west of Regina. Flat prairie, big sky, the kind of place where you can see a storm coming [music] from three provinces away.

[00:01:20]And underneath the downtown streets, a series of interconnected underground passages [music] and rooms. Some tall enough to stand upright in, some narrow and low. Built from brick and timber that's been modified, sealed, reopened, and sealed again over decades.

[00:01:37]The tunnels of Moose Jaw are real.

[00:01:40]That's the starting point. You can actually buy a ticket and walk through a portion of them today through the tunnels of Moose Jaw tourism attraction, which has been operating since the early 1990s. But here's where it gets interesting.

[00:01:54]Two stories follow these tunnels everywhere they go.

[00:01:56]The first involves [music] Chinese workers fleeing racist violence in the late 1800s.

[00:02:01]The second involves Al Capone.

[00:02:04]Both have passionate defenders. Both have equally passionate critics.

[00:02:08]And the archaeology beneath Moose Jaw does not yet fully support or fully disprove either one.

[00:02:16]The Chinese story is older. And it connects to something [music] real and devastating.

[00:02:21]By 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was complete. The thousands of Chinese workers who had [music] done the most dangerous labor, blasting through mountains, lowered over cliff faces in baskets [music] to set dynamite charges, were suddenly not needed anymore.

[00:02:38]The Canadian government's response [music] was the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885.

[00:02:44]A $50 head tax on every [music] Chinese person entering Canada.

[00:02:48]That was roughly two months wages.

[00:02:50]Within 18 years, it would [music] rise to $500.

[00:02:54]The question is whether some of those Chinese residents facing racist [music] violence and police harassment built or adapted underground passages beneath Moose Jaw's Chinatown to move through the city without [music] being seen.

[00:03:07]The physical evidence is suggestive.

[00:03:10]There are rooms down [music] there, not just passages, with signs of cooking fires, sleeping areas, and accumulated human [music] presence.

[00:03:18]Artifacts recovered include ceramic pieces and buttons consistent with a Chinese community presence in the late 1800s.

[00:03:25]>> [music] >> And some sections of tunnel run in directions that make no engineering sense for a steam heat utility system.

[00:03:33]The Capone story?

[00:03:34]That one rests almost entirely on oral tradition.

[00:03:37]No documentary evidence places him in Moose Jaw.

[00:03:40]His known movements during the 1920s don't leave an obvious gap for a Saskatchewan visit. But absence from the record is exactly what successful criminals aim for.

[00:03:50]Did you know the $500 tax imposed on Chinese immigrants in 1903 was equivalent to two full years of wages for a laborer [music] at the time?

[00:04:01]The Canadian government collected over $23 million from it and didn't formally apologize until 2006. [music] What makes Moose Jaw matter isn't whether Capone was there.

[00:04:12]It's what the tunnels represent, a community [music] that was told it had no place above ground and responded by building its place below it.

[00:04:21]Number 11, Fan Tan Alley, Victoria, British Columbia.

[00:04:27]Head west to Victoria, [music] British Columbia, the provincial capital, English gardens, afternoon tea, the kind of city that feels like someone tried to build a piece of England on the Pacific coast and mostly succeeded. Fan Tan Alley sits in the heart [music] of Victoria's Chinatown.

[00:04:43]The narrowest commercial street in Canada, they say.

[00:04:46]The buildings that front it look like ordinary two- and three-story brick structures [music] from the street. Inside and beneath them is a completely different story.

[00:04:55]The basements of these buildings were connected by passages [music] that allowed movement between establishments without ever stepping outside.

[00:05:04]Rooms beneath the basement level provided additional space [music] invisible from the street.

[00:05:09]Some passages ran beneath the alley itself, connecting buildings on opposite sides.

[00:05:14]Before 1908, when opium was still legal in Canada, Chinese-owned opium businesses operated from these basement spaces. The mixed clientele, which included white Victorians [music] who preferred privacy, appreciated the discretion.

