Never Take the First Van

An Airline Crew Legend

A quick note before we get creepy: This story was written for the Create an Urban Legend Challenge hosted by Labyrinthia Mythweaver and John Watson - Horror Author . They asked us to create something that felt like it had already been whispered from person to person for years, and apparently my brain immediately went to hotel vans. So, thanks to both of them for giving me another excuse to make airline crews suspicious of completely ordinary things. Here is where my brain took me…..

Nobody seems to know where the story started. I’ve heard Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, and Albuquerque, although one old captain was adamant that the original happened somewhere in New England in the early nineties. When I asked how he knew, he told me he’d heard it from a flight attendant who’d gotten it from another flight attendant during initial training, which is about as reliable a source as you’re going to get for something like this.

That’s the problem with airline stories. We spend our careers flying with people we’ve never met before, and then spend three or four days trapped together in cockpits, hotel vans, and airport restaurants. Stories travel. A captain hears something from a flight attendant in Oakland, tells a first officer six months later over Kansas, who tells another crew on an overnight in Nashville. Give it twenty years and nobody will remember where it came from, but everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who swears it happened.

The details of this one depend on who’s telling it. Sometimes the crew works for a major airline and sometimes it’s an old regional that doesn’t exist anymore. The hotel might be a Marriott, a Hilton, or one of those airport hotels that’s changed names four times and still somehow has the same carpet. Even the city moves around.

The rule doesn’t.

If nobody called the hotel, don’t get in the van. At least not the first one.

If you’ve spent enough time flying, there’s nothing particularly interesting about a hotel shuttle. By the middle of a trip, the whole routine happens without much thought. Land, taxi in, run whatever checklist needs running, grab your bags, walk through a terminal that’s mostly shut down for the night, and figure out where the hotel pickup is. Somebody calls the front desk, they tell you ten or fifteen minutes, and eventually a tired guy in a polo shirt pulls up in a van that smells like Armor All and a thousand other flight crews.

According to the oldest version I’ve heard, a four-person crew arrived sometime after midnight following a long delay. They were on the second night of a three-day trip, already tired and irritated, and nobody was interested in spending another minute at the airport. By the time they got downstairs, the terminal was nearly empty and their hotel shuttle was sitting outside with its flashers blinking.

The captain asked if somebody had called. One of the flight attendants thought the first officer had. The first officer assumed one of the flight attendants had. Nobody remembered doing it themselves, but nobody thought much about it either. They had been flying together for two days. Somebody must have called.

So they got in.

The driver knew the hotel. That’s important, because depending on who tells the story, the crew never actually told him where they were staying. Some versions go further and say he knew the captain’s name or their pickup time the next morning. I’ve even heard one where he knew everyone’s room number, which is probably where twenty years of flight-attendant embellishment took over.

The original story is simpler. The crew loaded their bags, climbed aboard, and the van left the airport.

For the first ten minutes, nobody noticed anything unusual. The flight attendants talked quietly in the back. The first officer stared at his phone. The captain sat behind the driver watching familiar airport hotels and parking garages slide past the window. It was exactly like a thousand other overnights until the captain realized they’d been driving for almost forty five minutes.

The hotel was supposed to be seven miles away and zero traffic.

He leaned forward and asked the driver how much farther they had to go. The driver didn’t answer, so the captain asked again.

Still nothing.

By then one of the flight attendants had noticed too. They weren’t surrounded by hotels anymore. There were no restaurants or gas stations, no warehouse lights or freeway signs. The airport glow had disappeared behind them, and outside the windows there was nothing but a two-lane road running through darkness.

The captain asked where they were going. This time the driver looked at him through the rearview mirror.

“You already know.”

That’s one of the few details that survives every version I’ve heard. Same three words, every time. Then the driver started laughing.

Not a chuckle or the uncomfortable laugh of somebody realizing he’d taken a wrong turn. It came out high and wild, building until he was nearly howling behind the wheel, his shoulders shaking while the van kept rolling through the dark.

The first officer checked his phone and didn’t have service. One of the flight attendants tried hers with the same result. The captain told the driver to pull over. When he didn’t, the captain stood, grabbed the back of the driver’s seat, and made it considerably clearer that this wasn’t a request.

The driver hit the brakes and his laughter stopped. The crew looked outside. They were at the airport. Not approaching it. Not somewhere on airport property. They were sitting at the same curb they’d left, beneath the same HOTEL SHUTTLE sign, with baggage claim glowing through the automatic doors behind them.

Nobody remembered turning around.

The flight attendants were out first. The pilots followed, dragging their bags onto the sidewalk while the captain tried to get a look at the license plate. Before he could, the doors closed and the van pulled away. A few minutes later another shuttle arrived bearing the same hotel’s logo.

Depending on the storyteller, this is where things usually get ridiculous. Some people swear it was the exact same make, model, and color. One guy told me both vans had the same license plate, although I’ve always wondered how anybody would know that when the whole point of the story is that the captain couldn’t read the first one.

What matters is what happened when the second driver lowered his window.

“Sorry, guys. You waiting on the hotel?”

The captain asked if he’d already been there. The driver laughed.

“No. Front desk just called me.”

Nobody said much during the ride. There are dozens of variations now. In one, a crew drives for three hours while the dashboard clock stays frozen at 1:17. In another, they keep passing their hotel on the opposite side of the highway but can never reach it. My favorite involves a flight attendant checking her phone bill weeks later and discovering she’d made a seventeen-minute call from the van to her own number.

Most of that is probably embellishment. Airline crews are very good at turning a strange story into a better one.

Still, enough people have heard some version of the story that a few rules have attached themselves to it over the years. Never tell a shuttle driver which hotel you’re staying at; make him tell you. If he somehow knows your room number, leave your bag on the curb. And if the van is waiting before anyone has called the hotel, wait for another one.

Or, as an old captain once put it to me:

Never take the first van.