Brigham Young Forest Farmhouse

The Forest Farmhouse was built in 1861–63 on Brigham Young’s Forest Farm, a few miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The two-storey house, likely the first balloon-frame building in Utah, was not Young’s regular home; one of his wives lived there to run the farm. Among the women associated with the house is Ann Eliza Webb Young, who became his nineteenth wife in 1868 and later divorced him, left the church and wrote a memoir criticising polygamy. She complained that the house was inadequate against winter cold and summer heat.

After Young’s death in 1877 the family kept the property until 1889, when it was sold and broken up into the Forest Dale neighbourhood. The house became a schoolhouse, a meetinghouse and a community space, and a 1923 remodelling removed its porches and part of its structure. The LDS Church acquired it in 1968 and rebuilt the missing section; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. In 1975, after a land exchange with the state, the building was sawed in half horizontally and moved to This Is the Place Heritage Park, reopening to tours on 24 July 1976. The move cost it its National Register status, since the register requires a building to remain on its historic site.

The ghost stories are repeated in Utah newspapers as part of Halloween coverage. In November 2003 the Deseret News called it reputedly one of the most haunted houses in the state, naming Ann Eliza Webb Young as its best-known ghost. Reported activity includes phantom footsteps, rattling doorknobs, objects moving, ghostly images and the voices of children. Storyteller Michael Bennett said he had not seen anything himself, but recalled that some strange events reported before the house was moved had not happened since. A former guide, Pamela Schiess, said that while closing blinds alone one October evening she felt another person in the room.

The park has made the house part of its autumn programme, such as the 2005 “Haunted Deseret” hayride, where costumed actors told ghost stories in first person and the farmhouse was opened for the first time in years. As with most such sites, the accounts come from staff and visitors and are not documented, and the paper’s psychic interviewee suggested remodelling might remove “residual energy” and leave only the spirits most attached to the site. Ann Eliza’s connection to the haunting seems to come from her well-known unhappiness rather than from any account of her living there in particular.

Phantom footsteps and rattling doorknobs, objects moving, voices of children, a sense of someone else in the room, and the apparition of a woman identified as Ann Eliza Webb Young.

The farmhouse’s upstairs rooms and hallway at This Is the Place Heritage Park, particularly during evening and October visits.

The farmhouse figures in Utah Halloween coverage and in the heritage park’s annual storytelling events. Ann Eliza Young’s memoir, Wife No. 19 (1875), made her one of the best-known public critics of polygamy.