Chapter Text
Some of the stories shown here were taken from the books: “Myths and Mysteries of Washington County, and “More Myths and Mysteries from Southern Utah County. Chapter Five, Return to Washington County, “by author the late Brenda Dare. Published in 1992, it is the sixth book in her uncompleted series of books known as the “Haunted Utah collection.” Which set out to chronicle as many stories and folktales of the beehive state.
I’d like to thank Mrs. Dare for her enthusiastic and exhaustive research into our state's supernatural history, as well as her son Clayton, for allowing us to republish her older works here. Most of her books have gone out of print, which is why we’re uploading the stories presented here on our hauntings pages.
We’ll be continuing to publish more excerpts on a per-town basis so everyone can see so people may continue to see and enjoy this wonderful woman’s work. In addition to her work, we’ll also be adding our notes and some stories we’ve uncovered that weren’t in her books.
We again thank Mrs. Dare for all her hard work and her family for supporting the preservation of her work.
Searching Lights of Interstate 15.
Taken from “Myths and Mysteries of Washington County.” Chapter Three, Roads to Ruin. Pg 38. Year of Publication: 1992
Should you ever find yourself driving south along Interstate 15 between Hamilton’s Fort and Kanarraville on a moonless November night, keep watch out your windows! Because if you’re lucky, you may catch a glimpse of a unique and little-known haunting.
If you look east, towards the old US Route 91, you’ll see what appears to be a pack of blue lights moving through the nearby field. This display may at first seem like some kind of private light show, but don’t let appearances deceive you. The cause of these lights is not of this mortal world, though the source may be rooted in an almost forgotten tragedy.
According to one of the surviving journals of William C. Mitchell, one of Cedar City’s founders, sometime back in the mid-1800s, a family of six was making their way toward Cedar City from somewhere in Arizona. The family patriarch was hoping to set himself up with a job in the mines, and so had packed up his wife, three kids, and his mother in a covered wagon to head towards hopefully greener pastures. Unfortunately, their trek lasted longer than he’d expected, and those green pastures turned snow-white by late November. But with their destination less than a week’s worth of travel away, the family chose to press on.
It was when they were near the present-day site of the Grand Ranch Hotel that the first signs of a blizzard began to show. Desperate to find a place to shelter, the father urged his team of horses onward toward what he hoped would be safety. But they just barely managed to make it past Murie Creek before the snow stopped them in their tracks.
Caught out on the open with the wind and snow buffeting their tiny wagon on all sides; it didn’t take long for panic to settle in amongst the family members. They did all they could to keep the cold out. Even going so far as to take apart some of their clothing to use as extra, makeshift blankets. But their efforts could only help so much when they were under a constant barrage of subzero wind and snow.
It took five whole days for the storm to abate, and nearly a week longer for the snow to abate enough that it was possible to travel through the area again safely. And when the first post-storm group of travelers came through the area, they found a dreadful scene near Murie Creek.
When they came across the family’s covered wagon, they opened it up and found the cold, warped faces of three dead people staring back at them! It would quickly become apparent that all except the children had perished in the storm, and the only reason they had survived was due to the surviving adults bedding them down further and further on the floor of the wagon below the spare layers of clothing that’d been taken off their dead family members.
The wagon had to be partially disassembled to get the children out without forcing them to fully witness the horror of their dead family members. The frostbitten bodies of the adults had frozen stiff and couldn’t be safely removed from the wagon. This thanks to both the storm, and needing to be taken apart, was in no condition to finish its final journey, leaving its discoverers with an unenviable decision.
Deciding that they didn’t want to wait until the corpses had thawed, and figuring that leaving them would be a disservice, the patriarchs among the group decided to borrow a page from the Vikings book. After the children had been removed and sequestered safely away within the traveler’s covered wagons, the half-taken-apart wagon was set alight and burned on the spot as a funeral pyre. As soon as they were certain almost nothing remained and the last embers had gone cold, they continued to Cedar City; where the story was later recounted to William C. Mitchell and a few of the other town founders.
Whatever happened to those children and their rescuers is unknown. The records of their names and the lives that they led after this tragedy become lost to the annals of history. But what is known is that ever since that dreadful winter’s day, lights have been seen in the area where the adults of the family died.
They move like lanterns in the dark. Clustering in the area where it’s thought the wagon finally came to rest; each of them then moves out in three different directions before disappearing one by one at a certain distance.
