Though one of the lesser populated states, Utah's urban legends nonetheless cover so
many scary stories that the entire country can find something to make their skin crawl.
Read up on some of these stories that have been told over roaring campfires in creepy
Utah for decades, becoming as much part of the state as its sites.
6 Skinwalker Ranch.
Skinwalker Ranch, also known as Sherman Ranch, is a property located on approximately 1.9
km2 southeast of Ballard, Utah that is allegedly the site of paranormal and UFO-related activities.
Its name is taken from the skin-walker of Navajo legend.
Claims about the ranch first appeared in the Salt Lake City, Utah Deseret News,and later
in the alternative weekly Las Vegas Mercury as a series of articles by journalist George
Knapp.
These early stories detailed the claims that a family that had recently purchased and occupied
the property only to experience an array of inexplicable and frightening events.
Colm Kelleher and co-author George Knapp subsequently authored a book in which they describe the
ranch being acquired by the National Institute for Discovery Science to study anecdotal sightings
of UFOs, bigfoot-like creatures, crop circles, glowing orbs and poltergeist activity reported
by its former owners.
The ranch, located in west Uintah County bordering the Ute Indian Reservation, was popularly
dubbed the "UFO ranch" due to its ostensible 50-year history of odd events said to have
taken place there.
Knapp and Kelleher cite the 1974 book The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist's Report by
Frank Salisbury and Joseph "Junior" Hicks, which details an earlier investigation into
alleged UFO sightings in the Uintah County region, as partial confirmation of their account.
According to Kelleher and Knapp, they saw or investigated evidence of close to 100 incidents
that include vanishing and mutilated cattle, sightings of unidentified flying objects or
orbs, large animals with piercing red eyes that they say were not injured when struck
by bullets, and invisible objects emitting destructive magnetic fields.
Among those involved were retired Army Colonel John B. Alexander who characterized the National
Institute for Discovery Science effort as an attempt to get hard data using a "standard
scientific approach".
However, the investigators admitted to "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific
publication."
Cattle mutilations have been part of the folklore of the surrounding area for decades, but National
Institute for Discovery Science founder Robert Bigelow's purchase of the ranch and investigation
funding was reportedly the result of his being convinced by stories of mutilations that included
tales of strange lights and unusual impressions made in grass and soil told by the family
of former ranch owner Terry Sherman.
A 2013 film entitled Skinwalker Ranch is loosely based upon the folklore surrounding the ranch.
5 Grave Robber Jean Baptiste.
Those who knew and loved young Moroni Clawson were no doubt saddened by his death in January
1862 and may have even witnessed his burial in the city cemetery on the north bench of
Salt Lake City.
Several days later, however, their private grief turned public.
An event had occurred that, according to outraged citizens and public officials, could not pass
unnoticed and without severe consequences.
Only weeks before his death, Moroni Clawson had been arrested for participating in the
sensational robbery and assault of government.
John W. Dawson, whose stormy relationship with the Mormons had prompted him to flee
the territory.
When the young man escaped from the penitentiary on January 17, he was pursued and shot down
by a Salt Lake police officer.
Since no one came forward to pay for a proper burial, Henry Heath of the city police department
purchased, with his own money, Clawson's burial clothes.
After witnessing the burial, Heath was surprised to learn a week later that, while uncovering
the grave to move the body to a family cemetery, George Clawson, Moroni's brother, had discovered
that the corpse was completely naked!
Heath quickly organized an investigation of the strange occurrence.
Finding no evidence at the grave site, he continued his inquiry at the home of gravedigger
Jean Baptiste.
His wife invited the officers into the house.
While there they noticed a stack of boxes in a corner of the room.
One of the officers peeked inside a box and found neatly folded burial clothes.
Upon further investigation it was discovered that Jean Baptiste had collected nearly 60
pairs of children's and adult's shoes, clothing, and personal belongings by robbing
some 300 graves.
He was arrested and sent to jail.
When news of the lurid discovery spread throughout the city, residents expressed both their horror
and loathing of the crime.
Mobs gathered at the jail, threatening to lynch the grave robber.
Hundreds thronged to the city courthouse during his trial.
In reaction to the situation, Brigham Young assured worried residents that the bodies
of their loved ones would rise up in the resurrection wearing the original clothes in which they
were buried.
Meanwhile, police officers tried to correct part of the problem by putting all the burial
clothes found in Baptiste's home in a large box and burying it in a single grave in the
cemetery.
Still, the question of what to do with Jean Baptiste remained.
Shunned even by his fellow inmates, he was not safe within or outside prison walls.
Arguing that the prisoner's safety could not be guaranteed, city officials had Baptiste
secretly placed in a wagon at night and taken across the Antelope Bar to Antelope Island
in the Great Salt Lake.