[00:05:29]After 1908, when possession became criminal, those same spaces became genuinely [music] hidden and the connecting passages became operationally critical.

[00:05:39]Police records from the [music] period describe raids on establishments where occupants and goods simply vanished through passages [music] to adjacent buildings.

[00:05:48]Multiple simultaneous entries were required to be effective. The underground network was a practical countermeasure and it worked.

[00:05:56]Gambling, also criminalized but in high [music] demand from both Chinese and non-Chinese populations, was conducted in the same basement rooms. The passages served multiple [music] purposes simultaneously.

[00:06:08]Here's what makes Victoria more documentable than Moose Jaw.

[00:06:12]Descendants of families who occupied the Fan Tan Alley buildings have provided detailed accounts of specific [music] passages and their uses.

[00:06:20]These accounts don't exist in official archives because [music] they were never entered there.

[00:06:25]They exist in family memory, in recorded interviews with elders, in the patient listening of researchers who understood [music] that the most important documentation of this history was never going to come from a government file.

[00:06:38]Researchers affiliated with the University of Victoria and UBC have been working [music] with Chinese Canadian community organizations to map surviving underground features [music] in and around the district.

[00:06:50]Ground-penetrating radar surveys have identified sections of [music] the passage system that were assumed destroyed by 20th century development but appear to have survived in modified form.

[00:07:01]The underground was the space that [music] the surface refused to provide.

[00:07:05]It was architecture built under duress and it should be understood as such.

[00:07:11]Number 10, the Rideau Canal underground chambers, [music] Ottawa.

[00:07:18]Now, let's talk about something the government actually built and then quietly stopped talking about.

[00:07:23]The Rideau Canal, [music] built between 1826 and 1832 under Lieutenant Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers.

[00:07:31]Most Canadians know it as the world's largest naturally refrigerated [music] skating rink in winter.

[00:07:37]What most Canadians don't know is what's underneath it.

[00:07:40]The canal was [music] constructed specifically as a military supply route.

[00:07:44]A way to move troops and material between Montreal and Kingston without exposure to American attack along the St. Lawrence. At Bytown, which became Ottawa, the northern terminus required excavating a sandstone ridge to allow [music] the canal to descend to the Ottawa River.

[00:07:59]That excavation created the famous Rideau Canal locks.

[00:08:03]Still operational today.

[00:08:05]It also created a series of chambers and passages >> [music] >> within the stone that were used for various purposes over the following decades. These spaces have been studied, but their full extent and the history of their use over nearly two centuries of [music] the canal's operation is not comprehensively documented in any public record.

[00:08:25]Military engineers working in the 20th century [music] added modifications and extensions that were never entered into records made [music] fully available to the public.

[00:08:35]Some of the deeper sections have not been comprehensively surveyed in the modern era.

[00:08:40]The simple fact of a well-documented military structure does not mean everything within it has been documented. And in Ottawa, the national capital, home to Parliament Hill and over 150 years [music] of federal government operations, the tunnels connecting various federal buildings in the parliamentary precinct are not entirely secret, but they are not entirely public, either.

[00:09:04]Security concerns have limited documentation of what exists [music] and where it runs. Modifications made during both World Wars, during the Cold War, and after various security incidents [music] are not reflected in any comprehensive public record.

[00:09:19]Some of what exists beneath Canadian government buildings is not mysterious.

[00:09:23]It's classified. And classified [music] information left in that state long enough effectively becomes mysterious to everyone, including sometimes the officials nominally responsible for the spaces. [music] Number nine, Halifax Citadel's unmapped passages, [music] Nova Scotia.

[00:09:41]Halifax Citadel sits on a hill above the harbor. Star-shaped earthen walls visible from [music] most of the city.

[00:09:48]It's a national historic site. Parks Canada runs tours. You can read about it in academic [music] papers.

[00:09:55]And it still has sections that nobody has fully mapped.

[00:09:58]The current structure dates primarily from work done between 1828 [music] and 1856.

