I see the old people, hesitating to board them at the mall, so I know it's not just me. On some level, that feeble old codger baby-stepping up to the escalator, gripping and ungripping the rubber hand rail to coordinate his movements, holding up the entire line and causing countless missed flights and sold-old merchandise has been secretly terrified of the steel contraptions his entire life. But he was young and strong for awhile and assumed he could match anything the mechanical devices threw at him. Now? One good … what? They're never quite sure precisely how the escalator might attack, but they understand its power to crush a hip or an elbow or a knee-joint with a single thrust of one powerful corrugated-steel stairstep.

Seriously. I know it's retarded, I never believe something sinister is really going to befall me, but I really do approach them sometimes with this odd little queasiness. Is it all merely a control issue? Once you board, you're quickly surrounded on all sides, there's nowhere to go except over the edge if that half-ton of hidden motors and gears and wiring and steel and electricity ever did try something funny.

Wednesday night, just after the Rockies game, when the escalators were jammed to peak capacity, on a fireworks-display night that always leads to a sellout, in a park crammed with thousands of extra small children and grandparents, they finally struck. An escalator went haywire, smashing bones and battering bodies, sending 20 unsuspecting fans to Denver hospitals.

I always suspected the attack would have more to do with entanglement, but the clever little machines took a different tack. Check out this dispatch from a local news account:

Ambulances and paramedics rushed to the scene … Witnesses said the scene was chaotic, with people falling onto one another and tumbling out of control.

"I heard a loud boom. I thought it was a joke at first, then I heard people screaming," said Kristin Leiker, who was at the game. Leiker said the escalator "just sped up, and people toppled on top of each other." …

"People kept coming down, they were hooting and hollering, said Alex Frenier. "And then I saw people come down real fast. People were hitting each other."

Sound like Onion copy? It's off the front page of Thursday's Denver Post, lead story. It lead even bigger this morning: six stories, eight photos, one diagram, three quarters of page one, and two full pages on the inside. Here's the lead from today's front-page sidebar:

Regina Marzulla first spotted her little boy's shirt, barely visible beneath a pile of much bigger bodies. Then she saw her 3-year-old, Morgan, face down on the ground, try to get up, only to have another body crash on top of his.

"I tried to grab his arm, but he was under everyone," Marzulla said. "I couldn't get him out. I was screaming for him. I could see him but I couldn't pull him out."

The 33-year-old Littleton mom was as helpless as her son, unable to do more than watch the crush of slamming bodies, the screaming and chaos that erupted in seconds when the escalator at Coors Field went out of control leaving dozens injured Wednesday night.

Within 24 hours, The Post had uncovered twelve similar incidents. (The heading oddly notes that each tragedy took place at a public venue. Suggesting countless more undocumented escalator mishaps inside private homes?)

I don't know what I'm going to do. Those little voices only inhabited the back of my head before. How will I keep them out of the front now? How will you ever trust your small children or aging parents to ride one of those contraptions again?