Reviewed by Josh N · Updated July 28, 2026 · How we verify
Reported Phenomena
- Phantom dog barking
- Doors moving alone
- Lights without power
- Sense of presence
Reported by visitors & local legend. Stories, not verified claims.
The Old Mill Utah is the name locals still use for the roofless stone shell at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon in Cottonwood Heights, a building that has been a paper mill, a burned-out ruin, a dance hall, a rock venue, a craft boutique and a commercial haunted house attraction. It is one of the most recognizable historic structures in Salt Lake County, and it carries a long-standing reputation for ghostly activity involving two men, a dog, and lights that appear in a building with no electricity. That reputation rests on stories told by visitors and former haunted house patrons rather than on anything documented in the mill’s history.
Quick Facts
- Also known as: Cottonwood Paper Mill, Granite Paper Mill, the Old Mill Club
- Location: Mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, Cottonwood Heights, Utah
- Built: 1883, by the Deseret News, under the direction of Henry Grow
- Original use: Pulp and paper manufacturing, up to 5 tons of paper per day
- Destroyed: Fire on April 1, 1893
- Partially rebuilt: 1927, as an open-air dance hall
- Designations: Declared a historic site by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers in 1966, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971
- Status: Abandoned and condemned by the city of Cottonwood Heights in 2005. Not an operating attraction
The History of the Old Mill
The mill was built in 1883 by the Deseret News under the direction of Henry Grow. Its purpose was practical: a local supply of paper for a growing territory that was importing most of what it needed. Workers installed paper making equipment brought over from the older Sugar House Mill and used it to grind logs hauled down from the nearby canyons into pulp.
Rags collected from old clothing went into the same process. The pulp was poured into molds and dried into sheets. At full operation the mill could produce as much as 5 tons of paper per day, a substantial output for a plant at the mouth of a canyon.
For close to ten years the mill provided both paper and steady jobs. What ended that was not fire but freight. The railroad made paper manufactured outside the region cheaper to bring in than the local product was to make. In 1892 the Cottonwood Paper Mill was sold to the Granite Paper Mills Company.
The Fire of April 1, 1893
On April 1, 1893, a fire broke out in the stockpile of finished paper stored inside the building. The date worked against everyone. Many people who heard the alarm assumed it was an April Fools’ Day prank and did not respond.
The fire gutted the mill. What remained afterward was a stone skeleton: thick masonry walls standing open to the sky, with the interior burned out. That shell is essentially what visitors see from the road today, more than a century later.
From Ruin to Dance Hall to Haunted House
The stone walls survived well enough that the structure was partially rebuilt in 1927 and reopened as an open-air dance hall known as the Old Mill Club. It operated in that role into the 1940s.
Its second life as a music venue came in the late 1960s, when rock bands played there on Friday and Saturday nights. In the 1970s and 1980s the building was put to two very different uses: a seasonal haunted house and a craft boutique. That haunted house period matters to the modern legend, because it is the era in which many of the ghost stories now attached to the mill were first told and retold.
Recognition came alongside the reinvention. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers declared the mill a historic site in 1966, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. In 2005 the city of Cottonwood Heights condemned the structure, which is where matters stand now.
Reported Phenomena
There is no evidence that the Old Mill is haunted, and the documented history of the building does not record the deaths that local legend describes. What exists is a body of reported experiences, most of it circulated during and after the years the mill operated as a commercial haunted attraction.
The story told most often holds that two men and a dog died at the mill and that all three remain there. The accounts attached to the site include:
- The barking of a dog heard on the property with no animal present
- Doors said to move or shift on their own
- Lights reported inside a building that has long been disconnected from power
- A general sense of presence described by people walking the grounds after dark
These are reported experiences rather than verified events. The 1893 fire is the tragedy in the mill’s real record, and no one is documented as having died in it. It is worth noting how neatly the ghost stories map onto the decades when the building was staged and lit specifically to frighten paying visitors, which is a plausible origin for at least some of what people now recall as unexplained.
Visiting the Old Mill
This is not a tour stop. The structure was condemned by the city of Cottonwood Heights in 2005, and the walls are an unroofed nineteenth century masonry ruin with no maintained interior. Entering is unsafe and is not permitted.
What the mill offers is an exterior. It stands in plain view at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, and the stone shell reads clearly from outside the fencing, including the scale of the original walls and the visible line between the 1883 construction and the 1927 partial rebuild. Photographers should plan on shooting from public ground and treating the site as what it legally is: private, condemned property on the National Register, not an abandoned building open to exploration.
Anyone coming for the ghost stories should come with the history in hand as well. The mill’s documented past, a locally financed paper works undercut by the railroad and finished off by a fire nobody believed was real, is at least as interesting as the legend layered over it.
See The Old Mill for Yourself
Sources
Reader sightings
Nobody has reported anything here yet. If you have been, you would be the first.
Report your own visit to The Old Mill Utah: History and Reported Hauntings
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