👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9476
ACTIVE
Forbidden Plateau
Forbidden Plateau is a location reputed to be haunted in British Columbia, CA. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Forbidden Plateau?
- Location
- British Columbia, CA
- Type
- Forest / nature
- Coordinates
- 49.683, -125.317
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Forbidden Plateau said to be haunted?
Forbidden Plateau is a sub-alpine expanse of ridges, wet meadows and small lakes inside Strathcona Provincial Park, on Vancouver Island northwest of Comox Lake. The story attached to the name says the K'ómoks sent their women and children up here for safety during a raid and that they were never seen again, leaving only red-stained snow. The story is documented, dated and attributed, and it is documented as an invention: Clinton S. Wood, waterworks engineer and secretary of the Courtenay Board of Trade, wrote in 1967 that he added a bit of mystery to publicise the district, and named the editor who carried it to a Vancouver paper and the man who supplied the word Forbidden. The one older document behind it all, Robert Brown's 1864 expedition report, records a fear of armed neighbours on a river route and never mentions a plateau. Andy Everson, an anthropologist of the K'ómoks First Nation, told an interviewer in 2015 that his research contains no mention of the place and no taboo about the mountains.
What is the history of Forbidden Plateau?
The BC Geographical Names Office files Forbidden Plateau as a plateau "NW of Comox Lake on E side of Strathcona Provincial Park, Comox Land District", adopted under that name on "12 December 1939 on 92F/11". Its file carries a caveat lifted from the Report of the Provincial Museum for 1954: "'Plateau' is somewhat misleading, since only a small part of the region is flat or platuau-like. In general this 100 square mile area consists of a series of ridges, sloping wet meadows and open park land at various elevations ranging from 3,500 to 4,000 feet." The misspelling of the word is the gazetteer's.
The document everyone treats as the root of the name is older and says nothing about the plateau. On Thursday 1 September 1864 — a weekday that checks out against the calendar — Robert Brown left the settlement he spelled Comoucs at the head of the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, and reported that he had set off "having failed to persuade any natives to accompany us, the fear of the vengeance of the Seshahts and Opechesahts being too great and the attractions of the salmon fishery now commencing too strong for them." His route ran up the Puntledge with the canoe dragged by ropes and "the party up to their middles in the current", through a two-day portage over rapids he recorded as "Ski-ep, 'the laughing waters'", to "a lake eight miles long" on 7 September, which is the floor of the valley, and the word "plateau" occurs nowhere in the printed report.
A second account sits in the same gazetteer file and is almost never quoted. W. Harvey, who lived in the area in the 1890s, told William Newcombe at the Provincial Library that the name was a "Translation of the name given by local Indians on account of the loss of many of their hunters, killed by Nootka Indians who had travelled here from the west coast in search of elk and killed any Salish hunters they encountered." The people lost in that account are hunters, adult men on the ground where they hunted.
The promotion came sixty years after Brown. Ryan Stuart dates the opening to "the dry Comox Valley summer of 1924", when Courtenay piped its water from the Browns River and sent its waterworks engineer up to look for a lake worth damming; the Strathcona Wilderness Institute, transcribing the museum binder, has Clinton S. Wood as "Waterworks Engineer for the City of Courtenay in 1925 at the time of his explorations". The two datings differ by a year and the sources are not reconciled anywhere. Wood came back without a lake, and in a recollection he wrote in 1967, transcribed into Ruth Masters' binder, he set out what he found instead: "So entranced was I with the great beauty of this sub-Alpine country that I made up my mind that the general public should be made aware of its great potential as a drawing card for the district and as a great recreational district for all, especially if it could be made a bit more accessible." Then the mechanism, in his own hand: "I was Secretary of the Board of Trade, and had the idea that a bit of mystery added to the obvious attractions would help to publicise it. I wrote a small article to the Comox Argus and the idea was seized upon by Ben Hughes, the Editor, who wrote an article to the Vancouver Daily Province, using the word 'Plateau'. To this was added the word 'Forbidden' by Cecil Scott, and thus originated the name."
The gazetteer pins that article to a page: "Vancouver Province (magazine section) 17 April 1927, p. 7". Stuart quotes a line from it — "whether their fear rose from a taboo placed on the region by the sorcerer of the tribe, or whether it was fear of the legendary foe, it is difficult to say" — which is Brown's sentence about the Seshahts and the Opechesahts converted into a question about sorcery. The business followed the name into the mountains: Wood ran pack-horse and hiking tours for decades between cabins at Kwai, Mckenzie, Croteau and Becher; a land trade brought the plateau inside Strathcona Park; the Forbidden Plateau Lodge and the Wood Mountain ski hill came later, the second founded by Wood himself. In 1969 Helen B. and G.P.V. Akrigg printed the compact version in 1001 British Columbia Place Names: "Forbidden Plateau so-named because the Indians believed it to be inhabited by evil spirits."
