Blue-Eyed Charlie and Shadow Ed

Tokyo Rose, the silken-voiced World War II radio propagandist for Japan, is credited with coining a ship’s nickname that has withstood the test of time. When she dubbed the USS Lexington “the Blue Ghost,” the name was doubly appropriate. First, the aircraft carrier’s dark blue camouflage paint enabled the gigantic vessel to appear seemingly out of nowhere; second, the Japanese showed a marked tendency, born no doubt of wishful thinking, to offer premature reports of the feared ship’s demise. Four times they declared the Lexington sunk, and four times they were wrong; the carrier that wreaked such havoc on the Japanese navy survived the Pacific conflict and several decades of postwar service to become in her retirement years a treasured piece of floating history. Since 1992 crowds have streamed to the waterfront at Corpus Christi, Texas, to visit one of the Navy’s most celebrated aircraft carriers, to traverse the massive flight deck, to wend through the labyrinth of passageways, to touch the remnants of an adventurous past.

But some of the remnants are of a more ethereal nature—visible but not tangible, talkative but elusive, there and suddenly not there. In her half-century of service the Lexington housed many crews and absorbed hundreds of deaths, and spirits are astir in her cavernous reaches. In response to the alarming prevalence of ghostly sightings, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times set up a Web site where distraught witnesses could exorcise the memories of their experiences. The site soon swelled with some two hundred reports by visitors to the Lexington who had come face to face with the paranormal. On this sixteen-deck floating city, ghosts have been encountered above, below, and in between, vestiges of different time periods and disparate tragedies. One particular apparition, however, has made himself especially familiar to the living who venture on his ship. Descriptions of him are consistent in details of both temperament and deportment. He has been characterized as singularly “polite, knowledgeable and kind.” And he is handsome as the devil, cutting quite a dash in his Navy summer whites, fair-haired and youthful. But above all there are the eyes—unforgettably, piercingly blue. Interestingly, the Blue Ghost has a blue-eyed ghost.

Who is this charming, affable specter? The candidates are legion. The Lexington logged her first death before ever entering the theater of war, a poignant death that shocked the nation. Many more quickly followed in the Pacific cauldron, and yet more entered the roll call of the fallen during the ship’s ensuing years of service. Some stay, occasionally crossing into our realm from theirs; foremost among them is the friendly, mysterious, good-looking hologram with the azure stare. Though who he was in life remains cloaked in uncertainty’s mist, his familiar presence has earned him a nickname; lacking more concrete data, those who have seen him simply call him “Charlie.”

The ship he haunts is the fifth in the Navy’s history to be dubbed Lexington in honor of the village where American Minutemen first met British Redcoats in battle on April 19, 1775. More specifically, this Lexington carried the torch of her immediate predecessor, the aircraft carrier lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Lexington that was launched in February 1943 was of the superlative new Essex class, one of two dozen such carriers that surged forth from American shipyards to help win the war. She was 880 feet long at the waterline, 910 feet at the flight deck—a flight deck large enough for three simultaneous football games. More than two acres of takeoff and landing surface sat atop 27,100 tons of U.S. diplomacy, the exemplar of a new era of warships. As tall as a nineteen-story building and as long as three city blocks, she set a course for her Caribbean shakedown cruise amid a general spirit of élan from bridge to belowdecks. On her sailed a young recruit beloved by the American public, a celebrity who was imbued with that rarest of celebrity commodities: a heart of gold and a lack of guile.

Lt. Nile Clark Kinnick Jr. was more than just a promising flyer. He was “the Cornbelt Comet” himself, the All-America halfback who captained the University of Iowa Hawkeyes through their legendary 1939 season—Kinnick the Ironman, the Big Ten’s Most Valuable Player, the Heisman Trophy winner, the Associated Press’ Top Male Athlete of 1939. He epitomized the scholar-warrior ideal, a book-devouring Phi Beta Kappa and student body president as well as football hero. His teammates loved him. The press and the public loved him. His Heisman Trophy acceptance speech at the Downtown Athletic Club in New York City was so moving that the audience momentarily sat in stunned silence before rising from their seats in an eruption of thunderous applause, whistles, and cheers. A reporter observed, “You realized the ovation wasn’t alone for Nile Kinnick, the outstanding college football player of the year. It was also for Nile Kinnick, typifying everything admirable in American youth. This country’s OK as long as it produces Nile Kinnicks. The football part is incidental.”

Kinnick brought Iowa its only Heisman. His jersey number, 24, was retired, and Kinnick Stadium today is the proud home of Hawkeye football tradition. His statue, with books in his hand and a football helmet at his feet, greets all who enter.