It’s thought that the lights are the souls of the three adults. Forever left wandering the plains due to the horrible circumstances of their deaths and the denial of a proper funeral and eternally searching for the missing members of their family unaware of their survival. Leaving them to fruitlessly search the plains until the final Judgment Day.
***NOTE: 5/07/2006. Although this haunting is more associated with the Kanarraville area, we’ve interviewed residents of New Harmony who have claimed to see these lights travel as far as the city limits. In addition, some historians who believe the report say that the wagon actually came to a stop closer to New Harmony than Kanarraville. For simplicity’s sake, we’ve chosen to place the story on both towns’ pages.
The Last Train out of New Harmony.
Taken from “Myths and Mysteries of Washington County.”Chapter 3, Roads to Ruin Pg 33. Year of Publication: 1992.
Located less than an hour’s drive away from St George, and nestled only four miles from Interstate 15, New Harmony is a small town with a modest history to match its equally modest population. Settled in 1862 by a gathering of families driven from Fort Harmony by floods, the town has rarely seen the population grow just beyond two hundred people during its one hundred and thirty-six years of existence.
Many of its current residents will tell you though, that they wouldn’t trade their quiet lifestyles for anything else and it’s not hard to see why. The area is peaceful; with its tranquility only broken by whatever sounds are carried off the interstate, and if you believe the older timers, the occasional sound of a train running along the rails just outside of the town center.
However, the rails haven’t seen actual service since 1985, which is when the Cedar City to Hurricane Railroad shut down its branch into New Harmony after the Bald Hill Mine closed its doors. Like the town, there isn’t a lot that can be said about the Hurricane Road, which was built in 1892, with the branch through New Harmony being added sometime in 1908 and lasted nearly ninety years before completely going out of business in 1990.
As far as my research can tell, there were no major accidents during the branch’s lifespan that resulted in significant fatalities. Of course, there were deaths every so often as railroading was and still is one of the most hazardous jobs one could have back then. But the lack of any truly devastating derailments leaves no historical basis for why a ghost train would run along the old tracks outside of town.
Yet still, the train runs. Some of the residents that live near the old tracks report that on seemingly random days; they’ll feel the ground beneath their feet shake, and even sometimes hear the shrieking of metal wheels moving along the worn-down tracks. There haven’t been any reports of some kind of horn or whistle; although residents some have spoken of distantly spotting the headlight of a locomotive moving down the tracks that winks out as it draws near the witness.
All anyone can speculate as to why this train and presumably its crew choose to roam this forsaken section of track. But perhaps this particular haunting isn’t linked to any particular tragedy and is instead a window through which to view the echoes of a bygone era when the iron horses ruled the land.
The Burnt House on South Rachel Lane.
During The Ghost Hunter’s Society of Lower Utah’s investigation into the later-mentioned haunting of Alistair’s General Store, we were informed of another supposedly haunted house out on South Rachel Lane When we went to investigate; we couldn’t find any trace of the house. But that isn’t too surprising since, according to the person telling us the story, it’d been flattened by, fire twenty years ago after having stood abandoned since the 1960s.
The reason for its notoriety and abandonment was, again, according to the person who relayed the story to us. There was an unhappily married couple living in the house at the time. The husband wasn’t the nicest guy around; in fact, he was a pretty heavy drinker who’d throw child-like temper tantrums whenever his wife didn’t meet his every need. Despite his drunkenness, he managed to successfully retain employment as a lawyer somewhere in town. His exact place of employment couldn’t be placed.
One night, he came home to find out that she hadn’t finished making dinner. For some reason, having to wait drove him into a bloody rage, and so he decided to punish his wife for one missed dinner too many.
What happened next, if it could be verified, could be considered one of the most brutal murders in Utah’s history. The crazed husband supposedly dragged his wife by the hair to the kitchen and beat her senseless with a meat cleaver. Then, once she’d been thoroughly “tenderized,” he went about chopping off her fingers since in his mind; she wasn’t using them and therefore didn’t need them anyway.
At some point during this torture, he succumbed to total inhumanity and ended up hacking her to pieces, leaving the kitchen and himself a complete bloody mess. Then, for the first time in his life, he felt compelled to try and clean his house. Unfortunately for him, his wife’s screams hadn’t gone unnoticed and the cops arrived midway through his clean-up and arrested him there and then.
At his trial, he decided he wanted to represent himself and pulled out every trick he’d learned from his time in the law firm he’d once worked out to get himself off the hook. It was this prowess as a lawyer that would be his undoing, as the jury decided that he was of sound mind at the time of the crime and sentenced him to death. He was later executed in Draper sometime in the 1950s.
