Salt Lake magazine provides a rich and engaging exploration of Utah’s lore and history, offering readers a deeper understanding of the state’s unique cultural, historical and geographical heritage. Through a blend of storytelling and in-depth research, the magazine delves into Utah’s diverse past, highlighting everything from the early Native American inhabitants and the Mormon pioneers to the state’s role in Western expansion and the development of the American frontier.
The magazine often features stories that uncover forgotten events, little-known figures, and historic landmarks that have shaped Utah’s identity. Its coverage extends to the state’s folk traditions, ghost stories, and legends. Whether profiling historic towns, exploring the state’s natural wonders, or recounting famous events like the founding of Salt Lake City, Salt Lake magazine offers and contact perspective on Utah’s past recent and ancient.
In 1893, a large wooden crate marked “Household Goods” arrived at an address in Chicago. No one at the address knew what it was, and other than the vague description, it was unlabeled, so they refused the delivery. Three years later, in 1896, the crate resurfaced in an unclaimed freight auction (think: Storage Wars).
This was a blind auction, meaning bids were made without any inspection of contents. The two Chicago businessmen who purchased the unopened box, which was heavy, speculated it could contain a cast iron stove and put in the winning bid for just under $15. However, after prying open the wooden shipping crate, they found a zinc metal box, which accounted for the crate’s weight. It was sealed with spot welds and measured 32 x 22 x 18 inches. Inside, they found a desiccated body with a thick rope tightly binding its knees to its chest and pulling its head down into the body. It was a snug fit and, very clearly, bones had been broken to make the squeeze.
Courtroom illustrations of the two men, Carl Haas (left) and Frank Ahlgrim (right), who purchased the trunk at a storage auction. Illustrations and clipping courtesy of Chicago Chronicle/newspapers.com
The discovery made national headlines and the ensuing investigation determined the box had been shipped from Salt Lake City. No return address, of course.
Which leads us to Franklin Avenue, the original name of a mid-block street connecting 200 South and 300 South in SLC (renamed Edison Street in 1906). According to the blogger Rachel Quist (Rachel’s SLC History, slchistory.org), when Franklin Avenue was at its heyday (the late 1880s and 1890s), it was home to the majority of African Americans in Salt Lake. Like other midblock alleys in the downtown area—Commercial Street and Plumb Alley—Franklin Avenue was considered a Tenderloin district. There were brothels and saloons on Franklin but also a multi-racial community living in boarding houses, as well as many businesses owned by people of color.
The case of the mummified remains was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1898.
But back to that guy in the box. The body was (most likely) the origami remains of one Monsieur Prospier Chazal, a Frenchman who frequented saloons on Franklin Avenue. He was last seen flaunting large amounts of money and diamonds around town. And the trail ends there.
No one knows how M. Chazal met his end or what possessed whoever did the killing to gruesomely stuff his body into a metal box, weld it shut and ship it COD to Chicago.
Edison Street Today
Today, Edison Street is a popular spot with restaurants, bars, a hip record shop and, let’s not forget, the brand new shiny Utah State Liquor Store. One of the bars, Franklin Avenue Cocktails + Kitchen, was named in remembrance of the street’s former name and its spicy history.
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So, are there ghosts in Utah’s abandoned ballrooms? Sure feels like it. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, Utah is a hotbed of supernatural stories surrounding shuttered ballrooms once teeming with life, laughter and big-band music. Like a sinister movie set (and, in some cases, the actual site of a sinister movie set), these glamorous Utah halls now sit in echoing stillness, bedecked with peeling, hand-painted millworker, crumbling plater columns, toppling finials and threadbare flounces. Does “Saltair Sally” really wander the corridors? Do the windows at the Old Mill light up at night? Even if some of these relics of bygone eras don’t host a chilling urban legend, what is it about derelict-but-once decadent dance halls that makes our spines tingle?
The Berthana Ballroom
A grand ballroom built as the second story of a retail development on Odgen’s 24th Street, this establishment aimed to indulge hundreds of young people and their love for dancing. Opening night festivities in 1915 included a speech by the governor declaring the Berthana as the “most beautiful ballroom in the west.”
The Berthana celebrating its public opening on May 26, 1915. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library.
The site of love and heartbreak, weddings and beauty pageants, even suffrage meetings and boxing matches, donors Bertha Eccles and Anna Dee (there combined name: ‘Berthana’) spared no expense in creating a glittering and sumptuous art deco-style haunt for Ogden during the heyday of big band dancing.