[00:10:04]Its tunnel system is substantial.

[00:10:07]Underground magazines, connecting passages, sally [music] ports, ammunition storage chambers built into the earthworks.

[00:10:14]The documented [music] portions have been studied by military historians.

[00:10:17]But the Citadel also has sections not open to the public. And the documentation [music] of what exists in those sections is not complete in any public record.

[00:10:27]Military engineers working in the 20th century [music] added modifications and extensions to the 19th century system that were never entered into records made fully [music] available.

[00:10:37]Some of the deeper or more peripheral sections of the tunnel complex have not been comprehensively surveyed in the modern era.

[00:10:44]This is a pattern that repeats at military sites across Canada.

[00:10:48]The documentation is official and therefore [music] authoritative. But official documentation is created for specific purposes at specific moments.

[00:10:57]It rarely captures [music] everything that was built, modified, or repurposed over the lifetime of a complex installation.

[00:11:05]Buildings are modified, tunnels are extended, connections are added, chambers are sealed. All of this happens over decades and centuries.

[00:11:14]And the administrative records that capture it are uneven in their completeness [music] and availability.

[00:11:20]Halifax Citadel is not hiding anything nefarious. But the habit of treating documented military infrastructure as fully understood because it's documented, the physical evidence repeatedly undermines that assumption.

[00:11:34]Number eight, Fort Henry's underground network, Kingston, Ontario.

[00:11:39]Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario >> [music] >> sits at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence River and the Rideau Canal. A position of obvious strategic [music] importance that was fortified beginning in the early 1800s.

[00:11:51]The current structure, completed in 1836, [music] has an extensive system of underground passages and chambers built into its walls and ramparts. Partially documented, partially open to visitors.

[00:12:05]Like Halifax Citadel, [music] Fort Henry also has sections that have not been fully surveyed in recent decades.

[00:12:12]The full extent of the connecting passages between various parts of the fortification >> [music] >> remains incompletely mapped in publicly available sources.

[00:12:20]Nobody is hiding treasure down there, but the full picture [music] of what connects to what and what was added when has never been made fully public. And in a structure that has been continuously used, modified, and repurposed for nearly 200 [music] years, that gap between what's documented and what's actually there is wider than most people realize.

[00:12:43]Number seven, the Underground Railroad Cellars, Southern Ontario.

[00:12:48]Here's a story Canada's comfortable telling because it ends better [music] than most. The Underground Railroad was not, for the most part, literally underground.

[00:12:57]The name described a network of covert routes and safe houses that helped enslaved people escape from the American South to freedom in the north.

[00:13:05]After 1850, when American law made the north unsafe, the routes led to Canada.

[00:13:11]But in some locations, and this is where the story intersects with the literal [music] underground, the safe houses and gathering places of the freedom network in Canada did involve underground spaces. Cellars where people could be [music] hidden while patrols passed.

[00:13:26]Root cellars and storage chambers beneath barns [music] that doubled as temporary shelters. In some cases, connecting passages between buildings and communities with established African Canadian populations.

[00:13:38]Towns like Dresden, Chatham, and Buxton in Ontario became centers of relatively established black communities with the full architecture of community life.

[00:13:48]Churches, schools, [music] newspapers, businesses, and the physical infrastructure of mutual [music] protection, which included underground spaces.

[00:13:57]The oral tradition within some of these communities has preserved [music] knowledge of specific spaces, specific farm properties, specific church basements that [music] served these functions.

[00:14:08]Physical archaeology at some sites has corroborated those traditions [music] in partial ways.

[00:14:13]What is less often acknowledged is that this history of underground refuge extended beyond the pre-Civil [music] War period.

[00:14:20]African Canadian communities continued to navigate a Canadian reality that was less [music] violently hostile than the American South, but was not by any measure free of racism and exclusion.

[00:14:32]The underground spaces that had served one purpose in one era were repurposed [music] as community gathering spaces in new configurations.

