Paria, ghost town in Kane County, Utah, United States

Paria is a ghost town on the Paria River in Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Kane County, Utah. Its remaining buildings are of weathered, unpainted grey and brown wood: a single-storey structure with horizontal siding and a dark open doorway, and a taller two-storey building of vertical and horizontal boards with exposed beams at the top. A line of wooden fence posts and rails runs off to the right across flat reddish ground.

Peter Shirts's Mormon group settled the site in 1865 as Rockhouse, named for his sandstone house. In 1870 residents moved about 5 miles upstream and founded Pahreah, a Ute and Southern Paiute word meaning "mud water". The Paria River flooded every year from 1883 to 1888, washing away fields and buildings; a 1911 gold mining operation was wiped out within a year, and the last bachelor prospector left in 1929.

The name Pahreah, later Paria, comes from Ute and Southern Paiute and means "mud water". The post office, opened in 1892, used the spelling Paria. Visitors can see the weathered wooden buildings of the 1960s film set, built about a mile west of the original townsite.

The site is reached by a gravel road that most vehicles can handle in dry conditions, but rain or flooding can make it impassable. There are no facilities on site, so bringing enough water and wearing sturdy footwear is a good idea before heading out.

From the 1940s onward, the area was used as a film location, and a fake western town built nearby for the 1961 movie Sergeants 3 has since collapsed into ruins next to the real ones. Visitors standing on the site are surrounded by two layers of history: the actual settlement and the movie set that imitated it.