Ogden’s grand Berthana takes its name from two visionary women, one being Mrs. Berthana Eccles. Photo courtesy of Ogden Standard Examiner.
Like nearly every ballroom in the country, the Berthana’s popularity declined when big band-style dancing fell out of favor. The floor was inverted into a giant roller rink in the late 1940s as teen socializing shifted from jitterbugs to jam skating, before shuttering in the 1980s.
“I’ve been up several times, and it really is a beautiful place,” says first-floor tenant and Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt owner Rory Rich.
A basement bar with ever-changing ownership was the only fixture on the property until a recent renovation of the ground floor and exterior. For years, bartenders have entertained patrons with tales of the creepy ballroom two floors up, Piano keys pounded by an unknown ghost and a hair-raising tale of murder were always sure to scare up another round.
An on-record death in the 1970s involving a young man being pushed on roller-skates into a chair that impaled him has also created fodder for tales of otherworldly haunts. With once-shimmering paint now peeling, murals in despair, and boxes of old roller skates and other garbage littering the grand floor, the once-opulent Berthana Ballroom remains a vestige of an earlier time, with a few resident ghosts on hand.
Old Mill
The Deseret News’ first paper mill near Big Cottonwood Canyon received an extreme makeover in 1927, after a fire ruined it decades earlier. From its ghostly frame grew a glamorous resort clubhouse and Prohibition-era speakeasy named the Old Mill Club, rivaling the Salt Lake Country Club.
“The Old Mill Club is open now and the moon is already there, waiting tote danced under,” reads an archived advertisement from the era. As if in reply, couples took to the open-air dance floor every night of the week but Sunday, and bougie activities like trapshooting at its gun club and horseback trips up the canyon matched the stone structure’s old-world charm. Orchestras and laughter filled the beautiful halls, but advertised plans for an 18-hole golf course, banquet rooms to be run by a chef of “interesting fame,” a swimming pool and a toboggan slide never came to fruition. Instead, World War II broke out, and the laughter and dancing ceased.
The former grandeur of the ballroom, cir. 1967. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress. Locals enjoy a night of dancing. Photo taken June 8, 1949. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library. Granite Paper Mill opened in 1880 and supplied the Desert News for 10 years before a fire broke out. The mill was partially rebuilt as a dance hall known as the Old Mill Club in 1927. It operated into the 1940s. In the 1970s and ’80s it was used as a haunted house. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library.
Still under the same ownership, the mill was leased and reinvented into a popular discotheque that brought star power within the stone walls. A venue for pop and rock music in the 1970s, its stage welcomed artists like Alice Cooper and the Steve Miller Ban before again closing its doors late in the decade.
Because of its many iterations over the past 150 years, the site oozes creepy vibes. Even its earliest days, with lengthy spans of disuse, urban legends abounded: caretaker suicides and satanic rituals, doors opening and closing on their own, a strange woman’s voice, the electricity-less building lighting up or the feeling of eerie cold spots.
The Walker family, property owners since its country club days, seized the opportunity to put those legends, combined with the mill’s crumbling facade and punched-out windows, to good use, selling tickets as the concept of haunted houses became popular in the 1980s. While that, too, lasted for a time, the building was ultimately condemned in 2005 and enclosed in barbed wire. Now, under layers of pigeon poop and spray paint (plus remnants ranging from old glass beer bottles circa 1970 to tinsel-lined spider webs), the mill tops the list on Preservation Utah’s 2025 Most Endangered Historic Places; the organization argues in the face of proposed plans for demolition to make way for townhomes and condos that the Old Mill Club is a rare piece of working history.
Van’s Hall: Delta, Utah
In Utah’s west desert, the humble farming community of Deltagathered at a secret watering hole. Sitting atop an unassuming storefront on Main Street, a flight of stairs led folks into a grand and otherworldly shimmering temple of dance known as Van’s Hall.
Billy Van de Vanter, or ‘Billy Van’ as he was known, was an eccentric jack-of-all-trades (inventor, mechanic, wild animal-keeper, builder) who created the 1923 dance hall as his pièce de résistance: a dance hall/house of mirrors in all its wacky, slightly garish glory. The spacious hall, built above his auto garage, still sparkles with thousands of mirrored glass tiles arranged in stunning decorative designs. The shimmering mosaics bounce reflectively off a 500-pound glitterball suspended over the dance floor.
