Of Hangars and Their Hangers-On

The tale was told among the sailors of the Hornet that whenever she was at sea, a ghostly formation of aircraft could be seen following the carrier’s wake at twilight. But they were not the Hornet’s planes—not this Hornet, anyway. They came from the previous Hornet that had sunk in 1942, and they were doomed to fly forever in vain pursuit of the ship’s flight deck. They were the fifteen planes of Torpedo Squadron 8 that had been shot down at the Battle of Midway during a gallant but doomed attack, a lost squadron offering a twilight reminder that just as airpower became a key component of sea power in the twentieth century, so too has the Navy’s pantheon of ghosts come to include those of the airborne variety. And from one end of the country to the other, airfields and hangars at present and former Navy locations are imbued with the haunting mystique of phantom planes, phantom flyers, and fiery finales.

It seems fitting that the place often fondly referred to as “the Annapolis of the Air” would be home to a resident spectral flying ace. But it is worth noting that Florida’s Pensacola Naval Air Station is, in fact, steeped in history (and hauntings). The Navy’s presence at the site far predates the station’s emergence as one of the world’s premier flight-training centers. The Pensacola Naval Hospital opened in 1826, and the Navy yard there was well established by the time the Confederates commandeered it during the Civil War. The Pensacola naval story lies in layers like an archaeological dig, and the ghosts rise up teeming from different chapters of the saga, merging in a macabre masquerade ball of disparate styles and customs. Eerily glowing figures drift down stairways of buildings in use since the nineteenth century. Objects fly across rooms. Baleful inscriptions suddenly deface walls. “Help, Let Me Out!” and “Death Awaits!” are among the horrifying communications scrawled by some netherworld hand. Faded voices from the yellow fever epidemic of the 1880s emanate from the dark depths of the hospital, and a keeper who perished on the job continues to haunt the Pensacola Lighthouse. A plaintive widow from the Civil War remains as a phosphorescent white evanescence in Quarters A, where the ghost of Commodore Woolsey, an eccentric commandant whose ardor for medicinal spiced rum failed to prevent his death by yellow fever, continues to pace the cupola at night.

But with due deference to the station’s rich history, to the general populace the name “Pensacola” connotes Navy “flight school,” an association it has been earning since the earliest days of the naval aviation concept. During World War I Pensacola became one of the Navy’s first full-time air stations, and more airfields, more facilities, and more personnel continued to be added in the 1920s. In this period of a rapidly expanding aviation program, the oldest intact building on the original Navy yard came to be used as flight officers’ quarters. The 1834 octagonal structure directly across from the haunted commandant’s house had been many things in its time; its role as a chapel spared it from destruction by the retreating Confederates in 1862. And as naval aviation started coming of age, the old octagon became home to the fearless and talented new breed of flying men.

Capt. Guy B. Hall, USMC, embodied the romanticized image of the dashing pilot that captured the imagination of the early-twentieth-century public, a devil-may-care spirit and rugged good looks encased in a leather jacket and tall boots. He had a ready smile, an educated taste in whiskey, and a gambler’s soul that appreciated the pleasures of an all-night poker session when not savoring the exhilarating perils of flying. Flight is inherently a high-stakes, high-risk proposition; in the fragile bi-winged planes with open cockpits of the 1920s it was all the more so. The captain was assigned to Pensacola as a flight instructor, as worthy a duty for a gambler as there could be. Even when one was ace-quality skilled, the dangers were constant and immediate. Two Voight airplanes flown by Marine lieutenants were tossed like dry leaves by strong wind gusts and crashed into each other three thousand feet over Pensacola in 1923, a deadly reminder of the tenuousness of planes and pilots alike. When he wasn’t braving such everyday threats as a routine part of his job, Captain Hall held court at epic poker games in his octagon quarters. Any card player who sat in with him soon learned the captain’s trademark quirk, his habit of picking up his poker chips and idly letting them drop back on the table, generating a distinct and resonant clacking.

Captain Hall, one of those who set the swashbuckling standard for all who since have followed them skyward, was killed in a failed landing attempt on Corry Field in 1926, his death a sad testament to the fact that even the good do not fly risk-free. The old octagonal building that was his temporary residence at Pensacola is today known as Building 16 and is the home of the Navy–Marine Corps Trial Judiciary’s Trial Service Office. And to this day it is haunted by the poker-playing ghost. The falling poker chips of Captain Hall still resound with their clackety-clack rhythm through Building 16, where a flyer’s all-night poker game has transmogrified into an eternal one.

