There are plenty of interesting stories about the Denver airport — from mysterious arsenals to underground tunnels, there's something eerie about the place. Something a bit haunting.
Airports at night can be a bit... unsettling. When the shops are closed and the concourse is mostly empty — dark corners and abandoned corridors. The Denver airport may be the most unsettling of them all. There are as many stories about this airport as there are flights in and out of it every day. And this story is about a woman who met a person (well, she thought he was a person) and discovered some of the haunting rumors about this airport are true. And terrifying.
Thanks to this season's sponsor, YETI for supporting the podcast.
Artwork by Tyler Grobowsky (@g_r_o_b_o)
THIS PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY YETI. YETI MAKES RUGGED AND RELIABLE COOLERS, DRINKWARE, BAGS, AND GEAR THAT’S BUILT FOR THE WILD. THE STORIES YOU’RE TUNING-IN TO HEAR MIGHT SEEM PRETTY UNBELIEVABLE, BUT THE WILD CAN BE THAT WAY. THAT’S WHY EVERYTHING YETI MAKES IS BUILT TO WITHSTAND WHATEVER YOUR ADVENTURE CAN THROW AT IT. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE COOLER THAT BESTED A GRIZZLY BEAR? OR THE DUFFEL BAGS THAT RODE IN THE BACK OF A TRUCK THROUGH DAYS OF POURING RAIN, AND EVERYTHING INSIDE – DOWN TO THE LAST SOCK – REMAINED DRY? OR HOW ABOUT THE CAMPERS WHO STILL HAD ICE AFTER THREE DAYS IN THE WOODS? OR THE WATER BOTTLE THAT FELL OUT OF A TRUCK ON A ROCKY, CRAGGY ROAD BUT LIVED TO TELL THE TALE? THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE BUILT FOR THE WILD: FROM BLISTERING HOT DAYS, TO FREEZING RAIN, ROCKY SHORELINES AND STEEP TRAILS, YETI GEAR IS BULT TO HANDLE IT ALL. AND WITH GEAR YOU CAN RELY ON, YOU JUST MIGHT END UP WITH SOME PRETTY UNBELIEVABLE STORIES OF YOUR OWN TO TELL.
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No matter how dark the night…
No matter how fast you run…
No matter what is chasing you…
You’ll be safe if only you can make it to the campfire.
There it is, up ahead, through the trees.
We’re waiting for you, but…
Will you make it?
This is the Camp Monsters Podcast.
Nick or Kiersa or Chelsea’s soothing voice: Will passenger Cepeda please report to the ticket counter at Gate B14? Passenger Cepeda to B14, please.
Well, this is not turning out according to plan. I’m sorry, we should have been deep in the New England woods by now, talking about a creature that haunts the forests and rivers and… in particular an old, abandoned watermill out there. But the airports are so crazy these days-- who knew our connection would be canceled and we’d be stuck in this enormous Denver airport? Let’s hope the next flight goes as scheduled-- it’s the last one that will get us out of Denver tonight.
Of course there’s something kind of unsettling about airports, especially late at night like this, when the shops are closed and the concourse mostly empty. And this Denver International Airport may be the most unsettling of them all. There are as many stories about this airport as there are flights in and out of it every day.
Look out the window there, past the runways. See that big patch of darkness, beyond the headlights of the toll road? Well, if you can’t see it from here you’ll see it when we take off. That’s the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. A pretty place-- sixteen thousand acres of grassland prairie just a few miles from downtown Denver. They’ve got a little herd of bison out there-- you can see them from your car if you drive the loop road that runs through the refuge. A very pretty place... with the darkest, darkest secrets.
You may have noticed the word “arsenal” in the name of the wildlife refuge. That’s because the land the refuge occupies used to be the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Of course an arsenal is a place to build and store weapons. So what kinds of things were built at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal? What kinds of things were stored there?
Nightmares.
Nightmares more horrible than anything we will ever talk about on this podcast. The worst kinds of suffering imaginable, distilled and bottled into bombs and shells and aerosol canisters, then given the sane- and scientific-sounding name of “chemical weapons”. Our great-grandparents called them “poison gas”, and that is a step closer to the vicious reality... but only a small step. We won’t talk about the reality. You can read about it in any memoir from World War One, and then imagine what decades of... well I guess we call it “progress”... at places like the Rocky Mountain Arsenal had done to advance the technology involved.
