The University of Arizona boasts an unusually extensive system

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The University of Arizona boasts an unusually extensive system of utility tunnels, more than 15 miles worth of them, altogether. They were mostly built in the 1950's, and house tons of steam and water lines that go to pretty much every building on campus. They also provide access to the handful of fallout shelters that were built in the basements of some of the campus building at that time.

There are also a few chambers in the tunnels that don't seem to have any purpose. There's only a handful of them, five maybe, though some claim there's many more if you really look for them.

You access these chambers through a vent built at ground level, covered with a sliding steel hatch with a serial number printed on it. On a couple of these, the steam pipes run directly in front of the hatch, rendering them pretty much inaccessible. They're big enough that a grown man could comfortably crawl on his hands and knees through them.

The chambers themselves are square, about twelve feet to a side, divided into quarters. From above, they'd look like a square with a plus sign inside. There's only about a foot and a half of clearance between the walls and the tips of the plus sign, so you have to sidle a bit to get from one quarter to the other.

There are no light fixtures in these chambers, no outlets, no openings of any kind except the entry hatch. Some of them are plain concrete, others have been painted white. It's not clear why they were built, or exactly when. Storage for the fallout shelters, maybe? But why the odd design?

The guy who told me about these rooms told me that you start getting creeped out really fast when you're in them, like something unfriendly is watching you. Once, when he was working down in the tunnels, he went into one near the Medical Center, and in the quarter opposite the hatch, there was a folding chair sitting on the ground. For some reason, that just made him beat a panicked exit from that room and he never went in again.