Eight hundred and ninety-one miles inland from Pensacola, a naval air station arose hastily on the Kansas prairie to meet the exigencies of World War II and continued to train flyers up through the Vietnam era. The Olathe Naval Air Station is no more; in the 1970s it was converted into the Johnson County Industrial Airport, which in turn subsequently metamorphosed into the New Century Air Center. But vestiges of its naval origins remain, paranormal traces of the thirty-four fatalities that occurred on the site during its years as a Navy flight-training base. Much of its supernatural legendry centers on the infamous Hangar 43, but that is not the sole spectral spot; this haunted heartland facility has plenty of ghostly residents elsewhere.

Commissioned in 1942, the Olathe Naval Air Station quickly became a beehive; some 4,500 naval cadets trained there in World War II alone. Three gigantic hangars were built with two-hundred-foot bays on each side. One of these unprecedentedly large wooden structures, Hangar 43, would remain standing and in use almost to the end of the century. Over the years, mechanics, guards, and others working there offered disturbing testimony of a whistling ghost that walked the catwalk overhead. The hangar phantom slammed doors in people’s faces, upended coffee cups, turned on faucets, and always seemed to return to his default pastime: parading on the catwalk whistling eerie melodies. “I don’t want anyone to know I believe in ghosts,” a worker told the Kansas City Business Journal on the condition of anonymity, “but this hangar is definitely haunted.”

A witness may actually have sighted the usually invisible whistler one night after midnight. The ethereal figure was described as “a person dressed in white, like a military uniform.” Was this the selfsame musical ghost or a different presence entirely? The spirit, or spirits, of Hangar 43 continue to haunt the modern airport that has come to occupy the space, and whether it is a single ghost or many, a nickname collects them all into one entity, “the Commander,” and associates him with one of the fatal plane crashes that occurred at Olathe Naval Air Station.

But the crash most often linked to the Hangar 43 hauntings has no immediately apparent direct connection to the hangar. An Army pilot, Lt. Neal R. Webster, tried to come in for an emergency landing at Olathe and careened into the administration building on January 3, 1949, at 5 AM. Webster was killed. His passenger, Pvt. Thomas Ruse of Lowery Air Force Base in Denver, lived long enough to be rushed to the station’s sick bay but died later that morning after briefly regaining consciousness. Oddly, an eyewitness to the crash claimed to have seen a passenger walk away from the wreckage and then mysteriously disappear.

Paranormal events soon followed this mishap; the administration building and its environs began to exhibit strange occurrences. Through the years, the ghostly manifestations of the 1949 crash merged in memory with the discrete hauntings of Hangar 43 (many erroneous accounts describe the plane as having crashed into the hangar). But these are separate ghosts entirely. Several people are known to have fallen to their death from the treacherous heights of Hangar 43, affording ample opportunities for site-specific spirits. Other parts of Olathe were known to be haunted as well—the long-ago demolished Hangar 21, for example. (The sick bay, too, would have had its share.) Hangar 43 may have had some connection to one of Olathe’s other fatal crashes, but not the crash of 1949—that tragedy involved soldiers in transit, while, judging from his uniform, the Hangar 43 ghost was a Navy man.

Fifteen hundred and eighty-four miles west by southwest of Olathe, Kansas, amid the sprawling naval complex of San Diego, California, a hangar still bears the imprints, both concrete and psychic, of a calamitous accident that filled the air with smoke, flame, shrapnel, and screams in 1969. Officials declared the incident at Miramar Naval Air Station “the worst disaster in San Diego County history.” The results of that fateful morning would have been all the more tragic, however, and the death toll considerably higher, had it not been for the unhesitating heroism of the sailors who rallied to rescue their comrades from the sudden and all-consuming conflagration. Some were beyond saving, killed instantly in the roaring blaze and deafening explosions that marked this spot for all time as a grim Miramar landmark: haunted Hangar 1.

