The day-to-day risks inherent in warship service are an open-ended invitation to the paranormal. If sailors are a notoriously superstitious lot, it is because their lives are notoriously dangerous. For what is superstition but an encoded form of self-preservation? A keyed-up sensitivity to cause and effect, to caution and portent, comes naturally to those constantly on the edge of hazardous duty and perilous circumstance. Whether amid the storm of battle or in the normal flow of routine in calmer seas, the fighting-ship sailor is acutely aware that any watch might be the one when the Reaper comes calling.
The USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier preserved for public visitation at Alameda, California, is a salient example of a high-risk working environment layered with the supernatural reverberations of mishap and trauma. Fifty-nine times she was attacked, yet not a single Japanese torpedo, bomb, or kamikaze ever found its mark. No, in war she remained unscarred. Some 270–300 sailors died aboard the Hornet nevertheless during her twenty-seven years of naval service, and the ship has come under the intensive scrutiny of paranormalist investigation teams in the wake of a stunning and escalating number of ghost sightings. The Hornet, it seems, is a veritable hornet’s nest of hauntings.
Like her Essex-class sisters (and sister ghost ships) the Lexington and Yorktown, the Hornet was named for an earlier carrier lost in the first years of World War II. The previous Hornet had gained fame in the Doolittle raid and the Battle of Midway before being sunk during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. The next ship to perpetuate the Hornet name (a name gracing Navy ships all the way back to the Revolutionary War) was launched and commissioned in late 1943 and was in the Pacific action by June 1944 bombing Saipan and Tinian, Rota and Guam. She unleashed the opening raids of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, contributed to the resounding success of the Marianas Turkey Shoot, supported the landings at Leyte, and helped sink an entire Japanese convoy at Ormoc Bay. She was there for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and she scored the initial hits in the sinking of the mighty Yamato. In all, the Hornet’s planes sank more than 1,269,000 tons of Japanese shipping and wreaked concomitant havoc on Japan’s air wing. In the process of destroying 1,410 Japanese aircraft, the Hornet set World War II’s record for the most enemy planes downed in a single day: 67. And in a karmic nod to her namesake predecessor, the Hornet’s flyers were the first to hit Tokyo since the previous Hornet’s 1942 Doolittle raid. In the 1950s and 1960s the Hornet became a staple of the Seventh Fleet, operating from Vietnam to Japan. And before her 1970 decommissioning she had the honor of being the retrieval ship for the 1969 splashdown of Apollo 11, welcoming back to Earth the first men on the Moon.
But even a vessel as successful and highly decorated as the Hornet has her dark side. An aircraft carrier is, after all, an inordinately dangerous place to work. And in addition to her requisite share of deaths by propeller blades, jet intakes, burning ordnance, flailing flight cables, and the violence that can erupt between men under duress, the Hornet also somehow managed to garner the negative distinction of having the highest suicide rate of any ship in the history of the U.S. Navy. The evanescent remnants of endings tragic and untimely have accrued throughout the Hornet’s vast, intricate superstructure; weird manifestations were jarring crewmen by at least as early as the 1960s. And when the ship was rescued from mothballs in 1995 and a new generation of restorers, caretakers, and visitors came to occupy her decks, abundant ghosts were roused anew.
The headless corpse that lurches back and forth across the catapult room has terrified witnesses to the very threshold of madness. Many say that the sighting of this grotesque figure is the single most horrible experience in a lifetime. If an aircraft carrier is one of the most hazardous workplaces in the world, then the catapult room is one of the most hazardous workplaces on an aircraft carrier. Here, where ingenious machinery imparts instantaneous lift-off velocity to planes, flinging them off the flight deck and into the air, the cable wires instrumental to the process are occasionally susceptible to snapping. A snapped cable is like a razor-sharp serpent spinning lethally at five hundred miles per hour, slashing and slicing everything in its path indiscriminately. At least three of the Hornet’s crewmen are known to have been decapitated in this manner; one of them remains, haunting the catapult room, doomed to grope in search of his missing head for a wretched eternity.
