At the top of the hills in the Avenues, the northern part of Salt Lake City, is the Salt Lake City Cemetery, a sprawling graveyard—one of the largest city-owned cemeteries in the United States. About 120,000 people have been buried there since its formation in 1851, but one mausoleum in the Jewish section has become a legend among ghost hunters. And teenagers looking for a lark.
The legend claims that if you hold a lighted candle and circle the grave three times, chanting “Emo, Emo, Emo,” a pair of demonic red eyes will glower out of the mausoleum’s window. Only there’s no window now, just a sheet of rusty metal. The legend evolved, and now has it that you’ll see a ghost with red eyes appear near the grave. It is also alleged that this was the grave of Salt Lake’s first acknowledged Satanist. Other versions claim this is the grave of a 7-foot-tall Native man or that it is the grave of a miner killed in an explosion engineered by his wife and her lover. There are more variants but all agree on the grave-circling and the red eyes.
It’s actually the grave of Bavarian-born Jacob Moritz, founder of Salt Lake Brewery and once owner of 36 local pubs. Moritz became a respected man in Utah, a member of the 1895 convention that drafted Utah’s original constitution under which it would finally become a state. Moritz’s brief political stint also brought him head-to-head with Simon Bamberger when the two ran heated campaigns for a seat in the state legislature. In the end, Bamberger became the first Jewish governor of Utah and Moritz suffered some bad press. Bamberger, that very same opponent, is buried in a grave directly across from Moritz. Perhaps a lingering resentment for Mr. Bamberger is the cause for “Emo” to rise from the grave when called upon, casting an eternal withering glare at his former political rival. Or so says Kristen Clay, director of Salt Lake City and Ogden Ghost Tours, “Imagine if Trump and Biden were buried across from one another, one of them would definitely rise up to face their mortal enemy as a ghost.”
Discover more spooky Utah history here.
