Seventy-seven dressed gophers in forty-four dioramas, and a bomb threat before opening day
The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum stands in Torrington, Alberta, a hamlet of about 200 people some 120 km north of Calgary: two small historic buildings, a century-old one-room schoolhouse and a former grain elevator office, joined by a hallway and covered in shiplap to look like one. Inside, 77 stuffed Richardson's ground squirrels, the gophers of the Canadian prairie, act out life in Torrington across 44 dioramas.
It was born of hard times and a joke. After the railway lines were decommissioned and the grain elevators closed, the village applied for a one-time $9,000 provincial grant to create a tourist attraction. At the last of three brainstorming meetings, with the district overrun by gophers, one woman suggested stuffing them and putting them on display. Farmers, hunters and veterinarians supplied the specimens, five local people learned taxidermy, and volunteers found or built the miniatures and sewed the costumes. The local artist Wayne Schneider, once an artistic director on the comedy series SCTV, painted the mural on the west wall.
The gophers hunt, fight fires, rob a bank, cut hair, play pool, serve as priests and as Mounties; one plays hockey in an Edmonton Oilers jersey, another hammers at a blacksmith's anvil, others stand on an Olympic podium. Some scenes went to great lengths for realism, down to real sheep manure sealed in plastic.
A short filler piece on Calgary television sent the news around the world before the museum even opened. PETA protested, there was a bomb threat, and in 1996 it opened anyway to more than 10,000 visitors. For years it drew thousands more each summer, charging a toonie for adults and 50 cents for children, and turned up in Reader's Digest, National Geographic, Ripley's Believe It or Not and the 2015 documentary World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Its longtime caretaker, Dianne Kurta, noted that the way of life it shows was dying even in Torrington itself. Laural Kurta, whose mother ran the museum for 24 years, took over during the pandemic and kept it going on donations.
At the end of September 2026 the museum closed until further notice. The old buildings could no longer hold the heat and humidity control the taxidermy needs, and no suitable new home had been found. The community has started an online fundraiser to build a new museum and keep the gophers in Torrington.
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