He was soon moved to the more remote Fremont Island in order to prevent his wading ashore
to the mainland.
Jean Baptiste's life in exile on Fremont Island was short-lived.
Only three weeks after his arrival cattle herders came to the island to survey their
animals.
They discovered that a heifer had been killed and its hide tanned for leather.
Lengths of wood had been torn from a small ranch house on the island, presumably to construct
a raft.
Leaving behind only these small traces of his existence and possible escape, Jean Baptiste
was nowhere to be found.
The mystery of the eventual fate of Jean Baptiste has never been solved.
When hunters found a skeleton with an iron clamp around its leg near the mouth of the
Jordan River in March 1893, an article in the Salt Lake Tribune retold the story of
Jean Baptiste and speculated that the skeleton belonged to the unfortunate convict.
The Deseret News contested this theory by recording the statements of police officers
Henry Heath and Albert Dewey confirming that Jean Baptiste was not wearing a ball and chain
around his leg when he was placed on Fremont Island.
This controversy added yet another puzzling element to the Jean Baptiste story.
Even today the bizarre tale of his grave robberies and island exile remains a mystery in the
annals of Utah history.
4 The Bear Lake Monster.
The Bear Lake Monster is a being appearing in folklore near Bear Lake, on the Utah–Idaho
border.
The myth originally grew from articles written in the 19th century by Joseph C. Rich, a Mormon
colonizer in the area, purporting to report second-hand accounts of sightings of the creature.
However, he later recanted the stories.
Not all descriptions of the Bear Lake Monster agree, but one team of folklorists stated
that it "is reported to resemble a serpent, but with legs about eighteen inches long on
which it marauds along the shoreline."
One article reported that the creature had "a large undulating body, with about 30
feet of exposed surface, of a light cream color, moving swiftly through the water, at
a distance of three miles from the point of observation."
Others reported seeing a monster-like animal which went faster than a locomotive and had
a head variously described as being similar to that of a cow, otter, crocodile or a walrus.
Its size was reported to be at least fifty feet long, and certainly not less than forty.
Some sightings even spoke of a second member of the species and smaller monsters as well.
An 1868 article in the Deseret News announced that, "The Indians have a tradition concerning
a strange, serpent-like creature inhabiting the waters of Bear Lake….
Now, it seems this water devil, as the Indians called it, has again made an appearance.
A number of our white settlers declare they have seen it with their own eyes.
This Bear Lake Monster, they now call it, is causing a great deal of excitement up here"
and then the author—Joseph C. Rich—went on to relate several sightings of the creature
in recent times.
The article created a stir in Salt Lake City and within a month "a news staff member…
quizzed many Bear Lake people and found hardly a person who doubted it."
LDS Church leaders took an interest in the monster and when they visited the area on
preaching tours, took the opportunity to speak firsthand with the residents of the region.
They stated that they "had conversation with brother Charles C. Rich and other brethren
from Bear Lake Valley, respecting the monster which have been seen in the lake" and found
that they declared that the testimony that had been given "by so many individuals,
who have seen these creatures in so many places and under a variety of circumstances" that
the locals considered the story to be "indisputable."
Articles about the Bear Lake Monster continued to appear over the next several years, either
reciting new sightings of the Bear Lake Monster as well as similar creatures in other rivers
and lakes in the Utah Territory or calling the sightings into question.
The number of alleged appearances of lake monsters all across northern Utah caused some
people to speculate that there was an underground channel connecting the Great Salt Lake and
other waterways to Bear Lake.
Sighting of the Bear Lake Monster continued even after Rich admitted that he fabricated
the original sightings as a hoax.
A 1907 letter published in a Logan, Utah newspaper claimed that two men had seen the Bear Lake
behemoth attack their camp and kill one of their horses, a four-year-old claimed to see
it in 1937, and a Boy Scout leader spoke of seeing it in 1946.
The last reported sighting of the monster was in June 2002, when Bear Lake business
owner Brian Hirschi claims to have seen the monster.
The monster has become a part of local folklore, partly due to sporadic sightings and partly
in jest.
For years a Bear Lake Monster Boat—a tourist boat shaped to look like a green lake monster—offered
a 45-minute scenic cruise of Bear Lake with folklore storytelling.
Another self-parody that the locals have done is to fill a float in the Garden City, Utah
Raspberry Days parade with local children and label it "The Real Bear Lake Monsters."
On another occasion, during the 1996 Raspberry Days, a competition was organized in Garden
City to have local school children name the leviathan.
The judges decided on the name Isabella, which had been submitted by an eight-year-old girl.
3 D.B.
Cooper and Richard McCoy.
A man identifying himself as "D.B.
