From Cache Valley to Bear Lake, USU Folklorist talks Utah folklore, belief, and local legends

Watch the full interview on the News4Utah+ app.

LOGAN, Utah (ABC4) — Utah is a place rife with folklore and local legends, and a USU folklorist sat down with us to talk about some of those legends and what belief means to society.

Associate Professor of Folklore at Utah State University Lynne McNeill spoke with ABC4 about some of Utah’s most interesting pieces of folklore and what it’s like to study the paranormal.

Utah State University is home to the Fife Folklore Archives, one of the largest folklore archives in the country, and McNeill said that it’s a great reason to come to Utah and study folklore. In addition to being a professor, McNeill has also appeared on multiple TV shows, including “Paranormal Caught on Camera” on Travel Channel and “The Unexplained History’s Greatest Mysteries” on History Channel.

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Lynne described herself and other academic folklorists as having a “professional agnosticism” when it comes to ghosts and the paranormal.

“I very much think that belief is the far more interesting stance to take. I just don’t like to close any doors,” she said. “I’m interested in other people’s belief.”

She said that it’s easy to assume that people who believe that something supernatural happened are being irrational, but research has shown that people are not making irrational leaps.

“People are always trying to explain something through rational or natural explanations first, and when they sort of can’t, that’s when they go, okay, maybe it’s something supernatural or paranormal instead of something natural or normal that happened here,” she said. “And I think what motivates people to believe that is often incredibly meaningful and often very personal.”

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For Lynne, folklore is important because it is focused on stories from normal people. She explained, “I think that what folklore studies teaches us is the value of everyday people and their cultural expressions and experience.”

“Folklore kind of brings us down to a more grassroots level, a more everyday level: the stories we tell each other, the ways we make meaning of the world in and of ourselves, and that’s almost more influential and more significant than those great works that culture and global society can give us because that’s the daily world in which we live,” she continued.

The Nunnery

The nunnery is also known as St. Anne’s Retreat, and it was a retreat for the Catholic Church. Lynne explained that as the story goes, it was also where nuns were sent if they had gotten pregnant, which is against the rules of the church.

“The story is that nuns would go here to convalesce while they were pregnant, have the babies, give them up for adoption, and then they would leave and rejoin their convent out back in the outside world,” Lynne said. “And the story goes that one young num who arrived there made the really horrific discovery that the babies that were born there were not being given up for adoption.”

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Instead, the babies were being drowned in the pool and buried in the woods. In the story, the nun tries to escape, but she and her baby are murdered, and she haunts the area.

The nunnery is a popular site for legend tripping, which Lynne explained is when a group of friends pile into a car and go to check out the creepy place for themselves.

Monster of Bear Lake

Like Loch Ness in Scotland, Bear Lake is supposedly home to its own lake monster.

“This idea that there is a large, oftentimes serpentine type creature, sometimes described as having a horse like head, sometimes described as having a long body. There is a lot of precedent for stories like this in a lot of lakes around the world,” Lynne explained.

The Bear Lake monster is officially named Isabella, and she has been in the news since the mid 1800s.

“A journalist named Joseph Rich from the Deseret News wrote an article with a bunch of interviews from locals, all of whom said they’d seen the monster, they’d heard of the monster, they knew someone who’d been dragged into the water by the monster. Years later, Rich says he fabricated it. He says it’s all a lie,” Lynne said.

But that didn’t stop people from reporting sightings of the monster. According to Lynne, there are records in the archives dating from the 1960s up to the last four years in the student folklore collection.

“People still see this lake monster. People still have stories about it, so the jury’s really out on this one,” Lynne said. “There’s a Bear Lake Festival. I mean, people love a local monster. It sort of becomes a mascot for the region.”

Logan Cemetery

The Logan Cemetery is known for one particular statue known as the weeping woman, and Lynne said that she is another longstanding story with records in the archives going back to the 1970s.

The statue itself is what’s known as a surrogate mourner–a figure meant to be expressing grief and loss constantly, when family members can’t always be at the cemetery. The legend, though, is as if the statue is of a woman who’s buried in that grave.

There are two stories, according to Lynne, one where the woman murdered her children, and one where they died of natural causes and her grief killed her.

“The story says that if you go there at one of these sorts of ritually appointed times and chant, ‘weep, woman, weep,’ or some people say, ‘cry, lady, cry,’ at the statue, you will see her cry real tears. Some people even say tears of blood,” she explained.

Lynne has even had her own supernatural experience at Logan Cemetery, which she said was the scariest thing that’s ever happened to her. On Halloween night a few years ago, using an app meant to communicate with spirits, she heard a clear voice tell her to leave.

Watch the full interview on the News4Utah+ app. Learn how to download the app for your smart TV device here.

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