Gold Camp Road

Drive the lower stretch of Gold Camp Road outside Colorado Springs and you'll hear the same story everyone tells about Tunnel #3. The story goes that a school bus full of children — orphans, in some tellings — was crushed when the tunnel caved in on them. On quiet nights, people say, you can hear them laughing near the blocked entrance, laughter that turns to screaming, and that tiny handprints appear in the fog on your car windows.

Here is the part the story leaves out. There was no bus.

Tunnel #3 did collapse, in 1988. But it failed because its hundred-year-old timber-and-stone supports finally gave way, not because of any accident inside it. No record exists of a bus, a field trip, or any children killed there. The collapse closed that stretch to cars for good, and the tunnel sits iron-fenced on both ends today, splitting the old road in two.

The real history underneath is stranger than the ghost. The road isn't a road at all by birth — it's the bed of a railroad. The Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek District line, "the Short Line," ran gold ore and passengers up this grade starting in 1901. It was so scenic that Theodore Roosevelt, riding it that same year, said the trip "bankrupts the English language." The line went bankrupt itself by 1920. A coal-mine owner named W.D. Corley bought the route for $370,000, pulled up the tracks, and reopened it as a toll highway in the mid-1920s. The federal government took it over in 1939 and renamed it Gold Camp Road.

The lore stuck anyway. Some accounts add a dark figure pacing near the tunnels, cars that seem to roll on their own, dusty handprints left on parked windshields. Part of it gets pinned to fatal wrecks and workers said to have died building the tunnels, though no death toll or names survive in any record.

So the bus is a lie. The tunnel still fell. And people keep hearing children in a place where, as far as anyone can prove, none ever died.