Ghost stories are more than spooky fun by a crackling fire around Halloween — they reflect society's anxieties. For Utah, that means Latter-day Saint pioneer anxieties and their history that refuses to die.
Consider the tawdry tale of Jean Baptiste, an 1850s convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from somewhere across the pond — as recounted by historian Matthew Bowman. After Baptiste became a grave digger in Salt Lake, he turned to grave robbing.
"He appears to have dug upward of perhaps 60 or 70 graves, taken the clothing and other items, and tried to actually sell some of them [and] wear some of them as clothes, which is suitably creepy," said Bowman, a professor of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Of particular affront to the Latter-day Saints was that those clothes included religious temple clothing that the faithful are buried in.
For his crimes, Baptiste was exiled to Antelope Island and later Fremont Island, both in the Great Salt Lake. Folklore tells us he was left with a ball and chain around his ankle, his ears were cut off and he was branded with the words "grave robber" on his forehead. He later vanished. But you might still encounter his ghost if you visit the lake.
"There are innumerable Boy Scout troops who go to these islands in the Great Salt Lake to camp and hear his ball and chain rattling, who see him carrying bundles of clothing, wandering around the shores," Bowman said.
This story speaks to the high fear and suspicion of outsiders among the early Latter-day Saints, said Bowman — this was the time of the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
"And in some ways, right, John Baptiste is this emblematic figure of the person who comes to this community and betrays it from the inside," he said.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: Only half of Utah adults identify as Latter-day Saints these days, says Pew's Religious Landscape study. Why do these ghost stories live on?
Matthew Bowman: A couple of things. Despite the numerical nature of the numbers there of the actual breakdown of the population in Utah, the culture of the church is very, very powerful. And it is said sometimes that in Utah you are either "Mormon" or "ex-Mormon," regardless of whether you are a member of the church ever or not, right? The dividing line the church creates in the society of Utah is very, very powerful. And of course these sorts of stories speak to kind of disquiet in the LDS experience — which speak to some of the fault lines in the LDS community — can speak to the fact that these fault lines persist and continue to today as well.
CH: Why does troubled history birth ghost stories?
MB: Ghost stories can either, I think, help us to put our troubled past to bed, as it were, by telling stories about ghosts who are appeased, ghosts who are exorcized. A ghost we learn wants something or needs something. In Latter-day Saint folklore, this is often ghosts who come back and want temple work done, for instance, and then they go away. But other times, as in stories of Jean Baptiste and other haunts in Salt Lake City, these tales remind us that the past is actually never really past. That happens, I think, so often with events in the past that we are not entirely at peace with.
CH: What about the supposed hauntings of the pioneer village and historical buildings at This Is The Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City?
MB: Many of the most famous ghosts there are ghosts of polygamous wives from the 19th century, and polygamy, of course, is one of these real deep unsettled moments in Latter-day Saint history that we still grapple with today. And the ghosts there, I think, are doing that. There are two that I will mention. The first is Ann Eliza Webb, who became famous in the 1870s and 1880s as wife number 19 of Brigham Young. She perhaps wasn't exactly wife number 19. Reports on that are mixed, but it is certain that she married him while she was in her mid-20s, and he was in his mid-60s.
After four years of marriage, she divorced him, and then she wrote a book about this experience and made a lot of money traveling around the East Coast of the United States, talking about [it] in very lurid ways, as was the style of the 19th century. Her ghost, it is said, appears on the stairs and in the doorway of the Brigham Young farmhouse in This Is The Place.
That is particularly pointed, right? Because in life, she divorced Brigham Young. She left Utah, but now she is back, and is trapped again in Brigham Young's home. And there is certainly something metaphorical and telling about that — the ways in which polygamy is remembered, perhaps, and to some degree even, at the time, feared.
CH: And the other ghost?
MB: Yes, the other ghost is Mary Fielding Smith, the wife and widow of Hyrum Smith, who was, of course, widowed when he was killed in 1844, along with his brother Joseph Smith Jr. Mary Fielding Smith is famous, actually, and the subject in many folktales among the Latter-day Saints, often as a figure of great faith. Of a woman who traveled across the plains by herself with her children after the death of her husband.
Her home has been moved to This Is The Place. If you speak to guides and other people who frequent the park, they will tell you that sometimes she appears there and she is angry. They think [it's] because her house was moved. After she worked so hard to get it to where it was and to build her house in its original location and to build a life for herself there, she's been uprooted again. Just as she was uprooted when her husband was killed. Just as she and so many others were uprooted and made their way to Utah to try to build a new life for themselves. Her ghost does not appear happy that her house is now part of a tourist attraction.
CH: What do these ghosts say about us?
MB: They tell us something about how we remember the past. And about how the pioneer village at This Is The Place is an attempt to retell this sort of story of 19th-century Utah as a story of great order, a story of kind of happiness, and the kind of building of a new community with very few problems. When in fact there was tragedy and angst and anger underneath the surface of all of these 19th-century settlements. And to the extent the park tries to sand that away, these ghosts remind us that pain and anger and tragedy can never really be entirely eliminated.
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