The Question
Every airport run past that thing produces the same conversation. Somebody sees the red eyes glowing in the median on Peña Boulevard and says: is it true it killed the guy who made it?
Yes. That part is true, and it is the only part of the legend that survives a look at the record. Which makes it worth doing properly, because the true version is sadder, and better, than the ghost story built on top of it.
The Assumption
The popular version goes like this: a cursed demon horse killed its creator, the city was sued over it, and it has been haunting the airport ever since as one more piece of evidence in the great Denver airport conspiracy.
Start with the basics, which almost nobody gets right. Its name is not Blucifer. It is Mustang. It stands thirty-two feet tall and weighs about nine thousand pounds. It is cast fiberglass over a steel armature, not bronze, whatever you have read. It was one of the original public art commissions for the airport, dating to 1993, and it was installed on a windy morning, February 11, 2008. All of that is from the City of Denver's own public art page, archived.
The sculptor was Luis Jiménez, a nationally significant artist from El Paso who worked in New Mexico and spent his career making large fiberglass work about the American West and the people actually in it. He was not a novelty artist. His pieces are in major museum collections. In Denver he is remembered almost entirely for a nickname his family hates.
It is worth pausing on why the piece exists at all. Denver has required capital projects to spend one percent of their budget on public art since 1988, and the airport's collection was built out of that requirement. Whatever anyone thinks of the horse, it is there because the city decided art was not optional at a public building. It is also, by a wide margin, the most recognized object in the entire collection, which is a complicated sort of success.
The Evidence
Claim: the sculpture killed him. VERIFIED. On June 13, 2006, at his studio in Hondo, New Mexico, a section of the sculpture came loose from a hoist while being moved and pinned Jiménez against a steel support beam, severing an artery. He was 65. The Denver Post's account is direct: creation of the piece “survived lawsuits over the pace of the work, the illness of sculptor Luis Jimenez, and his death when a section of the sculpture came loose from a hoist and pinned him against a steel support beam.” That's from the paper's January 2009 report, and a 2021 follow-up adds the detail that he bled to death from the severed artery.
Claim: the eyes are demonic. FALSE, or at least backwards. The red eyes are a tribute. Jiménez's father ran a neon sign shop in El Paso, and the artist grew up in it. His widow, Susan Jiménez, told Colorado Public Radio that “the eyes do not have any evil intent whatsoever.” The family has spent years objecting to the demonic branding and, per the Denver Post, hardly ever approves licensed use of it.
Claim: there was a lawsuit. PARTLY VERIFIED, and messier than the legend. After deadlines slipped, the city sued Jiménez to recover money already advanced on the commission; he countersued; it went to mediation and he agreed to finish the work. Every account of this traces back to the same secondary reporting, and we could not produce a docket number, a court, or a published opinion — which is consistent with a dispute settled in mediation rather than tried. So: the lawsuit is real as reported, but anyone telling you who “won in court” is making it up. There was no verdict.
There is a second, separate legal thread that people mash into the first one. In 2023 the artist's estate threatened action against merchandisers using the sculpture's image for demon-themed products, as Westword reported. That is a copyright dispute in the present day, not the 1990s commission fight.
Claim: the horse is bronze. FALSE. Cast fiberglass. Every primary description says so.
Claim: it's tied to other deaths or disasters at the airport. NO EVIDENCE. We went looking, in news archives and in the reporting that exists about the sculpture. There is nothing. Not a thin case — nothing at all. The airport conspiracy material that circulates alongside it, the Freemasons and the apocalyptic murals and the underground bunkers, is folklore, and Colorado Public Radio catalogues it as exactly that.
The History
The delay is the real story, and it is not supernatural. The commission dates to 1993 and the sculpture went up in 2008. Fifteen years.
Some of that was the artist's health, which was poor through the fabrication years. Some of it was the airport changing its mind about where the piece would go: the original plan for a small roadside park with parking and benches was scrapped after September 11 for security reasons, as KUNC reported, and a plan to put it inside the terminal died when the space was needed for security screening. Some of it was the fight over money and deadlines. Then the accident, and then the family and studio painters finishing the work he did not live to finish. The three sections were shipped to a firm in California for final assembly.
The cost tracks the delay. It was commissioned for $300,000. By the time it stood on Peña Boulevard, the city had paid roughly $650,000, funded through Denver's One Percent for Art program.
Two things about that fifteen-year run are worth holding together. The first is that public art at this scale is a construction project, with rigging and cranes and multi-ton components, and it carries construction-project risk. The second is that Jiménez was still doing that physical work himself, in his sixties, in poor health, on a piece that had already cost him years and a lawsuit. He was not a man haunted by his own sculpture. He was a man behind schedule, doing dangerous work alone in a rural studio.
The airport reads differently once you know that. A driver approaching Peña Boulevard at night sees a landmark, a wayfinding cue, the thing that means you are eight minutes from the terminal. It is also the last thing a man made.
The Verdict
The horse did not kill anyone. An industrial accident during the assembly of a nine-thousand-pound sculpture killed a 65-year-old man who had been fighting to finish it for over a decade, and Denver turned that into a punchline within about a year.
The removal campaigns are real too. A Facebook group and a website called byebyebluemustang.com made national news in 2009, and the argument resurfaces every few years. Denver's public art rules did not allow removal petitions for the first five years after installation, which bought it time; by the time that window closed, the cost of taking it down had become its own argument for leaving it up.
Our verdict: the death is true, the curse is not, the lawsuit is real but has no verdict behind it, and the demonic reading of the eyes is the opposite of what the artist meant. Campfire rating: worth telling, if you tell it with his name in it.
Sources
- City and County of Denver, Office of Cultural Affairs, “Mustang / Mesteño” — official city description, archived; dimensions, install date, credits
- Denver Post, “Mustang sculpture controversy rears up” (Jan. 28, 2009) — death, delays, removal campaign
- Denver Post, “Today is Blucifer's birthday, but the family… would prefer you don't call it that” (Feb. 11, 2021) — the family's objection to the nickname
- Colorado Public Radio, “Everything you ever wanted to know about Blucifer” (Nov. 4, 2019) — interview with Susan Jiménez; airport folklore
- Westword, “After five years, it might be time for ‘Mustang' to mosey on” (Jan. 31, 2013) — $300,000 commission, $650,000 final cost
- KUNC, “The demon horse of Denver” (Feb. 3, 2013) — post-9/11 cancellation of the roadside park; five-year removal rule
- Westword, “Mustang heirs threaten legal action” (Dec. 19, 2023) — the estate's separate copyright dispute
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