By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
This Halloween, my favorite Catholic cemetery—off the beaten path in rural Northern Utah—has transfigured into a much happier haunt.
Pioneer monks from Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey (where Thomas Merton lived and wrote) travelled west in 1947 and started a new monastery near the small town of Huntsville. For the next seven decades, Trappists worked and prayed at Utah’s Holy Trinity Abbey.
The monks set aside a small plot of land, just north of their Quonset hut church, to bury their confrères who graduated to Heaven. The Trappists marked each monastic grave with a plain white metal cross.
One cross honors a tall and thin transplanted New Yorker with angelic blue eyes who lived at the Utah abbey for sixty years. As a boy and young man, I spent many happy hours with him, my old friend and mentor Br. Boniface Ptasienski.
After I married, started my legal career, and had three children, our time together was limited. Br. Boniface, however, persevered in his life of solitude.
Before I realized how much time had passed, he was old, sick, and then in 2006 dead. In typical low-key Trappist manner, the monks buried Boniface before I even knew he was gone.
Beforehand, they held an all-night vigil beside his body, praying and saying goodbye. After a similar vigil, Merton—who Boniface knew from their time together at Gethsemani—wrote, “[A]s you walk through the dark echoing cloister you are no longer afraid of death or of dead bodies, but you see them as they are—sad, inevitable things whose sorrow is not without an infinitely merciful remedy.”
The next morning, the Utah monks interred Br. Boniface in the distinctive Trappist manner—wearing his worn white monk robes, face hooded, and laid directly into the ground with no coffin.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Again, Merton explains, “[T]his simplicity and poverty have something about them that is immensely clean in comparison with the nightmare of fake luxury and flowers with which the world tries to disguise the fact of death.”
Although I missed his funeral, I visit Boniface when I can. The old Holy Trinity Abbey cemetery is a lovely place.
The chant of birdsong serenades the resting monks within a cathedral of surrounding mountains and trees. Elk, sandhill cranes, owls, bobcats, and herds of wild turkeys often stop by the peaceful site.
When the Utah monastery closed in 2017, the Trappists had planted 29 monks there. Six more—who had moved to a Salt Lake City retirement home—have joined them over the last eight years.
Bill White, the new property owner, has placed the monastery land under a conservation easement and preserves what he can. However, he couldn’t save the old abbey’s Quonset hut building, which was packed with asbestos and long past its expiration date.
Bill takes care of the picturesque cemetery too. He mows and waters the lawn, pulls the weeds, and tries to minimize damage caused by foraging wildlife.
He even restored one of the monastery’s beautiful old statues of Mary and set her on a small plaza to watch over the monks. Yet, despite Bill’s best efforts, the aging white crosses have rusted and deteriorated.
Boniface’s cross is very weathered after two decades outside in the hot summers and frigid winters of the surrounding Ogden Valley. With the monks and their church gone, I’ve sometimes worried and wondered—might the old cemetery disappear too?
Thankfully, I now think the answer is no. Within the past few months, Bill and Gethsemani abbot Fr. Elias Dietz have taken significant steps to preserve it too.
Fr. Elias has been a compassionate and attentive pastor for the surviving Utah monks, who became Gethsemani monks again when the Huntsville monastery closed. He supports them generously and visits as often as he can.
Fr. Elias and Bill also recently purchased and placed new and more permanent markers on the graves of the Huntsville monks. Each new granite marker notes the name, vocation, and life dates of these devoted men.
Bill and Fr. Elias hope to install a decorative chain fence supported by bollards around the sacred site. Bill saved the old abbey bells and plans to build a base or tower near the cemetery from which they might ring out again.
The monks asked Bill to preserve their agricultural legacy too, so he asked the McFarland family—local sixth generation Latter-day Saint family farmers—to manage the land. They call it the Historic Monastery Farm and, among other things, planted a large pumpkin patch near the abbey gates.
All this wonderful reanimation means that this Halloween, I can take my two grandsons to a place I loved as a boy, help them pick a pumpkin from a field where I chased a wayward calf, and then introduce them to the benevolent spirits that haunt the abbey cemetery.
One of them is my old friend Br. Boniface.
(The National Catholic Reporter published a version of this story on October 31, 2025.)
*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. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
