waxing gibbous

Here's a Halloween themed ad for a Camaro just for you because I love you! Don't you know how swell you are? Rock on!

So it's Halloween. I've been to about 5 parties, one haunted train ride, one haunted house, and watched countless horror movies in the last few weeks. I guess you could say I'm trying to get into the spirit of things. It makes things much more enjoyable than just sitting around. But the things that REALLY scare me are the ghost stories. And that's saying something, because everything scares me.

The thing is, I think that maybe, just MAYBE, they might be true. I kind of believe in ghosts. It's hard to prove that ghosts exist, but can you prove that they don't exist? Exactly. That's why I kind of believe. I can't personally vouch for possessing all knowledge in the world, and therefore cannot say for certain that these things are not real. Also, I am very aware of all the haunted places around me. They are everywhere. And some of them are really creepy.

First there's the old asylum in Lehi. One night a doctor went crazy and hung a nurse from the flagpole. She can sometimes be seen hanging there at night.

In Big Cottonwood canyon, you can see the people who have drowned in the creek watching you from among the trees.

The old Ben Lomond Hotel is a big haunted spot. The mother that let herself die from neglect basically after her son died at war, and two other people committed suicide there by jumping from the window. It's a popular thing for some people to rent a room there and try to find something scary happening.

In Rock Canyon there is a ghost who looks like a man from the 70s. People have seen him stand on top on the canyon wall and then run straight down the rock face at an impossible pace. Supposedly there have been some murders and Satanic rituals there too.

A little girl can be heard crying in the basement at Riverton Elementary. She died somehow in the school, and still haunts it.

A couple hundred years ago, there was a grave digger that would rob the clothes and other items from the caskets he was burying. They caught him and sentenced him to exile on Antelope Island, which is in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. He disappeared, and people say they see him walking the shores holding the things he stole. I say if they were in a drought, he probably could've just waded out to shore.

We have our own Gravity Hill. The story behind that is some guy was driving over an overpass and fell off and died. So now if you put your car in neutral on the hill, you'll roll forward instead of back. I guess the guy is trying to help people out.

A woman wearing a wedding gown haunts Memory Grove. I don't know the story on how she died, but I'm glad I've never seen her.

At the Shilo Inn a crazed lady shoved all of her kids off one of the high balconies and then jumped. The story is you can hear the kids screaming for their mother to stop.

And finally the classics. The gravestone that says "666 Victim of the Beast" at the Salt Lake Cemetary. I've found that gravestone there, and I was creeped out. In the same cemetary is Emo's grave. You are supposed to walk around it three times and say his name three times. Then if you look in the window you will see Emo's face looking back at you. Also the door is supposed to be the door to hell. According to the story, Emo is some Satan worshipper from a few hundred years ago.



Another story that I've heard a lot is all the people in white hooded robes in the canyons in that small corner of Arizona that I-15 crosses over. I've heard that they are either klansmen, or Satan worshippers. Either way, that's scary.

A man I used to work with told me the story of how he and his mother and siblings spent the night in the mountains sometimes when their dad wasn't pleasant to be around (so to speak). They would just pitch tents up there. One night he heard a very loud, strange animal-like sound. He went out of his tent to look, just in time to hear something huge crashing through the trees, about 10 feet away from him. He couldn't see it very well because it was night, but he swears it was a Bigfoot.

Also, there is a giant sea monster in Bear Lake. No one has ever mapped the depth of Bear Lake. It's just never been done because it's so deep. Some people say there might even be a tunnel connecting our lake with the loch in Scotland, and maybe it's the same monter, just swimming back and forth.

The last one I can think of is about the skinwalkers. Supposedly they will sometimes keep pace with trucks and other vehicles on the highways in the more rural areas of Utah. A skinwalker is a person who uses black magic to turn into an animal. However, they can be recognized as skinwalkers because their eyes glow and they have an unnatural gait for an animal, and they are evil and probably trying to kill you. It is typically associated with Native American stories.

The point? I say embrace the haunted places around you, just don't go there at night. Unless it's Halloween. Then really don't go there at night.

P.S. Make sure you read your "Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark" or some Edgar Allan Poe today. Reading it in the dark with a flashlight below your chin makes it even more fun. If that were even possible.