Hunting the supernatural in a Cape Breton ghost town

Deserted town believed to be haunted by locals The small-town of Broughton, N.S., was once thriving with coal miners, training soldiers and was going to be Canada's first planned town.

Tucked away in a remote forest in Cape Breton lie the traces of a once-thriving town.

Deserted now, all that remains of Broughton, N.S. are the crumbled foundations of a few buildings, including its crown jewel, the Broughton Arms Hotel. These days, the soldiers who trained there during the First World War, and the coal miners who called the town home, are nothing more than distant memories.

Or are they?

Eleanor Anderson, a community historian, is undecided about her belief in the paranormal, but she thinks something is haunting the old town.

“I’m not sure about my belief in ghosts, but I think it’s haunted by the dreams that weren’t realized here,” she told CTV Atlantic.

The former mining town peaked in 1906, when its population reached nearly 1,000. There were plans to accommodate more than 10,000 people, but unfortunately, those designs were never realized. The town lost much of its lustre and rapidly declined after then end of the First World War.

“It’s basically a ghost town,” Anderson said. “It’s deserted, but it once held a lot of promise.”

Although the once-booming town has been abandoned for more than a century, there are some who believe it’s not exactly empty.

Jason Murphy, a paranormal investigator for Haunts from the Cape, has visited on numerous occasions. Armed with a device intended to pick up supernatural sounds, Murphy and his team say they have had a number of unsettling experiences in Broughton.

“We were asking, you know, ‘Did you live here? Were you a resident of the town?’ and we got a voice that came back crystal clear that said ‘No. I was a soldier,’” Murphy recalled.

Despite her hesitation about the existence of ghosts, Anderson also believes the eerie town is not as empty as it appears.

“There is still an energy out here and I think there’s still a story to tell out here,” she said.

Whatever that story may be, Murphy plans to keep searching.

“There’s something still here. I think, in time, we’ll find out what it is for sure,” he said.

With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Ryan MacDonald