That is of course, if you believe the local rumor mill. People have emailed us saying that the house became one of the most haunted places in the world following the trial, with rumors attesting to all manner of paranormal happenings. Some people claimed to have heard the doomed wife’s screams carry on the wind on the anniversary of her murder. Others have told me that they broke into the house and could steal identity where the bloodstains even after so many years of decay. Yet still, a woman working at Alistair’s claimed to have seen the blood-covered form of a man standing in the kitchen window.
Normally we don’t seek to discredit people’s claims, but after doing a bit of digging into the town records, I’m afraid I’ll have to declare this legend debunked. There was no record of this heinous crime happening in New Harmony during the mid-century. In fact, a look through the local land claims and holding titles shows that all the land where the house was supposed to be has been owned by the same family since the 1920’s, and not once has it changed hands. Even more damning is how there’s never been a permit filed to build a house there.
As for what those who claimed to have seen inside the house have experienced, I can only speculate. Our best guess is that they found maybe the remains of an outbuilding or barn and a legend was born out of it. Unless we find evidence to the contrary, this story will be chalked up to another case of rumor and hearsay.
Alistair’s still on the Job
Taken from “Myths and Mysteries of Washington County.” Chapter Four, Pioneering Spirits; Ghosts from the Frontier Pg 74. Year of Publication: 1992.
Located on the corner of 100 N and N Main, right across from the New Harmony post office stands a charming testament to the years gone by that still serves as part of the local community to this day.
The rather simple style two floor plus basement brown wooden building was constructed a year after the town was founded in 1863 by Alistair Young. When it was finished, the building was christened by locals as “Young’s General.” The building proved popular as one of the first of its type in this corner of Washington County and was dutifully kept in good shape by Alistair for over forty years until his death at age eighty-seven in 1905.
After that, the store was passed onto his grandson. Who kept it running until 1931 when, like so many others around then, the fortunes of the Young family all dried up. The grandson was forced to close the store due to lack of business, and he and the remainder of his family all packed up and went out west in search of greener pastures. Their departure left Alistair’s pride and joy to waste away in the uncaring Utah sun, where it would’ve eventually collapsed into a pile of sun-bleached timbers were it not for a second use caused by the very thing that drove away the last of the Young family.
In 1934, the Olsen family was making their way out west with similar intentions to the departed Youngs when they made a stop in New Harmony to try and find enough work to refuel their car. As the family’s matriarch, a recently widowed woman named Pearl was walking through town with her three children; six-year-old Hector, four-year-old Evangeline, and the twelve-month-old Jamey.
The group found themselves standing in the doorway of the old general store. Despite the building’s dilapidated condition, Pearl chose to knock anyway in the hope that maybe its condition was merely due to lack of upkeep instead of abandonment. Almost immediately after the first knock, the door to the building swung open as though it were being pulled by an invisible hand.
Curiously, the group stepped inside, hopeful that they’d be greeted by a kindly host. But instead found the barren remnants of a once-thriving icon of the New Harmony community. At first, Pearl was rather wary of the building. But after walking up, down, and around its two fifty-by-twenty-foot floors, she found herself falling in love with the place.
“Mom couldn’t explain why, but she just had a feeling we needed to be the ones caring for the place,” Hector Olsen said when recounting the story behind his mother’s purchase of the old property.
Back out east, Pearl had been a talented seamstress living in a now incorporated suburb just outside of Chicago and she’d brought along many of her tools and remaining supplies when she and her children had struck out in search of a better life. After making a quick call out to where the Youngs had settled, Pearl purchased the general store with what little money she’d had left.
The Youngs were happy to be rid of the property, though they were surprised to discover that they wouldn’t need to mail back the key to get inside. Hector noted, “They told Mom that they’d locked the place up tight when they’d left for the last time. When she told them that the door had been opened for us, she said that the guy nearly fell off his chair!”
After all the paperwork was signed and a little work was done to keep the place standing, the family reopened the place as a sewing shop where Pearl made affordably priced and comfortable clothing for the residents of New Harmony.
“It was like something out of a fairytale.” Recalled Evangeline, Pearl’s oldest daughter, “We went from paupers to what felt to us like royalty nearly overnight.”
For many years afterward, and much like the Young family before them, the family took great care of the old building. And eventually, when the Second World War broke out and her fabric supplies ran low, Pearl converted part of the shop back into a general store while still keeping the seamstress area open for mostly repairs.
