About 12 people die inside the park each year, although many of the deaths are caused by heat or natural causes, rather than falls.

Just feet from the front doors of the El Tovar Hotel lies one of the park's signature mysteries: a flat, inconspicuous gravestone with an epitaph that reads, "Pirl A. Ward: 1879-1934". Over the last century, countless visitors and employees claim to have seen a black-caped figure walking from the stairway to the grave before wandering off and disappearing into the woods.

The Grand Canyon displays a geological phenomenon known as the Great Unconformity. This phenomenon refers to the fact that 250-million-year-old rock layers lie directly against 1.2 billion-year-old rocks. No one knows what happened to the hundreds of millions of years of missing layers.

It is said that those who take what doesn't belong to them at the Grand Canyon are haunted by what they've stolen from the land. Backing up this claim, Park Rangers have reportedly received hundreds of stolen artifacts from tourists who explained that they had experienced extreme bad luck and illness since removing these items from the park where they belong.

In the 1950s, commercial airplanes often took detours over the park to give passengers a look at the Grand Canyon. In 1956, however, two of these planes tragically collided. The crash had no survivors, leading to the passage of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which created the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The Buckey O'Neill Cabin was built in 1890 by William "Buckey" O'Neill after discovering a nearby copper deposit. O'Neill was, among many other things, a member of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. He was killed in action in Cuba in 1898, but was instrumental in establishing what would eventually become the Grand Canyon Railroad and Grand Canyon National Park. The cabin is currently used as a guest house, but booking is required well in advance.

The South Rim gets the lion's share of visitors due to the year round attractions and amazing views.

President Theodore Roosevelt first visited the Grand Canyon in 1903 and was deeply moved by the unique landscape. In 1906, Roosevelt signed a bill that proclaimed the area the Grand Canyon Game Reserve, and two years later, he made it a national monument.

The site of Phantom Ranch and the areas around it were used by various Native American peoples for millennia. Numerous artifacts, including split-twig figurines carbon dated at 4000 years old, have been discovered in nearby caves. Puebloan peoples built pit houses and a ceremonial kiva in the area around AD 1050, and likely survived by hunting and growing corn, beans, and squash.

The Grand Canyon is one of the most popular national parks in the United States with an estimated 6.2 million visitors each year.