She won the young Republic’s first major sea victory, fought the slave trade, and saw service in two world wars. She survived the conflagrations of battle and the ravages of time. She has been rebuilt repeatedly and debated over endlessly. “Huzzah for the Constellation!” rang the refrain of America’s first triumphal sea ballad. Of the fledgling U.S. Navy’s original six frigates, she was the first successfully launched down the slipway. Reborn in the mid-nineteenth century as a sloop-of-war, she was the last pure exemplar of the American age of fighting sail. Long is her lineage; much has she seen; many are the generations who manned her; and numerous are the sailor souls who remain aboard her for eternity. Indeed, the grand old USS Constellation is reputed to be “one of the most haunted sites in America.”
The Continental Navy left a legacy of glory but no legacy of ships. The last vessel that had sailed forth in the cause for independence met her end in the wrecker’s yard in 1785. But the infant nation soon felt the sting of John Paul Jones’ prophetic words: “Alas, for the nation without a Navy.” The Barbary pirates were wreaking havoc on American merchant ships in the Mediterranean—plundering them, imprisoning their crews, and exacting steep ransoms from the cash-strapped, still-faltering new United States of America. Thus did Congress in 1794 authorize the construction of a naval fleet to protect American citizens and American interests on the world’s oceanic trade routes. In six American seaports, plans were laid out and timber was gathered for the first six vessels of the United States Navy.
The ships would be commanded by sea-wise veteran officers from the Revolution, and each ship’s construction was overseen by the captain who would eventually command her. The frigate taking shape in David Stodder’s shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland, was assigned to Thomas Truxtun, who had sailed the seas as a privateer in the Revolutionary War. Rotund, florid-faced, a stern taskmaster, and a tough captain to serve under, Truxtun was demanding and often ill-tempered, but he was brilliant and bold as well. The completed craft launched with great fanfare before a massed crowd at Baltimore on September 7, 1797, was a beauty to behold. She was beautiful in the way that great sailing ships are beautiful—neither frivolous nor luxurious, but impeccably functional. She was 171 feet long, weighed 1,265 tons, was armed with 36 guns, and sported a mainmast towering 150 feet above the deck. She was the Constellation, named for that newest constellation in the firmament of nations, that assemblage of stars on the blue field of the U.S. flag. She was a frigate—smaller than a ship of the line but still brimming with firepower, and swift and maneuverable to boot. She slipped into the water that first day with perfect grace.
She would test her mettle not against the Barbary corsairs, for that problem had temporarily abated while other trouble was brewing at sea—French trouble. America’s erstwhile ally, livid over American trade with Britain and plundering ever-increasing amounts of American merchant shipping in revenge, became the Republic’s first naval foe. It was an undeclared war, but it was war nonetheless.
The Constellation was off the coast of Nevis on February 9, 1799, when she sighted a large ship, evidently a ship-of-war, standing to westward. Truxtun ordered the British signal colors run up; the mystery ship responded suspiciously. Truxtun then ordered the American signals up; the other ship clearly did not know the flag code. Truxtun ordered battle stations and full sail on. Cannon muzzles emerged, and the Constellation’s hull now bristled with deadly projectile force. Cutlasses and pistols were issued. Sailors scampered like monkeys into the vast forest of canvas and rigging. Lieutenants stood by their gun crews, ready for the bloody work to come. The American frigate flew across the waves, and the mystery ship revealed herself with a signal shot to windward and the raising of her true colors at last: the French tricolor.
The French craft made a run for it with the Constellation in hot pursuit. The American was gaining distance, but then, call it what you will—a singular random meteorological circumstance or the hand of national destiny—a vicious squall arose and the Caribbean Sea turned into a churning cauldron of angry waves beneath an afternoon sky gone suddenly black. As the wind howled and the tropical rains pummeled the rolling decks, the two ships enmeshed in their game of chase seemed suddenly diminutive, toys teetering on the edge of the abyss. Some back home had thought the Constellation too top-heavy with sail, and that her speed would come at the sacrifice of stability. Here was a test. Truxtun, his old privateer’s hunting instincts fully roused, was determined to run down his French quarry, squall be damned. As the Constellation lurched and leaned over the peaks and valleys of storm waves, he ordered just enough sails reefed to keep her from toppling without abandoning the pursuit. Fortune would prove to be on his side. The French ship’s main topmast came crashing down amid the raging elements, slowing her fatally. And then, as quickly as it had arisen, the squall passed.
