The April Fools' Fire: Cottonwood Paper Mill (Utah)
About this episode
The episode explores the haunted history of the Cottonwood Paper Mill in Utah, detailing its transformation and the strange events surrounding it.
At three in the morning on April Fools’ Day, 1893, the alarm bells at Utah’s Granite Paper Mill began ringing. The people living nearby heard them, checked the date—and went back to sleep. By sunrise, the mill’s wooden interior and machinery were gone, leaving behind a roofless fortress of granite that somehow refused to disappear. Over the next 130 years, the ruin became a Jazz Age ballroom, a counterculture rock club, a Halloween attraction, a Hollywood filming location, and eventually one of Utah’s most notorious haunted landmarks. But many of its ghosts have histories almost as strange as the building itself—because they appear to have been assembled from real events, theatrical props, canyon acoustics, and decades of collective memory. Tonight, we explore the Cottonwood Paper Mill, a building that survived fire, abandonment, and folklore... and may now be facing the one thing it can't survive: demolition.
Topics covered
- haunted history
- fire disaster
- abandoned places
- ghost stories
- cultural landmarks
- folklore
Keywords
- Cottonwood Paper Mill
- haunted landmarks
- Utah history
- fire
- abandonment
- ghosts
- folklore
- demolition
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Granite Paper Mill
Places: Utah, Cottonwood Paper Mill
More episodes of Haunted American History
- The Curse That Erased the Hayden Family: The Hayden House (Vermont)
- The Ghost Story That Changed With The Building : The Everett Mansion (Vermont)
- The House That Became Hill House Anyway: Jennings Hall (Vermont)
- The Devil's Not on Trial: The Fall River Murders (Massachusetts)
- The Murder Blamed on Witches: Jeannette DePalma (New Jersey)
- The Boy Who Never Made the Bus: Macin Smith (Utah)
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