David Glasgow Farragut sailed to victory with a wooden fleet at the Battle of New Orleans in 1862. Two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, his squadron also included a quartet of strange, new-fangled-looking monstrosities: ironclad monitors. America’s first admiral thus straddled the cusp of the ages of sail and steam, of wood and steel. The century that had begun with the age of fighting sail at its zenith would conclude with world powers trapped in an escalating contest to see which could build the biggest, most indomitable metallic behemoths of the sea. The dawn of the nineteenth century had seen Nelson at Trafalgar; the dawn of the twentieth saw the eve of the mighty dreadnought era. HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, gave her name to both the new age and the new supercraft that ruled it. The lumbering, thick-skinned giants bristling with big-gun firepower rendered obsolete all preexisting warships afloat. Empires old and new joined in the dreadnought construction boom, and for decades the great ships ruled the waves and defined sea power. Only one of them remains. She is American, and she is haunted.
When she rolled off the ways on May 18, 1912, no one knew, of course, that the USS Texas would someday hold the distinction of being “The Last of the Dreadnoughts,” as she has come to be fondly nicknamed. What they did know was that the Texas was the mightiest ship of her day, the dreadnought of all dreadnoughts—27,000 tons and 573 feet from stem to stern. Her arsenal included ten 14-inch guns mounted in pairs in five turrets; they were the largest guns in the world at the time, and she was the first ship to have them. A battleship of the New York class, the Texas was destined for a long and action-packed career, including laudatory service in two world wars. From 1914, when she was officially commissioned, until 1948, when she was finally retired, the Texas logged 728,000 miles from Iceland to South America, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and crossed the Panama Canal sixteen times. In her thirty-four years and six weeks of naval service (only the Arkansas topped the Texas in longevity of commission), the Texas underwent seventeen gun reconfigurations and witnessed the switch from coal to fuel and the introduction of electronics. She sailed across the crucial first half of the American Century, ever adapting, ever active. She was the first U.S. Navy ship to have an aircraft launched from her deck (March 9, 1919) and the first to have radar installed. Hers was the first ship launching filmed by a motion picture camera, and she is the last surviving warship in the world to have fought in both world wars. And somewhere along the way, at some spot in her forays into harm’s way around the globe, the Texas picked up a ghostly occupant. Who is this enigmatic sailor specter who over the years has come to be known as “Red”? Red himself is not telling. He simply stands there, looks you in the eye, and smiles a beaming yet inscrutable smile. And then he is gone.
He did speak—once—to save a man’s life. And he has generated nonverbal noises in order to convey dire warnings. But the majority of his manifestations have been strictly visual phenomena accented by neither whispers nor screams; only that mute and mysterious grin. Did he die on board or did he return to his favorite berth in life after dying elsewhere? He seems, above all, a protective spirit. From what chapter of the battleship’s illustrious saga does he spring?
If Red is one of the original crew of the Texas, then he was part of a complement of 1,072 officers and men who first sailed her into action at Veracruz in May 1914. They were providing support to the U.S. troops landing in retaliation for the Tampico incident, in which Mexican troops had detained U.S. sailors, sparking a tense international situation. It was the warm-up for a conflict of a more global nature. The Texas served in World War I as part of the American Battleship Division, a valued auxiliary to Great Britain’s Grand Fleet, helping to keep Germany’s High Seas Fleet bottled up in port and providing protection to minelayers putting down the massive North Sea mine belt that stretched from Scotland to Norway. After the war, the Texas spent the 1920s and 1930s intermittently fulfilling the role of flagship of the U.S. fleet, conveying President Calvin Coolidge to the Pan-American Conference in Havana in 1928, escorting the ship carrying the American delegation home from the London Naval Conference in 1930, alternating between Atlantic and Pacific duties. In late 1939, after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the Texas was on patrol in the North Atlantic, drilling for battle when not patrolling, preparing for the inevitable.
The inevitable came on December 7, 1941, borne on the wings of Japanese bombers, and the United States entered the fray. The Texas alternated between convoy missions and combat, embarking in October 1942 as flagship of the attack group carrying out Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. She maneuvered along the coast of Morocco, unleashing ship-to-shore barrages in support of the Army assault force. From June 6–18, 1944, she lent her firepower to the Normandy invasion as flagship of the Omaha Beach bombardment group, blasting German emplacements; taking out snipers, machine-gun nests, and mortars; then bombarding antiaircraft batteries and German troops farther inland. She fought off a night attack by a German plane on her starboard quarter and kept raining 14-inch shells down on the foe’s fortified inland positions until the action had moved east beyond her range.