The engine room necessary to power a behemoth warship is another location with high potential for fatal misfortune. In clattering confines where 1,500-degree steam courses at high pressure through keening pipes, the room temperature can rise past 125 degrees even when all is well. Add a ruptured pipe to this powder keg, and lethality of the most gruesome sort ensues. A pitiable, gore-soaked monster of a ghost appears as vivid and nauseating testimony to one such tragedy, and has been a recurrent presence on the Hornet since the Vietnam era. In life he was a sailor whose arm was cut off by the laser-like effluence of concentrated heat jetting forth from a broken pipe. He was found later by his shipmates, who were aghast at the realization that his blood literally had boiled, causing his skin to peel away like a scorched and lacerated fruit rind. He hovers about the master control panel to this day, a fearsome sight. A witness who saw him in 2008 described his “uniform matted with glistening blood, his burned flesh hung in grotesque ribbons from his bones, eyeballs bulging in stark terror.” When the burn-victim phantom suddenly disappears, he leaves behind the acrid stench of cooked viscera.
A sad specter who met a similar fate haunts the Hornet’s sick bay. He was a sailor who lost his footing on the flight deck and slipped right into the path of a landing aircraft. The propeller sheared off the top of his head and laid bare his brain while the intense heat of the jet’s engine incinerated his uniform and torched his body. Barely alive, he was rushed to the sick-bay operating table where he died within moments. But perhaps because of the instant and traumatic exposure of his brain matter to the elements, he became locked in that vile moment and never realized he was dead. And so his spirit essence remains in sick bay to this day, a residual entity with a sense of self-identity retained past death’s brink. A psychic accurately described the details of the sailor’s deadly accident with no prior knowledge of the occurrence—aware of what happened because of the ghost’s powerful presence.
On a ship with a crew numbering in the thousands, unfortunate incidents of an interpersonal nature also are likely to transpire. Even a convivial mess hall can be the stage for a drama with an unhappy ending, thus becoming another shipboard site haunted by the legacy of foul moments. Infrared cameras in 2001 captured the image of the legendary Hornet mess hall ghost and helped verify stories of a long-ago chow-line murder. The luckless victim, impatiently standing in line with rumbling stomach, bumped into the crewman in front of him. The contact led to heated words between men grouchy with hunger. Words led to shoves, and shoves led to flying fists. The accidental instigator of the donnybrook quickly found himself surrounded by his antagonist’s friends, who proceeded to pound him to a pulp. In the heat of the moment they beat him to death. And his ghost has been a cafeteria presence ever since, his appetite never sated, his life never completed, his indignity at his unfair killing never fading. He is, in effect, a prisoner of the mess hall.
A far surlier prisoner can be found just where one might expect: namely, the brig. A distinctly hostile force is incarcerated in the brig of the Hornet, unseen yet felt, invisible yet violent. Here, among a shipload of American ghosts, is a Japanese ghost, and an enraged one at that. In the waning weeks of World War II a kamikaze failed in its attempt to crash into the Hornet, plummeting instead into the water alongside. The pilot was rescued and placed behind bars on the Hornet. Thwarted in his mission to sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory for Japan, the pilot went insane. He finally managed to defy the efforts of his captors to keep him alive and succeeded in committing suicide in the brig, casting an enduring spell of powerful malevolence on the spot. During the Hornet’s years of active service, sailors who were tossed in the brig would afterward tell disbelieving superiors that an invisible entity attacked them as they tried to sleep. In the carrier’s current incarnation as a museum ship, psychics have ventured into the brig and reported that the kamikaze ghost is “extremely powerful” and “angry.” One overnight visitor made the nearly fatal error of going on a midnight ramble that led him deep into the ship’s recesses; the further below he ventured, the more lost he became. He stumbled at last onto a place with cots. Huffing and sweating, he was gratified to find a welcoming mattress on which to catch his breath before attempting the long maze quest back topside. So glad, in fact, that he didn’t mind the jail bars that told him this was the old brig. He nodded off with ease but awoke, he later said, “feeling as if someone was violently choking me! Jumping off the cot, I had the distinct impression someone had his hands clasped around my throat.” He managed to break free from the phantom’s strangling grasp, let out a garbled scream, and “dashed down the passageway as fast as my legs would move. . . . That incident put an end to my lone explorations of Hornet’s labyrinth of corridors.”