Van’s dancehall opened in 1926 and featured a floor made of melted down shellac records. It remained open as a dancehall until the mid-1970s and has since been closed to the public. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library.
Competing with church dances in the area, Van’s Hall became known as a livelier, edgier hot spot than the cookies-and-punch parties put on by the Mormons, although church members, he often said, were his best customers. They, like everyone else, loved to swing to the catchy rhythms and lively melodies played by the best musicians in the area. Billy Van even used his jackknife to carve an impressive small-scale version of the Salt Lake Temple and placed it atop the glitterball just a few yards away from the smoking room. Other sculptures, glass stars, glittering lights and banners (like the one that reads: “We Dance Next Sat.”) were touches that made the hidden-away hall feel like a secret sanctuary for the hardy and industrious young people of Delta, who spent most of their waking hours in school and harvesting alfalfa near the Sevier River. (Later, the town would become infamous for housing a Japanese incarceration camp during WWII).
The hall attracted young people for more than three decades, but its popularity, like most dance halls, declined in the 1950s and ’60s. Failing to meet safety codes, a Christmas party was its last recorded event in 1975, and the hall, which remains in all its plasterwork and mirrored glory, seems suspended in time. While there’s an effort to restore and bring the hall up to code, it’s slow going. Under lock and key atop Delta’s quiet Main Street, only the older locals seem to remember the hall even exists and only a lucky few get to enter.
Skougaard’s Tavern: Fish Lake Resort
Part spooky, part rustic charm,old-timers remember when the ballroom at Fish Lake Lodge (named Skougard’s) shone as the hotspot for young people living in Central Utah towns like Richfield, Salina, Loa and Fremont. Built in 1933 of native spruce logs, the now eerily quiet, slumping structure stands as a sentinel along the glittering, aspen-draped alpine lake.
Big bands assembled to play “In the Mood” and “King Porter Stomp” to the hops and triple steps of hundreds of slick-haired boys and girls with victory roll hairdos who descended on the tiny lakeside town during warm weekend nights. The scene, according to locals, became livelier post-war, as curfews lengthened and skirt hems shortened. Teens, driving everything from farm trucks to muscle cars, packed a case of beer and wound their way up Seven Mile-Gooseberry Road to Fish Lake National Forest to check out the nightlife at the timber-framed ballroom, which spilled out into an Adirondack-style patio built to admire sparkling lake views.
The original hotel at Fish Lake Resort was built in 1911 and featured eight bedrooms with a dining hall that could fit up to 16 people, an open air dance pavilion, and a bait and tackle store. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library.
The sagging roof, creaking floors and locked-away ballroom tell a far different tale today. The lodge’s main area is still open every summer, selling T-shirts, knick-knacks, and a few groceries to campers and cabin renters. But the shuttered grand ballroom sits empty 51 weeks of the year, with sheets of plastic draped over stacks of chairs visible through the windows. As if being raised from the dead, it comes to life when square dancers gather for the Fish Lake Frolic on one weekend each July.
“It really is a heritage,” says caller and Frolic board member Kathy Beans, speaking of the more than 60-year-old annual event. She says her fellow square dancers, who still know what it means to ‘take yer partner’ onto the dance floor, dance every evening while taking in the natural beauty by day. Fish Lake is, after all, home to Pando, a colony of 47,000 genetically identical quaking aspens with a massive interconnected root system. It was designated as a national forest in 1907. “It’s a special building in a special place.”
Saltair
Dubbed the “Coney Island of the West” during the early 1900s for its cafes, bathhouses, rollercoaster, swimming pier, silent movie theater and a hippodrome for visiting spectacles (like boxing matches and “flying ballerinas”), Saltair’s greatest attraction was its nonstop dance pavilion. Twenty-eight-piece orchestras placed at both ends ensured there was never a lull in the music as thousands of pleasure seekers crowded the dance floor each evening from Memorial Day to Labor Day. On Sundays, when dancing was illegal (really), people packed picnic lunches to enjoy concerts instead, traveling first by steam train, then by electric cable cars and finally, in their automobiles, to the Great Salt Lake attraction.
The interior of Saltair’s original dancehall cir. 1900. Photo courtesy of Special Collections/ UofU J. Willard Marriott Library.
