Haunted Salt Lake

With Halloween fast approaching, people are leaning into the spooky season. Tales of ghosts and ghouls abound, and many people claim a supernatural visage in the air. Places become much less friendly when the sun goes down, leading many to call them haunted.
In keeping with humanity’s strange enjoyment of all that is haunted, the Rambler toured a few of these haunted locations, armed with ghost-detecting equipment (Amazon doth provide) in the form of an EMF reader. Ghosts supposedly emit EMFs – short for electromagnetic fields – when present.
We took our EMF detector with us to each location. In every place, it showed us glimpses into the other side.
We started at the Fort Douglas Cemetery, heading amongst the graves around 9 p.m., well after the safety of the sun had left us. It was eerily calm and was very well-kept. The grass was freshly trimmed, and at first nothing really seemed to be amiss. But of course, that wasn’t to last.
Fort Douglas was established by General Patrick Connor in 1862 under the direction of Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to establish a military presence in Utah to ensure that the Mormons who had settled the area wouldn’t try and break free from the Union. The first graves here were dug in 1863 for those who fell in the Bear River Massacre, where, after months of skirmishes, American soldiers under General Connor massacred a local Shoshone tribe.
This site now has graves for men who died in every war from the Civil War to Vietnam, although most of those buried there are from before WWI. The site is also the final resting place for many prisoners of war who died in Utah, most famously including 21 German POWs from WWI.
People have reported hearing footsteps at the cemetery, although we didn’t hear anything.
We found very little supernatural activity, with two places being the exception.
The first of these is a wrought iron gate in the middle of the cemetery. No sign denotes its purpose, nor is there any meaning to it. It’s just there. And it was creepy. Just looking at it sent a chill through the air. It didn’t help that our little EMF reader was going nuts the whole time we were around it.
The other place was the grave of General Connor himself. Buried in his own little plot covered by trees, it got unnaturally warm around his remains. One would take two steps back and feel the chill bite into them, and then walk next to the grave and feel as though it were summer again.
Fort Douglas was spooky, and the EMF detector suggests the supernatural, but we are not sure it qualifies as haunted.
Next, we went to the Salt Lake Cemetery in the Avenues. While Fort Douglas was neat and tidy, this was a mess. Metal fences had been torn off their posts and overgrowth covered the cemetery walls. The place was huge. Absolutely incomprehensibly massive. You couldn’t see half the cemetery from any given point, except on top of a tall hill which had its own eeriness.
Although it began operations in 1849, the Salt Lake Cemetery was permanently established in 1851 under one George Wallace, who offered his land – roughly 20 acres – to create a cemetery for the new city. These grounds have kept the last remains of thousands of people for over 170 years.
That gives it plenty of time to develop a haunting.
People report seeing children playing, only to vanish when approached or to hear footsteps behind them, and even to see dead men roaming at dusk.
The Salt Lake City Cemetery is also home to two graves of ill repute. The first, Lilly’s grave, is the least famous of the two, and the one we couldn’t find in the dark. This one reads as follows.
“Lilly E. Gray / June 6, 1881 – Nov. 14, 1958 / Victim of the Beast 666.”
This last part is what is considered supernatural about it. Nobody knows why her husband put that on her grave, as she died of disease well into her 70s. No clues come down to us of why those words were engraved on her headstone. Anyone who knew is long dead, perhaps also victims of the beast.
The other and considerably more famous of the two is Emo’s grave. This is a mausoleum in the Jewish section of the cemetery, although no mention of Emo is anywhere on the grave. Rather, it belongs to Jacob Moritz, a very successful brewer from Germany. Moritz emigrated to the US in 1865 and after several years moving around, he came to Utah and founded what is now the Salt Lake City Brewing Co. in 1871. After founding a very successful business and becoming involved in politics, Moritz traveled back to Germany with his family and died in 1910. Soon after, the rumors of Emo’s grave began. No mention is made of who Emo is or how the legends began, but supposedly if you walk around the crypt three times chanting Emo’s name and then peer into the crypt, glowing red eyes will appear.
We saw no such eyes after completing the ritual, although by now the crypt has been sealed and a metal sheet placed over the window, perhaps to prevent something from getting out.
Other than that, the cemetery wasn’t very haunted. The vastness was creepy, but the more time we spent in it, the less frightening it became, and was more a place of peace and quiet. We saw no small number of deer there, and it was as if they were saying that this was not a place to be afraid. That is, until the sprinklers turned on. I would have rather something jumped out at me than had to listen to those banshees wail every time they turned on.
The final place we dared to journey was up Millcreek Canyon. Now many of you are probably scoffing, thinking there’s nothing haunted about old Millcreek Canyon. And to those of you who have been up there at night no longer trust that I’m human. But rather something far more sinister.
The people who have dared the canyon at night know that there is something evil in those woods. Something terrible and bloodthirsty. A common tale is that there are Skinwalkers far up Millcreek Canyon.
Skinwalkers are witches in Navajo folklore that are shapeshifters who transform into animals such as deer or wolves in order to inflict terrible harm. They have superhuman strength and speed, as well as the ability to perfectly mimic human voices in order to lure their prey closer.
According to mythology, a person becomes a Skinwalker after committing a heinous act, like the murder of a family member. They then fall into the practice of dark magic and enact their bloodlust on those unlucky enough to be caught by them.
Millcreek Canyon is home to them. Stories that fit a Skinwalker’s description abound up there. Tales of voices deep in the woods of people who couldn’t possibly be there or people with horribly twisted and malformed bodies are common. I know brave men who absolutely refuse to go into the woods at night up Millcreek unarmed and alone.
Our experience up Millcreek was especially eerie. We drove up for quite some time before pulling off at a turnout above the cabins up Millcreek. It was pitch black; one couldn’t see past the nearby tree line. We tentatively got out of the car, and it was even worse. A sense of dread hung in the air, like something terrible had happened. We heard a twig snap in the trees behind us and called it quits, rushing back to the car and speeding off without investigating. That was the end of our night.
Of course, Salt Lake City is home to more haunts than the ones we explored. Perhaps this Halloween, take care not to become another one of the many ghost stories.