Tranquille, Kamloops

Tranquille had four lives on the same Secwépemc flats by Kamloops Lake: a place called Spelemtsin, occupied for at least 7,500 years; the King Edward Memorial Sanatorium, opened in 1907 as the first tuberculosis sanatorium west of Ontario; the provincial Tranquille Sanatorium from 1921, a self-contained village of 360 beds with its own farm, bakery, power plant and two kilometres of delivery tunnels; and, from 1959, an institution for people with intellectual disabilities that held some 700 residents. Its closure was announced on 7 July 1983 and answered by a twenty-two-day workers' occupation; the last residents left in 1985. The ghost reputation is younger than any of that, and it can be dated: an MTV dare show filmed there in 2002 under an invented name, after which the site's own manager spent a decade turning paranormal investigators away because, he said, the real history was more interesting. The property is private, its cemetery was moved to Kamloops, and in June 2026 the whole estate went up for sale.

The flats where the Tranquille River spreads into Kamloops Lake were a Secwépemc place long before they were an institution. The settlement is called Spelemtsin in Secwépemctsín, and the wider area Pellqweq'wíle — "has biscuitroot", after the root harvested on the alluvial fan. The oldest dated archaeological material from Tranquille is roughly 7,500 years old. Independent archaeologist Joanne Hammond told The Wren in 2023 that preliminary shovel testing at the site returned positive results "extremely high" compared with regional averages, and was blunt about what lies under the fields: "There's no doubt that the site includes ancestral burial grounds." Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Elder Jeanette Jules described the consequence in the same report: "Every so often somebody disturbs an ancestral burial. Then we have to go and do the ceremonies." Even the name is borrowed. French-speaking fur traders nicknamed the Secwépemc leader Piqwemús (Pacamoos) "Tranquille" for his manner; Archibald McDonald's 1827 map already carries the name on the river. Piqwemús died around 1841. In 1869 William Fortune acquired roughly 320 acres by pre-emption for about $140, and Charles Cooney — married to a Carrier woman, Elizabeth Allard — took the adjoining half. By the 1890s both ranches were taking in tuberculosis sufferers as paying boarders, drawn by dry air, sunshine and distance from the Kamloops mills. That informal trade became an institution in 1907, when Fortune sold to the British Columbia Anti-Tuberculosis Society and the King Edward Memorial Sanatorium opened on his land: the first tuberculosis sanatorium west of Ontario. Dr J. C. Fagan, the province's medical health officer, was its first director; Dr R. M. Irving served as first medical superintendent from 1907 to 1909. By 1910 it held about 49 patients with four nurses and twelve attendants. After the First World War the federal government added buildings for soldiers who had contracted tuberculosis overseas, and in 1919 the sanatorium started its own newspaper, The Tranquillian — the Kamloops Museum and Archives still holds three copies of volume 1, number 1, dated 1 August 1919. The Society could not pay for what it had built. In 1921 the province took over management to settle mounting debts and renamed the place Tranquille Sanatorium; in 1922 it bought the neighbouring 580-acre Cooney property for $47,356 and expanded. By 1932 the sanatorium could accommodate 360 patients. What grew there was not a hospital but a company town with a hospital in it: farm, dairy, bakery, power plant, laundry, gymnasium, auditorium, tennis courts and a school. The laundry alone processed some 682 kilograms of textiles a day, serving other health facilities including Royal Inland Hospital. Underneath it ran about two kilometres of tunnels, built in stages between the 1920s and the mid-1970s and measuring roughly 2.4 metres square. They were utility corridors and a delivery system: electric carts nicknamed "Tuggers" pulled trailers of food and laundry between buildings, and staff and patients used them to move about in winter. Rooms opened off them — a barbershop, storerooms, dining halls, offices, showers and a morgue. Effective drug therapy ended the sanatorium's reason to exist. It closed in 1958, the buildings passed to the province's Mental Health Services Branch, and from 1959 the site operated as an institution for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. At its peak it held roughly 700 residents — about a quarter of everyone institutionalised on those grounds in British Columbia — across more than forty buildings, and employed around 600 people, making it the third-largest employer in Kamloops. Its end was a political event, not a quiet wind-down. On 7 July 1983 the Bennett government's restraint budget announced the closure, with no community placement plan for the residents. On 19 July members of the BC Government Employees' Union occupied the institution: they changed the locks, evicted management, raised a hand-painted union flag, elected a council with representatives from each shift and ran the place themselves while keeping every essential service going. The occupation lasted twenty-two days and ended on 9 August with a government agreement; Diane Purvey's account dates it a day later at each end, 20 July to 10 August. The institution nonetheless closed; the last residents were discharged in 1985, about eighty of them placed locally in Kamloops. Diane Purvey's study of the closure records that a June 1984 poll found 75 per cent of surveyed residents opposed it, and that follow-up research found "invisible walls" still isolating people who had been physically relocated. One point deserves care, because it is routinely blurred online. The formal finding of systemic physical, emotional and sexual abuse in a British Columbia institution belongs to Woodlands in New Westminster, in Dulcie McCallum's report The Need to Know, submitted in August 2001 and released in July 2002 — not to Tranquille. What the province did extend to Tranquille was its response: the 2002 apology delivered by Gordon Hogg, then Minister of Children and Family Development, and a $2-million trust fund for support and counselling covering former residents of Woodlands, Tranquille, Glendale and Endicott. No equivalent public inquiry into Tranquille has been published. The property has changed hands, and stories, ever since. In September 1991 Giovanni Camporese, president of A&A Foods, bought it for about $8 million and renamed it "Padova City" after his birthplace; his golf course and marina never appeared and the province repossessed the land after a 1997 foreclosure. In 2000 B.C. Wilderness Tours took it through a court-ordered sale for $1.5 million and hired Tim McLeod as development manager for a scheme called Tranquille on the Lake. By 2013 fourteen buildings had been restored, heritage tours ran, and an oral-history project with Thompson Rivers University and the Kamloops Heritage Society had interviewed roughly a hundred former staff and patients. The Agricultural Land Commission has repeatedly refused to release the farmland: in 2022 it turned down an application to exclude about 51 hectares, saying prime agricultural land should stay in farming. On 17 June 2026 Castanet reported that the whole 476-acre property at 4600 Tranquille Road — five titles and more than three kilometres of lakefront — had been listed for a little under $15 million, the conditional development contract having lapsed.