At its height in the Roaring ’20s, the resort’s fame attracted celebrity entertainers and U.S. presidents. But all that changed in 1925 when a fire tore through the resort, turning nearly everything to ash. Although a rebuild (Saltair II, designed after the original structure) ensued, the resort never again achieved its earlier status. A series of floods, fires, windstorms and a receding lake caused its closure in 1958, making its eerie emptiness the subject of ghost stories and fodder for horror movies like Carnival of Souls. Even that didn’t dissuade attempts to breathe new life into the resort until a final fire (suspected arson) destroyed it in 1970.
Nothing but a few wooden pilings remain on the site where once the Glenn Miller Band and Nat King Cole performed at the largest unobstructed dance hall in the U.S. Not a single rail remains from the Giant Racer rollercoaster that whizzed folks through the sky, nor a brick from the bathhouses that spat recreation seekers into the salty warm water—undeterred despite their heavy wool swimming costumes as they frolicked in the July heat. No planks remain as an emblem to lovers who embraced on the massive dance floor by the thousands, or strolled along the pier.
Today, Saltair III stands a fair distance from the original site. Built in 1981 from an airplane hangar near the Interstate to resemble the other Saltairs, the current structure exists as a successful concert venue for big names like Ed Sheeran, Playboi Carti, Billie Eilish and Post Malone—but that doesn’t shield it from constant rumors of paranormal activity. Some say any iteration of Saltair is cursed. The body of a woman found on the property in 2000 has fueled decades of horror stories about “Saltair Sally,” whom the paranormal reality show Ghost Adventures chased in its episode entitled “The Great Saltair Curse.”
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Sherlock Holmes was created in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle, whose creation would eclipse his creator in world renown. Known for his fastidiousness, scientific methods and use of sharp deductive logic, Holmes, and his long-suffering assistant, Dr. John H. Watson, are among the most beloved characters in the English canon. Doyle’s creation spawned the entire mystery (or crime, as it’s known across the pond) genre. But did you know that his first novel, A Study in Scarlet, features a murder mystery that includes a villainous depiction of early LDS leader Brigham Young and a gang of his enforcers, known as the Danites?
A Study in Scarlet, originally published in 1887 introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
A Study in Scarlet was originally published in 1887 without fanfare in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Doyle’s detective, however, lived on in future stories published in The Strand, a penny magazine that dealt in salacious and gossipy tales. In the first story, Holmes and Watson solve a mystery that has its improbable roots in Salt Lake City after two murders are committed by a London cabbie. The cabbie turns out to be the betrothed of a woman who was forcibly married off to a Mormon man on the order of Brigham Young back in Utah and has died of a broken heart. The erstwhile groom has tracked this Mormon man and his partner in crime to London and kills them in revenge, writing the German word for revenge, “RACHE,” in scarlet blood at one of the crime scenes (which gives the novel its colorful name). Holmes and Watson solve the crime, naturally, but the book paints the early Mormon faith in a rapacious and derogatory light. This perspective was common in entertainment and fiction of the period, which often treated the allure of the far-off frontier with a combination of fear and romanticism.
Meanwhile, in actual Utah, the Danites were a real deal. They were members of a fraternal order of Mormon men who played a part as vigilantes in the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, before the faith’s Exodus-like emigration to Utah. Here in the West in 1857, the territorial militia, The Nauvoo Legion, (with the aid of mercenary Southern Paiutes), perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre—the mass murder of at least 120 members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train traveling the Old Spanish Trail bound for California. (The event figures prominently in the Netflix series American Primeval.)
Photo thought to be Bill Hickman, who was also known as a “Danite chief.” The photo has sometimes been incorrectly identified as Porter Rockwell. Photo courtesy of Marriot Digital Library Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who was made famous in the novel A Study in Scarlet, which features a plot that originated in frontier Utah. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
Old Port
While it is folklore that the Danites were a precursor to the Nauvoo Legion, it is not known if the group formally existed in the Utah Territory. However, one of the Danites’ most well-known members, Porter Rockwell, was a notorious and feared Luca Brasi to Brigham’s Michael Corleone. Rockwell, known as “The Destroying Angel of Mormondom,” was indicted but never formally charged with the attempted assassination of the Governor of Missouri. He was also Brigham Young’s bodyguard out west. Meanwhile, the Danites and “Old Port” remain an important part of early Mormon folklore and legend.
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Drinking in Utah has been zany since the first clink. Detailing the Byzantine intricacies of Utah’s liquor laws would take several volumes and acres of footnotes, but here’s a distilled…
Utah is famously known for its per capita consumption of Jell-O—so much so that in 2001, the Utah State Legislature voted to name Jell-O its official state snack.
