Utah Lore

Are there ghosts in Utah’s abandoned ballrooms?

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 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.

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.

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 Delta gathered 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.

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 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. 

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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In the mood for more scares and spooks? Check out six more haunted locations in Salt Lake.

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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 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.)  

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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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?’”

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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 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’ 

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!

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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. 

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In the mood for more spooks? Discover six haunted locations in Utah!

In the summer of 1945, 19-year-old Joe Badali stepped off a train into the barren expanse of sunburned desolation known as Wendover, Utah. He was an East Coast kid, raised in Connecticut, and most recently stationed with the Army Air Force in Delaware. The terrain before him was like nothing he’d ever seen—a blistering moonscape of low, rocky hills jutting up like icebergs from the vast, lifeless salt flats. Joe turned to Steven Gregg, a fellow soldier transferred from Delaware, and said, “They took us from heaven and sent us to hell.”

Hell, as it turned out, was an ideal place to test the men and machinery that would execute one of the 20th Century’s defining moments: the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. During a frenzied 10-month period beginning in late 1944, Utah’s remote West Desert was on the leading edge of the atomic arms race, as crews put the finishing touches on the world’s first nuclear weapon and the plane that would carry it into battle.

Can you keep a secret?

In the fall of 1944, the Army Air Force (AAF) put 29-year-old Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets in command of the newly formed 509th Composite Group. The 509th was a completely self-sufficient unit of nearly 1,800 airmen, machinists, engineers and scientists charged with carrying the atomic bomb to the enemy. Tibbets was already an accomplished pilot, having flown combat missions in Europe and North Africa. He was also a military test pilot for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the plane the AAF chose for the atomic missions.

Army brass offered Tibbets the choice of three bases for the 509th, but he never even made it to the other two; one look at Wendover and he was sold. The air base on Utah’s western border had a large airstrip, barracks, hangars and other support buildings built by conventional bomber groups starting in 1940. It also had easy air access to California’s Salton Sea, where test bombs could be dropped.

But the airfield’s primary asset was its isolation. The base covered 3.5 million desolate acres and the fledgling town of Wendover offered few distractions beyond the tiny cobblestone Stateline Hotel. It was the perfect place to keep a very big secret. 

That secret was even kept from the soldiers themselves. No one was told the full extent of their mission, and they were not to talk about it to anyone, including spouses and other military personnel. 

Like most incoming soldiers, Joe Badali’s first interview at the base was with an FBI agent, who informed Badali that the agency had investigated him so thoroughly as to have paid visits to his schools and neighbors back home. The agent then asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

“I said, ‘I think so,’” recalls Badali, during an interview from his home in Ogden in 2005. That answer, imbued with teenage nonchalance, was not quite what the agent had hoped for. “He stood up,” says Badali, “leaned across the desk, pounded his fist down and said, ‘Damn it, can you or can you not keep a secret? Yes or no?’ I said, ‘Yes sir!’ ”

All told, roughly 400 FBI agents kept an eye on the men stationed in Wendover, camouflaged as workers, military personnel and civilians. “We found out after the war that our latrine orderly was an FBI agent,” laughs Badali. “I’m sure he picked up a lot of gossip there.”

When Morris “Dick” Jeppson arrived at the base in late 1944, he quickly realized that his stay would be anything but ordinary. Jeppson was a 24-year-old electronics wiz from Carson City, Nev. The Army Air Force had sent him through its electronics school, then on to Harvard graduate school, and finally to MIT to study radar engineering. He and six other electronics specialists arrived in Wendover at the behest of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the scientific arm of the atomic program.

“We were met there [in Wendover] not by the Air Force but by Professor Brode from the University of Cal Berkeley,” says Jeppson, who passed away in 1987 at his home in Las Vegas. “He took us around in a carry-all to talk to us about this highly secret but important project. He briefed us a bit, but he didn’t tell us what the project was.”

Only later did Jeppson realize why he’d been sent to Wendover. “One or two of us surmised during our trips to Los Alamos that we were working on a uranium weapon,” he says. “But we never talked about it.”

Neither did Joe Badali, although he knew better than most what was going on. His unit, the 216th Special Base Unit, assembled dummy test bombs of the uranium bomb called Little Boy, and the plutonium version known as Fat Man. During a briefing in the bomb assembly building, Sgt. Joe Cerace stood next to a Fat Man and deftly explained the weapon’s unconventional nature. 

“I can still see this little sergeant there patting the bomb,” says Badali. “And he says, ‘This here is an atom bomb. If this bomb were to explode, there’d be a big hole in the ground where Utah used to be.’ He scared the hell out of us.”

Taking flight

The Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were enormous. Little Boy was 10 feet long, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed 9,700 pounds. Fat Man was slightly longer and 500 pounds heavier, with a bulbous, five-foot diameter housing that gave it its name. The only way to load them into the belly of the B-29s was to tow the planes over specially constructed bomb-loading pits and hydraulically hoist the bombs into place from below ground.

With such a heavy payload on board, the 15 B-29s assigned to the 509th were modified to carry out the atomic missions. To save weight, Tibbets ordered the planes stripped of their guns, turrets, ammunition and fire-control systems. Only the tail gunner’s .50-caliber machine guns were left in place. Improved engines were installed and the forward bomb bays were outfitted to carry either Little Boy or Fat Man.

Under the direction of Col. Tibbets—he’d been promoted to full colonel in January of 1945—the 15 crews took to the skies over Western Utah, designing and testing the means to drop a bomb that was still being developed and had never been detonated.

Even Tibbets did not know fully what to expect. The scientists at Los Alamos conceded that the shockwaves from the blast could destroy the plane that dropped it, even at 30,000 feet. So Tibbets trained the crews to take a sharp, diving 158-degree turn away from the target once the bomb was released, putting maximum distance between the plane and the detonation.