The Constellation thus won the chase and closed in on the French warship’s lee quarter. She proved to be L’Insurgente. Hails arose from the cornered foe as the Constellation approached; Truxtun stood on the quarterdeck, coolly silent as the Constellation eased into point-blank range. French gunners stood at the ready, staring across at their American counterparts. Now that he had been outrun, the French captain was babbling for a parley. Truxtun’s answer was terse and unequivocating: “Fire!” And down the rows of gun crews the word echoed, from officer to officer. With a horrible roar the Constellation’s guns erupted, pounding the enemy hull with a ferocious barrage of 24-pound double-loaded cannon fire. The French frigate immediately replied to the broadside in kind, and for more than an hour the ships traded fierce cannonades, the air dense with smoke-stench and flying splinters, with shouts of command and screams of the bloodied and the dying.
The French fought with a certain fastidiousness born of avarice. Hoping to secure a valuable prize, they aimed at the Constellation’s masts in order to disable her but not inflict a death blow. The Americans fought British style: brutally bludgeon the foe’s hull; pound him into submission with unchecked violence; worry about winning the fight first and to the devil with the condition of the prize afterward. The Constellation struck her deadliest blow with a wicked circling maneuver that took her across the bow of the French frigate. Each of the Constellation’s 24-pounders in turned fired straight down the length of the enemy’s deck, ripping materiel and men to shreds. Continuing to circle, the Constellation pounded out another broadside, then came around across L’Insurgente’s stern and unleashed yet another staccato sequence of merciless deck-length cannon fire. Three times the Constellation raked the French vessel fore and aft, until her deck was crimson with Gallic blood. Lt. John Rogers, commanding a Constellation gun crew, reported, “Although I would not have you think me bloody minded, yet I must confess the most gratifying sight my eyes ever beheld was seventy French pirates (you know I have just cause to call them such) wallowing in their gore.”
In the heat and din of the fight, a young American seaman named Neal Harvey felt the cold, raw panic that only someone who has experienced close-in bloodshed can know. In his terror, Harvey lost all composure and suddenly fled from his station. Lt. Andrew Sterrett, in command of the gun crew on which Harvey served, exploded with rage. As the battle swirled around them, he chased Harvey down, cornered him, and impaled him on cold steel. “One fellow I was obliged to run through the body with my sword, and so put an end to a coward,” Sterrett boasted afterward. “You must not think this strange, for we would put a man to death for even looking pale on board this ship.”
And so the official report of the first major sea victory by an American-made warship included a haunting and terse entry on the casualty list: “Neal Harvey, killed for cowardice.”
The Constellation compounded her initial success by battling the frigate La Vengeance in February 1800 in a bloody, five-hour night fight from which the young U.S. Navy emerged victorious again. The French now had a nickname for the Constellation; they called her “the Yankee Racehorse.”
The Racehorse went on to fight in the Barbary Wars, but in the War of 1812 she was sidelined into a largely defensive role by the British blockade. She chased slavers in the 1820s and circumnavigated the globe in the 1840s. And periodically she was brought into port and rebuilt. After the 1853 rebuilding at the Gosport Navy Yard, the Constellation emerged as essentially a new ship—a sloop-of-war now rather than a frigate. That final rebuilding started a rancorous debate among naval architecture historians that rages to this day. Was she still the same ship?
For years, conventional wisdom held that the 1797 frigate and the 1854 sloop-of-war were indeed the same Constellation, drastically altered yet with a continuum of identity. But the conventional wisdom shifted in the late twentieth century, and with it the official Navy line, which now treats the original frigate Constellation and the sloop-of-war Constellation as two distinct vessels.
