The Nunnery
Known by various names, including Hatch's Camp, Forest Hills, Pine Glenn, St. Anne's Retreat, and the Nunnery, this historic site is about 6 miles up Logan Canyon in the middle of the Cache National Forest. This former summer camp has been listed on top haunted lists of the US.
The first owners and developers of the land were the Hatch and Odlum families. Boyd and Anne Hatch and Floyd and Hortense Odum not only developed this land together, but also went into business together starting in the 1920’s and soon became millionaires due to their entrepreneurial efforts. In the 1950s the Hatch family donated the property to St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Logan. which gladly accepted the property on behalf of the Catholic Church and renamed the camp St. Anne's Retreat. It was only after the Catholic church took over the ownership of the Hatch property that rumors began to take hold of the community, filling the communal mind with images of drowning babies and Satanic nuns. Gary Topping, the archivist of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, is unaware of any actual crime that would taint the site's reputation in the era when the church used the property as a resort and was unable to find any evidence of any incident in the records of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish. A reporter for the Deseret Morning News was also unable to unearth any evidence backing up local legends. This leads many to believe that these horror stories were created from an environment of prejudice against non-LDS religions in Utah.
In 1995, Jesse Smith Bushman, a BYU graduate student, conducted a study in which he interviewed two Catholic priests in Utah about their experience as a religious minority in the area during the time that the rumors began about St. Anne’s retreat. These are some of the things they had to say about the LDS church and Catholic relations during the 1950s, “The LDS church and its members tended to overlook the other faiths in the state” and “some adults are still very affected by social barriers and may leave for that reason”. This idea of a “us” versus “them” society is shown in a story that one of the priests shared “about a man who had felt somewhat left out for five years and then after joining the LDS church felt quite accepted." These candid accounts suggest how mistrusting rumors could have started about a non-LDS religious institution.
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