Timeline: the documented record of Forbidden Plateau
- 1 September 1864 Robert Brown leaves Comox at the head of the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition and reports that he went "having failed to persuade any natives to accompany us, the fear of the vengeance of the Seshahts and Opechesahts being too great and the attractions of the salmon fishery now commencing too strong for them." His route is the Puntledge valley, and the word "plateau" appears nowhere in the printed report.
- 1890s W. Harvey, resident in the area, gives William Newcombe of the Provincial Library the account later filed by the BC Geographical Names Office: the name is a "Translation of the name given by local Indians on account of the loss of many of their hunters, killed by Nootka Indians who had travelled here from the west coast in search of elk".
- Summer of 1924 Ryan Stuart dates the first exploration to "the dry Comox Valley summer of 1924", when Courtenay piped its water from the Browns River and sent Clinton Wood up to investigate damming a lake in the headwaters. The Strathcona Wilderness Institute, transcribing the museum binder, dates the same explorations to 1925.
- 17 April 1927 Ben Hughes publishes the article that fixes the name, cited by the BC Geographical Names Office as "Vancouver Province (magazine section) 17 April 1927, p. 7". Ryan Stuart quotes from it: "whether their fear rose from a taboo placed on the region by the sorcerer of the tribe, or whether it was fear of the legendary foe, it is difficult to say".
- 12 December 1939 The name is made official. The BC Geographical Names file records it as "Adopted 12 December 1939 on 92F/11", twelve years after the Province article and seventy-five after Brown.
- 23 June 1946 A magnitude 7.3 earthquake strikes at 10:13 a.m. on a Sunday. Natural Resources Canada records that "the epicentre was in the Forbidden Plateau area of central Vancouver Island, just to the west of the communities of Courtenay and Campbell River", that it knocked down 75% of the chimneys in Cumberland, Union Bay and Courtenay, and that two people died — one drowned when a small boat capsized in an earthquake-generated wave, the other of a heart attack in Seattle.
- 1954 The Report of the Provincial Museum objects to the name itself: "'Plateau' is somewhat misleading, since only a small part of the region is flat or platuau-like." It describes instead "a series of ridges, sloping wet meadows and open park land" across roughly a hundred square miles.
- 1967 Clinton S. Wood writes down his recollection, transcribed into Ruth Masters' binder rather than published as a book of his own. He names the three men and the motive: "I had the idea that a bit of mystery added to the obvious attractions would help to publicise it", Ben Hughes carried it to the Vancouver Daily Province with the word "Plateau", and "to this was added the word 'Forbidden' by Cecil Scott".
- 1969 Helen B. and G.P.V. Akrigg give the story a reference-book form in 1001 British Columbia Place Names: "Forbidden Plateau so-named because the Indians believed it to be inhabited by evil spirits." No source is offered for the belief.
- 1983 Trevor Davies, a founding member of the Comox District Mountaineering Club, records his reminiscence in the same binder: Hughes was "a wonderful man at making up stories", he "invented the story of the Indian war", and "there is absolutely no truth in these stories as far as the local Indians are concerned".
- 2015 Ryan Stuart publishes "Finding Forbidden" in The Comox Valley Collective after interviewing the Courtenay Museum curator Pat Trask and the K'ómoks anthropologist Andy Everson. Everson: "In my research I've seen no mention of Forbidden Plateau. There's nothing about a taboo about going up into the mountains."
Is there a rational explanation for Forbidden Plateau?
Andy Everson was born in Comox in 1972 and named Na̱gedzi after his grandfather, the late Chief Andy Frank of the K'ómoks First Nation; his master's degree in anthropology was taken with a thesis on contemporary Comox identity. Ryan Stuart put the story to him in 2015. "In my research I've seen no mention of Forbidden Plateau," Everson answered. "There's nothing about a taboo about going up into the mountains. But there is probably some kernel of truth. There was a lot of warfare in this area. We were attacked from the north, south and west." Stuart reports him adding that the Nuu-chah-nulth groups of the Alberni Valley would have come by way of Comox Lake rather than over the plateau, and that the K'ómoks had no reason to go up there with so much to harvest in the valley.
The absences behind that answer can be counted. On the K'ómoks First Nation's own Cultures page, which publishes the Sathloot and Pentlatch origin stories in full, the strings "Forbidden", "plateau" and "taboo" each return zero; controls run on the same page on the same day return Pentlatch 31, salmon 12 and village 9. Brown's 1864 report returns zero for the same three words across two independent scans — the Google digitisation and the CIHM microform — against 92 for "lake", 64 for "Indian" and 26 for "mountain". One caution on those counts: the Google scan renders "vengeance" as "vengeaAce", so a literal search for that word alone reports zero there while the passage is plainly present. The figures above were reconciled between both files.