Much of the work at the Arsenal took place underground. These nightmares were manufactured underground, the better to contain any accidents or leaks. The finished products were stored in underground bunkers, for obvious reasons. The deadly waste products of the manufacturing process were piped into concrete-lined tanks underground, and in 1961 a twelve-thousand-foot-deep well was drilled to determine whether these horrors could be safely disposed of by injecting them at high pressure directly into the earth-- but the experiment was halted in 1966 after it was determined that the injections had caused a series of earthquakes-- the world itself rebelling under such treatment.
And then there were the tunnels that led to the other bunkers... the ones separated from the rest by distance and security... and secrecy. You see... the whole point of any weapon is lost... if you don’t know what it will do to human beings. So... unfortunately... you have to... you have to test them.
If the records of these tests still exist, they have never seen the light of day. And they never will. Because at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, good people just like you and me allowed fear to hound them into doing and creating horrible things-- things that they hated. Things so horrible that when the terror of the Cold War ended, everyone woke with a start and tried to forget that the nightmare had ever been dreamed. But it had. It has. And it goes on being dreamt... in the darkness under the ground of what was once the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
Not many rumors escaped the Arsenal-- the place was designed to prevent such things. But one of the few-- and the most persistent-- was of a figure who haunted the whole complex. Some said he was the victim of an accident or an experiment that was later covered up. Or maybe he was just the manifestation of a collective guilty conscience. Whatever he was... or whatever he is... the encounter would go like this: a soldier on sentry duty or a technician working late at night would glimpse someone in a long tan coat and an old-fashioned, fedora-style hat, moving in some high-security, tightly-restricted area... they would call out and approach, but the stranger would walk or run away. The pursuit would go on and on, and if the soldier or technician was unlucky enough to catch up with this stranger... well...
Well, there’s some recent stories from here, in the airport, that seem to lead back to that old one. A figure just like that is said to appear here in these terminals from time to time. People who know the airport call this... man, this... thing “The Traveler”. But I think there’s a link between The Traveler stories and whatever it was that haunted the tunnels of the old Arsenal.
When they chose this site for the Denver International Airport, back in the mid 1980s, there were whispers of some secret connection to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal-- otherwise why build the airport so far away from the city, when there were better sites available much closer to downtown? All other proposed locations were rejected in favor of this one, thirty miles from downtown Denver... and right next to the Arsenal. But just as the airport was being constructed, and just as speculation about a connection between the two reached a fever pitch-- the arsenal closed. At least... they say it closed.
But just as its closure was announced, the construction of the airport ran into a series of delays... delays so severe that Denver International Airport opened two years late and ran three billion dollars over budget. Three billion.
Where did all that extra time and money go? The official story is that it was just a case of bad design, poor planning, worse management and a six-hundred-million dollar automated baggage system that destroyed most of the luggage that was put through it for testing and was abandoned without ever being brought into operation… but of course there were whispers of other explanations. Whispers that the time and money had been spent on secret facilities beneath the airport... bunkers, hidden buildings... tunnels that led west... toward the old Rocky Mountain Arsenal...
But May-Ying had never heard about “The Traveler”, or any of these other stories when she finally made it through security here at the Denver Airport one evening last year. Security was always tough for May-Ying. She’s a mountain climber, and she was heading home from climbing some of the most technically-challenging routes up the tallest, toughest peaks that Colorado has to offer. But she always managed to forget a carabiner or some other piece of metal climbing gear inside her carry-on. Plus she had liquids. And a tablet that she had forgotten to take out of her bag. And she had lace-up boots. And screws in her thigh from a bad fall five years ago-- they always set off the metal detector and got her pulled out of line for an individual inspection.
When May-Ying finally made it through, she felt like she’d been pulled into half a dozen separate pieces. She sat down on a bench on the other side of the checkpoint and jammed her phone into her pocket and her liquids into her bag, her tablet back in its place and her shoes on her feet. She had just finished tying them up and was in the act of standing when something fell to the ground at her feet.
She assumed it was something she’d accidentally left on her lap, and stooped quickly to pick it up. But even as she did she recognized that it was nothing like anything she owned. It was a passport or something-- a small, stiff, brown-covered booklet with a gold-leaf seal of some kind on the cover. She took in all these facts as she bent to scoop it up, and immediately looked around to see who had dropped it.
That had to be him, the only figure nearby at that moment: a man in a long brown coat and old fashioned hat, walking swiftly toward the escalators. He was moving fast-- must be late for his flight. She called after him:
“Excuse me!”
<<simultaneous>>
Nick or Kiersa or Chelsea’s velvet tones: Denver International Airport is a non-smoking facility. Smoking is allowed only in the designated areas [begin to fade out] outside of the main terminal on levels 4, 5, and 6. Please obey [fade out completely anywhere here] all signage and staff member instructions. Thank you for your cooperation. Welcome to Denver.
