Rio Grande Depot and the Purple Lady

The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad built its Salt Lake City depot in 1910 for $750,000, deliberately outspending the Union Pacific station completed three blocks north a year earlier. Designed by the Chicago architect Henry Schlacks in Renaissance Revival and Beaux-Arts style, with a vast barrel-vaulted waiting hall, it embodied the rivalry between the rail barons George Gould and E. H. Harriman – a contest Gould ultimately lost.

For decades the depot was one of the city’s great gateways. Soldiers left from and returned to it in both world wars, and generations of Latter-day Saint missionaries departed from its platforms. Passenger traffic declined after the 1950s; the Rio Grande Zephyr made its final run on May 29, 1979, and the building later served as Salt Lake City’s Amtrak station until 1999. The state bought the depot for a dollar in 1977, and from 1981 it housed the Utah State Historical Society, its research library and, for nearly 40 years, the Rio Grande Café.

The depot’s ghost is known as the Purple Lady. According to local legend, reported by the Deseret News on the building’s centenary in 2010, she was a jilted woman who jumped down onto the tracks to retrieve a ring and was struck by a train. She is said to make her presence known particularly in the women’s restroom of the old café, and security guards have reported her footsteps on the mezzanine at night. No record of such an accident has been identified.

The magnitude 5.7 earthquake that struck the Salt Lake Valley in March 2020 cracked the depot’s plaster and shifted its upper walls, forcing the building to close for repairs and the café to move out. Its tenants, including the Utah Division of State History, relocated, and the Utah Historical Society now lists an address elsewhere in Salt Lake City. The ghost story, at least, has stayed with the building.

A female presence – the “Purple Lady” – felt or glimpsed in the former café’s women’s restroom, and footsteps heard by security guards on the upper mezzanine of the grand hall after hours.

The women’s restroom of the former Rio Grande Café and the mezzanine overlooking the main waiting hall.

The Purple Lady is one of Salt Lake City’s best-known ghost stories and a regular feature of local Halloween coverage and ghost tours. The depot itself, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, is a landmark of Utah’s railroad era.