Haunted Utah

Top FIVE in utahhaunted places What Lurks in Your Backyard?

By Danny B. Stewart

Utah is a haunted state. More so than most people realize. There are all manner of folkloric and legendary spooks and boogies lurking about in our backyard. Here is my list of the top-five most “haunted” and interesting places in Utah:

5 North Temple. In 2018 I spent several dangerous nights (collecting stories here was one of the stupidest, most dangerous things I’ve done for an article) roaming about North Temple, specifically the area west of the Guadalupe Bridge. After midnight this stretch of road becomes Escape From New York meets Night of The Living Dead. I was collecting tales of headless phantoms that float around the TRAX station next to the State FairGrounds, and a

footprint-leaving specter that haunts the Mestizo Coffee House alongside a gnome who can be seen rushing across the dining room. There are numerous haunted spots’ along this stretch of road.

4 The lowest west section of Orem’s Center Street (between the freeway and Geneva Road) has a long tradition of weird events. I grew up on a racehorse farm that was tucked away in this area. During my time here, I heard rumors of shadow people, one haunted radio, malfunctioning robots that hide in the abandoned buildings, hermit serial-killers who hid in the swampy areas just north of the street, four different haunted houses, a skeleton lady who hid in farmers’ chicken coops, and one instance of two escaped elephants. The area has since been developed, but if you decide to go exploring, there are several spots in the area that might be worth taking a closer look at.

3 The Provo Vortex. This is my baby. I’ve been actively collecting stories about this area for almost twenty years. There is a square mile radius of spooky joy that sits predominantly in the Grandview Neighborhood of Provo, with the epicenter being Lion’s Park, at 950 W 1280 N Street. I have single handedly collected more than forty different stories involving missing time, teleportation, Faerie and Gnome sightings, Ufological phenomena, and shadow people. I give a two-hour after midnight walking tour of this area to those brave enough to follow me into the woody abyss.

2 Logan, Utah and the surrounding Cache Valley. There is a lot to unpack here. I’ve only been collecting data in this area for a year, but I have already found a plethora of great stories. I’m in the process of collecting them for a ghost tour I am building as my Master’s Project at Utah State University. I’m up to my neck in rumors of “haunted” comic book stores, a female spirit that haunts the local skate shop, and thespian spirits who continue to “perform” at pretty-much every theater in the area. If you are ever in town, I recommend you look skyward, as there are lots of strange things going on in the skies above Cache Valley. I have personally seen seven different unexplainable objects flying about the night sky. Then there are the urban humanoid sightings — or, as it is more commonly known — Bigfoot.

1 Coming in at number one in our countdown is Utah Lake. Several Utah cities border the lake, each area having developed many of its own interpretations of the strangeness within and around it.

From a strictly aesthetic standpoint, Utah Lake is a creepy place to visit. There is a “monster” in the lake that has been pulled from early Native American tales as well as reports and sightings from the early Mormon settlers of the area. The morphology of the beast(s) range from a fire-breathing alligator to giant serpents with dog-like ears, to small, dangerous merfolk known as “water-babies.”

I have also found several accounts of people finding large three-toed footprints along the west side of the lake. These have been found near the shore areas and further west from the Lake. I find Utah Lake to be one of the most supernatural places in Utah.

Be careful out there!

Fiona burning sage in the labyrinth outside her home. She uses the labyrinth to help people work through dilemmas.

In service to the spiritual world

Moab-Based Fiona Raison Helps Ghosts To Move On

By Rachel Fixsen

Fiona Raison has been a healer for 30 years, helping both the living and the dead. She can help living people find the roots of physical and emotional pain, resolve internal dilemmas or get in touch with lost loved ones. She can help ghosts — “trapped souls” — get unstuck from the “in-between.”

Raison explained that ghosts don’t know they’re dead, and can’t move on to the next phase of existence. They’re invisible to those living in the third dimension. Ghosts can see and hear living people, but they can’t

communicate, leaving them lonely, frustrated and confused. If this sounds like the plot of the movie The Sixth Sense, Raison said it is very much like that. Souls can get stuck, she said, when a person dies quickly and unexpectedly. “Murders, car crashes, accidents — that’s when souls just get trapped,” she said. “They don’t have time to transition gently.” Raison, who is from England, began her service to the spiritual world decades ago when she was approached by a ghost in London. “Ghosts come to people who can help them,” she explained.

She wasn’t sure what to do at the time, and sought advice from her masseuse, who she knew was a healer. Together they helped the ghost move on.

