Saltair

The story

Saltair is the name of several resorts that have stood along the Great Salt Lake's south shore, about 15 miles west of Salt Lake City, most of them within what is now the city of Magna. There have been three, and the ghost stories belong to the most recent.

The first Saltair opened in 1893, built by a company with ties to the Latter-day Saint church together with a railway that carried visitors out to the lake. Promoted as the Coney Island of the West, it became a major attraction. At its peak in 1924 it drew roughly half a million visitors a year. In April 1925 an electrical fire destroyed it.

A second pavilion opened in 1926, but the lake was against it. As the water receded, the resort was left stranded, and after years of decline it closed in 1958. Its abandoned silhouette had one memorable afterlife: the 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls drew on it, and its key scenes were shot in the empty pavilion. In 1970 the building burned in a fire suspected to be arson, never solved.

The third Saltair went up in 1981, about a mile from the original site, using an aircraft hangar from Hill Air Force Base. Two years later, in 1983, the rising lake flooded it under about five feet of water. It was restored in 1992-1993 by Walter Plumb and was bought in 2005 by investors from the music industry, who run it as a concert venue. A local researcher writing a history of the resort has dismissed the modern building as a poor imitation of the original.

The legend

Nearly all of Saltair's ghost stories come from the 1981 concert hall and the people who work there: stage crews, managers and staff closing up at night. No haunting report is known from before 2000, and even local investigators say none of the spirits seem linked to the historic pavilions. They estimate around ten ghosts, a handful of which are seen regularly.

The best known is Saltair Sally, a nickname for a woman in white said to pace near the large second-floor windows. She is connected to a grim real event: the remains of a woman were dumped on or near the property (around 2000, according to Ghost Adventures; the Deseret News speaks of two women, the remains of both left at the site). No source names her, and her story deserves to be handled with care. Staff also describe a soldier or military man near the staircase banister or the bar, a figure linked by some to the building's origin as an Air Force hangar; a boy and a girl, with children's laughter in the rafters; a blonde woman in a white dress resembling a nightgown; a tiny elderly woman in the ladies' room on the main floor; and a very tall shadow figure.

The reported phenomena are typical of busy old venues: footsteps when someone closes alone, doors and lights working on their own (lights shut off at random in a green room nicknamed after Marilyn Manson; another space is said to be about eight degrees cooler than the rest of the building), whispers, shadows, cool drafts, and a closet on the third floor believed to harbor a spirit. One man who tumbled on the grand staircase insisted that someone had shoved him. In 2020 the longtime events coordinator, Brandon Barrick, until then a skeptic, said he and others heard children laughing while readying the empty hall for a film crew, and found nobody outside. Believers also point to two salvaged objects: a board salvaged from the first resort's boardwalk, fastened to a pillar behind the stage, and the grand staircase, which came from Salt Lake City's historic Hotel Utah.

Local explanations for all this have merged into what is now called the Saltair Curse: a deadly stretch of Interstate 80 nearby, bodies dumped in the area, salt that supposedly traps spirits, even a portal. These are theories, not findings.

The building has drawn steady attention from investigators. Ghost Adventures opened its 22nd season there with The Great Saltair Curse, released on Discovery+ on July 22, 2021. Local groups including Mysteries and Legends Paranormal and Grimm Ghost Adventures held a public investigation in October 2024, and in 2025 KSL-TV followed the W.A.S.P. paranormal team and a local ghost-tour guide through the building with spirit boxes, dowsing rods and a structured-light camera. None of these investigations produced independent evidence, and the stories remain staff accounts and folklore.

What remains today

Nothing stands of the 1893 and 1926 pavilions, which were lost to fire. The current Saltair, a converted hangar from 1981, sits near the lakeshore off Interstate 80 and operates as a concert venue. Inside, the grand staircase from the Hotel Utah and a plank from the original boardwalk link the modern hall to the past.

Visiting

Saltair is a working concert venue, so the legal way to see it is to attend a show; check the venue's listings for dates. Local paranormal groups organize ticketed ghost-hunting events in the building, and a seasonal haunted attraction has reportedly used part of it, so look for those around October rather than wandering in. Do not try to enter outside events or explore the surrounding lakeshore property. If you are interested in the history, look for historic photographs of the first two pavilions, or watch Carnival of Souls for a glimpse of Saltair II in its abandoned state.

Sources

1. Cambrian excursion to Saltair! Friday, August 19, 1898 : Madam Amanda Swenson ladies' chorus. Prof. E. Stephens' male chorus. Prof B.W. Ashton, character artist, will also appear — Internet Archive, 1898-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Saltair, Utah — Wikimedia Commons
3. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Antelope Island South, UT 1952 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1952 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Tooele, UT 1955 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1955 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Tooele Valley, UT 1885 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1885 · Public domain (USGS)
6. Ghost Adventures: The Great Saltair Curse — TheTVDB — TheTVDB
7. How The Great Saltair became a ghost hunting hotspot — Deseret News (Margaret Darby, 29 Oct 2024) — Deseret News (Margaret Darby, 29 Oct 2024
8. Official website
9. Spooky Saltair: Concert venue home to ghostly sightings, unexplained encounters — KSL.com (Andrew Adams, 31 Oct 2025) — KSL.com (Andrew Adams, 31 Oct 2025
10. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.