The booming voice over the PA drowned May-Ying out, and the stranger was trotting up an escalator by the time she grabbed her carry-on bag and stood. She didn’t even think of taking his passport to security-- he was right there, and heading the same direction she had to go anyway. She’d catch up to him.
And she almost did. Several times. She almost reached him on the moving walkway, but the couple between them suddenly stopped to search their luggage and his lead widened while May-Ying excused her way through. “Sir! Sir!” she called. Many heads turned, but his wasn’t one of them. He went down one of the concourses, which happened to be the one that led to her gate as well. She followed, speeding up to catch him… but no matter how fast she went he always remained just out of comfortable earshot ahead of her, and whenever she got close enough to try calling out again a slow-strolling group of pedestrians or a beeping airport cart would appear to impede her.
She didn’t notice her gate as she passed it-- she was straining her eyes forward, having momentarily lost sight of the stranger in the brown coat. When she picked him up again he was turning a corner past a newstand, and she broke into a trot to catch him-- but when she made the corner he was still just a bit too far ahead of her. Her mind protested for a moment-- it was strange how much ground he’d covered between the time he’d rounded the corner and when she had. Strange-- it was impossible. Well, anyway… they must be almost to the end of this wing of the concourse. She was certain to catch up to him there if she didn’t before. She still had plenty of time before her flight.
Though she didn’t particularly notice, it was night outside the terminal windows as she passed them. That busy kind of airport night-- the flashing lights of taxiing airplanes and baggage carts, fuel and service trucks. The orange glow of floodlights from the terminal and the multi-colored markers that lined the runways. The man was still just ahead of May-Ying, and still they hadn’t reached the end of the concourse. She tried to conjure up a map of this airport in her mind… did the terminals loop around on one another? Had they already been by this way? The stores and snack counters were not helpful landmarks-- they all look the same in every part of every airport everywhere. More and more of the ones they passed now were closed, with their iron security gates down-- was it that late already? Or was this section of the concourse known to be less busy at this time of night?
The gate numbers were different, but without an idea of the airport’s layout they didn’t mean anything to May-Ying. She couldn’t remember if they’d passed these gates already. She saw a woman talking on a cell phone who she was sure she’d seen before, but when May-Ying got close she heard that this woman was speaking a foreign language, while the first woman had spoken English. May-Ying decided it must be a different person, though the similarities stuck in her mind, and she looked back at the woman once or twice as she continued after the man in the brown coat.
When another gradual bend in the concourse revealed yet another long hall lined with gates, and no end in sight, and the man still just a little too far ahead, May-Ying finally decided that this was ridiculous. It had gone on long enough. Too long. She’d done more than politeness called for, and she decided to turn the passport or whatever it was over to the next gate agent or airport employee she saw. But… funny thing… all the gates they were passing now were closed. There were still a few people around, sitting scattered in the chairs or standing in groups of two or three in the middle of the concourse, but they all seemed to be passengers. Anyway they all had luggage with them. And as she passed she noticed that everyone was speaking in a different language. She wasn’t sure what language it could be. At a distance it had the tone and rhythm of English, but whenever she drew close May-Ying couldn’t understand a word.
A strange tongue. And everyone spoke it softly, not quite whispering, but… in a murmur. The high concourse roof batted the echoes around until they sounded just like… just like some place that May-Ying had been before. Where was it? That cathedral she’d visited in Spain, when she’d hiked the Pyrenees? No, that wasn’t it, but it was something like that… connected somehow… she’d think of it.
Around yet another gradual bend in the concourse where she’d seen the man go, still looking for someone to give the document to-- suddenly May-Ying was confronted with the end. The end of the terminal: a large room with gates on every wall, all of them closed. Rows of empty chairs, vacant ticket counters, display screens glowing with airline logos… And no one around. Not the man in the brown jacket or anyone else-- no one at all.
May-Ying peered around, looking for the man-- she seen him come down this way. And there was no way out, except the way she’d come… But the stranger had disappeared-- unless he had a key to one of the closed jetway doors, or was hiding behind one of the counters or the pillars that held up the roof. If he was hiding… down here with no one else around… she certainly didn’t want to find him.
Strange for any part of this airport to be completely empty like this. May-Ying looked behind her, trying to remember the last time she’d passed someone. Not too far back, it seemed, but there was no one in sight that way either. Dark shops behind closed security gates. Ads playing silently on video screens. A departures board flickering, changing. The hum of the empty end of a busy space… but… listen-- people couldn’t be too far away. She could hear the murmur of their voices down the concourse. Those murmuring echoes, just like in that empty Spanish cathedral she’d been… no. Not like the echoes in the cathedral, soft and lofty and muted. She remembered now: these were like the echoes in the crypt she’d visited beneath the church, where the smallest sound came back at you from every direction, sharp and close.
