Also, it wasn't exactly entertainment, but Harry S Truman inspected Camp Kearns not long before becoming commander in chief. He came in August 1944, a month after becoming the vice presidential running mate of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman would become president after Roosevelt's death the next April.

Closed. But haunted?

When the war ended, so did the need for the base. It closed in 1946.

The Army initially talked about returning it to use as farmland. Veterans groups protested, complaining that returning GIs often could not find affordable housing — and suggested using the base for new homes.

Base buildings and materials were declared surplus and auctioned off in 1948. Todd said most of the old barracks had been derisively called "chicken coops" by soldiers who lived in them, "and ironically many of them became real chicken coops for farmers who bought them at auction and moved them."

Most base buildings were auctioned and removed or demolished for scrap. One base chapel was moved to Copperton and became St. Paul's Methodist Church. Just a few buildings remained in Kearns. The rest of the land, streets and utilities were purchased by a housing developer for $287,270.

While the old base has virtually disappeared under housing tracts, some report that maybe a few soldiers remained as ghosts.

A 2006 history of Kearns Junior High, which had started as an Army theater and was remodeled and expanded many times, records that students through the years reported hearing crying in the auditorium when no one was there.

Adults and others reported seeing or hearing ghosts. One cheerleader said she saw a man who had been shot in the head. Others, more pleasantly, have reported hearing coins drop in the hallway around them, but turn and see the area deserted, while some report hearing whispering in various rooms, but no one was seen.

Like those reported ghosts, Camp Kearns was there and gone seemingly almost in an instant, too. But stories about the specter can still fascinate, even if little but a ghostly imprint of it is all that remains.

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E-mail: lee@desnews.com