Is there any truth behind these three Idaho legends?

POCATELLO — Idaho is full of legends that have changed with each telling.

Could there be any truth to them? Ghosts wandering the halls of a high school? A monster swimming through the depths of an old lake? The spirits of prisoners still trapped, haunting their place of captivity?

The Bear Lake Monster

It was a cold day, and Scott Tolentino saw something swimming through the water, creating a wave in the otherwise calm lake.

“What is out there?” Tolentino wondered.

Tolentino was a fisheries biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the only one stationed at Bear Lake. He was out on the shore that day to talk to anglers and see what fish they were catching.

There were no boaters out on this part of Bear Lake, but Tolentino knew he saw something out in the water. It couldn’t be…

He checked it with his binoculars but still couldn’t tell what was making the water move like that. Next, he whipped out his high-powered spotting scope.

What he saw amazed him.

“It was a herd of elk, swimming out in the middle of the lake,” Tolentino said. He has witnessed that same thing several times since that day.

Tolentino was a fisheries biologist, studying the Bear Lake for 31 years, and said that he’s “probably done more sampling than just about anybody out there that’s ever worked on Bear Lake, and I have yet to see anything that hasn’t been explained by either fish or some animals in the lake.”

Researchers have used hydro acoustics (soar technology) in the Bear Lake to monitor Bonneville cisco fish populations since the early 1990s.

“When we do this, we find fish from the surface of the lake all the way to the deepest depths,” Tolentino said, “and if there was any kind of big fish or some kind of monster down there, I’m sure we would have sampled it.”

However, Tolentino maintains that even though they haven’t found anything, doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

Bear Lake is an incredibly deep body of water. It’s maximum depth is 208 feet, and it’s average depth is 85 feet. The maximum length of the lake is around 18 miles and the maximum width is around 7.

Before 2000, the majority of the earlier literature regarding the lake estimated its age at 28,000 years. However, in the late 1990s, new research showed this estimate to be incorrect. Bear Lake is likely closer to around 250,000 years old.

“It’s very clear that the Bear Lake is a lot older than anybody thought,” Tolentino said.

Does that mean a monster could be living in its depths? People have been saying that since at least the 1860s, when colonizer Joseph C. Rich published a series of articles in the Deseret Evening News claiming locals had seen the monster in the water.

There was once a shallow sea that split North America in the Cretaceous period when monster-like creatures swam through the oceans. However, those creatures went extinct at least 66 million years ago.

The lake hosts a wide array of fish, with the cutthroat trout being the largest predator documented. Tolentino said they’ve documented fish in the lake in excess of 30 pounds and close to 40 inches long. However, it’s unlikely the aquatic life in Bear Lake could support a sea monster.

“We do a lot of sampling year after year to monitor that population, and if we saw anything on there, any kind of big fish or some kind of monster down there, I’m sure we would have sampled it,” Tolentino said. “But just because we didn’t, doesn’t mean it does not exist.”

While he doesn’t find it likely, there are still unexplained sightings from locals who insist they saw the creature.

“The legend lives on,” Tolentino said.

The ghosts of Pocatello High School

Arlen Walker is no stranger to ghost stories surrounding Pocatello High School.

Walker, the president of the Bannock County Historical Society, worked at the school from 1972 to 1998. In that time, he never saw anything that led him to believe there were ghosts in the school. But although he never saw anything, he talked to a woman in the late ’80s to early ’90s who thought she had seen something.

When Walker ran into one of the custodians as she was locking up the building, she was “white as a ghost,” he said.

The custodian told Walker she was checking the girls’ restroom and thought someone was in one of the stalls.

She knocked on the door and said, “You have to leave, I’m locking up the building.”

As the custodian was walking up the stairs from the bathroom, she heard the stall door clang and some footsteps leaving. But when she turned around, no one was there.

Walker said he isn’t sure what she saw, but she did look frightened.

“I didn’t experience that myself, but she was visibly shaken,” Walker said.

Other stories are much easier for Walker to debunk. In 2019, he did just that on an episode of “Ghost Hunters” featuring the reportedly-haunted school.

One of the most popular stories about the school involves the library chandelier. Supposedly, at certain times in autumn, if you walk in front of the building and look in the upper floor windows, you can see the apparition of a past librarian who hanged herself from the chandelier after having her heart broken.

That part of the school was remodeled in 1979, Walker said. That was when the chandelier was added to the ceiling, only two years before he began to work at the high school.

“Everyone would have known about it,” Walker said. “So it’s just a case of younger people passing on a story that cannot possibly be based in fact.”