Ruth Masters reached the same place from the archive. "Nowhere in my searches did I find any authentic Indian history or legends dealing with the Plateau," she wrote in her introduction to the binder, and she itemised what she believed had been built on Brown's single sentence: "all the yarns about evil spirits, hairy monsters, Indian women and children being murdered up there, the red snow representing their blood and so on". Pat Trask, a curator at the Courtenay Museum, opened his conversation with Stuart by saying "You know the story of the red snow is made up, right?", and supplied the motive without being asked: "They wanted to get more people to go to some cabins up there. It's human nature to want to go somewhere that's 'forbidden.'" Trevor Davies, a founding member of the Comox District Mountaineering Club, had said as much in a 1983 reminiscence transcribed into the same binder. He called Hughes "a wonderful man at making up stories", described the invention as "the story of the Indian war, when the Indians took all their wives up there", and concluded that "there is absolutely no truth in these stories as far as the local Indians are concerned". His practical objection is the sharpest thing anyone has said about the geography: "Obviously the Indians didn't go in there, because all their food was on the beach, and they weren't stupid like we are, they didn't go mountain climbing for no reason…"
What survives all of this is narrower than the legend and better attested. Brown recorded a real fear in 1864, of the Seshahts and the Opechesahts. Harvey's informants in the 1890s tied the name to hunters killed by raiders from the west coast. Everson describes a territory attacked from three directions. Every one of those is about armed men on a route, and none of them involves women and children hidden on a plateau, a disappearance or blood in the snow. No published source offers a natural explanation for the red snow, because the three people who have looked at it in print say the episode was invented. The sasquatch reading circulates too: Stuart writes that he read the local author John Bindernagel — printed in the magazine as "Bindermagel" — and that the book notes several sightings around Forbidden Plateau.
Can you visit Forbidden Plateau?
BC Parks gives the approach in three sentences: "The main access route to Forbidden Plateau from Courtenay and Campbell River is via the Paradise Meadows trailhead at Mount Washington. From Highway 19 follow signs to Mount Washington ski resort via exit #130 (the Strathcona Parkway) for 20km. Turn left onto the Nordic Lodge road for 1.5km to the Paradise Meadows parking lot." The plateau lies inside Strathcona Park, which the agency describes as "designated in 1911, ... the oldest park in British Columbia".
Everything else on the plateau is governed by the season, and BC Parks warns that "most trails are snow covered from late October or November until at least June, and for higher elevation trails, often until mid July", and asks anyone walking in that season to "be well equipped for changing conditions and check avalanche reports prior to heading out". Winter parking at Paradise Meadows is restricted under a separate published notice.
The Paradise Meadows centennial trail is barrier free, and the agency calls it "an easily accessible sub-alpine trail which is suitable for everyone". Dogs are admitted on a lead: "Dogs must be on a leash at all times in the Forbidden Plateau core area (Paradise Meadows)", and they are kept off the groomed Nordic trails through the winter. Camping in a day-use area is an offence under the park regulation. Open fires are banned throughout Strathcona "except in an authorized BC Parks steel fire ring", and snowmobiles are prohibited across the whole park. A standing advisory covers the car park itself: "Due to an increase in vehicle break-ins at trailhead locations, visitors are reminded to not leave any valuables in their vehicles."
Staying overnight on the plateau falls inside a charging area. BC Parks lists a "Forbidden Plateau area" map among its "Backcountry fee collecting area maps (shows areas where fees will be collected)", and the park page published no amount when it was read on 7 September 2026. The Strathcona Wilderness Institute staffs the wilderness centre at the trailhead, "adjacent to Mt. Washington's raven lodge, the nordic ski lodge", and offers "visitor information, maps, books, refreshments". The documentary trail behind this entry is a physical object anyone can ask for: "History of Forbidden Plateau 1920-86", the binder Ryan Stuart describes as "a 20 centimetre-thick leather bound binder" with the title carved into the cover, is held at the Courtenay & District Museum. The BC Geographical Names record is public at the same address given below and places the centre of the feature at 49°40'59"N, 125°19'04"W on NTS sheet 92F/11.
Sources consulted
- Robert Brown, «Vancouver Island. Exploration. 1864» — Vancouver Island Exploration Committee, printed by authority of the Government by Harries and Company, Victoria, 1865 book
- BC Geographical Names Office, «Forbidden Plateau — official name record 12978 (origin notes and history)» — Province of British Columbia, 2014 report
- Alan Pattinson, «Story of the Forbidden Plateau (transcribing Ruth Masters' introduction to 'History of Forbidden Plateau 1920-86', Clinton S. Wood's 1967 recollection and Trevor Davies' 1983 reminiscence)» — Strathcona Wilderness Institute, 2010 web
- Ryan Stuart, «Finding Forbidden» — The Comox Valley Collective, 2015 newspaper archive
- Natural Resources Canada, «The M7.3 Vancouver Island Earthquake of 1946» — Earthquakes Canada, 2019 report
- K'ómoks First Nation, «Cultures — K'ómoks First Nation origin stories» — komoks.ca, 2025 web
- BC Parks, «Strathcona Park — access, advisories and park regulations» — Province of British Columbia, 2026 web
- Andy Everson, «Artist (biography of Andy Everson)» — andyeverson.com, 2016 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-09-07 · How we verify our content
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