Ophir Historic District
Ophir Historic District is a ghost town in Ophir, Utah. Partially inhabited former mining community. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.
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Is Ophir Historic District haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Ophir, in Tooele County's Oquirrh Mountains about fifty miles southwest of Salt Lake City, took its name from the biblical land of King Solomon's gold — a name miners gave the canyon and district when rich chloride-silver ores were found on Lion and Tiger hills. The first claim, the Silveropolis, was located August 23, 1870, and the strikes that followed — the Tampico, Mountain Lion, Defiance, Silver Chief — made Ophir one of Utah Territory's first mining districts.
It made industrial history early: in June 1871 the Walker Brothers erected their fifteen-stamp Pioneer Mill at Ophir, the first stamp mill in the territory, processing roughly thirty tons of ore a day. The town boomed into the thousands through the 1870s; some mines on Lion Hill played out quickly, but the district — led by the Hidden Treasure and Ophir Hill workings — produced silver, lead, copper, zinc, and gold, on and off, for a century, with operations recorded as late as 1959.
An inhabited ghost town
Ophir never emptied. Its peak thousands shrank to a small resident population, but the town kept its buildings: the frame, false-fronted Ophir Town Hall of the early 1870s is the oldest surviving nineteenth-century mining-town city hall in Utah — one of only three left from the era — and was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey and listed on the National Register.
The file's own source draws the operative line: the district is included for mining and ghost-town heritage, and the settlement is not wholly abandoned — residents live among the old buildings. No haunting claim attaches; Ophir is filed as a boomtown that survived its boom.
Documented history
Ophir retains historic mining-town buildings; residents still live there. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. Media accounts document it — reported history rather than legend. The record appears in 'Get Your Spook On: Northern Utah’s Most Haunted Places'. The record keeps it — history, not lore.
Media reportedVisit Utah
Sources on file
- 01Get Your Spook On: Northern Utah’s Most Haunted PlacesVisit Utah · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Included as mining/ghost-town heritage; source explicitly distinguishes ghost towns from alleged hauntings. Settlement is not wholly abandoned.