Utah is a pretty scary place.

It's not as scary as St. Louis, ranked as the most dangerous city in the nation by the Morgan Quitno Press, which has published "City Crime Rankings" for the past 13 years.

Even so, Halloween may be the best time to celebrate our great state, although talking about gridlock on Interstate 15, shrinking open space and overcrowded schools isn't going to raise the hairs on your neck around the campfire.

In the news business around this time of year, we scramble to find spine-chilling stories about the paranormal. We hang with ghost hunters and dig up anecdotes from people who have experienced hauntings.

But we tend to focus on specific buildings — Salt Lake's City-County Building and McCune Mansion, Ogden's Union Station — as examples of where you can get the dickens scared out of you.

So here's a statewide tour of places that haven't had documented ghostly sightings but probably would if someone would go investigate — someone who is not me.

Hop in your car, pack your camping gear and get ready for a wild, winding ride around a spooky state. You should do this on a dark and stormy night.

First, let me say you can't go straight to Hell in Utah. Michigan is the only state that claims a town with that name. Instead, you can stagger along Hells Backbone, in Garfield County. It's just north of the ominous-sounding Box-Death Hollow Wilderness Area.

That's not to say the devil hasn't left a mark on this fairly pious state.

You could travel the devil's trifecta: Devils Canyon, in San Juan County; Devils Garden, in Grand County; and Devils Slide, in Morgan County.

And they say an idle mind is the devil's playground, so I guess that's where columns like this come from.

You think Rocky Point and all of those haunted houses are petrifying? Take a walk through the phantasmagoric Goblin Valley. You won't find any high school students in makeup working there part-time.

Now if it's the finality of death, or being trapped in some sort of netherworld that gets your frightened fancy, start at Upheaval Dome, in San Juan County, and since any upheaval worth its salt ends with a hanging, drop by Dangling Rope Marina, in Kane County.

A hanging usually has a predictable ending, evidence found at Death Creek Reservoir, in Box Elder County. The only logical place to visit after a place with death in the name is Coffin Lake, in Summit County.

It takes some time to go from the coffin to a skeletal state, just like it will take some time to get to Skull Valley, in Tooele County. And after Skull Valley, I want you to go to Hades Lake, in Duchesne County. I don't know if you deserve it or not, but someone is going to end up there. And it might as well be you.

And that's scary.

---

E-mail: jdougherty@desnews.com