He was interested in an eventual career in politics, but law school had to be put aside for flight school; he had already enlisted in the Naval Air Corps Reserve before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Embarking for war, Kinnick wrote in his diary, “May God give me the courage and ability to so conduct myself in every situation that my country, my family and my friends will be proud of me.”

Even amid the rigors of flight training he was aware of the beauty that was all around for those who looked for it. “I flew up in the clouds today—tall, voluminous cumulus clouds,” he told his diary. “They were like snow-covered mountains, range after range of them. I felt like an alpine adventurer, climbing up their canyons, winding my way between their peaks—a billowy fastness, a celestial citadel.”

Nile Kinnick was killed on June 2, 1943, when his Grumman F4F Wildcat bled oil during airborne training exercises off the coast of Venezuela. He was still four miles from the Lexington when the leak became a draining gush. He knew that even if he could make it back, the ship’s flight deck was crowded with other planes waiting to take off. Trying to land there would imperil them all. He executed an emergency dropdown in the water. When the rescue party arrived at his downed plane less than ten minutes later, Kinnick was gone. He had been twenty-four years old. His body was never found.

In old photographs he is still brimming with life. A warm smile lights his wholesome chiseled features, his pale eyes are intense with the enthusiasm and moxie of youth, eyes afire with a young man’s dreams—dreams never to be realized. His death stunned the country and served as a grim reminder that military service, even when not being carried out before the enemy’s guns, is extremely dangerous; and that life, even the life of a soaring exemplar, is as tenuous and fragile as an eggshell. “I never had a shock like that in my life,” one of Kinnick’s teammates later reminisced. “Hell, I thought he was going to live forever.”

“There was just an aura about him,” another friend recalled. “He didn’t try to create it, it was just there. You really had the feeling you were in the presence of someone special.”

In the service, the adage wisely observes, all give some, and some give all. Kinnick’s loss hovered like a mournful harbinger on the Lexington, but before much time had passed, the sad memory would become subsumed into the mounting death toll of a ship in wartime. In the thick of heavy night action off Kwajalein, a torpedo plowed into the Lexington’s starboard side on December 4, 1943, killing 9 crewmen and wounding 35. Off Luzon, a kamikaze pilot emphatically fulfilled his one-way mission on November 5, 1944, crashing into the Lexington’s island structure in a flowering blaze of destruction and death. Fifty sailors were killed and 130 were wounded in the suicide plane’s fiery hit. Embroiled in the Pacific’s biggest sea battles for twenty-one months, the Lexington ultimately suffered 238 deaths (a total that would near the 300 mark by the conclusion of her duties).

But in the end, the Lexington gave worse than she got. From the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” to the climactic Battle of Leyte Gulf, from the China Sea to Tokyo Bay (where she was the first U.S. carrier to enter), the Lexington earned her stature as enemy’s bane. Her planes helped eliminate Japan’s naval air arm and were in on the sinking of many of the mightiest of the Japanese battleships, cruisers, and carriers. She sank or destroyed 300,000 tons of enemy cargo and damaged an additional 600,000 tons. Her guns shot down 15 enemy aircraft and assisted in splashing 5 more, while her deadeye pilots eradicated 372 Japanese planes in flight and another 475 on the ground. And, belying the hopeful pronouncements of Tokyo Rose, the Blue Ghost survived it all.

After eight years of reserve-fleet status, during which time she was refitted with an angled flight deck and other requisite upgrades, the Lexington was recommissioned in 1955. The first carrier to deploy air-to-surface missiles, she was standing by for whatever might ensue during the tense moments of the 1959 Laotian Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the 1960s she emerged as an important training ship for Navy and Marine aviators vital to the Vietnam War effort, and in 1967 the Lexington logged her 200,000th arrested landing. Her service outlasted the Vietnam years, and in 1980 she became the first ship in the history of the U.S. Navy to have women stationed aboard as crew members. When she was finally decommissioned in 1991, the venerable Lexington had the twin distinctions of being the last active survivor of the Essex class and America’s longest-serving aircraft carrier.

A long time can equal a lot of ghosts; even if less than one-tenth of the Lexington’s three hundred dead still linger, that amounts to a significantly haunted ship. The spectral sightings predate the ship’s museum years by a wide margin. A sailor who served on the Lexington in 1969–70 reported friendly interactions with a ghost in the aft engine room (where men perished in the 1943 torpedo strike), and the “Charlie” nickname for the prominent resident spirit was an established part of the ship’s lore by at least the early 1980s. Sailors described the entity as “friendly and harmless,” though no doubt rather unsettling on first encounter.

