Denver Union Station

At Denver Union Station in Denver, Colorado, a well-dressed man in a dark suit is reported sitting near the windows that look out on the platforms. He stares at the tracks the way you stare when you're waiting for a train. Then he fades. The people who report him think he's a passenger who died waiting and never stopped.

He's not the only one stuck mid-wait. The recurring thread across every account here is the Great Hall as a waiting room that never empties. There's the "Confused Traveler," a man in early-1900s clothing who wanders the lobby searching for the right train, then suddenly vanishes. There's a three-fingered figure who the Crawford Hotel's own blog says "perished nearly a hundred years ago" and is said to pace the floors of the Great Hall late at night. And there's the Great Hall Guardian, a presence no one sees but staff say keeps watch over the hall after dark, even reassuring late travelers.

The one documented name in all of it belongs to George M. Lewis. He was a locomotive engineer, and in 1915 he was struck and killed by a passenger train at the station. By CBS Colorado's account, Lewis, "fearing being placed in a sanitarium for treatment of a 'nervous disorder,' had run away from his son-in-law and spent the night wandering the yards." Then a train caught him in the dark.

The building has been here, in some form, since 1881, when the original depot consolidated the rail lines under a tower roughly 180 feet tall, once among the tallest things in the West. A fire took the tower in 1894. The current Beaux-Arts hall opened in 1914, and at its peak the station moved as many as a million passengers a year.

It moves them yet. The hall reopened in 2014 with a hotel inside it, and trains run to the airport now. The same windows look out on the same platforms. And by every account, the man in the dark suit is still sitting there, watching for one that already came and went.