LOGAN, Utah — About 8 miles up Logan Canyon, across the river and among several empty cabins, there’s a swimming pool. Built by Depression-era millionaires, it likely hosted business tycoons and Hollywood starlets.
Some time ago, a trespasser must have attempted an exorcism, because the name “Jesus” and a cross are spraypainted on the swimming pool’s wall.
It’s one of the first things someone sees on the tour of Hatch’s Camp, now up for sale.
“We realize that many people would love to come see this property in person. At this time, it’s only open to qualified buyers,” said Eric Jones of Cache Home Realty. “We hope in the future that there may be a way that we could open it to the public.”
While trespassers have been a bane to the property for at least a century, many involved with the currently for-sale site agree that Hatch’s Camp could stand to be exorcised of some of its supernatural stigma.
Despite the popularity of ghost stories of baby-killing nuns and hellhounds connected to the camp popularly known as “St. Anne’s Retreat” — the Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures” filmed at the site five years ago — real estate agents, the current owner, the Forest Service and members of the Hatch family would all like to see less focus on the supernatural and more focus on the historic. The camp is on the National Historic Register, after all.
The cabins built in the Preston Valley area of Logan Canyon are built on U.S. National Forest Service land, and this time around officials want to make sure whoever gets the special use permit next is committed to opening the site up to the public in some form.
“Since it’s on public land,” according to Logan District Ranger Jennefer Parker, “what the Forest Service would be looking for is some type of public benefit to having that operation on national forest.”
Former Cache Valley resident Elaine Hatch Thomas visited the camp often before the family gave it away when she was 6.
“My times there were wonderful,” Thomas said. “It was just a delightful place, even though the pool was very, very chilly.”
Cold though it may be, the swimming pool at Hatch’s Camp is the only one at a Logan Canyon summer home site.
“I would be thrilled to have it in a situation where people could enjoy it again and maybe show it off to people and maybe take some of the mystique out of it,” Thomas said. “Which I don’t believe for a minute, that any of the things that took place there really, actually happened. It’s just what they call an urban legend.”
The Forest Service is keen to throw cold water on the ghost stories, as well.
“The Forest Service doesn’t support or promote some of the folklore and rumors that surround Hatch’s Camp,” Parker said. “There’s not truth to a lot of that. And every time we see something that is promoting that, we also see an uptick in vandalism.”
Logan magnate Hezekiah Eastman Hatch started developing the camp in 1910 and began building the first cabin there for his wife, Georgia Thatcher Hatch, in 1915, according to the National Register of Historic Places. By 1930, the camp had been expanded by their son, Lorenzo Boyd Hatch, and his millionaire brother-in-law, Floyd Odlum, to include some of the site’s most notable features: A swimming pool and a large summer home with a three-story tall main room and an imposing stone fireplace.
Some very tangible pieces of Logan’s history at Hatch’s Camp have to do with the fireplace in the Odlum cabin. While the fireplace itself is believed to have been imported, a 1951 Salt Lake Tribune profile of Floyd’s ex-wife, Hortense McQuarrie Odlum, states stones from perhaps its chimney were “taken many years ago from Logan’s old opera house when it burned down.”
The Thatcher Opera House and Thatcher Bank burned down on April 17, 1912, upstaging even the sinking of the Titanic for the main place on The Logan Journal’s front page.
“The story makes sense,” said Richard Hatch, “because my great grandfather Hezekiah Eastman Hatch was at that time president of the Thatcher Brothers Bank when it burned, so he would have had first dibs on anything salvageable.”
The well-to-do Hatches and Odlums used the camp as a summer retreat, inviting numerous friends.
“Guests included those with local ties as well as business associates, socialites, and other elites the Hatches and Odlums knew through their ties to New York and Hollywood,” the site’s entry in the National Historic Register states.
By the 1950s, however, the families’ interest in the property had waned, and nobody was willing or able to look after it. The family first offered the camp to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then to Utah State University. Neither could envision a use for the site, so it was ultimately donated to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City in 1958. The church used the site as a retreat for youth groups and for nuns serving in the diocese.
