Members of the ghost hopping team investigate the paranormal activity in the basement of the Rio Grande Depot in October 2017. The centuries-old building is said to be haunted. (KSL-TV)
Estimated reading time: 8-9 minutes
Publisher’s Note: This article provides an overview of Utah’s paranormal history for the historical section of KSL.com. Read at your own risk đź‘».
SCARY LAKE CITY – Utah is home to many ghost stories.
There are many buildings and places that are believed to be haunted to this day. One look at the old newspapers in the country and you will find that ghost stories have a tradition that goes back well over a hundred years.
As this is Halloween weekend, here’s a look back at some of those stories you might know and some you might not know.
The lady in purple
Over the years, many people have claimed to have seen a woman dressed in purple at the Rio Grande Depot in Salt Lake City who looks angry or unhappy.
In 2017, Colleen Murphy, manager of the Rio Grande Cafe, told KSL-TV that they see lights go on at night in a locked room at the bottom of a stairwell where there doesn’t seem to be anyone to turn them on. She also said she was locked out of the building “several times late at night” with no real explanation. Others have told her that they heard singing from the ladies’ room in the depot at night – even when the building appears to be empty.
According to legend, the woman threw her engagement ring on the tracks during an argument with her fiancé in the depot. Deciding she had made a mistake, she jumped down to retrieve the ring when she was caught and killed by an oncoming train. So says longtime Rio Grande Cafe server Dicky Holt, who was telling KSL-TV around the time the story was first heard in the 1980s.
Ghost investigators believe the building will be haunted after a nighttime excursion through the building. Is it because the legend of the Lady in Purple is true? Who knows. The building housed the state’s extensive history collection until recently. It’s always possible that something is the real cause of the haunted.
The enchanted Old Main
Almost everyone who has visited the Southern Utah University campus has heard the lore from Virginia Loomis and Old Main, a building on the university campus. The story is so well known among locals that SUU wrote about it on its own website back in 2016.
According to legend, Virginia Loomis was murdered in the late 19th century; Her body was discovered on the boulder that was used to make many of the bricks used to build the Cedar City building in 1898. It is said that some of the bricks even contain their blood. The alleged murderer Steven Farr was later hired as a janitor at the university, where vengeance was taken.
“On his first day at work, he allegedly lit the old coal stove in the basement of Old Main when something slammed the stove door on his arm,” says the official account of the SUU legend. “He burned to death, couldn’t tear himself away, and became the human torch that burned the Old Main down in 1948.”
It is said that the ghost of Virginia was seen “laughing in the flames” and that “Virginia” was written on Farr’s skull.
The dedication ceremony for Old Main on the campus of what is now Southern Utah University in 1898. The building is said to be haunted by a ghost named Virginia. (Photo: Southern Utah University)
For what it’s worth, there is no newspaper or other past record that really collaborates on this story as it was told – though a bloody brick remains in the university’s special collections.
Reference is made to at least one article in a 1986 student newspaper. There is talk of the creepy events documented from the beginning and a parapsychologist expert who was called in in 1948 to solve 50 years of buildings that haunt people.
“Supernatural activity became so common after the completion of Old Main that it was common knowledge among faculty and students (Southern Utah State College) that Old Main was haunted,” Tom Braun wrote in the article. “Ghostly apparitions were seen at night; unearthly lights glowed from the third floor windows; floating shadows swirled around the bell tower; and most famously, a soft, melodic flute began exactly at midnight and lasted until 1am. “
So is it really true? Thirty-five years after this article was published, people still claim to see or hear all of these scary events from Old Main.
The prisoner
There are a few ghost stories in Utah’s past that have not stood the test of time. You get lost in history. Thankfully, working on digitizing newspapers in Utah, they have reappeared.
The Salt Lake Herald-Republican reported a terrifying story from the Salt Lake City Jail on January 8, 1905. Two women in the prison said they saw a ghost walking through the hallways every night. The ghost was a man who wore a floppy hat over his eyes and peered through the bars in the building.
They told the newspaper that the ghost was that of a former inmate who had cruelly died there. On that particular night, one of the women said the ghost sound near a door. They went over and asked if it was really the dead inmate.
“Aren’t you dead?” She asked.
“In response, the ghost started dancing up and down the narrow hallway, waving its arms and smiling and laughing and shaking its head,” the newspaper reported. “The latter antics were too much for the hitherto brave woman. With a prayer that she might be kept until morning, she crept back into her bed, covered her head with the blanket and waited for dawn.”
Although they had never seen the man on the day of his death, they told the newspaper they were convinced it was him.
The “ghost” of Red Lopez
In early 1915, according to an article in the February 2, 1915 issue of the Ogden Daily Standard, the Bingham miners heard a voice that allegedly came from the ghost of Rafael “Red” Lopez.
Just to freshen up, Lopez was a miner who shot and killed another miner in November 1913. a week later he reportedly killed two other MPs in a manhunt that lasted until 1914. But Lopez was never found or heard from in Utah – it’s still one of the state’s biggest crime puzzles, which wasn’t closed until 2003.
Back to 1915. The report says that in an area of ​​the mine where two of the MPs were killed trying to “smoke out” Lopez, workers have been “terrorized” in recent days by the yelling of a grave voice. Was that the spirit of the notorious miner?
An undated picture of outlaw Rafael “Red” Lopez, a miner who reportedly killed six people in November 1913. (Photo: US Library of Congress)
No not this time. It’s pure fiction. It was just a prankster messing with his colleagues.
“The mine management’s investigations are said to have led to the discovery of the identity of the miner, who amused himself and frightened his companions by using his voice,” the report said.
A ghostly encounter?
Unsurprisingly, many of the most haunted areas of the state are near a cemetery.
One of the lesser known cemetery stories surfaced in 1904. As reported by the Salt Lake Tribune on May 2, 1904, “a young man” who recently met a lover one night walking through Murray City Cemetery was when “his” an anxious look met with a sight that befell him let the blood freeze. “
The sight stopped him.
“A few meters away a snow-white figure slowly emerged from the ground and hung over a grave,” the newspaper reported at the time. “The observer could see the outline of a small child who appeared to be 3 or 4 years old.”
The apparition “gradually” “disappeared” back into the earth, but then came back when the young man tried to escape from the cemetery.
“He had only moved a few steps when the pale scepter rose again from the grave and hovered over the surface of the earth. Again the young man stopped and again the ghost disappeared, ”the report continued. “The same performance was repeated a third time, with the young man turned his back on the haunted grave and fled without looking back again.”
The cemetery sexton told the newspaper that he had not seen anything during work that night. Two days after the story was published, Deseret News also copied it as “another ‘hot air’ story about a country cemetery”. That report added that “no ghost story like this had ever gotten around this close” until the Tribune article was published.
KSL.com found out about this particular story through Rachel Quist’s work at SLCHistory.org. She scoured grave records and wrote that, according to an article published earlier this month, she found “a close match” of a two-year-old child who was buried around the same time as reported.
Was that the child the young man saw? We will never know.
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