Death has a disturbing way of leaving its mark upon a location; the more violent and untimely the death, the more prevalent its hovering essence. Some are blessed with an inability to detect such unpleasantness; they are as impervious to death’s signals as to a sound-wave pitched too highly for their auditory limitations. But those burdened with an innate sensitivity to spectral lingerings know well the grim, unwanted sensation: You enter a room, and your intuition recoils from some time-dimmed act of mutilation and gore that has left its psychic scar. A hallway where an axe-murder occurred will be tainted thereafter with a repugnant aura; a basement where a child was strangled will never lose its unremittant sense of raw horror. But you don’t know about the axe murder, you’ve never heard of the demented strangulation—the details come later, part of the attempt to expiate the wafting dread that knocked you back. Death imparts its mystic stain upon the place where it occurred, and we grapple with such an unsettling imponderable with what feeble articulation we can summon, and we call it a haunting.
Can there be any location more conducive to such morbid echoes than a warship? By inherent purpose it is a space where death comes screaming and suddenly. In harm’s way the good die young, but even when the air is not thick with fire and shrapnel, mere daily routine can be fraught with risk on a ship of war. If a house can reverberate with the terror of a decades-old murder, imagine the aural aftershocks of that one death multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold—warships are vessels that carry such voluminous supernatural baggage in their holds.
From its scrappy upstart beginnings to its emergence as the most powerful sea force the world has ever known, the United States Navy has sailed audaciously into the thick of the fray. A litany of victories and a legacy of valor have generated a superfluity of hauntings as their phantasmal side-effects. Those who have served in the Navy tend to be familiar with some ghost stories; many are familiar with more than just the stories, but the spirits that spawned the stories as well. From the Old Navy’s heroic days of broadsides and boarding parties to the ultramodern Navy of now, the ghost-lore stretches in a mystical continuum, an epic time line of the eerie and the unexplained. The Navy’s ghostly history is presented here with an open mind to the unknown possibilities of a boundless universe. In dealing with matters of the spirit-realm, the degree of veracity one is willing to grant such accounts inevitably must vary from individual to individual; nonetheless these stories, these admittedly bizarre reports, do exist, regardless of whether or not one dares to believe them. They are recounted in this narrative with an eye to unearthing the actual history that lies beneath the supernatural mystery, to gleaning the overlap between the historical and the paranormal.
Here, then, is a saga of phantom ships and ghostly crews, of cursed craft, ectoplasmic captains, and banshee-howls in the oceanic night—the haunted history of the U.S. Navy.