But the guns of the Texas would not have much time to cool down. June 25 found her hotly engaged in the battle for Cherbourg; joined by the battleship Arkansas, the Texas unloaded round upon round on the German fortifications and batteries ringing the French port city. The Germans were quick to fire back. Thick spumes of angry water gushed skyward to port and starboard as the Texas wove through enemy near-misses and continued her shore bombardment. A German 280-millimeter shell finally found its mark, and the fire control tower exploded. The helmsman was killed and virtually everyone else on the navigation bridge was wounded. Another German shell, a 240-millimeter armor-piercer, smashed through the port bow and landed below the wardroom before fizzling. Through it all, through the smoke and destruction and casualties, the Texas kept up her fire, retiring only when ordered after three hours of heavy fighting. Next up for her was the Mediterranean, and shore bombardment duties in support of the August invasion of southern France. The Axis shell was cracking, and World War II already had availed the tough old battlewagon of enough sea stories to last her well into retirement. But for the Texas, as for the Navy, this was to be a two-ocean war.
She had been there for Operation Torch and D-day—the hinges on which the war in the West had swung, and now the Texas would participate in the momentous final act in the Pacific Theater as well. Through the last two weeks of February 1945 she relentlessly pummeled the deeply entrenched Japanese defenses on Iwo Jima, first in preparation for the storm landings, then offering directed support fire for the Marines as they carried out their arduous and bloody mission to conquer the island, crucial stepping-stone to the home islands of Japan. The fortnight off Iwo was the most intensive period yet for the gunnery crews of the Texas, who pounded the indefatigable Japanese defenders with nearly two thousand rounds of 14-inch and 5-inch shells. But this level of intensity was about to be topped, even doubled.
If Iwo Jima was one of the war’s signature epics—replete with struggle, death, heroism, and tragedy in outsized portions—Okinawa was the crucible of victory in the Pacific. If Iwo Jima had demonstrated that the closer American forces got to Japan, the more determinedly the Japanese troops stood their ground, then Okinawa, their last stand, illustrated what desperate men with nothing to lose could do. For six days starting on March 26, the Texas hurled salvo after punishing salvo of 14-inch shellfire, a ruthless daily bombardment in preparation for the pending landing of Army and Marine Corps troops. They stormed onto the sand on April 1, and the long fight was on. For nearly two months the Texas kept up her heavy fire, all the while fending off kamikaze attacks, including one suicide plane that sheared off a wing and crashed onto the starboard bow. When it was all over, when the Byzantine subterranean mazes all had been cleared, when the never-say-die samurai spirit of the Japanese troops finally yielded to the inexorable tide of the massed onslaught, the Texas had all but melted her guns to their turrets, expending more than 2,000 14-inch rounds, more than 2,600 5-inch rounds, and several thousand antiaircraft rounds as well.
The worldwide cataclysm was coming to a close, and none who fought their way through it would ever be the same. August 15, 1945—V-J Day—found the Texas off Okinawa in Bruckner Bay. After all she had endured, after all she had been both witness and party to in both hemispheres of the war, her final assignment was one of hope, of deliverance from the horrors. As part of Operation Magic Carpet, the Texas transported 4,267 American troops back home from the Pacific in time for Christmas 1945.
It was a poignant capstone to a remarkable career. In 1948 the Texas arrived at San Jacinto State Park near Houston; her eponymous state would be her permanent home, and the site commemorating the early heroes of the war for Texas independence would be her anchorage of honor. Struck from the Navy List in April of that year, the Texas became the first Navy ship to be transferred by act of Congress to museum status, the first such floating memorial; there are more now, but still, sadly, precious few.
Workers restoring the ship soon reported strange goings-on. A sailor in what looked to be an old-style uniform appeared before a workman and warned him to clear the deck quickly. Had he not heeded the ghostly admonishment, the laborer would have been rendered unconscious within moments by toxic paint fumes that would certainly have killed the helpless man. A welder was next to be saved, his efforts repeatedly interrupted by a loud tapping. Every time he started to fire up his blowtorch, the insistent tapping would start again. He went below to find the source of the noise but saw and heard nothing. Closer investigation with a flashlight revealed containers leaking fuel; his torch, once lit, would have triggered an explosion. The disaster was avoided thanks to the anonymous tapper.
Mostly, though, the ghost simply appears. His nickname, Red, refers to his bright hair. He is most often seen standing alongside a ladder on Deck 2 wearing a white sailor’s uniform and a big smile. Once, multiple witnesses tried to chase him down, to no avail. Red doesn’t always appear as his usual vivid, well-detailed self; one group of visitors on the ship saw a vaguely defined, cloudy mass moving along a passageway. Are the cloud figure and the tapping lifesaver also manifestations of Red or different spirits entirely?