But the issue is not so simply resolved. Great minds have grappled with the concept of identity continuity ever since Plato ruminated about Heraclitus’ river and Plutarch pondered the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. Modern philosophy, through the intertwining skeins of physical continuity theory, personal identity theory, and (most germane to a ship debate) spatio-temporal continuity theory, actually supports the one-ship contention. To wit: an object—be it a ship undergoing multiple increasingly elaborate rebuilds, a tadpole metamorphosing into a frog, or a person growing through continuous and complete molecular changeovers from infant to adult—maintains its core selfhood even as its components alter through the years, as long as it adheres to a traceable identity course through time and space. In short, “A and B can truly be said to have the same body, even though the body at the later time has no matter in common with the body at the earlier time.”
In the Constellation’s case, that last point is actually moot. There is some remnant matter from the original vessel in the rebuilt ship. The Constellation Museum in Baltimore acknowledges this crucial detail. When the Constellation was refurbished as the 1854 sloop-of-war, “eight pieces of the original ship [were] included in her construction,” thereby establishing “a provenance dating back to the Baltimore-built U.S. Frigate Constellation of 1797.”
All other arguments aside, there is salient proof that the Constellation of today has in her bones the Constellation of 1797—and that is the persistent presence of pre-1854 ghosts that haunt her decks. “Whatever was left of the original vessel,” a paranormal investigator reported, “its use in the new ship was enough to keep the ghosts around.”
And others soon joined them. John Campbell, Captain of the Forecastle on the new sloop-of-war, went overboard on March 16, 1862, and rescue efforts failed to retrieve him. By that fall, his waterlogged ghost was being observed alongside the lee cathead. In June 1863 another sailor who had died recently began reappearing, singing. By the 1870s, the ship’s log was recording orders to crew members “to stop saluting ghosts.”
Saluted or not, the ghosts of the Constellation grew to be protective of her as she advanced in age. In 1926, while she was at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, a fire broke out amidships. Miraculously, the blaze seemed to have extinguished itself by the time firemen arrived on the scene. The old wooden craft should have gone up like a box of matches. The incident remains a mystery.
Diverse odd occurrences haunted the old vessel while she lay moldering at the Newport, Rhode Island, Navy Yard: Navy men disrupted and disturbed by strange voices and fleeting figures, the stalking shadows of multiple generations of seafaring fighters, the jangled echoes of long years of service on many seas. The bloodied, ancient decks creaked beneath history’s footsteps, and the sailor dead still laid claim to their billets and made their lingering presence known.
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt resurrected the storied Constellation, appointing her the Flagship of the Atlantic Fleet and thereby recruiting the ghostly heroes of old to lend their spiritual hands to the cataclysmic struggle. Did their otherworldly intervention help turn the tide of war? FDR’s summoning of said spirits may not have been entirely inadvertent; he was known to be intrigued by occult possibilities and fascinated with spiritualism, a trait inherited from the Delano side of his family. After the war, the ship was moved to Boston Harbor to wallow alongside her younger sister, the Constitution. And there she sat, the once mighty Constellation, descending further and further into barnacled, splintering decay. In 1953 a group of Baltimoreans raised the money to bring the Constellation home to her birth port for long-overdue restoration. And in 1955, with great fanfare and national celebration, the Constellation came home to Baltimore. As workmen got busy on the Herculean task of restoring the historic vessel, they soon realized that they were not the only ones on board.
“Whatever it was—the phosphorescently glowing, translucent ectoplasmic manifestation of a late Eighteenth Century or an early Nineteenth Century United States Navy captain, or something else—it strode across the quarterdeck of the United States Frigate Constellation at Fort McHenry Thursday night,” the Baltimore Sun reported on December 31, 1955.