But apart from Utahns’ hearty consumption of Jell-O, the roots of the connection are shrouded. Jell-O is among the most well-known consumer products in the United States, and it was one of the first to blaze the trail of modern target marketing and branding in the early portion of the 20th century. Jell-O marketers squished Jell-O onto dinner tables via (1) a catchy slogan (“There’s always room for Jell-O”); (2) a fleet of snappily dressed salesmen; and (3) a slew of free cookbooks and recipe placements in bless-this-house publications like Ladies’ Home Journal.
But how did Jell-O and Utah become such a great punchline—a state joke up there with fry sauce and multiple wives?
Theory: The main appeal of Jell-O lies in its famous 1964 slogan, one of the most honest slogans in the history of huckstering. Jell-O is light, goes down effortlessly and has a pleasant (but not sinfully pleasant) taste. It is not healthy; neither is it unhealthy. It just is. And it’s cheap. Let’s face it, for the better part of the 20th century, everyone was broke (and now we’re back).
The modest, fruity kick of Jell-O brought a dash of color and life to tabletops laden with drab, gray meals. It slid its way into the tight budgets of America as easily as it slides down your throat. On grocery bills and in stomachs, there is indeed “always room.”
It stands to reason, then, that Utah’s moms, with their large families to feed, would find even more common cause with the bringer of color to the family dinner. I grew up amid large LDS families where there was a strong emphasis on buying in bulk, cooking in bulk and possessing larders the size of Carlsbad Caverns.
When you’re feeding 10 hungry mouths, Jell-O becomes a must-have foodstuff to fend off sweet-toothed mutiny. At the Willis compound (family of 10), there were always ice cube trays of red (is that a flavor?) Jell-O in the fridge during the summer. Hungry? Have a cube of Jell-O. It wasn’t luxury, but it sure tasted good after an afternoon of running through the sprinklers.
And thus, hunger for something lively amid dull—albeit fortifying—meals placed Jell-O firmly on the table at the ward picnic. And Utah moms and grandmoms, culinary Chuck Yeagers, have pushed Jell-O’s limitations past the sound barrier. Jell-O with mandarin oranges (yummy), carrots (erm) and whipped topping, even today, pay living testament to a time when a little bright, jiggling a dollop of gelatin and Red Dye No. 3 was cause for delight. Utah’s jiggling version of Proust’s Madeleine.
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Bear Lake offers one of Utah’s most scenic vistas. As you crest the hill of Logan Canyon into Rich County, the lake sprawls out into a vivid, sparkling blue jewel defining the valley that bears its name. If Delicate Arch is southern Utah’s Mona Lisa, then Bear Lake is northern Utah’s Girl with the Pearl Earring. But beware. Bear Lake’s stunning blue waters are said to hide a great serpentine beast, as wide as a man and, depending on the account, anywhere from 40 to 200 feet long. The creature’s head is alternatively described as a betusked walrus or a toothy alligator, both bearing giant eyes, set widely apart. The beast has conical ears (“like a pint glass”) and an indeterminate number of legs, is awkward on land but can swim, as one written account has it, “faster than a locomotive.”
The local lore, even today, has it that the depths of Bear Lake have never successfully been fathomed, and it is within these deepest, coldest depths that the creature lurks, hidden from the eyes of man. Down there. In the dark. That’s where the Bear Lake Monster waits.
But Bear Lake’s depth has been measured plenty, says the late Ted Alsop, the affable and beloved Utah State University professor of physical geography, from whose lips I first heard tell of the beast. Alsop used the story to debunk the myth that the lake’s depths had never been plumbed and to artfully describe the scientific difference between a crater lake and a lake, like Bear Lake, created from a “dropped-down graben.” (Which sounds equally monstrous, really: Watch out child, or the Graben will get you!)
“It was a story made up by drunk Mormons,” Alsop, who passed away in 2017, told his freshman classes year after year. “The lake is 280 feet deep at bank full, and no, it’s not a crater lake, although there are crater lakes in the area…,” etc.
But the legend (and all legends like it: Loch Ness, Sasquatch) persists because these tales of fearsome, left-behind creatures are vestigial holdouts from the time when we were fighting for control of this world.