If all of them are Red, and he is in fact the Texas’s sole spirit, then he may well be the ghost of the helmsman killed in the fire control tower explosion during the Battle of Cherbourg in 1944. His was, amazingly, the only death on board the Texas during her service, though there were numerous casualties. But one need only recall the Constellation, and the presence thereon of the ghost of Capt. Thomas Truxtun, who died on land but chose to return to his old ship. It is not unheard-of for the ghost of a longtime seafarer to seek the lilt of a good deck beneath his feet rather than wallow in limbo on land.
And there may be more supernatural mysteries on the Texas than an affable red-haired ghost. There is something weird about the trophy room, also on Deck 2. To those innately attuned to occult vibrations, it seems to be some sort of portal. A caretaker swore that she entered the trophy room and was sucked into a warp in the space-time continuum. She was transported to a far-off sea—a sea of gravestones, that is, in a military cemetery in Normandy.
The bizarre reports emanating from the Last of the Dreadnoughts finally spurred the Texas-based paranormal detection team Lone Star Spirits to launch an investigation in 1998. The sight of ghost hunters with armloads of audiovisual scanning equipment ascending the gangplank no doubt caused the smiling sailor to shy away into the shadows, for it seems to be the nature of ghosts to appear when they are not expected and to lay low when hunted. But the ghost of the Texas could not keep his presence entirely hidden from the Lone Star Spirits. Their probe yielded a significant electromagnetic field (EMF) spike and a photograph capturing an inexplicable patch of light. If it didn’t make the investigators sound as if they were angry, you might say . . . they saw Red.
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While paranormalist scrutiny will continue to focus on the mysteries of the Texas, she is not the only battleship to harbor the ghostly remnants of a martial past. The USS North Carolina, a veteran of some of the fiercest action of the war in the Pacific, is home to a gallimaufry of spirits, and not all of them are as blithe as the smiling, protective Texas phantom. In some dim quarters of this vast floating tomb malevolence can be felt, a dark pall of dread, reverberations of some past terror.
Just as the Texas, in terms of battleship architecture, is the last of the old breed, the North Carolina is the first of the new. Laid down in 1937, launched in 1940, and commissioned in 1941, the North Carolina aroused widespread interest among the American public from the very beginning. She was the first of the Navy’s modern battleships, the first U.S. battleship commissioned since 1923. (The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty had put an international moratorium on the construction of capital ships. No more arms races, no more world wars. That hope was dead by 1940.) Here was a brave new battleship indeed: 35,000 tons, nearly 729 feet long, her abundant armaments including nine 16-inch guns with more punch and accuracy than any that had come before. She drew such rapturous attention during her fitting out and shakedown that she earned a nickname, “Showboat,” that has stuck with her to this day.
But it would soon be abundantly evident that she was no mere show pony. From late 1942 through 1945 the North Carolina slugged it out in one major Pacific engagement after another. At the Battle of the Eastern Solomons (August 23–25, 1942) her gunners shot down at least seven and perhaps as many as fourteen Japanese planes within one eight-minute stretch while bombs dropped all around them. While the ship remained largely unscathed, Japanese strafing did kill a North Carolina crewman. On September 6, while supporting the Marines on Guadalcanal, the North Carolina pulled off an adroit maneuver and dodged a torpedo from a Japanese submarine. But she wasn’t so lucky on the fifteenth, when a Japanese torpedo smashed through the North Carolina’s port side twenty feet below the waterline, killing five men. The battleship was listing, but the well-trained crew soon succeeded in righting the doughty vessel.
After repairs she continued the hard slog of island-hopping across the Pacific, protecting aircraft carriers, supporting troops on shore, downing enemy aircraft, destroying enemy island defenses, sinking enemy vessels. The Gilberts and the Marshall Islands. Saipan. The Philippine Sea. Leyte. Iwo Jima. Okinawa. Tokyo Bay. The North Carolina rumbled through the bloodiest seas to the bitter end. She earned her battle scars, one of which was particularly unfortunate: on April 6, 1945, during the bombardment of Okinawa, the North Carolina succeeded in splashing three kamikaze planes but was hit by friendly fire, a wayward 5-inch shell hurled out amid the massive multiship fireworks display of antiaircraft fire. Forty-four North Carolina crewmen were wounded and three were killed. They were the last to die aboard her.