Run-ins with Charlie and other denizens of the shadow realm increased concomitantly with the increase in foot traffic after the Lexington was opened to the public. A couple visiting from Peoria, Illinois, were pleased to be greeted by a nice young man in uniform who offered to give them a tour of the ship. He led them below, all the while affable and informative, particularly about the workings of the engine room. But he disappeared before the couple had a chance to thank him. On leaving the ship, they made a point of tracking down another staffer to express their appreciation for “that knowledgeable young sailor” who had shown them around. The staffer, David Deal, himself a Lexington veteran, stood there aghast. He looked as if he had seen a ghost because he had just been told about one. He charged below, searching the engine room and environs in vain for the nonexistent tour guide. The confused couple described the mystery man in more detail: fair-haired, a pleasing smile, quite handsome. The most remarkable blue eyes.

“This apparition told things about the engine that I didn’t even know,” said Deal.

But Charlie isn’t always so loquacious. A woman in a tour group being led through the engine room fell back from the crowd to read some exhibit signage. She began to feel distinctly uneasy, as if being watched. She turned and he was standing right behind her: a sailor in a smart white dress uniform, young-looking, fair, his hypnotic eyes focused on her like twin blue laser beams. She started with a jolt, and he was gone. The woman grabbed her son from amid the tourist throng and asked if he too had seen the strange sailor. No, he hadn’t. The museum volunteer leading the tour confessed that she had not seen the figure either. Nor had anyone else. Except the mystified woman—and who knows how many others over the years.

Who is Charlie? The rhetorical “who” is the salient curiosity with any haunting, but all the more so with a spirit so vivid and interactive as the Lexington charmer. His attractive appearance and winning personality are remarkably suggestive of Nile Kinnick, the ship’s first—not to mention most famous—fatality. But Kinnick was a flyer, and Charlie’s interests and expertise are more indicative of an engine room stalwart, lending credence to the school of thought that he is the ectoplasmic vestige of one of those killed in the Kwajalein torpedo tragedy. Whoever he is, he is not alone. In addition to fair-haired, blue-eyed, crisply attired Charlie there is a dark-haired ghost in jeans and a denim work shirt who has been spotted making a precipitous jump from one deck down to the next, only to vanish in thin air. Members of the museum staff have seen a Japanese pilot and an American sailor appear simultaneously and then, when approached, disappear in the same fashion—twin hauntings, most likely, from the 1944 kamikaze inferno. One poor tourist recounted to a staff member how a khaki-clad officer appeared before him near the galley and barked at him to take off his baseball cap, then promptly disappeared.

And if Charlie is in fact the spirit of a sailor laid low by a Japanese torpedo, he is not the only lingering remnant of that midnight catastrophe. There is another presence in the engine room markedly different from the welcoming Charlie; this one is unseen and manifests itself with seething hostility, slamming doors, killing lights, seemingly desirous of repelling visitors rather than accommodating them as Charlie does. When this negative energy is afoot, a sudden temperature drop chills the air and there is the noise of frantic movement in the engine room blackness.

Everyone from sailors to high-ranking museum staff to visitors has experienced the unmistakable little sounds of human proximity—the rustle of clothes, the increasingly loud cadence of approaching footsteps—only to pivot and realize that no one is there. The sensation of someone rushing past, the clip-clop of hard-soled shoes hurrying along deserted passageways, lights turning on and off with unnerving poltergeist abandon, heavy sliding metal doors opening and closing repeatedly and violently, covers being pulled off the beds of overnight visitors consigned to the cold sweat of insomnia until morning’s blessed arrival.

Navy cadets on a Lexington overnighter emboldened one another into a nocturnal dare; they rose from their berths and proceeded to run around the dark, empty ship. And they ran headlong into a ghost. The face of a long-dead sailor blocked their path, forcing a retreat on the double-quick.

A pair of staffers was making the rounds when a man’s voice shouted, “Hey!” The incident was unusual only in that there was no one else on board the ship at the moment. A museum volunteer stared with a mixture of wonderment and bewilderment as a sailor walked right through a bulkhead. A door had once been there, and the ghost was retracing his well-worn steps impervious to the altered landscape. Similarly defying the laws of physics, a man in a World War II–era uniform has appeared and then slowly dissolved back into invisibility.

The carrier’s ghosts run the gamut from vivid and detailed to undulating and blurry. A ship’s electrician in the primary flight control tower saw a weird glowing blue ball that hovered above the flight deck and then suddenly shot into the dark sky. A blinding flash of red similarly appeared in another staff member’s office.

