Fort San Sanatorium is a tuberculosis hospital in Saskatchewan. As with most institutions of the era it had its own power plant that had tunnels going to the main building for heating and utilities. Their are always rumors that the tunnels were used to transport bodies but that is not the truth. Being only about 5'5 feet high and full of utility pipes that were covered in asbestos, these were very uncomfortable. Needless to say, you would never be able to transport a body down them and even if you wanted to - where would you go?
The tunnels ran from the power plant to the main building and had the pipes branching off to the nurses' housing and other buildings along the way to spread the heat. This means the other buildings did not need their separate utilities. On our first visit to the site, the entire building was secured so we tried the tunnels. In only one of the nurses' cottages, there was a hatch on the floor under a stove that had a ladder leading down to a small room. The "basement" room had a small hole leading into the tunnels - the other cottages just had a pipe going into the tunnels. We knew the tunnels ran into the main building so we used this as our way in. We walked through the pitch-black tunnels avoiding debris on the ground, broken pipes, and asbestos. We did know that the pipes were likely asbestos so we brought the proper PPE.
Our Fort San exploration is split into three parts. We also explored the main building on site HERE and the other buildings HERE.
