Every year at this time, I find myself recalling some of my local urban legends, eerie locales, and stories of the creepy/odd, that I learned about as a kid. The memories of "investigating" some of them for the truth, and wanting to experience them personally when I was old enough.

Utah definitely holds it's own when it comes to these stories of fear, and eeriness. So of course, as a 16 year old teenager, 19 years ago, and a huge fan of horror, paranormal, and all things unexplained, I just HAD to see, and do, some of them for myself.

This is one of my most treasured, if not THE most treasured memory of my personal experiences with one of them. It happened in October of 1996.

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, this is the most well known, and popular Utah urban legend of: 

Utah was first settled in July of 1847. A man by the name of Jacob Moritz came to Utah in 1871 from Germany.

As the legend goes, after Moritz became a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and his businesses took off, odd things started to happen that could not be explained. Utah experienced an evil as never before. Children started to get sick, and also disappear, later to be found dead. Soon, Moritz was being accused of witchcraft, devil worship, molestation, and for the murders of the children. But they could never prove it. He was given the nickname of Emo. Where that came from, nobody knows. In 1910, Moritz moved back to Germany because he "became ill". He soon passed away. Because of his strong ties with Utah, and it's history, he wanted a family member to return his ashes. They were placed in an urn, and sealed in a crypt bearing his name, Moritz, at the Salt Lake City Cemetery.

It was said that if you go to his crypt at night, light a candle, walk around the crypt backwards three times while chanting repeatedly "Emo return", he may appear. Either standing outside his crypt, reaching for you, or his head appearing inside the window of the crypt looking out at you.

So my two best friends, and I, decided that this particular October of 1996, the year we all turned 16, and would get our drivers licenses, we had to go do it. We planned, and scheduled a sleepover at the house that we could sneak out of the easiest, and not get busted by our parents, or checked on by the parents at the house we stayed at, because they "trusted" us.

On the night of the sleepover, we quietly went over the plan. I still remember the excitement, and fear that we all felt while preparing. We thought that we were so cool, and such bad*sses. The parents finally went to sleep. The time had finally come. We quietly snuck out of the window. Luckily my friend's bedroom was in the basement, and had a small window well. My friend popped his car in neutral, and we pushed it far enough away so that when he started it, it wouldn't be noticed by his parents. We drove downtown to the cemetery, parked on the street, enough away from where the crypt was supposed to be, trying to not look suspicious, and get caught. We found the crypt easy enough.

We were the only ones there. We had made it. We sat there staring at it, not daring to speak to each other. We looked at each other, nodded, and pulled out the candles, and lighters. Stood in a line, one in front of the other, lit our candles, put the lighters in our pockets, placed our empty hand on the shoulder of the one in front of us to help guide each other, and started walking slowly backwards, around the crypt while chanting "Emo Return". After the third time around, we stopped in front of the door, turned to face it, and waited. Staring so intently on the window. It was dead silent, other than a chill wind blowing, and leaves rustling on the ground. 

What seemed like eternity, but was probably only about four, or five minutes, I thought I saw something move off to the side. I slowly turned my head to look at my friends, trying to confirm silently what I thought I had just seen. They were doing the same, and based off of how pale, and clammy we each looked in the glow of the candles, it confirmed that they saw it too. We were so scared out of our minds, we couldn't move. We sat there staring at each other for a couple minutes not knowing what to do. All of a sudden, there was a piercing scream, and a figure jumped out from behind the crypt. We were staring so intently on the crypt window, that we didn't see another small group of older kids walking up to the crypt from behind it, to do the exact same thing we were doing. All three of us screamed louder, and jumped higher than i had ever seen any of us jump before, turned, and ran screaming, while dropping our candles. We ran a good fifty feet, or so, and stopped after we heard hysterical laughing. At that point, we knew we had been had. We stood there. After the fear, and adrenaline subsided, we dropped laughing uncontrollably for a good five minutes. After we laughed all that we could, we looked and saw that the older kids had left. I guess they decided that we were enough entertainment for the night.

That was one of the BEST nights of my life, that I will NEVER forget.

Even though we did not have an actual apparition appearance, there was still a feeling of fear, hate, negativity, foreboding, and presence of evil surrounding that crypt. Whether it was just because we were psyching ourselves up so much, and with the urban legend, or it was actually there, it's hard to tell.  But there is definitely something going on with it. The following picture was taken in the negative setting. Who knows what that shadowing could be on the crypt.