After the war, the battleship remained in reserve after she was decommissioned in 1947. Struck from the Navy List in 1960, she had been fated for the scrap yard but was rescued by a vigorous “Save Our Ship” campaign launched by the people of North Carolina. She was transferred over to that state in 1961 and is today a popular attraction in Wilmington. And as her proud tower stands its perennial watch on the Cape Fear River, restive spirits—some merely prankish, others threateningly angry—lurk in the shadows, creep in the passageways, stare menacingly through portholes, hover at hatchways, and scream.
In 1976 the North Carolina’s live-aboard caretaker decided he’d had enough and was ready to pass on the job to someone else, someone who could handle the long, lonely nights on the haunted battleship. “Shoot, I can sleep through anything,” avowed Danny Bradshaw when his predecessor warned him what to expect. The workload was relatively minor, the responsibilities were finite, and the degree of solitude was desirable to a person so inclined, as Bradshaw was. Save for the admonition about ghosts on board, the job was too good to be true.
Bradshaw soon discovered that any dream job has a catch to it, and in this case the catch was just as advertised—a superfluity of the supernatural. Venturing below one night to a storage area to grab an extra side table for his quarters, he felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding, then jumped in shock when a sudden sharp voice, a voice without a body, screamed, “Get out!” Bradshaw promptly did just that. It turned out that the storage area was near the spot where the Japanese torpedo struck in 1942, killing five sailors. The hatch leading down to this part of the ship displayed a tendency to slam shut by itself—a four-inch-thick iron hatch weighing approximately five hundred pounds, angled back so it was impossible for it to close accidentally, and held in place by a sturdy hook. The hook had been released and the mighty hatch shoved closed, yet there was no one else on board.
Then there was the night that Bradshaw was in the middle of a phone call when he heard an unmistakable sound. Someone was crumpling paper. He turned around to see, with horror, two sheets of paper being balled up, suspended in midair by an invisible hand. A deathly chill filled the room. Bradshaw high-tailed it to the parking lot and spent the rest of the night in his car.
That cold gust, a vile and depressing miasma like the breath of doom itself, was a recurring phenomenon. One night a friend came aboard to play cards with Bradshaw. The Carolina air was pleasantly cool that evening, and there was no need to have air conditioners or fans running on the battleship. The poker game was proceeding enjoyably when a heavy sensation of profound dread engulfed the room. That was soon followed by a shocking wave of Arctic air. “Danny, there is something very evil in this room,” his friend gasped, rising so quickly that he knocked over his chair. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Bradshaw by now knew that the ghosts, his fellow occupants of the ship, came and went at will. Though consumed by fear as well, he struggled to maintain his composure and tried to calm his friend. But his friend was by now entering the realm of sheer panic.
“The cold air is all over me.” His voice was shaking. “I can’t take this any longer, Danny, it’s freaking me out!”
The death chill passed and the temperature instantly normalized. But a relaxing game of poker was no longer in the cards. Danny walked his friend down to the parking lot. “That was the scariest feeling I ever had in my life,” the friend said, then drove away without even waving good-bye. He didn’t come back for a long time.
The North Carolina tended to have that effect on Bradshaw’s visitors. A friend called one evening to announce that she had prepared a home-cooked fried-chicken dinner for him—manna from Heaven to a ship-bound bachelor. He went down to the parking lot to help carry aboard the feast. She had just pulled in and was farther down the lot, alongside the section of the ship where his quarters were. She was honking her horn. When he walked over to her, she asked, “Who’s your company?”
He didn’t know what she meant.
She said, “Someone is in your room.”
She had seen a face in the porthole. She had thought it was Danny and had honked to get him to come down and help her.
His room was padlocked shut. There was no one else on board.
Tensely, with mounting fear, they turned to look at the porthole to Bradshaw’s quarters.
A face was staring back at them. After a moment it turned away and the curtain was closed.
Bradshaw’s friend screamed. He had no explanation for her. She drove off in a terrified hurry without even dropping off his hot dinner. He gathered his courage and cautiously approached the door to his quarters. It was still padlocked shut, just as he had left it. He went in. All was as it should be. No one was there. “There was no way for anybody to get in or out of that room,” he insisted in his memoir. So, who, or what, had they seen at the porthole? It wasn’t just hunger pangs that kept Bradshaw wide awake that night.
There was even an occasion where a spirit resident of the battleship attempted to reenact an earthly pleasure loved by sailors everywhere: shore leave. Bradshaw’s girlfriend at the time swung by in her van before heading out to a party; shipboard duties precluded him from joining her, so she came around for a quick hello. After promising to call him later, she headed off. She was barely out of the parking lot when the coldness gripped her. “I have never felt such a strange cold in my life. The further I drove the worse it got.” Within minutes, objects in the rear of the van started flying around, banging and caroming off the sides, everything back there—from books to a beach chair to snaking jumper cables—suddenly, violently airborne. Screaming hysterically, she screeched into the nearest gas station where a gentleman offered his assistance. She told him someone was in the back of her van. He searched it for her. There was nobody there.