“When we first found the place, most of the stuff meant for food storage was still inside and pretty new for the time. Ma never got rid of any of it and kept it all downstairs in storage. After we hauled it back up and dusted a lot of it off, well that was when things started popping off.” Hector recounts.
“We lived on the upstairs floor, and every night we’d hear someone fiddling with the cash register. Mom would always grab the boys and run down to check, thinking we were getting robbed but they never found anybody.” Evangeline said. “And the basement, oh that basement was the worst! If we happened to be down there around the same time we heard someone fiddling with the cash register, the next thing we’d hear would be boots thumping their way down the stairs, and what I always thought was the sound of rattling chains.”
Little information exists about what the building was like when Alistair first opened it, but what I could find suggested that the elder Young kept the store’s safe in the basement. As was customary, at the end of each night, Alistair would count out the money collected throughout the day and then take it down to the safe. However when I asked Pearl's children if they’d ever seen a safe downstairs, neither of them remembered one.
“If it had been there, it was long gone by the time we came around. But I guess the jangling of coins makes more sense than the rattling of chains.” Evangeline laughed.
Another haunting Hector recounts happening involved a spectral helpful hand after the wartime rationing died down and they started getting more fresh stock in.
“Each morning, Mom would have Jamey and I go down and sort whatever products we got delivered. Unfortunately for her, the two of us were a little lazy and would sleep in instead of doing our work. But whenever we finally woke up and hurried down to try and do what she asked, we’d find everything all neatly sorted. The first time it happened, we thought Mom had done it herself and planned to chew us both out later, but she commended us on how well we did the job! I don’t think either of us ever fessed up and told her the truth.”
And if that wasn’t enough, the helpful specter also once stepped in to save the building! After the war had wrapped up, Pearl had saved up enough money to have the place electrified and paid for a local electrician to do the job. But less than two weeks later, he was called back to the building, along with the local fire department. It’s a night that Evangeline remembers well.
“Mom told us afterward that she’d been asleep when the voice of an old man woke her up by shouting “fire!” When she got up, she said there was a faint smell of smoke in the air around her. So, she got all of us, kids, up, though none of us were in the mood to be awake, when she told us there was a fire, we got our butts in gear and hurried outside. She took all of us to the neighbor’s house and then used their phone to call the fire department. When they all got down there, the only real damage was a bit of singed wood. If it weren’t for that voice though, we might’ve lost the whole house.”
After the fire, the haunting around the building slowly died down, that was until 1956 when the ghostly presence finally showed itself to the youngest member of the Olsen family. By that time, Hector was living in St George and had started working in an office and Evangeline had gotten married and already had a kid of her own. The only one of the original Olsen children still living with their mother was Jamey.
By all accounts, he was happy to continue working at his mother’s mixed goods store and probably would’ve worked there until his dying day. On the night of August 12th, Jamey had been sweeping up the store after closing, his mother had already gone to bed. At some point during his rounds, he looked up and spotted a man standing by the counter, surveying his work with a critical eye. All of the man’s clothing was older like he’d stepped right out of the late 1800’s. Jamey and the man locked eyes for a couple, of tense seconds, before the man curtly nodded in approval of his work and then slowly faded from view like a mirage!
Hector recounts what happened next, he’d been winding down after a long day of office work when his phone started ringing off the hook. He picked it up and was surprised to hear his brother’s panicked cries from the other end of the line.
“He told me, “Hec, I just saw a man down in the store!”
“I thought he was trying to tell me there’d been a break-in at first, so I asked him why he was calling me instead of the police. And then he said,”
“I don’t think the cops are going to be any help Hec! It wasn’t some ordinary guy, he disappeared! He was there, and then just gone, faded away into nothing right before my eyes!”
“All that racket and yelling eventually woke up Mom. She got him calmed down, but he didn’t want to stay in the store anymore. He was gone the very next day, moved all the way out to Idaho. We haven’t heard much from him since, though I hear he might’ve started a family of his own.”
Unfortunately, Pearl’s time at the store couldn’t last forever. Already verging on forty when she bought the store, by 1971 she was approaching seventy-five and after a bad fall, was forced to retire and put the over one-hundred-year store up for sale. Luckily, the Utah State Historical Society quickly stepped in and purchased the property for a generous sum. This allowed Pearl to move in with her daughter’s family in Park City, where she passed away only a couple of years later at the age of seventy-nine.