[00:14:41]The archaeology of these spaces [music] has received even less systematic attention than the Chinese Canadian underground. The oral traditions associated with them have been recorded even more fragmentarily, but the spaces existed. And the people who used them deserve to have that history told properly.

[00:15:00]Number six, the Diefenbunker, Carp, Ontario.

[00:15:05]Location origin, historical context, physical description, >> [music] >> mystery controversy, evidence versus legend.

[00:15:12]In 1958, the government of Canada began digging a four-story underground [music] structure into the rock and clay of the Carp Valley, about 35 km west of Ottawa.

[00:15:23]Under conditions of considerable secrecy, the workers who built it knew they were building something for the government. They did not know [music] what. Local residents who noticed the construction activity had their questions [music] deflected or simply not answered.

[00:15:38]When it was complete in 1961, the structure contained a war operations room, a CBC broadcasting [music] studio, a miniature hospital, a decontamination facility, sleeping quarters for 535 people, and an emergency communication system capable of operating [music] independently of the national telephone network.

[00:16:00]It was designed to house the federal cabinet, the Bank of Canada's gold reserves, and the senior military and civilian leadership of the country in the event of a nuclear attack.

[00:16:10]The walls were reinforced concrete multiple meters thick. The blast doors were designed to withstand pressures that would destroy any conventional structure above ground.

[00:16:20]It was called the Diefen bunker after Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, though that nickname came later with a sardonic edge that reflected the public's eventual reaction to learning that the plan for nuclear survival apparently involved saving the cabinet while doing very little for anyone else.

[00:16:38]The Diefen bunker is now a museum. You can buy a ticket and walk through it.

[00:16:42]But here's what most people don't know.

[00:16:44]The Diefen bunker was not the only such facility. It was not even the primary one.

[00:16:50]The Canadian government's Cold War emergency planning infrastructure included a network of what were called emergency [music] government headquarters.

[00:16:58]At least one in each province in locations chosen for geological stability, reasonable distance from obvious nuclear targets, and discretion.

[00:17:08]Some have been decommissioned and are now known to researchers.

[00:17:11]Others were demolished. Some are documented only in archival records that require considerable [music] persistence to locate. And a few, and particularly those associated with communications [music] and intelligence functions, remain in a documentary gray zone, acknowledged to exist in general terms, not fully described in any public record. This is not conspiracy theory, it is documented government policy.

[00:17:36]What is less fully documented is the physical specifics, exactly where each facility was, what it contained, how it was modified, and what happened to it afterward.

[00:17:47]Some facilities were sold to private owners without the full history of what was in the ground being disclosed. Some were handed to municipalities with [music] documentation that was, charitably speaking, not comprehensive.

[00:18:00]Number five, the Keatley [music] Creek pithouses, British Columbia.

[00:18:04]Before any railway, before any Chinatown, before any colonial city laid [music] its grid over the Canadian landscape, the land was known, and that knowledge included the underground.

[00:18:16]The Keatley Creek site in the Fraser Canyon was occupied for roughly 2,000 years.

[00:18:21]It contained pithouses [music] of substantial size, some over 20 m in diameter, capable of housing [music] extended family groups of 10 to 20 people or more.

[00:18:31]At the height of its occupation, Keatley Creek may have been home to more than a thousand people [music] living primarily in semi-subterranean structures.

[00:18:40]These are not caves. They are engineered underground living spaces, built by people who understood how to work with earth and timber to create warm, stable, protected environments [music] in a landscape with significant winter temperature extremes.

[00:18:55]The knowledge required to build them was sophisticated and cumulative, transmitted across generations.

[00:19:01]It represented a relationship with the underground that was fundamentally architectural, not accidental. And here's the part that gets overlooked [music] in most Canadian history books.

[00:19:11]Some of the Chinese laborers who came to Canada had experience with mining and tunneling.