The sighting was captured on camera by Lt. Cdr. Allen Ross Brougham, USNR, who had heard the disturbing accounts that started when the rotting hull first arrived in Baltimore Harbor from Boston the previous September. “Firemen said they heard strange noises and saw strange shapes aboard,” noted Brougham. Furthermore, “when she was moved to the dock across from the USS Pike, crewmen on gangway watch on the submarine reported the same phenomena—strange shapes, strange noises.”
Skeptical at first, Brougham grew intrigued by the strange stories emanating from the decrepit old vessel whose weathered planks were steeped in history and blood. He consulted a psychic researcher, who informed him that “the best time to observe apparitions of this nature is at midnight during the period between Christmas and the new year.” They set up a camera rig that scoped the quarterdeck, and almost precisely at midnight —11:59 and 47 seconds, to be exact—a ghost made his shocking, albeit brief, appearance.
Brougham snapped the picture, all the time in a state of awed disbelief. “How can one describe a ghost?” he later reflected. “It’d be difficult to do it justice—the sudden, brightening blueish-white radiance; the translucency.”
The creepy photograph, published in the Sun, showed a blurred humanoid shape between the deck rail and the ship’s wheel. The spectral figure appeared to be moving forward purposefully. “I was aware somehow that he was motivated by a sense of great urgency,” Brougham recalled. Certain visual aspects were suggestive of military attire. “Our subject was wearing a definitely dated uniform. I’m no expert on early navy uniforms. But the gold-striped trousers, the cocked hat, the heavy gold epaulets, the sword—or what appeared to be these—looked to me like the sort of uniform that might have been worn by an officer around the year 1800. And it—or he—was—or seemed to be—a captain.”
A diagonal swath of fuzzed darkness seemed to indicate an arm reaching across the midsection. “He was reaching across his waist with his right hand, as though just about to draw his sword.”
That Brougham managed to capture the image is fortuitous, for there was scant opportunity to do so, particularly in his stunned state. “It was all over within the time he took to make a single stride.”
In the ensuing years, workmen enacting the Constellation’s repairs were shaken by weird, plaintive moans and baleful cries emanating from belowdecks. In every case, when they sought the source of the voices, silence greeted them in the dim recesses below. A human—or humanoid shape—was spotted lurking on the gun deck one summer evening; no visitors were allowed aboard at that hour, so the police were summoned. The officers brought with them a police dog, a redoubtable German shepherd whose sharply honed ferocity was enough to cow the boldest criminal. The dog’s handler ordered him to advance into the bowels of the ship and corner the trespasser—but the dog’s impeccable training failed him, as did his normal courage. There he stood, impervious to his orders—incapable of obeying them—quaking spasmodically in terror, neck hairs standing at porcupine attention. He simply would not go another step farther. The frightened lawmen reluctantly went below in the dog’s stead, and discovered . . . nobody.
And there was the occasion when a group of visitors witnessed the panic-inducing spectacle of the ship’s wheel being turned—rapidly, repeatedly, and determinedly—hard to starboard by the unseen hands of an invisible helmsman. “Nonsense!” the skeptic retorts. “Wind was pushing the rudder, in turn spinning the wheel.” Not in this case. The cable connecting the wheel and rudder was not attached; nothing natural made that heavy old wheel turn. Logic’s finger must point inexorably, with dread, to a supernatural mover.
A more visible manifestation appeared to a girl on board for a youth-group Halloween dance. Resting between numbers on a bulkhead bench, she turned her head to talk to her date—but no young man was sitting next to her. It was an ancient mariner, close up and face to face, and he was smiling at her. Before she could gather her thoughts, the strange sailor vanished. The girl, unaware of the stories of Constellation hauntings, assumed it was some old salt who was on the ship for one reason or another. But no such living individual was supposed to be there that evening, and the young lady’s description of the wizened sailor matched that of an entity in an earlier unexplained encounter—with a Catholic priest.
