Real Haunted House

The assigned post for this week is to blog about a real haunted house.  Yep, had to research this one.  I’ve never spent the time “researching” haunted houses before.  Most of what I found aren’t real haunted houses.  Instead they were haunted house attractions for Halloween.

While not a house, there is one location out here in Utah I’ve heard about.  It’s a haunted hospital.  The hospital is in Tooele (pronounced To-will-ah), Utah and is now used for ghost hunts, tours, and they also have a fright tour.  Here’s a picture of the hospital.

Haunted Hospital in Tooele, Utah. Photo from Asylum 49

I only knew about this place because a lady I new at my last job went on a ghost hunt.  Sadly their group didn’t see anything when she went.

As you might expect, as a hospital there are many spirits that have apparently found their eternal residence there.  In looking this up I’ve learned that the hospital featured in Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel.  And it apparently was used to film The Stand by Steven King.  Huh, how about them apples?

It has the (to someone like me) seemingly common mists, orbs, EVP recordings.  However, there is one part of this place that sounds really interesting to me.  A portal.  Yep, there is a spiritual portal where apparently they dead want to go to thinking it is the way to heaven.  The story goes that a spirit by the name of Maria guards the portal to keep others from crossing it.  Mighty helpful lady.

But there’s also a dark entity there believed to be the spirit of Wes, a former patient who passed away there.  He apparently doesn’t want to cross over.

 

I picked this place for the post for two reasons:

1) It’s local and probably not as well known by my classmates (you never know)

2) I can see the idea that a hospital would have many instances of paranormal activity and could provide for quite a story for someone living and sensitive to such activity.  I also think it’s interesting that while so many people do not like the feel of hospitals that there would be spirits that hang around it.  That could be interpreted in different ways depending on what you want to happen in a story.  With the plethora of instances in the hospital, it would be interesting to write a story about someone who (unlike most of the visitors) does not use technology in any way to communicate with the spirits.  Personally that’s a hangup I have with ghost stories.

Let me know if you have heard of this place or have or will visit it.  I’d like to read actual accounts.

6 thoughts on “Real Haunted House”

  1. I’ve heard of it, and I’ve thought about going to visit it from time to time to see if I could get any EVP from the place. However, now that it’s kind of turned into an attraction, I can’t take anything I’d find there seriously. They should have left it untouched in my opinion. In either case, I know it’s pretty famous and has been investigated by a lot of paranormal teams.

  2. Awesome! The haunted hospital/asylum! Those are always creepy stories to me. I think about it this way. People are in hospitals struggling to live. People are in asylums struggling to survive. To the core of their soul they are fighting to “not die.” And yet, for some, it happens while they are there. Is it any wonder why some spirits continue to struggle and rage against that unwanted change? (The Stand? How cooool!) This story reminds me of the movie starring Mr. Monk—I mean, Tony Shaloub—called Thirteen Ghosts, especially the story about the angry spirit, Wes.

    Seriously, not everyone can be ready to Pass On when Whomever draws that Trump card, right?

    I may have misunderstood your blog, but did you mean to say that ghost Maria guards the portal to keep others from crossing over? (Like that Tangi character in Poltergeist?) Or that she guards the portal to keep others from crossing into an area that isn’t a way into The Light and therefore doing her best to ensure other spirits’ safety? (Helpful, indeed. What a committed soul.) Or, that it IS a way into The Light and she’s trying to stop them from going forward? (Nurse Ratchett from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

    Anyway you explain it, Asylum 49 must be a busy place for her, and I don’t mean with guest tours.

  3. The idea of portals is interesting. Supposedly there’s all sorts of time portals in the national park next to where I live. The place has such a unique, special feel to it, but the landscape is so beautiful and unearthly it’s hard to say if it’s time portals, or visual stimulus and healthy imaginations. It wouldn’t surprise me either way.

    Way to find something local. I tried but was too attracted to Lizzie Borden because of the murder mystery behind it.

  4. I really like the portal. It gives an extra dimension to the haunted hospital trope. (I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.) From the photo, it looks like the building has an unusual shape. In a story, that could be linked to the portal, as either cause or effect. I like the idea of the technology-free communication. Now that communication among the living is ruled by technology, it’s taken over ghost hunting, but why would the dead need technology to communicate?

  5. I find it very interesting that so many of us chose hospitals to research and write about. Says a lot about our society in terms of historical instances of bad behavior inside institutions (among the inmates and the staff). Does this speak to some primal fear of imprisonment? Institutions are never extremely fun places to be, but even less fun after they start absorbing negative energy.

  6. Trying to narrow down a site was a bit of challenge for me, too, Dan. Phoenix is apparently filled with Halloween attractions that I’d never seen before. :/ It made it rather difficult to sift through the fake from the (mostly) real.

    The Stand? That’s why this one looked so familiar! I couldn’t put my finger on it for a moment there.

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