Four Navy F-8 Crusader jets of Fighter Squadron 194 took off from Miramar at 9:55 AM on December 22, 1969, for routine maneuvers over the Pacific Ocean. Several minutes later, about forty miles out at sea, one of the F-8 pilots, a Navy lieutenant who had recently served a tour of duty in Vietnam aboard the carrier USS Oriskany, radioed in that his oil pressure was dangerously low and that he was flying back to base immediately. Descending from an altitude of one thousand feet for an emergency landing, the lieutenant was at four hundred feet and about a quarter of a mile from the Miramar runway when a series of internal explosions rocked his jet. The oil pressure continued to plummet, and the lieutenant ejected from the cockpit. As his parachute billowed open and he drifted to the ground near U.S. Route 395, the now-pilotless jet rocketed toward the air station.

A machinist’s mate on duty at Hangar 1 that morning remembered looking up and seeing the rogue F-8 right before it hit. For a brief moment of suspended time, the jet “sort of floated in the air.” And then the world became one big fireball.

At 10:31 AM the 45,000-pound supersonic jet crashed through the partially closed bay doors of Hangar 1 at a speed of 250 miles per hour. About sixty people were in the hangar as the jet skidded under two parked F-4 Phantoms and exploded. “It felt as though somebody had lifted me by the seat of my pants,” a chief petty officer said. “The force of the explosion was that great.” Jet fuel and oxygen tanks combusted in exponential escalation of the initial burst as planes were blown to bits and fire rolled like gathering thunder. “It was like shrapnel and napalm flying around,” said a witness. As one of the jets exploded, its ejection mechanism activated and the seat torpedoed through the hangar roof. Manhole covers ripped free and popped upward in the percussive shock. Some men managed to evacuate. Some were incinerated instantly. Some were knocked out by the blast and trapped inside by walls of flame.

“The aircraft could not have hit at a worse place,” Miramar Fire Chief William Knight said. “Not only was there a congestion of personnel in the area, but also there were numerous aircraft fully loaded with fuel.”

The surviving sailors shook off their initial shock and immediately began rescue operations. “If it wasn’t for the way those guys went to work despite the possibility of more explosions, it could have been a hell of a lot worse and there could have been a hell of a lot more dead,” said Lt. Cdr. David Burleigh, who had been in a nearby hangar when the disaster struck. Fire Chief Knight echoed his sentiments. “Instead of running from the hangar, men were running into it, pulling out the wounded, carrying out their buddies. It took more than guts to go in there. They charged into the face of secondary explosions and fire. The men disregarded their own personal safety, and in so doing averted what could have been an even worse disaster.”

Nine men were killed in the hangar and two more had died by the next morning; twelve others were injured. Three F-8 Crusaders docked in the hangar were severely damaged, and five F-4 Phantoms were utterly destroyed. Total damages were estimated at $25 million. But the incalculable cost always comes down to the lives lost. The eleven killed in the Hangar 1 tragedy included a pair of young brothers serving as aircraft mechanics and a forty-one-year-old chief weapons officer who had just narrowly escaped death in a fire aboard the USS Enterprise the previous January; a veteran chief petty officer who was one year away from retirement and an air fuel controller technician married for a mere six months. Hundreds gathered for a service at the Miramar Naval Air Station’s Airman Memorial Chapel. Wives, daughters, sons, and friends wept uncontrollably as light filtered down through frosted windows onto the Christmas tree and poinsettias that had been put in the chapel to celebrate the season. Three days before Christmas, their worlds all had been shattered.

The Miramar Naval Air Station is Marine Corps Air Station Miramar now, but Hangar 1 remains, along with what one witness described as the hangar’s “non-corporeal inhabitants.” They have been a well-known factor of Hangar 1 duty since the 1970s. Shadowy forms, opaque and human shaped, walk the long corridors. They hover outside doorways, peering through the glass, knocking on the door, then vanishing when approached, leaving one staring down a long, empty hallway with an unshakeable sense of dread. Like the visible fissures that still scar the wall as a reminder of the 1969 tragedy, the ghosts that haunt Hangar 1 are inseparable from the fabric of the structure; it belongs to them by death right.

That they are not more numerous is testament to the courage of the sailors who ventured back into the fire, risking death in order to snatch others from its jaws. Their heroism came not during the adrenalized fury of battle but on a calm Monday morning turned hellish in the blink of an eye. And it was in just such a fiery scenario—one of unforetold happenstance, of disaster, flames, and young sailors rising to the unexpected urgencies of the moment—that one of the most troublesome hauntings in modern naval history was spawned.