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