Forget everything you’ve heard about Rocky Point. This is the true story of America’s number one haunted house. A story so bizarre, you’ll think it was taken from the very pages of some Hollywood script. But unlike a Hollywood script, this story is true.

The story of Rocky Point begins not with the Haunted House’s opening in 1979, as some would have you believe, but in 1965, in the foothills above Ogden, and on the most famous street in Salt Lake City.

For it was in 1965 when a young entrepreneur named Scott Crabtree built the Rocky Point restaurant in the hills above Ogden. And it was in 1965 that, 45 miles to the south, John Dunston, along with sons Kieran and John Jr., opened the doors of the Dunston Paint Factory on State Street in Salt Lake City. Each business was an immediate success. The Rocky Point restaurant quickly gained a devoted clientel, while the Dunston Factory was operating at maximum capacity within weeks. But fate had other plans. On October 16th, 1968, John Dunston collapsed at the factory, passing away that very evening at a local hospital and leaving ownership of the factory to his two sons. A week later, on October 23th, numerous witnesses recall seeing sons Kieran and John dining together at the Rocky Point restaurant—where their father had been a regular. The two exchanged heated words over who would run the factory and in a rage John Jr. stormed out of the restaurant and tore off down the steep drive in his 1965 Mustang convertible. Moments later the car slid off a high embankment, rolling seven times, and he was killed instantly. Four days later, on the evening of John’s funeral, the Rocky Point Restaurant was severely damaged in a mysterious fire, and closed its doors. The following day, on the eve of Halloween, Kieran Dunston was found floating in a giant vat of Crimson Red enamel in the Dunston Factory, an apparent suicide.

Within the space of a single week, both the Rocky Point Restaurant and the Dunston Factory were both boarded up and abandoned.

And so the restaurant would sit for over a decade, until 1979, when Rocky Point founder Scott Crabtree’s son Neil decided to put the restaurant’s unique architecture, lonely location, and reputation for being genuinely haunted to work, creating the the first Rocky Point Haunted House. A tremendous success, the Haunted House grew so quickly that within a few years Neil and sister Cydney began looking for a new site, searching throughout both Ogden and Salt Lake City before finding its present home—the still abandoned Dunston Paint Factory at 3400 South State.

Today it is said the factory is doubly haunted—with the ghosts of the living, and the dead.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Editors postcript. In the fall of 1996, the original Rocky Point restaurant in Ogden caught fire again, this time burning to the ground. The cause of this fire remains a mystery today, but the date was October 23rd, the anniversary of John Dunston Jr.’s accident.