They live on in our deep cortex. The feral, fight-or-flight memories of a time when we named the monsters and mastered them. But on a darkened shore of a silvery lake, these long-forgotten fears spring forth as a primal response to errant and suspicious splashes amid the lapping waters.
And we can easily see in our mind’s eye the scaled beast breaking the water’s surface, gliding in the moonlight in stern warning. It is a shadow of what we once encountered and conquered, and it waits with the patience of eons in its dark, murksome home to rise from the waters and take back what we took.
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When Mark Twain—then still just plain Samuel Clemens—came through Salt Lake City in 1861, he was accompanying his brother Orion on his way to take up the position of Secretary of Nevada Territory. It was usual for traveling dignitaries to stop in and say “hello” to the Lion of Zion, LDS Church President Brigham Young, and the Clemens brothers did just that. It is supposed that Mark Twain felt snubbed by the great man because later, in his 1872 book, Roughing It, he exaggerates the encounter and his impressions of Mormons in general in full Twain style.
Of The Book of Mormon, he wrote, “It is so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.” Of the practice of polygamy and Mormon wives, he said his heart “warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically ‘homely’ creatures…the man who marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their censure,” and then marvels at the man who could wed 60 of them, as he exaggerated Brigham Young’s matrimonial count. (Young actually had 55 wives, so Twain wasn’t far off the mark.)
Mark Twain passed through Salt Lake City in the journey west he recounts in his book, Roughing It.(Photos and Documents courtesy of The Library of Congress)
But Twain didn’t stop there, long after the official visit, the humourist imagines Young at the Beehive House overwhelmed by his many, many children.
“Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle—a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had 80 or 90 children in your house,” Twain writes as his imaginary Brigham. “But the deed was done—the man escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance. I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains. But they never caught him. I am not cruel, sir—I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged—but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.”
Mark Twain Gets The Last Laugh
Twain wrote, “When the audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he [Young] put his hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother: ‘Ah—your child, I presume? Boy, or girl?’”
Mars has alwaysbeen called the red planet, and it’s easy to see why with one look through a telescope. It’s also held a certain mystique, because for years we’ve been told that Mars is the planet most like Earth. And Utah is the place on Earth most like Mars. (Look at all that red rock.)
So it seems appropriate that the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is located just outside Hanksville, near the massive area of rock formations and deep canyons called the San Rafael Swell. The project is operated by the Mars Society, the largest non-profit organization advocating humans to Mars, and is funded by private donations, grants and crew fees.
The analog astronauts in Hanksville, as MDRS reffers to its crew members, never leave the Earth; their job is to simulate what life could be like if and when humans ever get to Mars. They field-test dwellings and figure out how to grow food in what they hope will be Mars-friendly greenhouses, and try to answer all kinds of practical questions that will come up for explorers in a truly otherworldly environment. The crew members are deployed for two- to three-week missions.
Driving by the site, you can occasionally glimpse these earthbound Martians, suited up for space and exploring the Utah landscape as if it were the Ghost Dunes of Noctis Labyrinthus. Beyond the otherworldly landscape that drew these would-be Martians to central Utah, the state long has had a connection to space exploration.
Dr. Bonnie Baxter, professor of biology at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and director of Westminster’s Great Salt Lake Institute, collaborated with the space program. Baxter’s work studying the microbiology of the Great Salt Lake caught the attention of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Baxter studies the transition of the ancient progenitor of the Great Salt Lake, Lake Bonneville, into the salty remnant that exists today.
In February of 2021, the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover landed on Mars at Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed. The Great Salt Lake Institute aided JPL scientists in developing special equipment for Perseverance to help with its mission of seeking out ancient life and collecting samples for a possible return to Earth.
MRDS Crew 261 on the MDRS campus – Photo Courtesy MRDS
A glimpse of what’s out there (right here)
The MDRS researchers even have all-terrain vehicles (Mars will test the limits of the term “all-terrain”) to explore. Designed by Polaris, the electric ATVs, piloted by suited-up Utah desert Martian explorers, occasionally can be seen crawling around the rocks of the San Rafael Swell.
Mars on Earth
What: The Mars Desert Research Station (MRDS) Where: Just north of Route 24, Hanksville, Utah Fun fact: The first Mars simulation project was situated in the Haughton Impact Crater in Northern Canada. More projects are planned for Europe and Australia. Learn more: Visit mdrs.marssociety.org
At its inception, Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution was a specifically Mormon institution. Known more often by its acronym ZCMI it was envisioned by Brigham Young, Utah’s Territorial Governor and LDS Church leader as a method for early settlers to financially cooperate to avoid price gouging from eastern merchants and acquire goods that could not be produced locally. ZCMI was often the only store in smaller Utah communities and was essentially the Utah equivalent of Sears & Roebuck along with its own catalog.
