Utah Macabre: Punjun Spring

In late September 1776, a Spanish exploratory expedition led by two priests of the Franciscan Order, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, entered the Utah Lake Valley.  After a few days spent exchanging gifts with the Timpanogos people who occupied the valley, they made a stop at a natural spring along the ancient highway that American Indians had used for generations to travel around the lake to the Juab Valley and further south to the southern regions of the Pahvant, the Paiute and the Navajo.  They were about 20 miles south from Utah Lake at a spring the Spanish priests named it Ojo de San Pablo, or the "Eye of Saint Paul."  They didn't tarry long.  The Utes called it "Punjun."  Punjun Spring, it is said, is without bottom, and sometimes, on the quiet nights, they could hear the sound of a baby's cry emanating from its depths.  2,188 miles to the east, the American Revolutionary War was raging, and 21-year-old Nathan Hale was arrested and hanged for espionage in New York City in late September 1776.  Before the fatal drop, Hale is reputed to have said the famous last words, "I only regret that I have but one lie to lose for my country." 

In late November 1849, a Mormon exploratory expedition into the southern regions of what would become the Utah Territory, led by well-known apostle of their church, Parley P. Pratt, made camp here.  They told of a Ute legend that the spring was inhabited by "a hairy being, like a child 8 years old."  What's more, this being was said to come out from the water at night, making "a noise like a frog and tries to frighten and catch Indians and draw them into this bottomless spring."  Of course, you might take this story with a grain of salt, considering this didn't seem to stop Ute traveling parties from making regular use of the water as a meeting place and watering hole.  On the other hand, when Brigham Young made a tour of his southern colonies in 1851, the Millennial Star newspaper once again reported the tales of the baby's cry that can be heard coming from Punjun on still nights.  In modern folklore, the source of the sounds are sometimes referred to as "waterbabies."

Then, in October 1857 (not long after the Mountain Meadows Massacre), in the midst of rising hostilities between the Mormons in Utah and the United States government, a group of six men that came to be called the Aiken party entered Utah while traveling east from California and were never seen again.  According to the memoirs of notorious Mormon frontiersman Wild Bill Hickman Brigham's Destroying Angel (co-written by journalist J.H. Beadle), the Aiken party was arrested by the local government on charges of espionage at Kaysville.  They were taken to Salt Lake City and investigated, but with nothing specific enough to hold against them, they were given an escort that included the infamous gunfighter Orrin Porter Rockwell, to be taken out of Utah via the southern route.  After a brief stop in Nephi, about 100 miles south of Salt Lake, where the escort party picked up a few more men, the Aiken party was taken further down to the Sevier River, where they made camp, but that night, Rockwell and his cohorts, armed with clubs, king-bolts and other quiet instruments, attempted to execute all six summarily. Two of them, identified as John Aiken and "the Colonel", very nearly escaped, managing to get back to Nephi and hitch a ride north, but they didn't make it four miles before the wagon driver stopped to water his horses as two men emerged from a cabin with double-barreled guns to shoot them through the head.  According to Hickman's and Beadle's account, the two men's bodies were sunk in a "bottomless spring," which the 1934 biography of Porter Rockwell by Charles Kelly and Hoffman Birney, Holy Murder identifies as none other than Punjun.  If it wasn't haunted in some form or other before then, sinking the bodies of these two men subjected to such traumatic deaths must have done the trick.  
In 1865, Richard Burraston, a cattle rancher, settled in the area, and Punjun has been known ever since as Burraston Ponds.  It is a popular hole for swimming and fishing.