[00:19:16]The railway work itself involved underground work. The men who dug tunnels through the Selkirk Mountains understood rock and soil >> [music] >> and how passages behave under weight.

[00:19:26]When they turned those skills toward creating livable underground [music] spaces in the cities where they eventually settled, they were applying knowledge that had been acquired at enormous human [music] cost.

[00:19:36]The tragedy is that so much of what they built has been interpreted through lenses designed to minimize it. Number four, the Nakimu Caves, Glacier National Park, British Columbia.

[00:19:47]The Nakimu Caves in Glacier National Park were not [music] formally discovered by non-Indigenous people until 1904.

[00:19:56]The Secwepemc people had known about [music] them considerably longer.

[00:20:00]The specific knowledge those peoples carried about the caves, how to navigate them, what they contained, what they were for, was not transferred intact to the scientists [music] who later mapped and studied them.

[00:20:13]That knowledge transmission was broken, often deliberately, through residential schools, through the suppression of ceremonies, through the outlawing of languages that carried the most precise geographic and historical [music] information.

[00:20:27]What survived survived in fragments.

[00:20:30]This is the recurring structure of the problem across Canada's underground history.

[00:20:35]Indigenous peoples knew things [music] about the underground landscape that took non-Indigenous researchers decades or centuries [music] to rediscover, if they rediscovered them at all.

[00:20:45]The Blackfoot peoples of the northern Great Plains have oral traditions [music] that describe underground passages in the Alberta foothills.

[00:20:54]Not natural cave formations, [music] but shaped spaces associated with particular ceremonial and social purposes.

[00:21:01]The Anishinaabe nations have oral traditions about underground spaces as threshold [music] places, where the boundary between the surface world and something else was thinner or more permeable.

[00:21:11]These traditions were transmitted in context that the colonial project actively [music] worked to destroy. And when fragments surfaced in conversation with non-Indigenous scholars, they were frequently categorized as mythology rather than history.

[00:21:25]That analytical move told the scholar more about their own assumptions than about the traditions they were hearing.

[00:21:32]Number three, the Cariboo anomalies, British Columbia.

[00:21:37]In the Cariboo region of British Columbia, there are passages in certain cliff formations that have been observed by hikers and climbers whose geological training is [music] sufficient to recognize that the passages don't look like the natural processes that shape the surrounding rock.

[00:21:53]The passages are not elaborately constructed. They are not cathedral-like chambers.

[00:21:58]They are simply spaces [music] in rock that have the wrong profile for natural origin.

[00:22:03]Openings that are too regular, floors that are too level, corners that are too sharp. Without more systematic investigation, which the rugged terrain makes logistically difficult, the explanation for these spaces [music] remains open.

[00:22:18]In northern Ontario, in rock country that has been occupied by Anishinaabe peoples for thousands of years, there are occasional reports of underground [music] spaces whose character and extent don't match the documented geology of the area.

[00:22:31]>> [music] >> Some of these reports come from mining operations, which have the advantage of employing people with professional knowledge [music] of what rock looks like when it hasn't been touched, and what it looks like when something has worked on it.

[00:22:43]Mining engineers who encounter an anomalous underground space in the course of drilling or excavation [music] are not prone to romanticizing it.

[00:22:52]When some of them have said that a particular space doesn't look [music] natural, that observation deserves to be taken seriously.

[00:22:59]The difficulty is following up.

[00:23:02]Mining companies are not in the business of archaeological investigation. They have practical incentives to process anomalies [music] quickly and move on.

[00:23:11]The anomalies get reported, sometimes in informal channels, sometimes in internal company communications, and then they disappear from the accessible [music] record. Number two, the Nahanni Valley Underground, Northwest Territories.

[00:23:26]The Nahanni Valley, a 200-mile gorge in the remote Northwest Territories.

[00:23:32]No roads, accessible only by float plane or a multi-day boat journey.

[00:23:38]Virginia Falls is twice the height of Niagara.

[00:23:41]The Dene peoples warned about this valley long before Europeans arrived.