That’s frontier history. Meanwhile, the facade on the flagship store is a piece of American architectural history, says Robert Baird, a retired principal at Historical Arts & Casting. “Brigham Young wanted to build a model city,” Baird says. “He’d been to New York City and Philadelphia. He wanted to bring what those cities had to Salt Lake.” What those cities had was cast iron. Previously, large buildings were made out of masonry. However, the innovation of the cast-iron facade allowed taller, stronger structures with bigger windows.
A 1970s rendering of the remodeling of the ZCMI Center design that preserved the cast-iron facade.
Photos courtesy of Utah Historic Society and Stuart Graves
“A department store is all over that,” says Martha Bradley, author of the book ZCMI: America’s First Department Store. “You want to display goods, and the advent of the cast-iron facade allows for this moment where life in American cities really takes off. Suddenly you’re walking down city streets, dazzled by this variety of goods. This sense of abundance made cast iron the backbone for a new era.”
Utah’s ‘Bloomies’
Book Cover of America’s First Department Store written by Utah Historian
ZCMI started as a frontier store to supply Utah settlers and became America’s first department store.
Photos courtesy of Utah Historic Society and Stuart Graves
And with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Young could bring cast-iron building technology to Utah. The facade was installed in 1868. Flash forward a century later. In 1973, the facade was slated for demolition to make way for the ZCMI Center Mall. There was an outcry from local preservationists like Baird’s father, Steven. The group demanded that ZCMI shoppers cut up their store charge cards and send in the pieces in protest, which they did. In large numbers. The “charge card” protest saved the facade. But déjà vu! It again faced the wrecking ball in 2006 to make way for yet another mall, City Creek Center. By 2006, ZCMI, after years of falling sales, had sold out to Macy’s, one of the marquee stores in City Creek Center. Macy’s owners, mindful of the history and beloved nature of the facade, agreed to preserve and install it on Macey’s storefront on Main Street. No credit card protest was required.
In her book, America’s First Department Store, Utah Historian Martha Bradley makes a compelling case that ZCMI was essentially the first department store in America. “From the word go, it had a range of products under one roof from dry goods to horse tack,” she writes. Take that Bloomingdale’s!
Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre property at the center of the Uintah Basin, which has long been home to tales of the paranormal—including hundreds of recorded firsthand accounts dating back to the 1950s. After decades of study, the source of the strangeness in the basin remains a mystery. The area, and other supernatural hotspots in Utah, continue to lure new investigations to document and discover the cause of these unexplained events.
The ongoing History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is in its fifth season and follows Skinwalker Ranch owner Brandon Fugal and his team as they attempt to uncover the ranch’s mysteries—from UFO sightings to cattle mutilations—experimenting with any and all technology at their disposal, like lasers and ground-penetrating radar.
The “skinwalker” and Utah are also at the center of the premiere episode of the latest season of Ghost Adventures, the popular paranormal investigation series on Discovery+. Zak Bagans and his team travel to Torrey, Utah, where a family reports sightings of a “skinwalker,” a reference to a magical figure that appears in Navajo Nation traditions. It is not Ghost Adventures’ first investigation in Utah, either. Their team has visited a dozen other spots in the Beehive State over the years, including the Fear Factory.
Paranormal investigators, like Bagans and his team, typically use a variety of handheld tools and worn equipment to document these events, such as electromagnetic field meters (EMF), portable radio scanners (AKA “spirit boxes”), thermal imaging and infrared cameras.
The U.S. Government had an interest in Utah’s paranormal activity as well. According to a 2024 report by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a former Department of Defense program (Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program, 2009–2012) investigated an “alleged hotspot of paranormal activity at a property in Utah,” examining reports of “shadow figures,” “creatures” and “inter-dimensional phenomena” believed to frequently appear at the unnamed property.
Further readings on paranormal investigations in Utah
The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist Brings Reason and Logic to Over 400 UFO Sightings in Utah’s Uintah Basin by Frank B. Salisbury
Hunt For The Skinwalker by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp
UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean
UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search of Alien Life Here—and Out There by Garrett M. Graff.