Many others on the Hornet have felt the creepy touch of invisible hands. A sailor who served aboard her was yanked out of his bunk and pulled to the floor multiple times by a forceful and determined (and invisible) spirit. Visitors have reported tactile disturbances that range from the feeling of being brushed up against, to a sharp and unmistakable tap on the shoulder, to being grabbed, pushed, beaten, or slapped on the back of the head. A woman endured the revulsion of having a ghost walk right through her body. And a worker helping to renovate the ship was hospitalized after being plowed into a bulkhead by an angry entity. “You’ve got a giant steel cocoon formerly inhabited by thousands of men of different temperaments over a period of nearly 30 years,” said Bob Messiah, a Hornet docent and former crew member. “Things happened. Tempers ignited. . . . Trouble ensued and grew intense enough to invade the spirit world.”
Others, while not physically violated, have been bowled over by the paranoid sensation of spectral proximity, of being voyeurized by long-dead eyes. A TV news reporter who braved a shipboard overnighter found herself the unwanted target of such eerie attention. “I could have sworn someone else was beside me,” she recounted. “I could ‘feel’ its chilling nearness . . . and hear its breathing. . . . I kept shuddering, unable to shake the feeling an unseen presence was beside me in that cabin.” Her experience was not unique. “I got the strong feeling that I wasn’t alone,” recalled another visitor, “that same type of feeling you get when somebody gets inside your personal space. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I got goose pimples on my forearms . . . somebody, something was moving toward me or perhaps circling around me.”
The officers’ berth is imbued with such a profoundly negative presence that psychics have learned to steer clear. Some of those who did try to enter were wracked by the extrasensory echoes of “unspeakable cruelty and suffering” and felt a strong pushing against their chests keeping them out. Glowing clusters of ghost lights often appear here, while a “deep blue amoeba-like plasma” has been seen on the fo’c’sle. Such visual anomalies also show up on tourists’ videotapes; when the film is played back in slow motion, ethereal blobs of light become more sharply defined as a striped sleeve, a hand, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the arm of a T-shirt—traces of human forms that are merely brief flashes to the naked eye.
Violence, suicide, and grisly accidents all cast their ghostly pall on the Hornet, and some two hundred paranormal experiences were reported within the first four years of the ship’s reawakening in 1995. So prevalent were the incidents that the Hornet’s staff felt compelled to summon experts trained in the burgeoning science of ghost detection. The Office of Paranormal Investigations (OPI) arrived in 1999 to record and cross-reference interviews, investigate the phenomena-rich portions of the ship, and document their findings. “The experiences aboard the Hornet are intriguing for a number of reasons,” said OPI parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach. “First of all, the witnesses themselves, for the most part, are people with little or no paranormal experience. Some skeptics have changed their tune after the experiences.”
Auerbach and San Francisco–based psychic Stache Margaret Murray interviewed more than thirty witnesses—Hornet Foundation members, museum staff, restoration workers, volunteers, maintenance men, and security guards—and Auerbach soon concluded that the Hornet comprises “what may be one of the most fascinating ghost investigations” of his life.
In addition to the sheer volume of incidents, there was a better than usual degree of veracity among the reports. “There are a number of multiple witness sightings,” reported Auerbach. “Having more than one witness to the same event provides us not only with more than one viewpoint, but also some degree of corroboration that the event was more than purely subjective.”
As OPI workers sifted through the massive and mounting empirical data, a remarkable possibility began to emerge: the Hornet hauntings seem to separate out into categorical layers. There are, of course, the numerous disturbed (and disturbing) ghosts who are locked into the vectors of their sudden and violent deaths. But Murray and other psychics believe that additional spirits are gathering there as well, “cohesive and positive” spirits, the vestiges of sailors going about their business—“people,” summarized Auerbach, “who did serve on the U.S.S. Hornet at one time, but did not necessarily die anywhere near the ship.”
In 1999, Alan McKean, a charter member of the Hornet Foundation, was giving a ship’s tour to a group representing a potential corporate sponsor. They were on the flag bridge when McKean “looked over and saw a fellow in khakis . . . going down the ladder.” The old-fashioned uniform appeared to be that of a senior officer. “He turned around and looked over his left shoulder directly at me. . . . He didn’t say a word. Then he went down the ladder.” One of the touring executives also saw the mystery figure. McKean sped down the ladder in pursuit, but the khaki-clad wraith had vanished.
“It wasn’t scary,” said McKean. “It wasn’t a cold look he gave me. Just very businesslike.”