Cooper" hijacked a plane on Thanksgiving Eve 1971, demanded $200,000 and four parachutes,
then bailed out somewhere over the Pacific Northwest.
Four months later, Richard McCoy, a Utahn and former BYU student, hijacked a plane,
collected a $500,000 ransom, and bailed out of the plane via parachute.
He was later captured and convicted of the second hijacking.
While serving his 45-year sentence, McCoy escaped prison and was later killed in a shootout
with police.
Some investigators believe that McCoy is "D.B.
Cooper," but the mystery may never be solved.
The FBI re-issued a map from the original investigation and photos: one of the parachutes,
a parachute pack, a necktie Cooper discarded on the plane, and some of the cash found along
the banks of the Columbia River.
The bureau also tried to shoot down an old theory that "D.B.
Cooper" was BYU student Richard McCoy.
In a book two decades ago, a former FBI agent and former probation officer claimed McCoy
did both skyjackings.
"Yes, we're very confident that Richard McCoy is 'D.B.
Cooper,'" former probation officer Bernie Rhodes said in 1991.
Former FBI agent Russell Calame added, "There's just too many similarities.
There's too many things that are the same."
On the ground in San Francisco, McCoy ordered his hijacked plane to fly eastward toward
Utah.
He gave pilots a list of towns in Utah to fly over, and then he bailed out somewhere
over Utah Lake.
He landed in a field south of Provo and walked to a nearby drive-in and hitched a ride home.
Calame still believes today McCoy and Cooper were the same person.
"I do.
I feel about the same.
I don't have any reason to feel otherwise, yet," he said.
The FBI press release says McCoy didn't match Cooper's description.
"The descriptions varied a lot, and that's not unusual," Calame said.
The FBI release says McCoy couldn't have been Cooper because he was home for Thanksgiving
dinner in 1971.
"I think we proved pretty conclusively that he wasn't here, that he lied about Thanksgiving
dinner," Calame said.
The debate persists long after McCoy died.
2 500 Million-Year-Old Human Footprint Fossil.
In the summer of 1968, an amateur fossil collector, William J. Meister, made the discovery of
a lifetime 43 miles west of Delta, Utah.
To his surprise he found a fossilized human footprint about the size of a US 13 shoe stepping
on a trilobite.
Now, trilobites only existed between 260 to 600 million years ago, so this makes it the
oldest human fossil footprint ever discovered!
Trilobites were small marine invertebrates related to crabs and shrimps.
Scientists currently think humans emerged 1 or 2 million years ago and only began wearing
such shoes a few thousand years ago.
This archaeological discovery could be sufficient to overturn all conventionally accepted ideas
of human and geological evolution.
According to science's currently accepted timeline of human existence on this planet,
humans advanced enough to wear shoes would not have existed hundreds of millions of years
ago.
As one might expect, this sent shockwaves throughout the scientific communities with
excitement for a new paradigm shift as well as skeptical denial.
Meister took the rock to a professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah, Melvin Cook, who
suggested he show it to the university's geologists.
But none of the geologists were willing to examine it, so Meister took it to a local
newspaper called The Deseret News and quickly became very well-known around the country.
This amazing find was presented on March 1, 1973 in a creation-evolution debate at California
State University in Sacramento.
The creationist team included Dr. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research and
Reverend Boswell of a local Sacramento church.
The scientific team consisted of Dr. Richard Lemmon of the University of California at
Berkeley and Dr. G. Ledyard Stebbins of the University of California at Davis.
Reverend Boswell said:
"I have here something that pretty much destroys the entire geological column.
It has been studied by three laboratories around the world and it's been tested and
found valid.
It represents a footprint that was found at Antelope Springs, Utah, while digging for
trilobites.
The man was digging for trilobites, and these are trilobites here and here embedded.
This is a brick mold of a trilobite footprint of a human footprint with a trilobite in it.
The man stepped on a living trilobite, burying him in the mud.
This particular strata is dated Cambrian, supposedly 500 million years extinct before
man arrived on the face of the earth.
The interesting thing about this photograph is that there is also heel marks, which would
indicate that they were made by modern man."
In a news conference, the skeptical curator of the Museum of Earth Science at the University
of Utah, James Madsen, dismissively said: "There were no men 600 million years ago.
Neither were there monkeys or bears or ground sloths to make pseudo-human tracks.
What man-thing could possibly have been walking about on this planet before vertebrates even
evolved?"
Mr. Meister claimed that when he had a geologist examine the print, the geologist offered him
$250,000 for the print.
Meister asked him, "What are you going to do with it if I sell it to you?"
The geologist replied, "I'm going to destroy it, it destroys my entire life work as a geologist."