Regardless of the relative clarity of the manifestations, most seem to offer tantalizing clues linking them to specific catastrophic events. A damage control officer on duty one night as a storm raged watched in disbelief as lightning illuminated the night sky to reveal the ghosts of long-dead men scurrying across the flight deck amid a cacophony of desperate screams.

Screams are a recurrent motif of Lexington paranormal reports—screams, voices (sometimes one, sometimes two in a heated argument), dim sounds of firing weaponry.

Some areas of the ship—the switch room, for example—are redolent with a pall of despair that is unbearable to the psychically sensitive. Reactions have ranged from fearful agitation to a panicked need to leave immediately to outright physical illness.

Sometimes, it is not so much a question of terror as just downright mystification. A restoration work crew in the midst of a paint job returned from a coffee break to find the work completed. In another coffee-break phenomenon, a worker mopped the fo’c’sle, went to the hangar deck for some java, and came back to find a fresh set of footprints in the middle of the still-wet deck—but with no footprints coming in or going out, a macabre and logic-defying head-scratcher worthy of a Charles Addams cartoon.

* * *

In another port, in another state, another aircraft carrier lives out her retirement years as a popular destination for history-loving travelers. The Lexington and her sister ship, the USS Yorktown, have much in common. Both are Essex-class carriers. Just as the Lexington was named to honor her predecessor, sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Yorktown was so dubbed to keep afloat the legacy of the carrier Yorktown lost at the Battle of Midway. The new Lexington and the new Yorktown fought (at times alongside one another) in World War II, went through a brief decommissioning hiatus, were recommissioned and refitted in the 1950s, enjoyed noteworthy post–World War II careers, and ended up as floating museums. And both are haunted. But there the similarities end. For while the salient ghost among the Lexington’s ethereal crew is the friendly, accommodating Charlie, the principal spirit encamped on the Yorktown is a skulking, secretive, and sometimes malevolent wraith. Officers of the security department at Patriot’s Point in Charleston, South Carolina (home of the Yorktown and other historic Navy vessels), long ago bestowed the ghost with a nickname befitting his personality: “Shadow Ed.”

Like Charlie on the Lexington, Shadow Ed is not the Yorktown’s sole spectral occupant. Nor should it be at all surprising that, as in the case of the Lexington, a warship with the Yorktown’s valorous record picked up a ghost or two along the way. They didn’t call her “the Fighting Lady” for nothing. Launched and commissioned in early 1943, the Yorktown was in the thick of things before the year ended, platforming raids in support of the assault on the Gilbert Islands in November. Early 1944 found her in Task Group 58 alongside the Lexington and others carrying out Operation Flintlock—mission: the Marshall Islands. Throughout the spring she cut an ever-widening swath through the seas of war, south to New Guinea to support Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Hollandia assault, north to the Marianas to back the Saipan and Guam landings—and to lend her might to the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In the battle’s first day alone the planes of the Fighting Lady splashed thirty-seven enemy aircraft and dumped twenty-one tons of bombs on the airfields of Guam.

By January 1945 the carrier was tightening the noose on Japan and fighting her way up the South China Sea, where her planes sank an astounding forty-four enemy ships. By March she was striking air bases on Japan’s home islands and incurring heavy punishment as a result. Shooting down attacking Japanese planes port and starboard, the Yorktown’s gunners finally let one slip through on March 18. The Japanese bomber’s payload hit the signal bridge and ripped through the deck before exploding, blowing two large holes in the hull, killing five men and wounding twenty-six. Through it all, the carrier’s antiaircraft guns kept blasting away, finally nailing the bomber that had scored the hit. The Yorktown was wounded but still operational. The Japanese had failed to sink her, and within a month she herself would be in on a sinking of epic and historic proportions.

The Yamato, the greatest battleship ever built, the symbol of Japanese sea power, lumbered forth at the head of a task force in early April 1945 in a quixotic last-ditch ploy to stem the tide at Okinawa. For the giant ship as for her homeland, it was an all-or-nothing gesture; the Yamato advanced with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. It was all she would need. The Yorktown joined in on the attack on April 7; naval aviation sank the Yamato, and with her died the battleship era and the hopes of Japan.

