Gold Camp Road

The school-bus tunnel legend on this Colorado Springs road is almost certainly fake. The handprints on cars parked nearby are harder to explain.

Drive Gold Camp Road in the fog and pull over near Tunnel 3, the one that collapsed in 1988, and you'll find what hundreds of other drivers have reported: tiny handprints on the outside of your car windows. Not yours. Not a kid's from the parking lot. Small, fog-damp palmprints pressed into the condensation, appearing on the glass as you sit in the car staring at the tunnel. The story that explains them is probably not true. The handprints, the people who have photographed them say, definitely are.

Gold Camp Road is a winding, mostly unpaved route through the Pike National Forest that used to be a railroad. In the 1880s, the Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek District Railway ran trains along this exact grade, nine tunnels included, hauling gold out of the Cripple Creek mining district to the foot of Pikes Peak. The line shut down in 1922, and the county converted it to an automobile road two years later. Then in 1988, one of the tunnels collapsed, and Gold Camp Road picked up its most famous ghost story almost overnight.

The story: a school bus full of children was driving through the tunnel when the ceiling gave way. The driver and every kid on board died. Their ghosts haunt the tunnel and the surrounding stretch of road, leaving handprints on cars that park nearby and sometimes scratching or pushing drivers who venture inside the collapsed section on foot.

The story is almost certainly apocryphal. Researchers who've dug through local newspaper archives for any mention of a school bus accident on Gold Camp Road in or around 1988 have come up empty. No deaths. No bus. No news reports at all. The tunnel collapsed from age and neglect, not from a disaster. And yet the handprint reports don't go away. Neither do the accounts of laughter from empty stretches of woods, the stories of unseen hands touching people's shoulders inside the tunnels, or the dashcam footage that periodically surfaces on paranormal subreddits.

The actual historical tragedies here are older. Local sources mention railroad workers killed during construction of the tunnels, though the details in the record are thin. Some of the local ghost stories predate the bus legend by decades. The tunnels were considered haunted by people who worked the railroad long before they were considered haunted by people driving a converted road.

Fox 21 News in Colorado Springs covered the road's ranking on a 2022 list of the twenty most haunted roads in America (it came in at number 17, on a list compiled from Google and TikTok search trends). The Atlas Obscura entry treats the tunnels as a roadside curiosity with a ghost-story overlay, which is probably the right way to approach it. Drive the unpaved section carefully, bring a decent flashlight, and don't expect to find anything that definitively proves anything.

The thing about Gold Camp Road is that you don't need the school bus story to make the drive feel wrong. The drive is narrow, one-lane in places, cliff-edge in others, with switchbacks that close in around you and a forest that gets very quiet at dusk. The collapsed tunnels are open-ended caves now, damp and cold, and they smell like mineral water and old stone. The back of your neck tightens the second you step inside, and the handprints, if they show up at all, are almost beside the point. Real people really did die building those tunnels. The bus story is probably fake. The atmosphere is doing the rest of the work for free.