The Empty Pool at St. Ann’s Retreat in Logan Canyon

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 4, 2026 · How we verify

Eight and a third miles up Logan Canyon, on national forest land in northern Utah, a fenced cluster of cabins and lodges sits around an empty concrete swimming pool. The property has been called Hatch’s Camp, Forest Hills, Pine Glenn Cove and, by generations of teenagers, simply the Nunnery. Its official name for most of the twentieth century was St. Ann’s Retreat, and that name is the one attached to the folklore: pregnant nuns, drowned infants, satanic rites and hell-hounds in the pines. None of it appears in the historical record. What is on the record is stranger, and in one case genuinely criminal.

Quick orientation: the camp sits 8.3 miles up Logan Canyon in Cache County, about 10 miles from the city of Logan, on the grounds of Cache National Forest. The compound holds 21 buildings and structures, including two main lodges, six smaller cabins, a playhouse, a pool house, a generator house, a fireplace, fire pit, fountain, bridge and the pool. It is the largest private retreat in Logan Canyon and the only one with a swimming pool. Hatch’s Camp was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 27, 2006, with 11 contributing buildings and six other contributing structures. It is not open to the public.

Hezekiah Hatch’s Cabin for Georgia

The site was developed in 1910 by Hezekiah Eastman Hatch (1855 to 1928), a prominent Logan businessman. Between 1915 and 1918 he built the first cabin there for his wife, Georgia Thatcher Hatch, who enjoyed it in her later years. She died in 1919, and their son Lorenzo Boyd Hatch took over the camp.

Lorenzo and his brother-in-law Floyd B. Odlum are the reason the place stopped being a cabin and became a compound. Both were self-made millionaires, owners of and investors in numerous prominent businesses, and they expanded the property until the summer camp had turned into a summer retreat, not only for the Hatches and Odlums but for a long list of friends and family. Guests included Hollywood movie stars, government leaders and business heads, socialites and business associates the two families knew through their ties to New York City and Hollywood. At one point the grounds included a small theater with an adjoining ticket booth, and a horse stable that has since been demolished.

How the Nunnery Got Its Nickname

In the 1950s the Hatch family gave the camp away. It was offered first to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then to Utah State University, and neither was interested. The Roman Catholic Diocese accepted the donation, renamed the property St. Ann’s Retreat, and used it as a vacation spot for nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Cross and the Benedictines in Salt Lake City.

That is the whole of the religious chapter, and it is worth holding onto, because the folklore rests entirely on it. The nuns came here on holiday. In the 1980s the site changed hands again in function, serving as a youth summer camp for the Boys’ Club of Weber and the Salt Lake Central City Community Center, and in 1993 it was sold into private ownership.

Drowned Babies, Hell-Hounds and the Silence of the Record

The best-known story attached to St. Ann’s Retreat says that nuns who became pregnant by monks or priests were sent here to give birth, and that they drowned the babies in the swimming pool because underwater you could not hear them cry. A more specific version narrows to one nun who drowned her infant to keep the pregnancy secret and then took her own life. Related legends add satanic worship on the grounds and hell-hounds patrolling the trees.

There is no record supporting any of it. No documented deaths, no documented births, no named women. What exists instead is an unusually well-preserved paper trail of the storytelling itself: collections of legends and first-hand accounts are archived in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, and further folklore materials are held in the Fife Folklore Archives at Utah State University. If you want to study how a rumour grows in a canyon, the sources are catalogued.

What Visitors Report at the Pool

Accounts gathered from the camp are consistent in what they describe and thin in what they prove. The two recurring claims are children’s voices heard on the property and an apparition of a woman dressed in black. Visitors have also described cold spots near the swimming pool, sobbing attributed to the nun of the legend, and the barking of dogs with no dogs present, which slots neatly into the hell-hound tradition. Treat all of these as reported experiences rather than events. The pool is a large concrete basin in a cold, steep-walled canyon at night, in a place people arrive at already knowing the story.

The retreat’s paranormal reputation reached a wider audience when St. Ann’s Retreat was featured as episode nine of season twelve of Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, hosted by Zak Bagans.

October 10, 1997: The Night in the Empty Pool

The camp’s most frightening night involved no ghosts at all. Legend-tripping, the practice of travelling to a supposedly supernatural site to test the stories, had been drawing young people into the abandoned camp after dark for years.

On October 10, 1997, a group of eight teenagers entered the camp illegally and were surprised by three armed watchmen. The men herded them into the lodge, handcuffed them, and tied their necks together with ropes. Police arrived and released them. Later the same night, a second and larger group of 30 teenagers, unaware of what had happened earlier, entered the camp and met the same men. This group was forced into the empty swimming pool, their necks bound with ropes and their hands zip tied, and told that if they moved and tightened the ropes an explosive would trigger and kill them. Police came again and released them. In both cases the watchmen had called the sheriffs themselves.

The aftermath put the camp on national headlines. Police initially regarded the men as local heroes, which produced substantial backlash and a public argument about trespassing, the role of law enforcement and moral values. The three men were eventually charged with six counts of aggravated assault. The trespassing charges against the teenagers were dropped: because the land was technically owned by the Forest Service, they had not been trespassing at all.

Visiting Pine Glenn Cove: Why You Cannot, Yet

The land belongs to the Forest Service, which rents the camp to private owner Matt Nielsen. The retreat is not open to the public. Nielsen has been working to restore the property with the intention of opening it up at some future date, but no opening date has been set.

Because of the folklore, vandalism and trespassing have been persistent problems, and security cameras have been installed to stop further damage to a work in progress. A Facebook page posts photographs of trespassers and asks whether anyone can identify them. The practical advice is simple: the pool and the lodges are off limits, the canyon road and Cache National Forest around them are not, and anyone tempted to repeat the legend-trip should read the account of what happened in 1997 first.

See The Nunnery for Yourself

Sources

• Legends surround St. Ann's Retreat
• We're guilty: St. Anne's defendants accept plea bargains · USU Digital Exhibits (Usu (official site))
• Collection of legends on revenants at Saint Ann's Retreat, Logan Canyon (Byu (official site))
• Utah State University student folklore genre collection of supernatural nonreligious legends – Archives West
• St. Anne's Retreat
• Wikipedia: Pine Glenn Cove

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