St. Anne’s Retreat

One of the recurrent legends for St. Anne’s involves the period when the camp was used by the Catholic Church as a summer retreat for nuns.

Ghostly Images of Dead Babies

The story goes that the church used the camp as a place to send nuns who had broken vows and, more specifically, had gotten themselves pregnant.

Many of these babies are said to have perished, and the ghosts of these children are to be seen floating in the abandoned swimming pool. Ghost hunters are said to have seen crying babies and nuns wandering around this pool. 

In one horrific story, one of the nuns is alleged to have drowned their baby in the pool before slitting their own throat. 

Demonic Possession

There are tales of people being possessed by demons while at the site. And there was one particularly violent incident in the 1990s that we know definitely happened: the irrational nature of the crime led some to suspect that the perpetrators had been possessed by demons. 

In October 1997, a group of teens took a trip up to St. Anne’s seeking some Halloween season thrills and got more than they bargained for when the security guards watching over the camp subjected them to a terrifying ordeal.

According to the teens, the men caught them trespassing near the empty swimming pool. They were armed with shotguns and knives and demanded that the teenagers freeze, even firing a shot over their heads.

19-year-old Kevin Thompson, who was with the group, told local press that they threatened to “slit our throats if we moved” and that one of the men singled out an Asian boy and told him that he’d killed Vietnamese people in Vietnam and “wasn’t afraid to do it again.”

The group were tied together by their necks and kept in the pool, the whole time being jabbed with guns. They were also told the wire used to tie them was a detonation wire that would blow their heads off if they struggled.

A gun was also fired very close to one of the teen’s heads, with some of their friends thinking that they had been shot dead.

Around three hours later, deputies arrived from the Cache Country Sheriff, though they were seemingly less than sympathetic.

Later one of the girls also alleged that a watchman fondled her while he was searching her for weapons.

The watchmen were hired by Mark Epstein, a San Francisco-based lawyer who owned an interest in the camp and several of its associated buildings.

Later the three men were charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault and the leader, John Jeppson, with forcible sexual abuse. 

They made a plea agreement, and Jeppson pled guilty to two felony accounts of aggravated assault, his son-in-law to two counts of attempted aggravated assault, and the third man the same.

The alleged paranormal element of this story comes in relation to why three grown men seemingly lost the plot and held over a dozen teens for hours in such bizarre circumstances. Some have suggested that the men were, in fact, possessed by some demonic force, causing them to act in such a reckless way.

This is what the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures team investigated in one of their episodes when they visited the site and took a psychic with them.

Psychic Possessed

On Episode 9 during Season 12 of Ghost Adventures, Zak Bagans and the team headed to St. Anne’s to investigate the legends and determine what might be true.

During the show, the psychic brought along to help with the investigation appears to be possessed and lose control of her senses.

The host, Zak, wonders if the same force could have affected the watchmen on the night in October 1997 when they went out of control.

The crew also heard multiple unexplained noises from the nearby woods. And in a cabin by the pool, they heard footsteps, and one of the team felt something brush u against him. 

An encounter with ghoulish handprints

In 2022, Utah Stories reported on the creepy case of Andrew Tims. St. Anne’s Retreat. When their car pulled up to the property, they saw a group of people screaming and running to a car before speeding away. Despite this, Tims and his friends continued inside. 

But after a while, one of their group began to feel ill. At first, they thought it was nothing, but then Tim’s pal worsened. They began shaking violently and vomiting. The group got a little scared and decided to leave. 

As they hurried back to their car, the group began to hear eerie noises all around them. They became increasingly terrified and ran to their car, speeding off in a hurry, just like the other group of people they’d seen. 

Tims claimed that when they later pulled into a brightly lit gas station, they were chilled to discover 60 to 70 handprints covering the outside of their car.  

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