On June 14, 1945, Captain Robert Lewis picked up plane 44-86292 from the Martin Company assembly plant in Omaha, Nebr., and flew it to Wendover. He didn’t know it then, but Lewis was piloting the Enola Gay, the plane that would carry out the world’s first atomic bombing mission. 

The Enola Gay left Wendover for the Pacific island of Tinian on June 27, 1945. Technically, it was still not the Enola Gay. The plane would not get its familiar moniker until August 5, the eve of the first drop on Hiroshima. Tibbets had decided he would pilot the mission himself and chose 44-86292 for the task. The plane was normally piloted by Captain Lewis and his crew. For this mission, Lewis would move to the co-pilot’s seat.

Just hours before takeoff, Tibbets summoned a crew to paint his mother’s name, Enola Gay, on the side of the cockpit. Lewis was reportedly quite upset to walk out onto the airstrip and see his airplane decorated with new nose art.

At 2:45 a.m. the next morning—August 6, 1945—the newly christened Enola Gay took to the South Pacific skies with 12 crew members and one Little Boy uranium bomb. Dick Jeppson, the electronics wiz from Carson City, was positioned in the forward pressurized compartment. Just days before, Navy Captain William “Deak” Parsons, a weapons officer, had voiced his concern that a crash during takeoff might detonate the bomb. So Little Boy had to be armed in the air—a job that fell to Parsons and Jeppson.

“Just after the plane took off,” recalls Jeppson, “he [Parsons] had me join him in the back of the bomb bay to connect some special wiring that had been left disconnected. That was one step of arming.” The second step, Jeppson explains, was to remove three test plugs that were inserted in the skin of the bomb and replace them with “live” plugs that would allow the firing signal to detonate the bomb. Once armed, the Enola Gay climbed above 30,000 feet and set a course for the Japanese mainland.

At 8:15 a.m., Tibbets and crew released Little Boy, 31,600 feet over Hiroshima, and immediately went into the hard right diving turn they’d practiced so many times in Wendover. Dick Jeppson didn’t have a window in the forward compartment, but he didn’t need one. 

“The plane experienced a shockwave from the primary detonation,” Jeppson recalls. “There was a second shockwave a few seconds afterward. From my training, I realized that that was reflected shockwave from the ground, which proved that the bomb had, in fact, detonated at somewhere near the desired elevation above
the ground.”

Three days later, Major Charles Sweeney of the 509th piloted the B-29 Bockscar to Nagasaki, dropping the Fat Man bomb. Not long after the Japanese surrender, Tibbets returned to Wendover, where young Joe Badali and other members of the 216th Base Unit lined up to shake hands with the colonel. Badali remembers it well. 

“He shook our hands and said, ‘Now when you meet someone, you can tell them, shake the hand, that shook the hand, that shook Japan.’ ”

The action in Wendover these days is on the Nevada side of the state line, where sprawling neon casinos and hotels blink seductively at travelers on Interstate 80. On the Utah side, the old airfield control tower stands watch over an assembly of buildings in various states of renovation including the cavernous, arched hangar at the east end of the airstrip—which once housed the gleaming Enola Gay, fresh off the assembly line.

On the other side of the country, the plane itself has been painstakingly restored and is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum near Washington D.C.

The Wendover Airfield is slowly being restored by the Historic Wendover Airfield Society, which
has preserved many of the barracks, hangars and support buildings where the crews lived in secrecy and trained for the atomic mission. The field’s restored service club is the main museum site and inside, on display is a replica of Little Boy—the bomb that changed the course of mankind, and once stirred Utah’s west desert into a frenzy of activity in a massive effort to end the war. 

Utah at War 

Utah developed into an important base for the U.S. Military at the onset of WWII. Its location was ideal for military planners, who after Pearl Harbor were justified in worry about Japanese attacks on the Western Coast. In 1941 Army Air Corps Gen. Henry H. Arnold set about diversifying military resources far into the nation’s interior and away from the reach of the Japanese Navy. Utah with its existing installations and highway and rail access became a prime location.

• Fort Douglas, which was built to house federal troops sent to Utah during the Civil War, was re-purposed as a processing center for U.S. Army recruits.

• The Ogden Arsenal, a weapon storage facility was built in 1921. It would become a manufacturing and shipping center during WWII. 

• Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base was established in 1940 but its beginnings were in 1934 as a mail supply relay. In 1940, the United States was supplying allies with weapons and support and quietly building up its own military power. Hill was a prime location to supply West Coast installations. 

• Wendover was chosen over Hill Field for the B-29 training missions to deploy the world’s first atomic weapons for its remote location to maintain secrecy.

Source: Launius, Roger D., “World War II in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia (University of Utah Press, 1994) 

The Darker Side of War in Utah

On Feb. 9, 1941, in the aftermath of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

Many of those Japanese-Americans were sent to Topaz, Utah, near the desert Topaz Mountain, where they finished building the barracks they were to live in, set up the barbed wire fence and built out the rest of the camp. More than 11,000 people were processed through Topaz—the population peaked at about 8,300.

In 2007 the Topaz site was listed as a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. The Topaz Museum opened in 2017 with interpretive exhibits detailing life in Topaz. President Roosevelt announced in 1944 that the camps would close in 1945. The Topaz camp didn’t close until October 31, 1945. Topaz Museum, 55 W. Main St., Delta, topazmuseum.org

Visit a Different Wendover

The Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Wendover, Utah, just over the border from the casinos and hotels in Wendover, Nev., is one of the most authentically preserved WWII Army Air Force bases in the United States. It is open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Learn more and plan your visit at wendoverairfield.org.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November 2006 issue of Salt Lake magazine. 

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