Tranquille is at 4600 Tranquille Road, on the north shore of Kamloops Lake about fifteen minutes' drive west of downtown Kamloops and just past the airport. It is private property and it has never been a public park. As of August 2026 you should not plan a visit without checking first, because the operation that used to receive visitors has gone quiet. The seasonal business Tranquille Farm Fresh ran a farm market, a corn maze, heritage tours and, from September 2013, guided tunnel tours at $25 a head, which from 2014 became the annual Tranquille Tunnel Theatre productions staged with Chimera Theatre of Kamloops; later years added Halloween escape rooms in the tunnels. Its website, tranquillefarmfresh.ca, no longer resolves at all, and tranquille.ca now serves a single promotional page for the Tranquille on the Lake development. On 17 June 2026 the whole 476-acre estate was listed for sale at just under $15 million after the conditional development contract lapsed, with 300 acres currently leased for cattle grazing. Until a new owner settles the site's future, treat any tour listing you find online as unconfirmed and contact the property directly. Do not go in uninvited. The buildings are derelict and were already full of vandalism, broken infrastructure and evidence of partying when the tunnels were surveyed in 2013; the tunnels themselves are unlit and require stairs. Beyond the physical risk, the flats hold registered archaeological sites and, on expert assessment, ancestral Secwépemc burial grounds, so wandering the ground is a heritage matter as well as a trespass. What you can do freely is better than it sounds. The complex is plainly visible from Tranquille Road and from the lakeshore, and it photographs as what it was — a white-painted company village on a green delta, not a horror set. The Kamloops Museum and Archives holds the Tranquille Sanatorium collection: annual reports from 1907 to 1932, correspondence received by Dr Fagan in 1907, the first issue of The Tranquillian, inspection certificates, maps and architectural drawings. Most of it is open to researchers; one patient file and two photographs were restricted for privacy, with the last restriction lapsing in 2026. If you want to stand where the sanatorium's dead actually lie, the address is the Old Men's Provincial Cemetery on Sixth Avenue in Kamloops, where their caskets were reinterred.