A raging blizzard across a Wyoming highway sent three people desperate for shelter into the rural town of Chugwater. When they finally found a place out of the storm, they had no idea they were stepping into a different dimension.
“Welcome to the Twilight Zone Restaurant,” Debra D. Munn wrote in her book “Wyoming Ghost Stories, Eerie True Tales.”
“One of the most baffling supernatural phenomena that took place in Wyoming occurred in March 1959,” she continued.
Munn’s story of accidental time travel is shrouded in mystery. The people involved did not want their identities revealed and those who would know the true story are now gone.
We may never know what really happened in Chugwater that stormy day. Now the story has become a spooky legend about that time a blinding Wyoming snowstorm led to the twilight zone.
The Storm
An airman stationed at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver in 1959 and had just been given leave to visit his wife in Worland, Wyoming. His friends, a married couple, joined him on the road trip.
Just as the three were leaving the Cheyenne city limits, a blinding spring blizzard struck.
The snowstorm made road conditions almost impossible to navigate and it took more than an hour and a half to reach Chugwater 45 miles from Cheyenne. The storm was getting worse, and they were grateful when they finally made out the dim lights ahead signaling a safe place to wait out the tempest.
“We were so glad to find a place to come in out of the storm and have dinner,” the airman later told Munn. “We pulled off to the left side of the road and walked across the building. I believe that we went through some swinging doors there in the front, and I remember that we were the only three having dinner at the time. The help were there — the cook, dishwasher, and others — but we were the only customers.
“The restaurant was quite pleasant, with white linen tablecloths, silverware and tall water glasses at each place setting. Two young women dressed in long dresses with black and white aprons waited on us.”
After the table was served a round of beers, the men ordered steak while the wife had chicken. The meal was ordinary and there didn’t appear to be anything odd about the food.
When they got their bill, the travelers were pleasantly surprised when it came to $9. Feeling generous, the airman left a $5 tip and was rewarded with shocked delight from the waitresses.
The waitresses thanked him and walked the three to the door. They cautioned them all to be careful since it was still snowing so hard that one could barely see.
Once again they entered the storm, anticipating a white-knuckled drive. But once they got on the other side of Chugwater and close to Douglas, the storm suddenly lifted.
They made it to Worland without any further incident.
Disappearing Act
In Worland, the airman and his friends told his wife and in-laws about this nice restaurant they had found. They decided to revisit it on their way back to Denver the next week.
The airman’s wife joined them on the return trip. The weather and roads were clear, and it was an easy trip to Chugwater. The highway took travelers right through the middle of town and the airman drove the now familiar street to the restaurant.
He pulled into the same parking spot he had used before and sat in the car, stunned.
“I remembered that as we had come down the hill from Denver heading north, the restaurant had been the third or fourth business on the lefthand side of the street,” the airman said. “But this time it just wasn’t there. There wasn’t even any building on the side — we were looking at a vacant lot.”
Unable to believe what they were not seeing, the airman and his friend walked up to a nearby hamburger stand and spoke to an elderly gentleman.
“I think his name was Charlie,” the airman said. “I told him that we had come through Chugwater and eaten at a restaurant that was no longer there.”
“Parden me?” Charlie was said to have asked. “Are you sure this was where you were?”
“I’m positive,” the airman replied. “That’s right where I parked.”
“When was this?” Charlie asked as the airman noticed that the older man had a funny look on his face.
“Eight days ago,” he replied.
“Son, the place that you describe burned down years and years ago,” Charlie chose his words carefully. “This has been a vacant lot since then.”
“There’s no way!” the airman responded adamantly. “We were just in there!”
He began to describe both of the waitresses to Charlie in convincing detail and was interrupted with a sad shake of Charlie’s head.
“Son,” the man said again. “That place burned down, and the two people you describe perished in the fire. But that was years and years ago.”
The airman looked over at his friend to see if they were both hearing the same thing.
His friend had turned pale and said, “The best thing we can do is get the hell to Denver!”
Time Travelers
Back on the road, the airman’s wife was convinced the three others were trying to pull a joke on her. The other wife became visibly upset and insisted that they were telling the truth.
“It was only then that I believed them,” the airman’s wife said. “After all these years, their story has never changed.”
The airman said that if his friends hadn’t been there to corroborate his story, he would not believe it himself.
They had all immediately tried to rationalize the experience away and thought at first that they had been in another rural town. However, there were no other towns on the route and everything else about Chugwater had been the same — except for the missing restaurant.
The three witnesses agreed that the food had been real, the restaurant a solid place and their hosts had not been ghostly.
One theory that seemed to make the most sense, though still very bizarre, was that they had somehow slipped back into the past.
Historical Facts
There is a newspaper story that fits the scenario that Charlie suggested.
He had told the airman about a restaurant burning down “years and years ago,” and indeed, a restaurant had burned down 34 years prior.
The Wyoming State Tribune reported in May 1925 that a fire had started in a restaurant about 1:30 a.m. from an undetermined origin. Three buildings were destroyed in Chugwater until the blaze was finally extinguished at 9 that same morning.
“The pool hall underneath the restaurant was destroyed as was the rooming house above the restaurant,” the editor wrote. “Guests were forced to flee in scanty attire.”
Author Munn did further research and interviewed old timers from Chugwater. Russel L. Staats had checked his diary and discovered that on March 25, 1959, Chugwater got 9 inches of snow, evidence of a spring blizzard that the airman said happened.
Staats also believed that a restaurant had existed at one time in the area that the airman had described.
Residents Tim and Peggy Dreas told Munn that another old timer of Chugwater said that almost every business in the rural town had burned to the ground in the first part of the century, although no one remembers any deaths.
Another local remembered a man who used to roam around Chugwater that fit the description of the man named Charlie in the airman’s story.
The incident remains a mystery to this day.
The airman and his friends are adamant that they really did eat in the restaurant and nothing, not even their own logic, can convince them otherwise.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
