Since his brother and the American disappeared, Juan has traveled to the base of the South Face at least once a year—usually during Argentina’s summer months. In early 2016, I asked Juan if I could join him on his search. Juan agreed to take me along, and we planned a trip in March—the same month that Adolfo and Bender went missing decades earlier.

In preparation, I’d studied topos of the South Face, and anticipated seeing it with my own eyes. There were many questions on my mind before our trek: Why does Juan keep searching for Adolfo’s and Bender’s bodies every year—is it some kind of grieving ritual, or a deeper obsession? Will this be the year that he finds their bodies? Is that even possible at this point?

My reasons for going to Argentina also extended beyond Juan Benegas; I’d come to find out more about the 32-year-old American climber Eric Bender. I’d actually learned of Bender before Juan, because an acquaintance of mine grew up with Bender in San Francisco, and was shocked to find a 2007 issue of Climbing magazine reporting that Bender was specifically referenced as the “ghost” that haunts Aconcagua’s slopes. Bender was said to appear as an apparition near a part of the mountain called the Playa Ancha, and locals knew him as El Caminante, or “The Walker.”

Juan believes that Bender haunting the mountain is a “ridiculous” claim. But Willie Benegas, Juan and Adolfo’s cousin and an accomplished mountaineer who has summited Everest 11 times, made a first ascent of The Crystal Snake on Nuptse, and set speed records in Africa on Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, told me over the phone that there is truth to the ghost story. He heard about Bender haunting the mountain from an elderly climbing guide named Obaldo at Aconcagua’s base camp in 1992—just a couple of years after Bender disappeared.

“This is how I came to know that he is the ghost,” Willie said.

Willie swore he even had a brush with the paranormal himself. In the early 1990s, not long after he heard about Bender’s ghostly presence on Aconcagua, Willie was attempting a speed ascent of the Normal Route, and as he was hiking through the windy Playa Ancha valley at 2 a.m., listening to Pink Floyd on a pair of headphones, he heard a strange buzzing noise in the background. He was so spooked that he began running, until eventually the noise went away. When he later relayed his story to locals, they also confirmed hearing strange sounds or seeing smoky apparitions in and around the same section of Aconcagua.