Forged in the fires of World War II, the Yorktown would come to be associated with another war as well. In retrospect, the Fighting Lady’s prominent presence in the Vietnam conflict can be seen as the culmination of a continuum of Far East involvement. She was there for a show of force in the Taiwan Strait when the Chinese Communists bombed the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1958–59. She deployed repeatedly to Vietnamese waters as the communist guerrilla insurgency ratcheted the instability level in 1959–60. She took part in Operation Sea Serpent, antisubmarine warfare exercises conducted by the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, in 1962–63. And in 1964–65, while Vietnam still remained a tangential issue to mainstream America, the Yorktown was back in the South China Sea, her old World War II hunting grounds, conducting special operations as U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese civil war rapidly escalated. And from 1966 to 1968, as the United States entered the fray full-bore and Vietnam’s faraway internecine nightmare became the Vietnam War of newspaper front pages and evening-news TV screens, the Yorktown did six Vietnamese tours of duty with Task Force 77. By the time the American public fully awakened to the situation, the Yorktown had been confronting it for years.

A couple of relatively glamorous assignments—recovery ship for the Apollo 8 space mission and a stand-in role in the movie dramatization of Pearl Harbor, Tora! Tora! Tora!—came the Yorktown’s way before her 1970 decommissioning and 1975 dedication as a museum ship. At miscellaneous points during her long, varied, and laudatory career the ghosts that now haunt her took up residence. In surveying the Yorktown hauntings, one cannot help but notice the intriguing symmetry between her dynamic, multilayered service record and the eclectic, multifaceted body of her ghost lore.

Occult experiences have ranged from familial telepathy across generations to phenomenal photographic evidence, from auditory anomalies and inexplicable sightings of phantom figures to the smothering cloak of raw terror that a ghost’s mere presence can cast upon the poor soul burdened with sensitivity to supernatural power spots. First and foremost on the paranormalist’s line of inquiry must be the enigmatic Shadow Ed: from what period of the ship’s history does he hail?

The evidence is tantalizingly scant; a Patriot’s Point security officer described Shadow Ed as “a dark shadow-like figure that stands about five foot six inches.” Multiple staffers have spied him lurking around the second deck, near the officers’ quarters on the starboard side. He darts in the passageway but is gone if pursued. Those who have worked the graveyard shift on the big, empty ship know well the cold chill that accompanies an unexpected glimpse of Shadow Ed.

A tourist observed a ghost matching that (admittedly shadowy) description near the engine room. The “dark outline of a person” emerged, appeared to pick up an object, stared at something momentarily, then merged back into obscurity. The witness’ first thought was that a homeless person had stowed away, but she quickly realized that the figure, though humanoid in form, had no discernible details of clothing, coloration, hair—he was, in short, a “shadow person,” and as he blended back into the larger shadows, the witness found herself wondering, “Why didn’t he make any noise?” The engine room yielded another compelling clue in the Yorktown ghost mystery when a photographer with a digital camera snapped a picture that shows the vague, translucent form of a man in what appears to be a khaki uniform.

Other manifestations may or may not represent the same specter: footsteps, voices, pans clattering in the unoccupied galley—are these more hints of the shadow person or the percussive resonances of disparate residual spirits? And what of the pall of horror that besets certain visitors? A woman spending the weekend on the Yorktown as part of a group trip had just showered and was standing before the mirror when she felt a jolt of raw, animal fear—immediate, instinctive, and unmistakable. Someone . . . something was standing behind her. Too petrified to raise her eyes to the mirror, she didn’t bother to gather her things as she fled. A heavy metal door groaned open as she ran past it. The presence, she said, was overpowering and best described as “ominous.”

Less baleful yet all the more mystifying was the experience of a vacationer who visited the Yorktown on a whim, only to be bowled over once on board by “the feeling that something or someone was attempting to contact me.” On the hangar deck he discovered a memorial list, and on it was the name of a cousin of whom he had heard but had never met. His cousin and the young man’s comrades (also on the memorial) had never made it back from a Guam sortie in 1944. No one in the visitor’s family had ever mentioned what ship he had served on, and the vacationer himself had no prior knowledge of the connection. That this long-lost cousin who died while serving on the Yorktown had the first name “Edward” is entirely coincidental—or is it?

The Yorktown certainly earned her ghosts, but Navy stories claim that at least some of the spirits were inherited from the previous Yorktown. According to the yarn, a couple of sailors were playing cards in the engine room of the older Yorktown when she was sunk at the Battle of Midway. Once the new Yorktown launched, these card-playing dead from the earlier ship moved in, made themselves at home, and continue to play cards, stuck forever in the game they were playing when they were sent to a watery grave.

* * *

Can spirits from one ship latch on to another out of some spectral logic of affinity? Can a new ship’s name invite restless spirits rendered homeless by their old ship’s destruction? If a ship’s name can in fact serve as a spirit magnet, it could help explain one of the most unusual cases in the haunted history of the U.S. Navy, a case involving fraternal bonds that held fast from America’s heartland to beyond the realm of the living.