Another of the Foundation’s charter members, Bob Rogers, had a similar encounter in 1999. While descending to main control, he said, “I could see someone in a khaki uniform going down the ladder below me.” Rogers followed the figure down to the engineering area, but “no one was there. That’s a confined space. . . . I went in the main and only entrance to that space that was open. The other side was locked up and chained closed.”
Rogers described the figure as dark-haired and seemingly focused on some mission; he didn’t acknowledge Rogers coming down the ladder right behind him. “The escape route was locked. No one was in there. There’s no way someone could have gotten by me.”
Hornet staffer Dorothy Tallmadge also had a run-in with a non-communicative ghost in uniform. She encountered him while en route to the flight mess lounge. “It was a man, wearing khaki.” Talmadge said hello, went on her way, and then sensed something weird about the run-in. “I thought, wait a minute. He made no response to me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared. I saw him full front just standing there, still, arms to his side.” She dashed back. The stranger had merged back into the shadows whence he came.
As Yuletide approached in 1998, two Hornet staffers were adorning one of the hangar bays with a tall Christmas tree when a sailor wearing a Navy pea coat over his uniform appeared and ran straight into (and through) the tree. “We walked all around the perimeter of the tree, and no one was there,” recalled Keith LaDue. “No one was there!” The pea-coated figure had continued on his course, impervious to his witnesses and to such obstacles as a fifteen-foot tree in his predetermined path.
A similarly impervious ghost, unaware of his observers and concentrating on the task at hand, appears when the proper mixture of environmental factors dovetail: it must be the night of a full moon, but it must be cloudy as well. Then he shows himself, a tall pilot in helmet and goggles walking determinedly along the flight deck’s center line, replaying forever his preparatory steps toward some long-forgotten sortie.
The uniformed, businesslike ghost crew of the Hornet is not merely a recently discovered phenomenon. Just prior to her decommissioning in 1970, a number of witnesses reported seeing a pipe-smoking officer in a World War II–period khaki uniform at the entrance to the hangar deck elevator. The strong aroma of pipe tobacco preceded the officer’s appearance, and after he was spotted he instantly disappeared.
While the majority of sightings involving ghosts in uniform have been noninteractive, exchanges do sometimes occur between apparitions and humans. An overnight visitor was lying in his bunk when a sailor appeared out of nowhere, said, “I used to sleep there,” then dissolved back into nothingness. And one night, as Keith LaDue continued laboring past the time when anyone else was aboard the ship, he was alarmed to hear the chattering voices of plane crews “talking shop, dropping tools, and working on airplanes, talking about the airplanes they were working on, and parts, and home.” LaDue, determined to finish his task, entreated them to quiet down long enough for him to complete his work and get out of their midst. And they apparently heard and heeded him, for no sooner had he asked than their banter suddenly ceased.
Between fearful spirits trapped by tragic demise and a hustling, bustling complement of long-dead, still-working officers and men, the Hornet is indeed swarming with spirit activity. “Two things could be going on,” theorized Auerbach. In one of the haunting categories, “there’s no interaction, no recognition. It’s like someone looking at you from out of a TV set. You can’t engage them.” Then there are more the clear-cut “apparition cases,” paranormal situations that are “more interactive. Someone has stuck around after death. The person may have unfinished business.”
In between the two haunting extremes is a shadowy area that paranormal research is still on the fringes of grasping. Regardless of other spectral causes, a difficult-to-pinpoint environmental factor may be involved as well. “Something in the environment at the time of death allows that person to stick around,” Auerbach explained. “Magnetic fields, geomagnetic fields, the position of the earth—there are a whole bunch of things we’re looking at right now.”
In ghost-rich environments such as that of the Hornet, the pioneers of paranormal research are probing ever further toward some sense of how our dimension and the dimension of the dead overlap, advancing to the place where physics melds into metaphysics, where the people from an earlier era see us just as we are seeing them, our moment and theirs somehow folding into one another. “In effect,” mused Auerbach, “we’re piercing the veil of time.”
To the ghosts, it is their ship and we are the intruders. Perhaps we are a frightening sight and they tell each other hushed and spooky stories about us. Perhaps some of them comfort themselves by contending that we are the product of some dead sailor’s overactive imagination, and that we don’t really exist.