‘Tales From Ogden Canyon’ provides fresh batch of Northern Utah ghost stories
Drienie Hattingh poses for a portrait at the Gray Cliff Lodge and Restaurant in Weber County on Oct. 13. The lodge is the location for the story "Lily" in "Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond." Lily, a Weber State University student, waits tables at the lodge and has a mysterious regular named "Martin." "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for a portrait at the Gray Cliff Lodge and Restaurant in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. The lodge is the location for the story "Lily" in "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" where Lily, a Weber State University student waits tables at the lodge and has a mysterious regular named "Martin." Martin always looked out of the window when he ate there. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for a portrait at the Gray Cliff Lodge and Restaurant in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. The lodge is the location for the story "Lily" in "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" where Lily, a Weber State University student waits tables at the lodge and has a mysterious regular named "Martin." Martin always looked out of the window when he ate there. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
The sun peeks over the cliff where a little girl took her last breath in Drienie Hattingh's latest book "Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond."
Bridal Veil falls is the location of one of the stories in Drienie Hattingh's latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for a portrait at the Gray Cliff Lodge and Restaurant in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. The lodge is the location for the story "Lily" in "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" where Lily, a Weber State University student waits tables at the lodge and has a mysterious regular named "Martin." Martin always looked out of the window when he ate there. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
The dam wall is the location for one of the stories in "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. This stretch of road along the dam makes a cameo in the story "Three's a Charm." "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
The stories in "Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond" pull from legends and ghost stories about, for example, the waterfall at the mouth of Ogden Canyon.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
Drienie Hattingh poses for portraits and points out locations for her latest book "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" in Weber County on Thursday, October 13, 2016. "Tales from Ogden Canyon and beyond" was just released this month.
"Tales from Ogden Canyon and Beyond" is the latest in a series of books featuring Ogden-area writers' work.
It’s not just about the ghosts for Drienie Hattingh.
The local writer is founder, editor and sometime-contributor to a series of books exploring, through truth and fiction, the haunted history of Ogden’s 25th Street, the Wasatch mountain range and, most recently, Ogden Canyon and the Ogden Valley.
But as with her previous volumes, Hattingh said, the stories in the just-released “Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond: Ghostly Legends of Ogden Canyon and Its Valley” go beyond thrills and chills.
“With all four books, I really emphasize the idea when I put the call out for stories that I don’t only want spooky legends; I want the history,” she said. “I want the authors to do some research. I want them to go to the places they’re writing about and take in the ambience and look around, so when they write the story, people will know this person was there. She’s not just writing something she researched online; she was actually there.”
THE SERIES
“Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond” is available in Ogden at Planet Rainbow, The Queen Bee gift shop, Wisebird Bookery and Booked on 25th, as well as at Simply Eden and Perk’s Cafe in Eden. It is also available on Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.
Drienie Hattingh will be doing a book signing 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 16, at Planet Rainbow, 1833 Valley Drive.
Other books in Hattingh’s “… and Beyond” series:
• “Tales From Two-Bit Street and Beyond … Part I”
• “Tales From Two-Bit Street and Beyond … Part II”
• “Tales From the Wasatch and Beyond”
The result is an enticing October potion mixed from equal parts glimpses into history, real tales and legends from local sites, and the distinctive voices of local writers — with a liberal dash of spooky chills thrown in for spice.
Take one of Hattingh’s own contributions to “Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond.” “The Hermitage,” written with Michele McKinnon, is a fictional tale of a family whose 1918 vacation is interrupted by a near-tragedy. The story’s ghostly elements trade on a real-life tragedy that occurred near Ogden Canyon’s Hermitage Hotel, a luxury establishment that played host to world leaders and famous luminaries before burning down in 1930.
BRIANA SCROGGINS/Standard-Examiner
Drienie Hattingh poses for a portrait at the location for the cover of her book and the former location of the Hermitage Hotel in Weber County on Oct. 13. “Tales From Ogden Canyon and Beyond” was released this month.