In 1987, “the church closed the facility for good due to a high rate of trespassing and vandalism,” the National Register states. “Because the camp was used only occasionally, there was plenty opportunity for trespassing.”
The church sold the buildings to private investors in 1992.
Perhaps because of the site’s uniqueness and the fact that it’s been periodically unoccupied, trespassing and vandalism have been a concern for at least a century.
An article in The Logan Journal on Sept. 28, 1921, recounts students from the Utah Agricultural College vandalizing Hatch’s Camp. A small news item in the same paper two years later, also shared on a private Facebook group about the camp’s history, states:
“Several boys accused of having broken into the Hatch camp in Logan canyon are going to be brought up for trial, and the penalty may be somewhat severe,” states The Logan Journal article from June 5, 1922. “There is a class of both men and boy vandals—not only in the canyon, but in the city—who have no regard for property rights, being vandals by nature.”
While owned by the Catholics, local occult folklore began to grow around the site. The church renamed the camp St. Ann’s Retreat, and nuns from the Salt Lake City area would visit.
A Utah State University digital exhibit collecting and analyzing some of this folklore, as well as connected historical events, is available at http://exhibits.lib.usu.edu/exhibits/show/stannesretreat.
“Local legends tell of a haunted place with stories laced in ancient themes telling of nuns and priests secretly engaging in sexual encounters, nuns getting pregnant by priests, giving birth and drowning their babies in the legendary pool,” the exhibit’s introduction states.
The exhibit goes on to deconstruct those legends, tying many of them together with the concept of “projective inversion,” or a tendency among legend-tellers of accusing others of things they’d actually like to do themselves.
“Some of the themes in the legends … appear to be the reverse of reality,” the exhibit states. “The ghostly nuns are described as menacing and aggressive, intruding on the visiting teenagers’ courtship scene; when in fact the teenagers were trespassing. The nuns are described as sexually active, thus breaking local religious and moral codes, when of course the teenagers are the ones doing the courtship game.”
It’s ironic, then, that modern, rattlecan-wielding trespassers may have attempted something so Catholic as an exorcism to rid the site of ghost stories when a cultural suspicion of Catholics likely contributed to those stories in the first place.
The pool was the site of an actual, non-supernatural scare one night in 1997 when nearly 40 young adults — who had arrived at the camp in two separate groups — were captured by three armed men living as unpaid caretakers at the site. The shotgun-wielding men tied up the trespassers and forced them to kneel in the pool until authorities arrived. The men were charged with aggravated assault and ultimately accepted a plea deal, while the young adults were cited for trespassing.
One feature of the property that could seem eerie to trespassers without the benefit of a tour guide is one cabin that’s much smaller than the others. Most adults would have to stoop to enter the door and find a small room with its own small fireplace. This cabin wasn’t creepy back in the property’s Hatch Camp days, however — it was one of the children’s favorite features, an actual cabin built in miniature for the girls.
“It was a little girl’s dream,” Thomas said. “All the furniture, everything. It was like you became Alice in Wonderland and you were in this little place that was made just for your size.”
The boys who visited the camp had a play cabin, as well, near the Odlum cabin and across from the pool, according to Thomas. Thomas said her father moved the boys’ playhouse to her girlhood backyard in the neighborhood of 400 North and 600 East.
“When he told me that I was getting a playhouse from the Hatch Camp, I envisioned the girls playhouse, which I loved playing in when we visited the camp,” Thomas wrote in a social media post. “When this log cabin appeared I was surprised and disappointed. But at 6 I quickly found joy in this cute little log house.”
The hope is that soon, more people will enjoy the camp, legitimately. Jones, the Realtor, said there are already several buyers lining up with ideas that let the public visit in some way.
What are the odds that it ends up as a haunted bed & breakfast? Not good, according to the Forest Service.
“We would definitely try to redirect that,” Parker said.