Since then, she’s helped many ghosts. She remembered one instance when she was part of an event-planning team organizing a gathering in a 15th Century castle outside London. As she lit candles on a long, formal dining table, preparing for a party of 50 guests, the flames suddenly all went horizontal. She felt a heaviness — “a sense of wading through treacle,” she said — and realized there was a crowd of ghosts in the room.

She told the event host that she needed some time to clear the building

before the guests could enter. She had a “group conversation” with the spirits, asking if they knew they were dead. “None of them did,” she said. She gently helped them accept their state and connect to the divine energies that facilitate moving on. An army of angels, Raison said, was ready to receive them. Once she discovered that could hone her intuition to perceive ghosts and that she had the ability and willingness to help them, she felt a sense of duty to keep doing it. There’s a creative side to it, she said, like an artist who feels a painting come through them from a higher place. Raison has also been a tour guide for many years, and it was that profession SHE HAD that first brought her to Moab 17 A 'GROUP years ago. Early on, she said it felt like CONSERVATION' WITH THE the whole town of ghosts approached her, with many souls SPIRITS, ASKING having been stuck since the years when IF THEY KNEW Euro-Americans first arrived in Moab — a THEY WERE time when the town was “pretty rough DEAD. around the edges,” she said. She recalled various buildings she’s cleared in the Moab Valley, including a vacant funeral home that was being converted into a thrift store, and the new owner asked Raison to cleanse the building first, a job she said was “really mucky.” A now-vacant lot used to have the old elementary school where a teacher asked her to clear a classroom before

opening for the school year.

Recently, new owners of the historic Apache Motel asked her to clear the old building. One of the ghosts trapped there, she said, was a dog that guests could hear lapping water throughout the night, until she helped it to transition.

Raison said that once people understand what ghosts are and what they’re going through, their fear of them subsides. “People are in fear of the unknown,” she explained. Ghosts aren’t trying to hurt anyone. “They just need to go. They don’t have the capacity to hurt you.” For both living clients and trapped souls, Raison said she can only facilitate the healing process. The person has to do the work — self-reflection, acceptance — on their own.

“We have to go through that individual process of making a connection with the divine,” she said.

Read about the ghosts at the Apache Hotel in Moab.

Andrew Tims capturing paranormal activities.

Paranormal ogden

Scary Places Frozen in Time

By Angelika Brewer

Most avoid the paranormal, while others, like Ogden local Andrew Tims, chase it, record it, and even collect it.

Tims is a filmmaker, an abandoned building explorer, and a collector of haunted items. In his home live an array of things many people would never touch, such as a handmade Ouija board carved from a cemetery tree, a cursed candle, graveyard dirt and a demon in a box. Even without seeking it out, it seems as though the frightful and the paranormal find their way to him. Before moving to his current home, he lived in a house that he says had a surprising life before becoming a residence. “The basement,” he says, “is really weird. There were all these little storage rooms, but they were metal. I asked the landlord what was up with it, and he said “Oh, it was an old mortuary. I bought it and turned it into a house.” Ogden has been around a long time. The streets are lined with historic buildings and landmarks, many of which are said to carry spirits of those who once wandered the city. Tims loves to explore, especially places he describes as “frozen in time.” He and his cousin have been making films for 13 years together, and utilize actual haunted locations as sets or inspiration for their horror films. He says

that when exploring, his goal is simply to experience and show others the moment as it stands without causing any harm to the place or its contents. “We won’t break in. We never damage property. I try to figure out if I can talk to the owners of the buildings before I enter. We won’t go in if there’s not a wide-open entrance,” he explains. Despite being difficult to scare, The Ogden Exchange Building was a frightening visit for Tims. “It was such a big crowd that I thought, ‘This won’t be scary,’ there are 10 of us.” The Exchange building has had

The Exchange building in Ogden, UT.

its fair share of visitors. What was once offices for the stockyard and the railroad, became a trade school, then a mental health clinic, and later, a haunted attraction. Now, what is left of it is entirely abandoned. There are an abundance of rumors surrounding the building and many visitors have reported paranormal activity. Tims shares that his group visit ended abruptly. “Everyone started getting a bad feeling … It started getting really sketchy. It was cold and people started feeling sick to their stomach, so a lot of people just got up and left and they went to climb out.” Nonetheless, his friend and himself, being very superstitious, refused to leave without saying goodbye to the spirits. While bidding the afterlife adieu, Tims says he and his remaining friend had an experience that had them running for the hills.

