Est. 1942 · WWII Japanese American Internment · National Historic Landmark · Draft Resistance Movement · Civil Rights History
President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the removal of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Construction at Heart Mountain began that June. The first internees arrived by train in August 1942, stepping off into a high-elevation Wyoming landscape that reached thirty degrees below zero in winter.
The site's 650 hastily constructed buildings stretched across a 30-block residential grid. Each family member received one army cot, two blankets, a wood-burning stove, and a single light. Residents improvised — hanging sheets for privacy, stuffing newspaper and rags into gaps in the shoddily built walls to keep out the wind-driven dust and cold. Labor within the camp paid $12 to $19 a month, compared to $150 monthly wages earned by Caucasian administrators doing equivalent work.
At peak capacity, the camp held 10,767 people, ranking it as Wyoming's third-largest population center. Over the three years of operation, 13,997 individuals passed through its gates. Heart Mountain ran its own school system, hospitals, newspapers, and agricultural operations — a self-contained town built on compelled labor and stripped civil rights.
The camp became historically significant for organized resistance. When the U.S. government reinstated the military draft for Japanese American men in 1944, the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee — led by Frank Emi — published an open challenge to the policy, arguing that men could not be compelled to serve a country that had stripped them of their constitutional rights. Eighty-five Heart Mountain residents refused induction, representing the highest draft resistance rate among all ten WRA camps. Seven Fair Play Committee leaders were convicted of conspiracy. Simultaneously, 385 Heart Mountain residents volunteered or were conscripted for military service; two received posthumous Medals of Honor.
The camp closed November 10, 1945. Most of the buildings were demolished or sold off. Today the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation maintains the site as a National Historic Landmark, operating the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center at 1539 Road 19 in Powell. The center holds a permanent collection of artifacts and archival materials, a dedicated film theater, and a reflection room. The grounds preserve the original hospital chimney — visible from the highway — along with interpretive walking trails, a memorial honor roll, and a reconstructed victory garden.
Sources
- https://www.nps.gov/places/heart-mountain-relocation-center.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Mountain_Relocation_Center
- https://www.heartmountain.org/visit/admissions-hours-directions/
Phantom footstepsSensed presenceShadow figures
The paranormal reputation of Heart Mountain Relocation Center is inseparable from its history. A site where nearly 14,000 people were held against their will, where children grew up behind wire and elders died far from home, carries a weight that many visitors describe in physical terms.
Daytime visits bring a quieter kind of unease. Multiple accounts describe the sensation of a presence following close behind — not threatening, but persistent. The Shadowlands report characterizes this as a friendly spirit, one that seems aware of visitors without interfering with them.
After dark, the character of reported phenomena shifts. Footsteps are heard on ground and floors where no one is walking. The sensation of being observed intensifies, described not as the casual awareness of being in a public space but something more focused and deliberate. The local framework for these accounts draws on Native American traditions of Shadow People — figures that observe without interacting, whose presence signals a charged or liminal space rather than active malice.
Whether these reports constitute genuine anomalous phenomena or the heightened emotional sensitivity that accompanies sites of documented suffering is a question the interpretive center leaves open. What the archival record makes clear is the human weight of the place: families forced from their homes, men prosecuted for resisting an unjust draft, children schooled in barracks designed to be temporary. That kind of history does not dissipate cleanly.