After finalizing the sale, members of the historical society set to work returning the building to how it resembled when Alistair Young first opened it back in the 1860s. Anything that they couldn’t source from the original store was recreated based on whatever scarce existing photographs were taken back in Alistar's day. Between the two of them, Pearl’s children are happy to see the building’s lifespan continue beyond their mother’s efforts. However, the fact that there doesn’t seem too much representation of her in the store has ruffled a few of their feathers.
“It’s sad to see them focus so much on Alistair’s time without giving our mother any credit even though she’s the only reason the place stays standing,” Evangeline says. “I’ve spoken over the phone with a few of the people running it though, and they said they’ve been talking about doing a summer where they recreate our mother’s shop for the fiftieth anniversary of the war.”
In 1987, custodianship of the building was transferred to the Washington County Historical Society, which maintains the building as a “living museum,” with actors in period dress showing what sort of goods were bought back then. In addition, they also sell locally sourced recreations of candies, sweets, and other items for young historians in training to buy.
It’s a lovely little place, which I’ve already taken a couple of visits out to with my children. But beneath all the cheer and history, some have reported seeing a man in period clothes with a short patchy beard watching the tourists making their way through the shop. He never says anything to them and seems to disappear just as quickly as they notice him. Whenever asked, the other actors running the building will always say that no actor like that exists on their payroll. But those who are aware of the building’s haunted history know that what they saw is old Alistair Young, keeping an eye over his store in death just as he did in life.
***Note: 07/18/2006. Ghost Hunter’s Society of Lower Utah was fortunate enough to be invited by the Washington County Historical Society to do an overnight investigation of Young’s general store on April 23rd 2007.
Since the time of Dare’s first writing about it, the group bi-annually rotates between the building’s appearance to reflect when the building was in the care of the Olsen family. While there, we managed to record several instances of ghostly phenomena. Our findings and the full story of our time in the building can be found on our investigation’s page.
Save the Last Dance at Fredbear’s Family Diner
Taken from “More Myths and Mysteries from Southern Utah County. Chapter Five, Return to Washington County. Pg 63. Year of Publication: 2000
I don’t know how a story like this managed to slip past my radar for so long! But after doing a lot of research on the building in question and sifting through all the aspects of its tragic history, I understand why many in New Harmony feel like some things are best left forgotten.
Situated just a stone's throw away from the tracks where the infamous ghost train runs; the New Harmony Dance Hall sits as a decaying monument to better times. The long, red barn-like structure was once the site of merriment and laughter as generations of young lovers from around the area walked through its doors and entered a place where the worries of the world could be thrown away. Its location close to the tracks made it an ideal hop-off point for those looking for the kind of fun that couldn't be found at the bottom of a bottle. Each Friday, a train nicknamed, "The Dancer's Special," by the railroad men would ferry those wanting to dance out to a small depot where they could hop off and walk the rest of the way to the building. Once there, they would enter a world of glitz, laughter, and music.
Unfortunately, not everyone who visited the dance hall did so with the purest of intentions. Local legend maintains that, sometime in the 1920s, there’d been a young married man from Hurricane who’d fallen out of love with his wife after less than five years of marriage. He’d gone and sought out a mistress, but knowing that they’d be quickly found out if they met up in Hurricane, he decided to take her on the “Dancer’s Special” every couple of weeks to the smaller New Harmony to get lost in illicit their romance amongst the thrall of other young dancers.
His attempts to keep the affair under wraps were;t successful as the popularity of the Dance Hall meant that other people from around Hurricane would also frequent it. He and his lover were spotted by one of his wife’s friends, who reported the man’s infidelity to the unaware woman at the first available opportunity. She was stunned by this accusation, but not entirely surprised as she’d already begun to suspect that her husband’s late nights out were more than him meeting up with his friends. To prove it, she played along as though things were still normal for a couple of weeks until her husband’s next rendezvous with his lover.
After he left the house, she put on her most concealing hat and followed him to the train station. There, she watched him meet his lover and then board the train bound for New Harmony. Distraught by this irrefutable evidence of his infidelity, she ran back home to their house after the train had left, and managed to find where her husband kept his revolver. After stowing it into her purse, she went back down to the station and bought a ticket for the next train.
Throughout the night, the husband and his mistress had remained unaware of the coming danger. As always, the two had spent most of the night getting lost in each other’s eyes as they danced the hours away. That was until the doors of the dance hall swung open and the man’s wife marched into the building. Her cheeks were stained with angry tears as she shouted out her husband’s name.