“We turned down the hall and heard a noise. We both, at the same time, turned our flashlights on. At the very end of the hall, we saw a pitch-black figure take a step from one side of the hall to the other. We looked at each other and I saw the color of my friend’s skin go straight white, so we booked it out of there.” Tims highlights the old Lucky Slice building and Union Station (which offers ghost tours in October) as other places he experienced activity from the other side. The Smith and Edwards building and the Ogden Cemetery are also supposedly haunted locations, but he says he’s never experienced anything otherworldly in them. According to Tims, many buildings on Historic 25th Street are haunted, but he has yet to explore most of them. While Ogden is full of fun for ghost hunters, there is only one place that has ever scared Tims to the point of not wanting to return — St. Anne’s Retreat in Logan. While some places don’t live up to their lore, that one, he says, exceeded it. Read about the St. Anne's Retreat in Logan on UtahStories.com

culinary creepshow

Freaky Foods to Terrify the Palate

By Ted Scheffler

Ihate cilantro. There, I said it. To me, fresh cilantro ruins everything from

Mexican street tacos to chicken vindaloo. It tastes like soap. But then, there are folks who would put cilantro on everything if they could. Which is just a way of saying that it takes all types to fill the freeways. What is horrifying to me might just be heaven to you. So, it is with a large grain of salt, and hopefully, not too much jingoism, that we take a brief tour of some of the world’s freakiest foods, including one from right here in Utah. I like octopus. Grilled. But if you’re looking for the strangest octopus eating

experience I can think of, you’ll need to book a flight to Korea, where the sannakji craze is fully blown. If you don’t believe me, just do a search on YouTube for videos of people eating live, wriggling, young, raw octopus. According to the Internet — which is always accurate, right? — an average of six people die each year from choking on live octopus.

What a way to go.

The next time you’re in a fancy Italian restaurant and the cheese cart comes by, you might want to pass on the casu marzu. It’s a stinky cheese from Sardinia that literally translates as “rotten/putrid cheese.” That’s because casu marzu goes beyond fermentation to a stage of decomposition caused by larvae of the cheese fly — translucent white worms about a quarter inch long. I’m told that casu marzu has an intense flavor. I’ll bet. Can’t find your pet guinea pig? Maybe it’s on someone’s plate. In Peru, guinea pigs are farmed for their meat, which is called cuy, is usually grilled, and supposedly tastes like chicken. (Doesn’t everything?) You can even find it in some Peruvian and Ecuadorian restaurants here in the US. Back when I was in college, my friends and I would occasionally venture over to Severance, Colorado, which is home to Bruce’s Bar. What is Bruce’s Bar known for? Well, country music and dancing, for one. And Rocky Mountain oysters for another. Yes, in addition to chicken fried steak, burgers, steak dinners and such, Bruce’s is best known for their world famous beef and buffalo balls — as in testicles. This is truly nose to tail butchery at its most literal.

And while we’re on the topic of foods that may disgust some, let’s not skip over Utah. If I told you I was going to make you a nice salad, side dish, or dessert made primarily of animal bones and skin, you’d probably say “No thanks.” But that’s precisely what gelatin is — the key ingredient in Jell–O, along with things like artificial flavors, adipic acid, disodium phosphate, fumaric acid, sodium citrate, and, in the case of Strawberry Jell-O, red dye #40.

While we’ve got red dye #40 in mind, how about a helping of KoolAid pickles? In the Mississippi Delta region, some folks are wont to liberate pickles from their standard vinegar and salt brine and submerge them in Kool-Aid for a week or so. Doesn’t really matter what color or flavor — blue, red, purple, green — those pickles are going to taste both sweet and sour, thanks to their sugary Kool-Aid bath.

The Scots have their haggis, of course. But did you know that something similar exists right here in the good ol’ USA? Yep. In southern Louisiana you can track down a dish rooted in French Acadian cuisine called chaudin (also called ponce). It’s a Cajun preparation of pig stomach which is stuffed with things like herbs, pork, rice, veggies, and spices and then typically smoked, sliced, and served over rice. Thanks in large part to Mario Batali, Italian lardo became a gourmet treat in this country. And, most of us have cooked with lard and/or bacon fat. But in the Ukraine there’s something called salo, which is straight up pork fat from the back of a pig served cold, usually with bread, and maybe not surprisingly, often followed by a shot of vodka.

Na zdorov’ya!