CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN • The Will Rogers “Shrine of the Sun” carries a sound that you feel, and the first sound you feel is the wind. It whhhhssshes down the eastern slope of this scraggly hillside and seems hellbent on testing the granite mausoleum for signs of weakness after 81 hard years.

The wind underestimates the Shrine. We all do. Its sound chimes on from 2,101 feet directly above The Broadmoor, site of this week’s 2018 U.S. Senior Open. Manhattan has its taxi horns, Seattle its seagulls, St. Louis its police sirens. Colorado Springs has the Shrine and its catalog of 300 songs, from Mozart to “Happy Birthday” to the Beatles, and its sound beats all. Standing guard on the wrap-around observation deck at the Shrine, soon after the morning gray had burned off, I heard the wind extend an olive branch to Colorado golf legend Hale Irwin.

It was in 2008 that Irwin, a three-time U.S. Open champion and current participant in the Senior Open that begins with practice rounds Monday on the timeless East Course, swore to the heavens the Shrine should shut the hell up. The chimes had rung down during his backswing on the first tee box, and Irwin topped his drive. Ol’ Hale’s reaction: Quiet, please!

“Let’s just say he wasn’t happy about it,” said Russ Miller, the resort’s gracious director of golf and a major reason The Broadmoor hosts a national championship for the third time in a decade.

“It’s up to the USGA if they want us to turn it off,” said George Guerrero, a U.S. Army veteran and the longtime curator of the Shrine. “Whatever their wish, we will comply.”

On a Monday in May, precisely at 1:45 p.m., John Elway was inclined to step away from a putt on the 13th green when the chimes kicked in. The governor of Colorado by common law, Elway smiled and joined his gallery in a laugh. (Then made the putt.) OK, so consider this a forecaddie: to avoid another Hale storm, would the USGA turn off the chimes during the championship?

“Our intentions are to leave it on,” said Ben Kimball, the director of the U.S. Senior Open. “To me, it’s part of the charm of the place.”

Close to 140,000 are expected to experience the U.S. Senior Open at The Broadmoor, which was built by the man who also built the Shrine. Grainy photos of the fearless Spencer Penrose show a man plucked straight from a Norman Maclean novel — bearded, burly, possibly a bareknuckle boxer. There must be no doubt the Shrine is hardened by the souls with whom it shares an intimate relationship: the great Oklahoman Rogers, who died in a 1935 plane crash during the Shrine’s construction (“I doubt if there was any man who had … as many friends as Will Rogers had,” Colorado College president Thurston J. Davies declared in 1937); Penrose, laid to rest there alongside his wife, Julie Villiers Lewis Penrose; and polo teammates Horace K. Devereux and William H. Leonard. Many Senior Open guests will come from out of state. And after catching their breath from the altitude adjustment will inevitably ask, What is that sound?

It’s the sound of modern technology, one speaker that replaced 60. It’s a computer that replaced a turntable (still there, miscast in a lonely drawer). It’s a piano that once was played for Mrs. Penrose at tea time and now belongs in The Smithsonian. The original sound system is 25 gleaming pipes now tucked away in a back room. The tower sings at a quarter past the hour (four chimes), half past (eight), three-quarters past (12) and on the hour (16). And for 10 minutes at three times on each day — 10 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. — the chimes ring down with three to four music selections. You won’t miss the chimes the first time around; you won’t notice them the next.

It’s the sound of U.S. Open champion Tom Watson emphasizing Rule No. 1 of surviving the East course with pride intact: “The main thing to know is the Will Rogers monument up there, keeping the ball on the other side of the flagstick from the monument. And that’s pretty simple logic.”

Watch the players’ eyeballs; they read the mountain to read the greens.

It’s the sound of history in the Pikes Peak region. And when you traverse the switchbacks that lead a car straight through the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and up to the Shrine — foot traffic is prohibited, though Broadmoor (and Clarity Media Group, which includes The Gazette) owner Phil Anschutz, another serial philanthropist, is rumored to have hiked the steep climb.

So is the old Cripple Creek Road to the northwest, where gold rushers dreamed big during the late 1800s and early 1900s; the site of the late Broadmoor Ice Palace to the northeast; the Air Force Cadet Chapel, if you squint, straight north. Others are not so apparent without a proper lay of the land: The Broadmoor’s all-inclusive Cloud Camp hideaway, where, at 8,000 feet, the USGA has planted a second weather operation to better track the afternoon thunderstorms that also roll in like clockwork; North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), six miles to the south in and around the same mountain, just in case the aliens double down on “Independence Day.”

The Shrine of the Sun is operated by the El Pomar Foundation and equal parts historic, prescient, meaningful and distinctly of the American West. Oh, and one more thing: the Shrine is haunted. That’s not something Guerrero divulged on our otherwise delightful tour, but something I gathered from the inner chimes pealing at 1:09 p.m. They were 9 minutes late, 6 minutes early or right on time, depending on your stance on goosebumps.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” Guerrero said.

I’ve never seen a ghost wearing a watch.

Have you?

“Absolutely haunted,” said Gretchen, the Shrine intern for the summer.

Ding, dong, let the Shrine chime on.