As soon as she saw him, still wrapped in his lover’s arms, the anguished wife pulled the pistol from her purse and with her arm held high, pulled the trigger. Her aim was true as the blast sent a bullet slamming into the man’s chest and killing him on the spot. Shattering his heart just as he’d broken hers.
As he slumped forward, blood training from the hole in his chest, his lover let out an anguished wail of grief-stricken terror. But her cries died as quickly as the self-widowed woman sent another bullet crashing through her skull.
As the two dead bodies crashed onto the floor, those dancers not stuck in a state of shock acted quickly and tackled the wife down before she could fire on anyone else. But According to several eye witlessness though, it hadn’t seemed like she’d planned on taking any more lives that night. Because after firing her second bullet, she’d frozen stiff, with the only sign of life being her stifled, trembling sobs. Having gotten her revenge but at the cost of both her sanity and freedom.
In her trial over in St George, the wife was said to have remained locked in a state of total catatonia, barely even seeming to register her surroundings. It was because of this that the judge sentenced her to a lifetime confinement to the USH; where she eventually died sometime in the 1940’s.
After the scandal behind the double homicide came and went, the dance hall found itself receiving fewer and fewer visitors as the Roaring Twenties died out and morphed into the Great Depression, eventually resulting in the hall’s owner’s shuddering its doors to the outside world. But it didn’t take long before the building attracted attention again, but for a very peculiar reason. It seems that not long after it closed, a couple of railway men managing the nearby freight depot heard the sound of a woman wailing in terror. The men left their posts and sprinted towards the direction the sound came from, which turned out to be the dance hall. Upon approach, they heard the crack of a gunshot rip through the night air! Convinced that they’d just heard someone being murdered, they ran back to the depot and called the police. But as you might’ve already suspected, when they arrived, nobody could find any current traces of ill goings on.
At first, people assumed the whole episode was a delusion brought on by overworked imaginations. What was harder to ignore though, were the numerous sightings of the unfaithful husband’s ghost, his chest covered in blood, solemnly peering out of the hall’s windows. Those brave enough to get close to the apparition noted how his lips seemed to be moving as if begging for forgiveness that would never come. Sometimes joining him is the ghastly visage of a bloody woman. The upper right half of her forehead blown open by a jilted wife’s bullet. Unlike her lover, the mistress wears an angry expression on her ruined face and blood-covered eyes glowed hot with anger. Forever wrathful about her fate.
It wasn’t just inside the building that hauntings were reported either. After she died in the 40s, it’s said that on the anniversary of the double killing, the ghost of the crazed wife repeats her trip from the abandoned depot to the front doors of the dance hall. Her form is said to shake with repressed sobs as she marches along to her murderous date with destiny.
Normally, I could end the story there. But a recent incident at the derelict Pioneer Mall over in Hurricane has led me to uncover a link between one of southern Utah’s most infamously unsolved crimes and the former dance hall. It seems that before he opened Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, the infamous Henry Rosebury had another restaurant, the bones of which were the New Harmony Dance Hall!
Few records exist of Mr. Rosebury’s time in New Harmony. The place known as Fredbear’s Family Diner was a rather humble affair, though what I was able to uncover through public records I could uncover suggests that there were only three animatronics in the building, He ran the business with his wife Amelia, his sister Jennifer, and his partner William Afton from 1975 until the end of 1980. On Halloween Night, evil once again descended upon the building. Amidst the staff’s Halloween Party, a still unknown perpetrator crept in and snatched away and then murdered Henry and Amelia’s two-year-old son, affectionately known as “Sammy.” His body was found early the next morning on November 1st by his wife. The Rosebery's shuttered the doors to their restraint out of grief and moved on to greener pastures, and even worse tragedies.
The dance hall now stands alone near the remains of the depot that once brought it many a happy couple. Weeds growing between cracks in the foundation and its roof sags from many years of rain. The windows have now blown out from some of the recent super storms that have passed through the area. Unless someone steps in to save the building, it’ll quickly rot away, and take the memory of its blood-stained past with it. Considering just how unlucky setting up shop in it proved for the Bakers though, I don’t think anyone will even bother.
***NOTE: 3/17/2009. The Ghost Hunter’s Society of Lower Utah has recently found information suggesting that the double homicide mentioned in the legend didn’t actually happen at the dance hall, but instead in Hurricane itself. We’ve decided to omit the names and exact details for the sake of privacy for the victim and murderer’s surviving relatives. An attempt was made to go and investigate the Dance Hall before this, but time had already claimed the building by the time we got there. All that was found was a flattened ruin of old timbers and concrete.