Great Salt Lake’s legends extend far beyond flamingos and sea monsters—its salty shores are said to be haunted by souls who came to the lake and never left. Among them is Jean Baptiste, whose story remains one of Utah’s most chilling tales. Before his name became a legend whispered around Great Salt Lake, Baptiste was an ordinary gravedigger. His crimes would later horrify the newly-established Salt Lake City.
The story begins in 1862, when a family asked to exhume their loved one from the Salt Lake City Cemetery to move him to their family plot—a decision that led to a horrifying discovery. The family found the body laying face down in the coffin, stripped of its burial clothes. Outrage spread around the city, and an investigation quickly ensued.
Police found Baptiste at work in the cemetery, digging for yet another grave. He denied any wrongdoing, but an officer that had recently buried his child in the cemetery reportedly seized Baptiste by the throat until he confessed. When they searched Baptiste’s home, the full horror of his crimes came to light: there were nearly sixty pairs of children’s shoes, stacks of funeral robes, and tattered garments from both children and adults. Baptiste had been robbing the dead on an unimaginable scale, desecrating as many as 300 graves.
Baptiste was said to wear the stolen clothing himself—one account described him wearing the burial suit of a recently-murdered saloonkeeper. He rarely sold the items, hoarding them compulsively, and even used coffin wood for firewood to warm his small home.
The stolen clothes were taken to the courthouse, where grieving families were invited to sort through the piles, identifying garments once worn by their deceased loved ones. The city was overcome with disgust and rage. Even Brigham Young, who had several relatives buried in the cemetery, expressed his fury:
“To hang a man for such a deed would not begin to satisfy my feelings,” Brigham Young said. “What shall we do with him? Shoot him? No, that would do no good to anybody but himself. Would you imprison him during life? That would do nobody any good. What I would do with him came to me quickly, after I heard of the circumstance; this I will mention, before I make other remarks. If it was left to me, I would make him a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.”
Jean Baptiste was tattooed with the words “BRANDED FOR ROBBING THE DEAD” on his forehead and banished to Great Salt Lake’s Fremont Island—a patch of land that was, at the time, surrounded by deep water. It was chosen precisely because Baptiste couldn’t swim and escape was thought impossible. Two ranchers who kept cattle there left him a shanty and a few provisions before rowing away.
When the ranchers returned three weeks later to check on their cattle, Baptiste was still there. Three weeks after that, he was gone. The ranchers found the roof of their shanty torn off—apparently used to build a crude raft—and one of their heifers slaughtered.
Whether Baptiste died in the lake’s waters or escaped to the mainland remains one of Utah’s great mysteries. Some herders later claimed to have seen a ragged figure wandering the shoreline, and to this day, they say his spirit still roams Great Salt Lake—restless and unburied.
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