Another of the most popular stories regards the supposed past swimming pool at the high school.

Legend has it that a custodian came back to the building on Thanksgiving Day to retrieve a forgotten item. When he walked into the central part of the building, he saw a boy dripping wet, standing in puddles of water. The story is that the boy drowned in the high school’s swimming pool.

But the problem, Walker said, is there never was a swimming pool in the building.

“It came about because a lot of the students from the ’30s remember taking swimming classes classes for P.E.” Walker said.

The only swimming pool in the area was in the basement of the old YMCA, now a parking lot. Walker said those students remember taking classes there.

Walker said he’s never came across any official record of anyone dying in the building. If something like that happened, it would have been in the newspaper.

“Particularly in the early days, like the teens and ’20s, you probably couldn’t burp in town without it being in the newspaper,” he said.

And yet, Walker said that there could be, “more going on in the universe that we’re not fully aware of.” Some legends he’s heard say spirits return to the place where they’re most comfortable.

But he also said that if there is more going on outside of our scope of reality, it’s not something we can verify.

“It’s fun to think it’s possible,” Walker said.

The haunting of the Old Idaho Penitentiary

Anthony Parry was closing a window that had been open for years.

“What are you doing?” Parry heard a low, guttural voice ask. It sounded like it was right behind him.

Parry, the historic sites director at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise, was walking through the closed-off section of a building called 3 House. He was there to assess its condition and see what it would take to open that part of the building to the public.

Parry was doing this in spring of this year, early in the morning before the facility opened to visitors. He said that when he heard this voice, he whipped around and saw no one there.

Parry thought the voice was one of the maintenance workers, and he ran around to the front of the building. Finding no one, he went back to the administration building where the other employees were and asked if anyone had been in the building.

They said that no one had.

“It shook me a little bit. I was not expecting that,” Parry said.

Unlike Pocatello High School, many people have died in the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

The exact number is unknown due to incomplete records over the prison’s century of operation. However, the Idaho State Historical Society has confirmed 130 deaths out of the 13,000 men and 217 women it housed over 101 years.

Fifteen of the people who died were imprisoned for forgery and 19 for grand larceny — both the most common crimes committed by prisoners there.

The penitentiary only incarcerated 271 murderers during its operation. Out of those who died, 34 were convicted murderers.

Out of the deceased, 24 died from various diseases, as well as 12 by tuberculosis, 21 by cardiovascular failure, six by cancer or influenza, and 18 by suicide.

By the time 1973 rolled around, the penitentiary was “antiquated and outdated in every sense.”

“The water systems caused sickness and created unsanitary conditions,” Parry said. “Outdated and nonexistent heating and cooling systems made Boise’s extreme weather conditions unbearable.”

On top of that, Idaho’s population was growing, bringing more inmates into the penitentiary. It’s population expanded to point that it was near — and often exceeding — its capacity.

Parry said it’s sad to work at the penitentiary and learn more of its history. It’s especially difficult to meet a family member who’s learning the fate of their loved one. There are still people alive today who were incarcerated in the old prison.

“It’s a difficult place, and there’s a lot of difficult history here,” he said. “Navigating it sensitively and humanely is sometimes … it’s really tough.”

Some of the facility’s biggest fundraising events include paranormal investigations, he told EastIdahoNews.com. The penitentiary Halloween event is its biggest fundraiser of the year.

“We have a lot of internal conversations about dark tourism and sensitivity towards the real, lived experience,” Parry said. “We try not to talk about the paranormal in what we do very often. We try to leave it to folks who do that, and we just focus on the history itself.”

Despite this, Parry acknowledged dark tourism is a “big part of what brings people here.”

Visitors regularly report feeling an “eerie” feeling while exploring the site. Visitors also report having sudden feelings of dread or sadness.

Parry said that other people have also “heard things” in that 3 House.

When Parry said when he heard that voice behind him, it gave him a feeling like, “I was taking somebody’s job.”

A man named Lee Canfield, who was charged with voluntary manslaughter, was sitting on a plank of wood in 1907. He was the cell house janitor, and he was cleaning a window.

The plank came out from under him, and Canfield fell four stories to his death.

“It’s a strange thing to say, but is he still kind of the cell house janitor, upset with us for altering or cleaning or doing anything to his area that he takes care of?” Parry wondered.

While Parry remains open-minded, he chooses to believe that what he heard has a natural explanation.

“I’ve encountered numerous inexplicable occurrences while at the penitentiary. However, in order to maintain my daily routine and peace of mind, I prefer to remain open-minded and attribute these experiences to the site’s aging infrastructure and its natural sounds and quirks,” he said.