“Michele and I wrote that together,” Hattingh said. “She’s actually a children’s author, and whatever she writes, she wants it to be something her grandchildren will read. She’s an accountant and really, really busy the last couple of months, so she said, ‘I’ll do the story and you do the research.’
“We sat down, and she brought her side and I brought my side, and we combined our efforts, and I think it turned out nicely.”
Hattingh, of Ogden, started the series as an indirect outgrowth of a writing exercise at a fall writer’s conference in Eden. Back then, she solicited stories from local writers she knew.
Four books — and 10,000 copies sold — later, the series, edited both by Hattingh and by another professional, has taken on a life of its own.
“It seems like every year, local fans want to see a new one,” Hattingh said. “Usually, when I’m preparing another (book), I ask local authors to submit stories. … I’m also always pleased at the quality. I don’t accept all the authors that submit stories; I just choose the 13 best.”
Hattingh also pays attention to the unique voices of her writers.
“One of my authors is an accountant, one is a private investigator,” she said. “There are artists, there’s a newspaper reporter. They all come from these different backgrounds, and you can definitely see it in their own writing styles.”
The newest book also acts as an unorthodox guide to Ogden Canyon and Ogden Valley, something Hattingh found readers liked in her first three volumes of stories.
“I’ve got the stories all lined up, so as you enter the canyon, you go into the canyon and Alaskan Inn and Gray Cliff Lodge, and then you’re out of the canyon to the frozen reservoir, and then the Shooting Star … and through the valley,” she said. “It’s a little tour down the canyon and around.”
Readers have used her previous books that way, she said.
“Several people came back and told me they will read the books, then they will start walking, see the places (along 25th Street), have dessert somewhere, move down the street and sort of relive the stories,” she said. “It was the same with ‘Tales From the Wasatch.’ People told me they went to every little town in that book because they were so interested after reading the stories.”
Even local readers who feel intimately familiar with Ogden Canyon and its environs may be surprised by some of the legends in the book. Many folks have heard stories of the disconsolate bride who, tales say, haunts the roads around Bridal Veil Falls (the manmade waterfall at the mouth of Ogden Canyon), but how about the man who seems to be looking out a window as people approach Gray Cliff Lodge — only to vanish when they go inside?
Or that, long before white settlers began using Ogden Canyon, local Indian tribes believed that, when a person died, they walked up the canyon walls and into the sky, where they crossed a “bridge of souls” to meet departed loved ones?
In “The Ice,” Dimitria Van Leeuwen trades on a tragic story from Stringtown, the settlement that once lay at the entrance of the valley on a site now covered by Pineview Reservoir. During a smallpox epidemic in Ogden, a few families moved from the city to Stringtown to escape the disease. Unfortunately, they brought the contagion with them.
That story, like Sherry Hogg Wallwork’s story “A Star-Crossed Love” about the hot springs near the mouth of the canyon, is chilling and deeply atmospheric, transporting readers, respectively, to a starry, drunken night in the “hot pots” and a blustery, frozen day walking the ice of the reservoir and seeing the echoes of the past roll in like fog.
Both Christy Monson’s “Into the Light,” starring a curious child who loves exploring, and McKinnon’s “Lily,” which features a young waitress eager to cheer up a beloved “regular,” explore relationships between people — including between those still living and those who have passed on.
[image=Secondary BS 101316 Tales From Ogden Canyon 05 -14}
Romantic love, on both sides of the grave, features prominently in Kera Fuller Erickson’s “Scent From Heaven,” which flashes back to the 1930s when the dam was being built, as well as the modern, slang- and ski-filled “The Ring in the Snow” by Wendy Toliver.
Asked to name her favorites, Hattingh describes nearly all of the stories in the book, laughing when she realizes she really can’t choose between them, so fond is she of each one, from the intricately plotted to the hauntingly described to the just plain creepy.
“There’s what the story is about, but then there’s the history behind it all,” she said. “People learn the history while they’re enjoying the story.
“Sometimes it’s sad, but of course, a person needs to die for a ghost story.”