The previous run-in had transpired in July 1959. The Constellation, open to the public while repairs were under way, was still in a sorry state but had already become a magnet for the historically curious. The priest, on an East Coast sojourn from his home parish in Detroit, asked permission to come aboard early that summer morning. Visitors’ hours did not commence until 10 AM, but the priest had an 11 AM berth on the Washington-bound train. Donald Stewart, the Constellation’s curator, consented but made it clear that he was too busy to provide a guided tour. The priest, grateful enough for the rule bending that allowed him up the gangplank, headed off on his own to explore.
Later, when the priest resurfaced abovedecks, beaming after his inspection of the ship, Stewart apologized again for not having been able to be of service as a guide.
The priest said that it was quite all right; he had enjoyed a wonderful tour courtesy of “the old gent.”
The incredulous curator said, “What old gent?”
The priest described the kindly elderly man in sailor’s garb who had offered him the full docent treatment, leading the way and pointing out various details of interest. “He showed me all around and was very nice,” the priest said.
“Ridiculous!” the curator responded. “Let’s have a look below.”
The pair searched the ship thoroughly, but there was no one else on board. The priest’s cheerfulness had left him now, replaced by the damp grip of terror. Suddenly eager to leave the Constellation, he clambered ashore with all deliberate speed.
Was the grinning old sailor encountered by the teenager and the priest the same ghost spotted by watchman Carl Hansen one night while Carl was playing cards? Looking up from his hand, Hansen stared in mute awe as an aged figure in naval uniform appeared out of nowhere, hovered, then walked right through the bulkhead, disappearing into the wood.
By the mid-1960s such incidents had become so shockingly recurrent that the Constellation committee deemed it necessary to recruit the services of paranormalist professionals. A request letter went out to Hans Holzer, one of the world’s top ghost investigators and a prolific occult-book author of international renown. Holzer arrived in Baltimore on a stormy October evening in 1966. He rendezvoused with the clairvoyant witch Sybil Leek, twentieth-century Britain’s greatest psychic, and went aboard the ship. As soon as they were on the main deck, Leek became distraught. Without benefit of lighting, she hastily began to make her way through the blackness to the haunted ship’s aural nerve centers. The rest of the party caught up with her at the after orlop deck, where she came to a sudden stop, shivering and upset, and said, “There is much evil here.”
Like a human divining rod to the world beyond, she had zeroed in on “a presence, lots of atmosphere . . . very cruel.” At first she thought it was a baby that she heard crying. Then, as the psychic signals came more clearly, she realized it was an eleven-year-old boy—being murdered.
Constellation authorities accompanying the investigation felt themselves in the maw of horror when they realized that they were standing right where the surgeon’s quarters had been; and in olden days naval surgeons employed cabin boys as assistants. As she stood there channeling the tragedy, Leek was ascertaining before their very eyes that just such a surgeon’s boy had been slain here by a pair of crewmen in August 1822.
Probing further into the ship’s recesses, Leek came into contact with other ghostly occupants—two men, it seemed: one named something like “Thraxton” (most likely Captain Truxtun, of whom the British clairvoyant had never heard), and the other a more vague, more enigmatic presence. The latter turned out to be two others. Leek thought she was psychically receiving a name that sounded like “Harsen.” Great sadness accompanied some of the vibrations, paradoxically alternating with a sense of profound happiness.
Finally, she was able to sort through the garbled transmissions from the netherworld to glean both the morose presence of Neal Harvey, whose execution for cowardice in 1799 had fated him to walk these decks for eternity, and the contented presence of a much newer resident, none other than Carl Hansen, the Constellation’s night watchman from 1958 to 1963. After being replaced by a burglar alarm, old Hansen lobbied constantly to get his job back, but to no avail. He had wanted more than anything to be on board the Constellation again. And he had just recently died.
Saved from the withering decay of time and tide, the newly restored Constellation took her place at Baltimore’s Constellation Dock in 1972 and quickly became a popular destination for visitors to the city. Many were interested in no more than the ship’s martial history, but the Holzer-Leek investigation had become a cause-célèbre in occult science circles, turning the haunted ship into a pilgrimage point for people who, either for purposes of serious research or for the thrilling intoxicant of a brief brush with the lingering dead, were delving into such matters in ever-expanding ranks in the 1960s and 1970s.