[00:23:45]Those warnings were ignored.

[00:23:47]>> [music] >> Since 1905, over 44 people have died or vanished here.

[00:23:52]Multiple victims were found headless.

[00:23:55]But here's what most people don't know about the Nahanni.

[00:23:58]Beneath the valley floor, there are karst cave systems of extraordinary scale.

[00:24:03]The Nahanni karst is one of the most significant in North America.

[00:24:07]Massive underground chambers, [music] river passages, and formations that have been only partially explored. The Dene oral traditions describe underground spaces in this [music] valley as significant in ways that go beyond simple shelter.

[00:24:21]Passages that connect to other places.

[00:24:23]Spaces that require knowledge to find and knowledge [music] to use safely.

[00:24:28]In 1978, UNESCO designated the Nahanni a World Heritage Site for its [music] natural beauty.

[00:24:34]What the designation doesn't fully capture is the underground dimension.

[00:24:39]The cave systems beneath the valley that remain largely unmapped. The oral traditions that describe them in terms no geological survey has yet fully corroborated. And the persistent, documented [music] pattern of deaths and disappearances that has never been satisfactorily explained.

[00:24:56]The valley has earned its names: Dead Men's Valley, Headless Creek, Valley of the Headless Men.

[00:25:03]And somewhere beneath it, the ground is hollow in ways that no official map has ever [music] fully charted. Number one.

[00:25:10]The network beneath Canadian cities, the big picture.

[00:25:13]Here's the thing about all of these tunnels. They don't point to a single story.

[00:25:18]They point to several stories connected not by a shared author, but by a shared dynamic.

[00:25:24]The underground across all of these histories [music] is where people go when the surface excludes them.

[00:25:29]It is the space that remains when all the sanctioned spaces [music] have been claimed.

[00:25:34]The Chinese workers who built the most dangerous sections of the transcontinental railway, and then found themselves legally [music] excluded from the country they helped build, they understood the underground in both [music] senses. The literal space beneath the city that was available when the surface was not, and the metaphorical underground of an existence that the official economy and official culture >> [music] >> required to be invisible.

[00:26:00]The indigenous nations whose knowledge of this land stretches back [music] thousands of years before any colonial map was drawn, they understood that the distinction between surface and underground, between what is visible and what is hidden, is a distinction that the land itself does not make.

[00:26:17]The government that built its emergency bunkers and communication tunnels in the anxious [music] decades of the Cold War, and then declined to give a full public account of what it had built and why.

[00:26:28]Even governments, it turns out, [music] sometimes go underground when the surface feels too exposed.

[00:26:33]And then there are the genuinely unexplained things. The geological anomalies that don't fit the standard frameworks. [music] The sections of tunnel whose age and purpose remain contested. The physical evidence that corroborates oral traditions >> [music] >> in ways that existing investigative tools cannot fully resolve.

[00:26:51]Ground penetrating radar is getting better. The archival work is getting more careful. The collaborations between indigenous scholars and earth scientists are producing results that [music] neither could have reached alone.

[00:27:03]The official account underestimated the underground. The physical evidence, read with adequate tools and adequate humility, is larger [music] and stranger and more human than the official account ever allowed it to be.

[00:27:15]>> [music] >> So, the next time you're walking down a street in any Canadian city, Moose Jaw, >> [music] >> Victoria, Kingston, Ottawa, let yourself wonder, just for a second, what might be below the concrete. What purposes the darkness there has served.

[00:27:30]Whose hands shaped those spaces. [music] Whose lives were conducted in them.

[00:27:35]The ground beneath you is not blank. It remembers.

[00:27:39]If you've been to any of these places, or if you know something about a tunnel in your town that [music] didn't make this list, drop it in the comments. We read everyone.

[00:27:48]And if this is the kind of Canadian history [music] that doesn't show up in the textbooks, hit subscribe, because we've got a lot more where this came from. We'll see you in the next one.