According to a 2005 Gallup survey, three out of four Americans believe in at least one type of paranormal entity. The most common belief (41 percent of respondents) is in extrasensory perception, or ESP, followed closely by haunted houses and visits by ghosts and spirits of the dead. Twenty-four percent of respondents said they believe extra-terrestrial beings have stopped by our planet at some point.
While Cache Valley may not, arguably, have the most haunted house in the U.S., the area has a long history of spooky and paranormal tales. Here’s a collection of stories found in news reports and from local sources:
No. 1: St. Anne’s Retreat, also known as The Nunnery
This collection of cabins up Logan Canyon is perhaps the best-known spooky place in Cache Valley, and is reportedly visited year round by curious youngsters looking for a thrill. However, it is important to note that St. Anne’s, officially called Pine Glenn Cove, is privately owned and the U.S. Forest Service patrols it for trespassers.
Legend has it that while the compound was owned by the Salt Lake Diocese and operated as a vacation getaway for nuns and priests in the mid-20th Century, one or several deaths occurred under suspicious circumstances. Visitors have reported that ghosts still haunt the area, especially around the now-empty swimming pool, where a supposed drowning took place.
No proof has been found to show these stories are true, but there is no denying the creepy vibe of the deserted compound of old cabins clustered into the trees just off U.S. Highway 89.
Check out The Herald Journal’s recent photo gallery of St. Anne’s Retreat, and a more full story of its history, online at hjnews.com.
No.2: UFOs and crop circles
Cache Valley has also made the news for hoaxes and stories of a suspicious nature.
On April 5, 1949, FBI agents sent a cable to J. Edgar Hoover reporting the sighting of a flash of light, explosions, and then a falling silver disc in the sky in this area. Three different men — a Utah Highway Patrol trooper in Mantua, a guard at the Army Supply Depot in Ogden and a Logan police officer — claimed they saw it.
Officials at Hill Field, now called Hill Air Force Base, told the FBI that it was two B-29s from Wendover Field practicing bombing in the west desert. However, that has not deterred speculations. Since then, other unidentified flying object sightings have been reported in the area.
In the late 1990s, crop circles appeared in local Utah farmers’ fields and in fields in Idaho and Washington. The first showed up in an 81-year-old farmer’s barley field near Providence and was dubbed the “Glyph.” According to Linda Dunning’s book, “Lost Landscapes,” the 240-foot-long symmetrical design was described by local police as a long-necked, long-tailed turtle on skis. Crop circles subsequently showed up in Smithfield, College Ward and near Cove over the next couple of years, and scientists were quick to examine and either declare them genuine or declare them a hoax.
Two men later confessed to making some of the circles, saying they used boards and strings to spell out the names “Mike” and “Joe.” They attributed the other crop circles to other Utah State University students because they all took the same physics class from professor Jill Marshall, who apparently taught them how to create a crop circle.
However, one woman, according to Dunning’s book, didn’t believe the circle in her family’s field was a hoax. Her husband planted the same field the next year and nothing would grow in or around where the design had been.
No. 3: The Weeping Woman
In the Logan Cemetery is a statue of a woman kneeling and weeping. Stories say if you stand in front of the statue under the full moon and say, “Weep, woman, weep,” she will cry real tears. Depending on who you ask, she may cry on the full moon or the anniversary of her children’s deaths, or you need to shine car lights on the statue to make the statue come to life.
The monument was erected by Olif Cronquist in honor of his wife, Julia Emelia Cronquist, after she died. Julia was reportedly inconsolable about the deaths of five of her children who died young, mostly due to scarlet fever, and would visit their graves often before dying of complications from scarlet fever herself.
Fans of the TV show Dr. Who can only be grateful the statue is not a weeping angel.
No. 4: Bigfoot/Sasquatch
In more recent memory, stories have circulated that Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, calls the mountains of Northern Utah home. After locals posted a YouTube video of a large, shadowy figure walking outside the fringes of a campfire in Providence Canyon, Bigfoot hunters from the TV station Animal Planet came calling.
They held a town meeting to ask for people’s stories about seeing Bigfoot, and interviewed a USU professor of folklore, Lynne McNeill, who said the Merill-Cazier Library’s archives have more than 50 recorded local Bigfoot sightings.
The first big sighting, according to Weeks’ book, was in August 1977, when a group of campers in the Uinta Mountains saw a large creature with a “white mantle of hair over its shoulders and half-way down its huge body.” The approximately 10-foot-tall creature stood by Fish Lake and then wandered off into the woods. Soon after, people reported sightings and said they heard howling sounds in the area, and stories of Bigfoot have proliferated.
No. 5: Theaters
There always seem to be tales of ghosts wandering the halls of theaters, and our local theaters are no different. The Caine Lyric Theater, built in 1913 at 28 W. Center St., has a ghost named Everett, according to Utah State University’s website. He played the second gravedigger in a production of Hamlet and fell victim to that thorn of theater folk: a jealous fellow actor. The first gravedigger grew upset that Everett, whose part was smaller, was getting more laughs.
No one knows what happened, but Everett stopped showing up to performances, and the first gravedigger had another skull for the grave scene. Everett’s ghost is known to prowl the catwalks, calling out to rehearsing actors and technicians. The house right loge seat is also one of his favorite hang outs, and the house right rear chandelier sways when he’s there, so the story goes.
Around the street corner at 43 S. Main St. in Logan, it’s said the ghosts of children haunt the halls of the Ellen Eccles Theatre. According to news reports, children have been spotted on the theater balcony. There are also stories about children asking for directions who are never seen again.
A little girl haunts the Main Theater in Smithfield, found at 141 N. Main St. Supposedly, investigators from Cache Paranormal Research Society have recorded phantom voices and seen objects move. In Utah reporter Andy Weeks’ book, Haunted Utah, he describes how the society conducted an investigation with a girl’s play doll. The doll reportedly moved, sliding five or six inches across the floor and lying down.
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