Camp Monsters - The Traveler

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

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 is an REI Co-op Studios production. 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. Passenger Cepeda, please report to the tick account at gate B-14. 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,

and in particular, an old old abandoned water mill out there. But the airports are so crazy these days. Who knew our connection would be cancelled and we'd get stuck in this enormous Denver airport. Let's just hope the next flight goes out as scheduled. It's the last one that would 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 is 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 out 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. It's a beautiful place. 16,000 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. It's 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 kind of things were built at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal? What kind of things were stored there? Nightmares. Nightmares more horrible than anything we'll ever talk about on this podcast. The worst kinds of suffering imaginable, distilled and bottled into bombs and shells and aerosol canisters, and then given the sane and scientific-sounding name of chemical weapons. Our great-grandparents might have called them poison gas, and that's 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 I, and then imagine what decades of, well, I guess we call it progress, at

places like the Rocky Mountain Arsenal have 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, and the deadly waste products of the manufacturing process were piped into concrete-lined tanks underground. In 1961, a 12,000 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

were causing a series of earthquakes. The world itself was 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 test them. If the records of these tests still exist, they've 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 underground of what was once the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Not many rumors ever 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. Maybe he was just a 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 and the pursuit would go on and on and if the soldier or the technician was unlucky enough to catch up with the stranger. 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. And you know, when they chose this site for the Denver International Airport back in the

mid-80s, 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? But all the other proposed locations were rejected in favor of this one, 30 miles from downtown Denver and right next to the Arsenal. But just as the airport was being constructed, just as the 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 $3 billion over budget. $3 billion. Where did all that extra time and money go? The official story is that it's just a case of bad design, poor planning, worse management, and a $600 million 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. Rumors that the time and money had been spent on secret facilities built beneath the airport. Bunkers, hidden buildings, and tunnels that led west toward the old Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

But Mei 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 Mei 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. Somehow 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'd 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 Mei 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'd 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 she stooped quickly to pick it up. But even as she did, she recognized that it was nothing like anything she she ever 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 an old-fashioned hat. Walking swiftly toward the escalators. He was moving fast. Must be late for his flight. She called after him.

Excuse me. Denver International Airport is a non-smoking facility. The booming voice over the PA drowned Mei 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, heading in 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 Mei 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 even notice her own gate as she passed it. She was looking forward,

having momentarily lost sight of the stranger in the brown coat. When she picked him up again, he was just turning a corner past a newsstand, and she broke into a trot to catch him. But when she made it to 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. No, it wasn't possible. 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 further out

the multicolored markers that line the runways. The stranger, the man in the brown coat, was still just ahead of Mei Ying, and still they hadn't reached the end of the concourse. She tried to conjure up the map of this airport in her mind. Did the terminals loop around on one another? Had they already been this way? The stores and snack counters were not helpful landmarks. They all looked the same in every part of every airport everywhere.

More and more the ones they pass now were closed with their steel 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 kept changing, but without an idea of the airport's layout, that didn't mean anything to Mei 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 Mei Ying got close,

she heard that this woman was speaking a foreign language while the first had spoken English. Mei Ying decided it must be a different person. There was a similarity stuck in her mind, and she looked back at the woman once or twice, and 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, Mei 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 that she saw. But, funny thing, all the gates they were passing now were closed.

There were still a few people around, 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 Mei Ying 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, she couldn't understand a word. What 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 Mei Ying had been before. Where was it? That cathedral that she'd visited in Spain when she'd hiked the Pyrenees? No.

No, that wasn't it. 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 documents to, suddenly, Mei 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. Mei Ying peered around, looking for the man. She'd 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 he was hiding behind one of the counters, one of the pillars that held up the roof. And if he was hiding, down here with no one else around, she certainly didn't want to find him. And it was strange for any part of this airport to be completely empty like this.

Mei 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. No, she remembered now. No, not like the echoes in the cathedral, which were soft and lofty and muted. These were like the echoes in the crypt she'd visited beneath that church, where the smallest sound came back at you from every direction, sharp and close.

Mei 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 down in one of the seats or something. That must be it. Mei Ying 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 the noise of her approach 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 Mei 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. She noticed one more thing

that was very odd about this situation. The oddest thing she'd noticed yet. The night. Outside the window. 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 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. Mei 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 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 and a passport would be. And there was a photo there a photo of someone with a wide wicked grin full of crooked teeth and features at all. No eyes, no nose or ears, just pale, pale flesh beneath a balding fringe of close-cropped dark hair. As a climber, Mei 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 Mei 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 down the hard tile floor of the long concourse, seeking... seeking anyone else. Anyone human. Now she couldn't hear the murmur of voices anymore, the soft hum of the building, 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 Mei 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... gates and ticket counters, and no one else around at all. Except, except the one she could hear dashing up behind her. Mei 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 it was for emergency use only. This was definitely an emergency. Mei 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. Mei Ying heard the footsteps approaching behind her. She didn't look back. When Mei 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'd 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, making her way through security, but they couldn't pin down where she'd gone from there. They searched the manifest of other outbound flights, spoke to gate agents and flight attendants in case Mei Ying had been struck by some kind of amnesia and 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. Mei 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'd become disoriented in one of the lower levels of the airport, gone through a restricted access door and become lost in the tunnels beyond. Mei Ying remembers things differently. She remembers running from the stranger down the stairs, running much farther than she

would have gone if they'd led to the tarmac. Much, much farther down. And all the time she heard those footsteps. The clattering of hard-soled shoes on the metal stairs behind her, gaining on her, but somehow never quite getting 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. And 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 Mei Ying's own version. She counts herself lucky, though, and credits her training as a climber with her survival. Her physical conditioning, her mental toughness,

and her climber's instinct never to look back at danger, to always focus on the path ahead. While that terrible experience didn't put Mei Ying off of Colorado, however, the state has too much to offer 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. It 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. Attention. All passengers for flight 1331 to Manchester and Austin,

please be aware that flight 1331 has been canceled. Please make your way to the airport. Ah, that's us. Well, looks like we'll be spending the night in Denver. Guess we better get our flight rescheduled and start looking for a hotel. Unless... I mean, 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. 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 Motila and Joe Crosby. Up here in first class, we have a celebrity, our podcast production intern, Kirsa 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 Patry, until we reach our cruising altitude of 35,000 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 the 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. Next week, we'll be in the woods and wilds of New England, hunting a creature that may just be hunting us. See you then.