Bloody tears from a ghostly statue
Think the cost of tuition, books and fees are scary?
Try this: Utah State University has underground tunnels, a ghost and a statue in Logan Cemetery that cries.
Legend has it there is a statue of a lady who cries tears of blood.
The Crosquist family were early settlers of Cache Valley from Europe.
Life was hard in the late 1800s. Five of the six children died at an early age from scarlet fever. A few years later Crosquist’s last child died from pneumonia. The mother was inconsolable in her grief and anguish after having lost all of her children.
She spent her remaining days grieving at the cemetery. Because she would not leave her children’s graves her husband was forced to bring her meals and to drag her home.
Soon her health failed and she died.
Her husband set up a memorial with a statue in her likeness grieving, to be sent back to Logan and placed were she could always watch over her children’s graves. It was placed near her children in the middle of the Logan Cemetery.
On a moonless night they say you can see glowing tears of blood streaming down her cheeks. And if you circle the marker three times saying “weep woman weep,” then lighting three matches, you will hear ghostly cries.
Jeannie Thomas, a professor of folklore for the English department, said she loves talking about these and other local legends in the valley in her class.
Don’t ask her if she believes in any of it, though.
She feels her job is to talk about what the legends reveal about culture.
“Legends have real implications,” she said.
As the stories change over time, she feels it shows what is important in our culture at the time, she said.
It may show how people feel about life after death, superstitions, etc.
Papers from Thomas’ English 1710 class last semester explained some of USU’s legends in detail.
Is there life after death? Maybe in Old Main.
In Old Main’s bell tower the original bell is missing. It has been moved and is hanging outside the Dee Glen Spectrum on the north side. The tower has a system of electronic chimes, bells and speakers. These ring every hour and half hour marking the time on the USU campus. There is also an organ that can be played manually or automatically that is used for playing the commencement music as the graduates march from Old Main down Champ Drive to the Spectrum for the graduation ceremonies.
Legend has it that a talented student was selected to play the organ on graduation day. The night before the graduation she had been driving though Sardine Canyon to come back to Logan when she fell asleep at the wheel and drifted into oncoming traffic. She collided with a large truck head on and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The electric organ was placed in the tower the following year to play automatically for graduation.
Some say on graduation night when the “A” atop the tower is turned blue for the graduates, if one listens very closely at midnight, you can make out the sound of spectral commencement music being played.
“Folklore teaches us something,” said Randy Williams, the Fife Folklore curator in the Merrill Library on the first floor.
“It is a record of interesting patterns that rise and fall in points in stories,” she said.
For example, when blond jokes were common, was it more about blondes or dumbness?
“It provides examples of commodities and people,” she said. “With a twist.”
Currently, the Fife Folklore Library has hundreds of stories of legends from Cache Valley to Salt Lake City.
Soon everything will be on a Web site for easier access, Williams said.
Additionally, the labyrinth of tunnels used to connect building to building for coal produced steam power underneath the campus at USU have a story.
The old coal burning steam plant is no longer in use with a cleaner heating facility now in its place. Now there are even new stretches of tunnel that have been built, but many of the old sections of tunnel remain. Some of the older sections have been sealed off resulting in dead ends.
It has long been customary to test the braveness of students to explore the catacomb-like tunnels after dark. Some say the only real dangers are being caught by the campus police and charged with criminal trespassing or to have a steam pipe burst and be scalded to death.
While others claim there are other more supernatural, hidden dangers lurking beneath the campus and while exploring have heard unexplainable noises and seen unaccountable sights.
People swear they have heard a man laughing, a child crying and a growling of a beast. Some claim to have seen lights ahead of them that mysteriously disappear.
Other legends around the university include a possible ghost in the USU cadaver lab, the Kent Concert Hall organ playing by itself and the ghost of a drowned victim around the HPER pool. For information about those and other legends, visit the Fife Folklore section of the Merrill Library.
-acbailey@cc.usu.edu