By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Good historians often are good storytellers, and my friend Utah historian Gary Topping knows many good tales about Utah’s past. He’s worked a lifetime to collect and preserve them, including during his years as archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City.
Some of them are ghost stories, including those in his 1992 book Ghost Towns of the Old West. My favorite of Gary’s stories, however, are the Utah Catholic ghost stories about which he often writes. For Halloween, here are four of the best.
Dying with your boots on
Ethel Hogan Hanson Heinz Merrill—the one-time organist for Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine—was remarkable in many ways (see Gary’s article: article).
She was a skilled musician and composer. She became the principal organist at the Cathedral in 1917 when she was only 14 years old. She was known to be the life of any party, playing requests on the piano late into the night. She married three times and buried two husbands. She could be vivacious and even flamboyant.
Yet, her death may have been the most memorable thing of all about her.
Gary reports that Ethel hated to be alone. At night, she stayed up late to listen to KSL radio, which broadcast the Nitecap radio program, a nationally syndicated call-in talk show started by Salt Lake City radio personality named Herb Jepko.
People from all around the United States would call in just to chat. When Ethel called in, she would play her organ. She was doing just that on the night of February 24, 1975, when she collapsed and passed away…while still on the air.
As Gary wrote, Ethel Hogan Hanson Heinz Merrill “died with her boots on.”
The dead bishop’s ring
During an oral history interview with Gary, Cathedral of the Madeleine employee Gregory Glenn recounted an unusual experience overseeing the exhumation (from the crypt) of Utah’s first bishop, Lawrence Scanlan, for eventual reburial in the remodeled Cathedral floor.
Glenn, the founder of the Madeleine Choir School, was extensively involved in the Cathedral renovations in the early 1990s. He was the designated observer when the renovations required that the old bishop be removed from his not-so-final resting place.
Glenn explained, “When he [Bishop Scanlan] was taken out of the marble sarcophagus, his casket had completely decayed. Not completely, but it has pretty much been destroyed. So his body was removed and placed on a noble stretcher, and I was instructed to go down and look at it. I remember he was inviolate. His body was all present. His skin was there. He looked very much like a dried flower, that kind of appearance. He was all intact. He had his crozier and his mitre, the old pontifical sunburst gloves, his hands were folded. He was a very tall man, very tall. That was a very striking moment.” (See: Gary’s Bishop Scanlan ring article.)
A bishop from one of the older archdioceses in Ireland gave Scanlan a beautiful ring which he used when he became the bishop in Salt Lake City in 1891. The ring has a long history, including medieval roots, and was considered quite a treasure. Bishops in Cashel, Ireland had worn it for some 300 years. Scanlan was wearing it when he died and was interred in 1915.
When Glenn came back upstairs after examining Scanlan’s remains, Salt Lake Bishop Joseph Lennox Federal was at dinner. Glenn was kind of shellshocked by the whole exhumation experience, but the first thing Bishop Federal asked him was, “Did you get the ring?” Glenn replied, “Well, no, I didn’t get the ring.”
Scanlan still wears it today.
The haunted nunnery?
Although Gary has some good ghost stories, he has debunked at least one too, including the legend of the haunted nunnery near Logan in Northern Utah.
The former summer camp site is about 6 miles up Logan Canyon in the middle of the Cache National Forest. It is listed as one of top haunted places in Utah and the United States. In the 1950s, a family named Hatch donated the property to St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Logan, which renamed the camp St. Anne’s Retreat and used it for all sorts of Catholic group gatherings, including for nuns.
Afterwards, rumors started circulating about mystic images of drowning babies and Satanic nuns. One salacious legend claims that nuns who got pregnant were shunned and sent to the retreat to give birth before they could return to their convents. A team from the television show Ghost Adventures even investigated the site in 2016.
On request, Gary—then the diocese archivist—researched the issue and reported he was unaware of any actual crime or incident that would taint the site’s reputation in the era when the church used the property as a resort. A reporter for The Deseret News also has found no factual evidence backing up local legends.
The real horrors happened after the Catholic church sold the property. According to local newspapers, in October 1997, three dozen teenagers who went to the site as part of a Halloween prank were ambushed, shot at, handcuffed, tied together, and threatened by three men who claimed to be security guards. The men later turned the trespassing teens over to police.
The spectral Catholic widow in black
When I wrote about Mary Harney Judge in a recent blog post, Gary had some wonderful but haunting comments for me.
Mary and her husband John came to Utah after the Civil War. In the late 1800s, they struck it rich with an investment in the now-famous Silver King mine in Park City. John continued to work in the mines but died in 1892 of lung disease. Mary never remarried and lived for almost twenty more years (see Gary’s article about Mary Judge).
During that time she significantly expanded the Judge fortune and then started to give away the money to charity. She helped build the Cathedral, and her endowment started Judge Memorial, first as a home for miners and then for over a century as a Catholic high school.
Yet, Mary seemed to be haunted in life and to mourn John long after his death at age 47. She wore black in every photo I have seen of her. She was known to keep to herself, and was reticent to discuss either her fortune or her generous philanthropy.
I really like Gary’s description of her: “Somewhere I’ve read that people recalled her black-clad figure—spectral even in life—scurrying along South Temple saying nothing to anyone each morning on her way to Mass at the Cathedral, where she would have had her own private pew. Memorable character.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