May-Ying turned to retrace her steps back down the concourse, back to humanity. And as she turned she glanced over her shoulder into the empty departure hall, the big dead end… and there he was. The man in the long brown jacket, standing in front of a window at the end of the concourse, looking out at the night. She must have… missed seeing him, somehow. She could have sworn that… he must have been sitting down, slumped in one of the seats or something. That must be it.
She walked closer to him. Not all the way-- not alone in this empty space. Just about halfway across the big, empty room. She walked noisily, dragging and slapping her shoes against the floor and waiting for her noise to turn him around. But he didn’t turn around. “Sir?” she tried-- and the echoes scuttled back at her so loud that she didn’t dare repeat it.
When the man in the hat and coat didn’t move to face the sound of her voice… that’s when May-Ying began to feel really frightened. And she took a few more steps forward, toward the stranger, because that was how she’d trained herself to react to fear: to face it, to move carefully toward it. And as she did-- as she came a few steps closer to the man-- she noticed something… one more thing that was very odd about this situation. The oddest thing she’d noticed yet.
The night. Outside the window. The night that the man was staring into. The night outside was… black. No planes. No carts. No lighted tarmac. No city lights on the horizon. No stars. Completely black, like a thick velvet curtain. Like the inside of a mine… like the inside of a tomb.
May-Ying looked down hurriedly at the little brown booklet that she held in her hands, which she noticed were now trembling slightly. The gold-leaf seal on the front cover said something about the Department of Defense, but she didn’t examine it closely. She opened the booklet, for the first time since she’d picked it up, and leafed through the light blue pages. Some had the smudgy marks of ink stamps on them, but she didn’t notice any details. She was looking for the stranger’s name, for something to call him… but she never found it. Instead, she flipped to the inside of the front cover, where the photo in a passport would be. And there was a photo there. A photo of someone with a wide, wicked grin full of crooked teeth… and no other features at all. No eyes. No nose or ears. Just pale, pale flesh beneath a balding fringe of closely-cropped dark hair.
As a climber, May-Ying had taught herself years ago that when you’re in danger you don’t look back or to either side. You just look straight ahead. You look where your feet are going. So May-Ying did not look back to see if the face of the man in the long brown coat matched his photo-- the way her feet were going was away from there. As fast as she could go, pounding back down the hard tile floor of the long concourse, seeking… anyone else. Anyone human.
Now she couldn’t hear the murmur of voices anymore, the soft hum of the building, the distant chatter of gate-change announcements. All she heard was her breathing, the thud of her shoes on the floor… and the sharp sound of another set of footsteps, running at top speed… just behind her.
As fast as she could go, down the long half-bright concourse, past gates that had been open and chairs that had been filled and cafes that had been serving… and now, never, never another person to be seen. Not a soul in sight. Not a living soul. But May-Ying didn’t slow down to wonder at this-- she didn’t slow a step until she reached something that was impossible… the other end of the concourse. She hadn’t missed a turn-- there had been no turns to miss, she’d run the only way there was to go… but here she was in another big room like the one she’d run away from, confronted with a similar row of empty gates and ticket counters… and no one else around at all. Except… except the one she could hear dashing up behind her.
May-Ying saw a door with a push handle on it and an angry red EXIT sign above. She turned her feet that way and slammed through the door that was plastered with the usual stickers warning that it was for emergency use only… this was definitely an emergency. May-Ying heard buzzers going off behind her, and found steel stairs in front of her, leading down. To the tarmac? To somewhere. To anywhere that was away from here. May-Ying heard the footsteps approaching behind her. She didn’t look back.
When May-Ying didn’t arrive home on her scheduled flight, and didn’t contact anyone to tell them where she was, her family reported her missing. Concerned climbing friends in Colorado scoured a route up a peak near Denver that she had mentioned wanting to climb, in case she’d gotten a wild hair to try it solo. The police reviewed the security footage that showed her leaving her hotel, arriving at the airport and making her way through security. But they… couldn’t pin down where she’d gone from there. They searched the manifests of other outbound flights, spoke to gate agents and flight attendants in case May-Ying had been struck by some kind of amnesia and had tried to board a different flight. They began to suspect that she must have wanted to disappear-- that she’d booked some other flight last-minute and vanished out of her old life completely. It had been known to happen.
But all that speculation went out the window when she was found… five days later.