An artist, a college professor, a high school teacher, a psychology student, numerous married couples, and “an elderly woman who wanted to bring her own medium along” were among the fifty or so specter-seekers who in November 1970 formally applied to the Constellation restoration committee for permission to hold an all-night séance aboard the ghost-laden vessel. While committee chairman Gordon M. F. Stick found the request worthy of interest, and even considered joining the experiment himself, the rest of the committee did not share his stance. After weeks of deliberation they voted overwhelmingly against granting such access. Holzer and Leek had been invited and accompanied by Constellation officials, but fifty paranormal experimenters on board overnight was deemed too phantasmagoric a scenario for the floating shrine. Noting that “the Navy might also look askance at such an event,” Stick conceded to his committee’s vote. “Personally,” he commented, “I have an open mind on psychic phenomena. At the same time I must ignore my own feelings and go along with the majority.” A local businessman who had been among the séance-requesting horde refused to accept the rejection: “As far as I’m concerned, this is not the end of the matter. And I think others will feel as I do.”
He was right. In subsequent years the ship’s controlling body would prove more receptive to ghost investigators eager to explore the apparitional hotspot. One group of visitors had a familial connection to the ship’s ranking spirit. Some two hundred descendants of Thomas Truxtun, converging from eighteen states and ranging in age from infants to elders, gathered at the Constellation for a family reunion in 1976. Having heard the accounts of their ancestor’s spectral presence, the clan anticipated some sort of manifestation. The old salt didn’t disappoint. As two of the descendants stood alongside the empty ship at midnight, one of them said, “Hurry up and do something, Commodore. It’s late and I want to go to bed!” In immediate reply, “a deafening slap in the water thundered immediately in front of us . . . wooden fenders rocked wildly between ship and pier, splashing water. . . . Like Abbott and Costello, we leapt three feet in the air and grabbed at one another.”
Paranormal research technology became increasingly refined in the years that followed, and the Constellation continued to offer opportunities for its application. In the early years of the new millennium the Constellation was undergoing state-of-the-art scrutiny by wireless video, infrared cameras, digital thermometers, and electromagnetic field detectors. She continued to attract local paranormal organizations, Canadian TV documentarians, and sundry other spirit-seekers from points in between.
At century’s end, due for repairs and subject to architectural reinterpretation, the Constellation was given an overhaul, and in 1999 she was unveiled anew, now reconfigured along her 1854 sloop-of-war lines. To the passerby not immersed in the arcane minutiae of nautical construction, she remained as she had been before—a beautiful old floating relic from the age of sail, wonderfully incongruous amid the surrounding modernity. She had long since established herself as the visual and spiritual epicenter of the bustling, congested, horn-honking cityscape surrounding her. In the early twenty-first century an estimated 100,000 visitors were boarding her every year.
And the ghostly sightings continued apace: faces in the gun ports, leering in the night; footfalls tramping on empty decks; Christmas tree lights tampered with in the office when no one was there to do it; the tinny melody of a long-ago cease-fire bugle; an unidentified sailor ambling about the gun deck wearing a look of deep sorrow; sounds and movements of some unseen crew rushing about in a great hurry. In many cases, the smell of gunpowder presaged a ghost’s appearance. A Constellation
staffer inspecting the orlop deck with a flashlight witnessed the sudden appearance of an amorphous white fog. The evanescence congealed into humanoid form—a humanoid in archaic sailor’s garb—and approached the staffer, who remained frozen with fear as the apparition walked right through him.
The staffer might have been alone down in that dark hold, but the ghostly sailor was not. The Constellation is teeming with his shipmates, with souls that have seeped into the timbers. Some, like old Truxtun, are there by choice, reliving past glories. Others, like sad Harvey, are there by fate, bound to the decks that absorbed their blood amid roar of cannon and clash of steel.