Can you imagine the implications of mankind around the world learning or realizing we
are hundreds of millions of years older than we thought and that we have been far more
advanced than even we are today?
The questions and answers beyond this metaphoric opened doorway could cause a rippling paradigm
shift worldwide.
During one interview, Michael Cremo said:
"The reactions in your question are typical of a group that I call the fundamentalist
Darwinists.
They support the theory of evolution not for purely scientific reasons, but because it
confirms their prior commitments to a strict materialism.
They do not want to hear me, and they do not want anyone else to hear me, so they say those
kinds of things.
Sometimes they try to stop me from lecturing at universities."
Those really seeking the truth are open to new information to learn from and examine
the scientific findings rationally without bias.
We may have to dig deep within ourselves to find the answers to the questions: Who are
we?
Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
1 Rhodes Gold Mine.
Utah is full of myths and legends.
from the monsters and various haunted places, yet none is more mysterious than the lost
Rhodes Gold Mine.
This mine was supposedly used to gain the gold to coat the Angel Moroni statue, on the
top of the Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Most common beliefs are that the mine is either in the Uinta Mountains, or on the Ute Indian
Reservation, near Ouray.
Some even tie the mine into the Spanish and legendary Aztec gold mine lore.
Over the decades, some have scoffed that the mine even exists at all.
A report in the Salt Lake Tribune of May 24, 1896 was written by an unnamed man who reportedly
knew Thomas Rhodes well and provided his own memories of the man and mining.
The story states that Rhodes had brought to Utah some $50,000 in gold dust that he had
secured in California.
Then, years later he was on Strawberry Creek in the Uinta Mountains and noticed some similarities
between the rocks there and the ones he had found gold at in California.
Rhodes then panned the stream and found a little gold there.
After returning to Salt Lake City, he told LDS Church President Brigham Young about the
gold and he urged Rhodes to keep the knowledge of any mines hidden.
That's because President Young didn't want an influx of people to the area, nor any disruption
in the Mormon Pioneers' stock raising and agricultural interests.
"And it is evident that Rhodes latterly lost confidence in the importance of his find,
as he had opportunities to determine its extensiveness," the article stated.
The article also stressed that Rhodes never claimed any great knowledge of finding or
mining gold.
"The 'Rhodes' mine is only a companion myth of the "Spanish" mine at Springville, the
Kanosh legend of Spanards working the Horn silver, the Mexican shaft in City Creek Canyon,
etc.," the article concluded.
Thus, to this man, the Rhodes mine was never a mine, merely a little gold panning that
evolved into a gold mine legend decades later.
"Rich land of the Utes" was an October 11, 1897 headline in the Salt Lake Herald newspaper.
Regarding the Rhodes mine, this article stated: "It is on the Uintah reservation that the
famous Rhodes mine is located.
Everyone in Utah is familiar with the story of Rhodes' life, who for years left home in
the spring with a pack animal and regularly returned in the fall with several thousand
dollars in gold.
The secret of this hidden wealth was transmitted on the decease of the father to his eldest
son who in turn died and left it to his younger brother, the man who is at present associated
with FWC Hatherbruck in the endeavor to obtain the Indian's consent to a lease.
Operations along this line have been temporarily suspended for the reason that Hatherbruck
has been subpoenaed as a witness before a court at Provo City."
A Feb. 6, 1902 story in the Eastern Utah Advocate newspaper strongly hinted that the Rhodes
mine was a myth.
It cited how many cowboys and sheepherders have roamed the territory, where the mine
is supposed to be, and have only found copper and no gold.
The article then cited the Wasatch Wave newspaper that stated:
"It claims that an older settler said that Rhodes secured his gold dust in California
in the early days -- brought it back to Utah and cached it out in the hills.
About once a year he would visit his treasure box, and upon his return with gold, people
were led to believe he secured it on the reservation."
Notwithstanding such scoffing, the Utah Mining Review of October 30, 1903 reported that the
Rhodes mine had been found by the Florence Mining Company.
Since no more was ever reported on that discovery, it was obviously proven wrong.
Also, the lost Rhodes mine was reported found much more recently, in 1958.
The Uintah Basin Standard newspaper of July 10, 1958 carried the headline, "Lost Rhodes
Gold mine believed found by Bullock Mining Co."
Again, with no future reports, that was also proven false in time.
The same newspaper had hinted at the possibility of a big gold strike in an Aug. 15, 1957 article,
during a year when 25 mining claims were filed in Duchesne County.
So the legend of this gold mine, as many similar gold mines in the West, refuses to cease.
Has the Rhodes tale evolved from simple gold panning, or from Rhodes' own possible cache
of California gold into a full blown lost gold mine?
Or, is it the real deal with an authentic lost gold mine out there ... Who can tell?
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