May-Ying was found deep down a long-disused portion of the extensive tunnels beneath the airport. A couple of maintenance workers were drawn to the hoarse sound of her shouting. She was staggering and dehydrated, incoherent. The official story released by the Denver Department of Aviation is simply that she had become disoriented in one of the lower levels of the airport, gone through a restricted-access door and become lost in the tunnels beyond.
May-Ying remembers things differently. She remembers running from the stranger down the stairs-- running much farther than she would have gone if they had led to the tarmac. Much, much farther. And all the time she heard those footsteps, the clattering of hard-soled shoes on the metal stairs behind her, always gaining on her but somehow never getting quite close enough to grab her. Finally, finally the stairs ended in a corridor, with another push-bar steel door at the end. She ran to the door and pushed it open… onto darkness.
Not perfect darkness. There was a light: a very, very dim light hanging somewhere high on a far wall, mostly blocked by a jumble of black shapes that loomed in the space between her and it. As she felt her way as fast as she dared through the darkness, dragging her hands across gritty concrete walls and along pipes and greasy machine parts that she could feel but never see, her eyes slowly adjusted-- not enough to see where she was or where she was going, never that much… but just enough for her to spot the pale, flesh-covered face of the stranger, the man in the brown coat, The Traveler… creeping after her. Turning his eyeless head this way and that in the darkness… seeking her… and rushing toward her with terrible speed whenever she stumbled or made a sound…
How long this game of cat and mouse went on she couldn’t say-- it continued as long as her memory held out. She can’t remember how it ended, or what happened to The Traveler, or what she did if and when she realized that he was gone.
So much for the official story. Now you’ve heard May-Ying’s own version.
She counts herself lucky, though, and credits her training as a climber with her survival. Her physical conditioning, mental toughness… and her climber’s instinct never to look back at danger-- to focus on the path ahead. That terrible experience didn’t put May-Ying off of Colorado, however. The state has too much to offer to a climber like her. In fact, she decided to move there. Today she lives outside of Colorado Springs. Great mountain country, down there. And when she has to fly, the Colorado Springs airport gets her where she needs to go. It’s a lot smaller than Denver International, and has a lot to recommend it. Not so far to walk between gates, for one; impossible to get lost in. And… not so many tunnels.
You know who you are’s voice: Attention all passengers: Flight Thirteen Thirty One to Manchester-Boston Regional Airport has been cancelled. [begin fade out] Please make your way to the ticket counter for re-scheduling. I repeat, Flight Thirteen Thirty One has been cancelled. [fade completely anywhere in here] All passengers please see a representative to make other accommodations. Patri Airlines apologizes for the inconvenience.
Ah! That’s us. Well, looks like we’ll be spending the night in Denver. Guess we’d better get our flight rescheduled and start looking for a hotel. Unless… if you want to save a little money, I’m sure we could spend the night here in the airport? It’s a huge place-- there must be some quiet area that isn’t too busy, where the shops are all closed and we could catch a few hours of rest.
No, I guess you’re right. A hotel would be more comfortable.
Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network. Your Captain and First Officer today are our Executive Producers, Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Up here in first class we have a celebrity, our Podcast Production Intern Kiersa Berg! And sitting right beside her is the undercover Air Marshal for this flight, our Senior Producer Chelsea Davis. You won’t notice our Engineer Nick Patri until we reach our cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet-- then you’ll look out the window and swear you see him out there on the wing, monkeying with some wires. Don’t try to tell anyone about him, though: no one will believe you. This episode was written and performed by yours truly, Weston Davis. I’ll be around with warm towels and refreshments in just a few minutes.
And a reminder that the stories we tell here are just that: stories. They’re based on things people claim to have seen and experienced, but it’s up to you to decide what you believe… and how to explain away what you don’t.
Thanks for listening, subscribing, rating, and spreading the word about this podcast. And special thanks to this season’s sponsor, YETI. All YETI gear is designed to be tough, to help you through even your roughest, ruggedest outdoor adventures. YETI coolers have stood up to grizzly bears, giant slingshots, massive fireworks, and an excursion with a Hollywood stuntman. Check it out on the YouTube channel “Yeti VERSUS”. Heck, there’s even a legend that a few YETI coolers were some of the last things tested on Denver International’s ill-fated automatic luggage system, which was famous for ripping bags to shreds. The coolers all made it through fine, except for one which was lost somewhere underground. They say it’s still there today, with ice-cold drinks still in it, refreshing any lonely wanderers that happen upon it…
And thanks again for listening. Next week we’ll be in the woods and wilds of New England, hunting a creature that… that may be hunting us. See you then.