This is the Place! For the Strange and Unusual: Six Utah Haunted Spots

As Vincent Price once said, “Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood!” And by neighborhood, I mean the good ol’ city of salt! That’s right, mere mortals, SLUG is taking you on a tour of six local haunted spots and their urban legends. Climb aboard our sinister hell ride and let us scare the living shit outta you!

St. Anne’s Nunnery

While many probably remember it as St. Anne’s Nunnery, the Logan paranormal hotspot (about six miles up Logan Canyon) went by St. Anne’s Retreat until the 1980s. Bought and developed by Boyd and Anne Hatch alongside Floyd and Hortense Odlum in the 1920s to help further development, it wasn’t until the ‘50s, after unsuccessful attempts to give the property to the LDS Church and Utah State University, that they donated the retreat to St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. After the sisters of the parish assumed control, rumors of satanic nuns drowning babies in the pool house spread throughout Logan over the years. Unfortunately, this legend isn’t the scariest part of St. Anne’s Nunnery, as something much more sinister took place during October 1997. Three watchmen rounded up 30-plus teenagers who were trespassing on the property. They held the teens at gunpoint and restrained them in the pool, where they assaulted victims and made them believe they had been rigged to explosives that would go off if anyone moved.

Kay’s Cross

To call Kay’s Cross in Kaysville the most unsettling place in Utah’s history would be quite the understatement. The polygamist Kingston family allegedly built the large stone monument (a giant cross with a “K” smack dab in the middle of it) in 1946 after attempting to start their own offshoot of the LDS Church. In 2018, the infamous Zak Bagans and his ghost adventurers also added fuel to the fire by trying to cement a history that can’t be accurately verified. Some stories say that a Kingston patriarch buried all seven of his wives around the base of the cross; others say his favorite wife’s heart was sealed into the center. It is also said that during a full moon, when the cross was still standing, it would glow red with heat. Others recall seeing apparitions of ghosts or werewolves. The only verifiable story comes from reports from locals who witnessed the unexplained explosion of the structure on a February night in 1992, where officers discovered 80 pounds of dynamite. To this day, some believe that current members of the Kingston LDS offshoot blew up the structure to halt any rumors of satanism, though there is no confirmed or convicted perpetrator of the crime.

Moon Rock

Once upon a time, there was a place where the “pharmaceutically-inclined” folks (aka my parents) would go to commit all sorts of legal and, don’t worry folks, definitely illegal shenanigans. Along the Little Cottonwood Pipeline Trail, amongst the graffiti-ridden concrete, there is a massive (also graffiti-covered) boulder affectionately called the “Moon Rock” by locals and the Utah bouldering community. The youth of the ‘90s would go there to drink, partake in any and all drugs and then try to cling to the very top of the boulder. About a stone’s throw away is an old abandoned pavilion in ruins. Legend has it that a local satanic cult would perform ritualistic goat (and depending on who you talk to, child) sacrifices there to strengthen the group’s powers and appease their deities. Though nothing confirms this, these stories were told to scare off young pestering posers, and older SLC punks have kept this story with them and passed it down to youngsters like me. As my old man would describe it, “Moon Rock was my early adulthood — pure awesomeness.” He took his younger Mormon siblings to this spot, where he and his friends would traumatize them into believing the rock was home to truly sinister things.

Ted Bundy’s Cellar

Towards the base of Emigration Canyon there is a graffiti-covered cement door leading down to what was once an underground cellar. As a child growing up in Salt Lake during the 2000s, word was bond — when the adults in my life told me that the uncanny, lonesome standing door once belonged to good ol’ Ted Bundy, I believed them and I sure as hell stayed away. According to the legends passed down to me, the cellar door allegedly was once a part of a house rented by Bundy and was used as a location to murder his five confirmed victims here in Utah. Those who enter the cellar described feelings of being watched or of walls starting to close in on them. However, public records show that Bundy only lived in three locations while he was here in our glorious state: two in the Avenues and one near the University of Utah. One house did in fact have a cellar, which is where this legend may have originated from. There is, though, a second Bundy legend located in American Fork: the Canyon Cave, where it has been alleged one of Bundy’s crimes took place. Folks who have entered the cave have reported hearing a woman’s scream and feelings of being choked. While police confirmed that one of his victims was found near that area, any claims of an actual murder taking place in the cave have been debunked.

The Summum Pyramid

If you’ve ever wandered around Salt Lake City late at night, you may have driven past the odd and somewhat out of place Summum Pyramid. Built in 1979, it faces what the Summum website claims to be “the true north of the Earth, allowing the sides of the pyramid to face the cardinal points of the universe.” The building is also sided with Brazilian quartz crystal cuts to “tune” into specific frequencies and is home to the Summum Nectar Publications for scholars to study from. Summum’s main goal is to re-introduce an ancient philosophy based on natural principles of creation. They also still believe and perform the process of mummification and transference. They believe that knowledge comes from revelatory experiences rather than faith or common knowledge itself. Now, while locals (and the Grimm Ghost Tours) will have you believe there’s some sort of evil — specifically, sex magic — hiding within the walls of this very pyramid, it’s not too different from the mainstream faiths that permeate our very city. While some of its online verbiage is cult-ish, they’re technically not doing anything illegal.

The Bear Lake Monster

The “Caribbean of the Rockies” is allegedly home to a serpent-like creature named the Bear Lake Monster. Its origins first appear in an 1868 article from Deseret News correspondent Joseph Rich. The Bear Lake Monster, whose government name is Isabella, was last seen in 2002 (conveniently right before tourist season started back up), despite Rich coming out later in life to say that he made the whole thing up. The “real” Bear Lake monster can actually be attributed to a grizzly bear that terrorized Garden City in the 1920s, earning the name “Old Ephraim” after one of P. T. Barnum’s grizzly bears.

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