Distraught, she returned to the North Carolina where Bradshaw tried to calm her nerves. As she left the parking lot for a second time she noticed “the funniest thing. . . . The temperature in the van went back to normal and that eerie feeling left.”
Her van’s haunting was blessedly temporary, a ghost on loan. Back on board the North Carolina, the spectral activity remains rampant and unpredictable. Of all her forever crew, the most frightening is the “blond” ghost who first appeared to Bradshaw belowdecks one night as he was flipping off power switches. The ship had been cleared of tourists, and his flashlight illuminated the power box as he went through his nightly routine. When he felt a hand on his shoulder, Bradshaw was overwhelmed by knee-buckling fear. It wasn’t just that no one else was on board. The hand on his shoulder was accompanied by the terrifying Arctic cold.
He forced himself to turn around. His flashlight beam illumined an empty passageway although footsteps clicked nearby. And then, where there had been empty space, a man now stood, glaring with intense anger. His swirling hair was so blond as to be bright white. The flashlight beam cut right through him.
At Bradshaw’s guttural and involuntary scream the entity turned away and vanished. Bradshaw ran for his life. As he flew up the ladder he was stopped by the sound of footsteps, those same footsteps from a minute ago but above him now, descending the same ladder. All he could think was, “Please, God, let me out. I don’t want to die here.” He slid back down the ladder and ran forward to another exit, clambered out, and didn’t stop moving until he was off the ship and in his car. “It was the horriblest thing I’ve ever experienced,” he told a reporter. Unfortunately, he was destined to run into the same ghost again. And what he thought had been white blond hair, he came to realize, was actually flames.
And the litany of oddities continued to grow: weird running footsteps, doorknobs turning by themselves, a shower spigot turning by itself, a television turning off by itself, a moving-chair incident that sent a group of tourists packing in abject terror. It was inevitable that the North Carolina would come to the attention of ghost investigators. Several waves of paranormal research teams have peered into the multitudinous nooks and crannies of the mammoth battleship. Seven Paranormal Research, an organization dedicated to exploring the bizarre and strange throughout North Carolina, endeavored to set up an overnight stakeout with three strategically placed cameras. For reasons unexplained, all three cameras simultaneously switched off at 9:35 PM. All three had fully charged batteries, and all three died at the same moment. Coincidence? Professor Al Profitt of Western Carolina University, author of works on regional paranormal phenomena, spent the night on the North Carolina and reported hearing disembodied footsteps and objects moving about. Exploring the area below the waterline where the torpedo had struck, his freshly charged flashlight suddenly quit working. When he returned topside, the flashlight shone brightly again.
When the famous Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) team arrived in 2005 to study the battleship for their television program, Ghost Hunters, they joined forces with the local group Haunted North Carolina for two nights of intensive ship scrutiny. The results were compelling: dramatic EMF fluctuations, wildly dropping temperatures, a self-shutting hatch, running footsteps. TAPS leaders Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson chased a moving shadow into a room that had no other exit—only to find the room empty. “We’ve had experiences before where we’ve come face to face with stuff, but not in that way,” Wilson said.
In the torpedo strike area, TAPS technical specialist Steve Gonsalves entreated, “Is there anyone here who lost their life who would like to speak to us? Please give us a sign of your presence.” His equipment recorded an instantaneous sharp EMF spike up to 2.2—a remarkably rapid and high reading.
Meanwhile, the North Carolina team’s audio equipment picked up a weird, quavering, unidentified voice—garbled as if through some dimensional muffler, but distinguishable nonetheless saying either “ship” or “shipmate,” or some related word construct.
After analyzing the data, Jason Hawes reported to the North Carolina’s personnel, “You seem to have a spooky and active ship.”
Validation is most gratifying, but the investigators certainly were not telling the North Carolina’s staff anything they didn’t already know.
* * *
Both the North Carolina and the Texas survived not only the smoke and din of war but the wrecking ball as well. They now serve as lasting memories of a cataclysmic century of unprecedented conflict and honor those who bravely rose to the occasion. Within these hallowed hulls, some memories linger in more tangible form, making themselves felt, heard, seen, or all of the above—memories that cannot quite let go of this physical plane. And the Texas and the North Carolina are not the only battleships of the dead; one such vessel is the vanguard of all the rest, at the epicenter of one of the U.S. Navy’s saddest hours.