Time marches forward. Wars begin. Wars end. Soldiers and families move on. But the ghosts remain. Sometimes, in the very quarters your family has been assigned.
The military has some pretty haunted spaces: airfields, hospitals, ships, even living quarters. I have heard stories about spooky happenings in all of these places.
Now, I’ll tell you my ghost story.
As a reporter for a local paper in North Carolina, I was assigned to tell the tale of Danny, the night watchman aboard the USS North Carolina, a retired battleship in Wilmington turned museum. When the photographer and I met him on the deck, just before midnight on a Friday, he wove a tale so terrifying, so unbelievable I didn’t know whether to run or dismiss the entire thing.
Turns out, Danny wasn’t lying.
Over the years, I visited Danny nearly every fall, re-telling his ghost story again and again for different publications. Every year, he looked older. Every year, he looked a little more terrified.
Danny lives aboard the ship in near isolation in a tiny room once occupied by World War II sailors. He leaves the safety of that sparse space to make his rounds each night and check for unwanted guests – of the human kind.
It was during these rounds, on one of his first nights on the job 36 years ago, he met his most frequent intruder – of the supernatural kind.
It was pitch black and Danny was headed to a power box in the galley when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He spun around and shone his flashlight into the empty space. He heard footsteps walking away.
He jerked his light around and saw a sailor with blond hair so fair it looked white. The light from the flashlight passed right through him. As Danny screamed, the sailor disappeared.
Danny headed topside up another ladder when something began banging on the rungs above him. Footsteps began descending from above. He jumped down and ran to the other set of ladders but stopped to pray first, “Please, God, let me out. I don’t want to die here.”
That was the first ghost story Danny told me during our many visits. I believed him, mostly. I wanted to believe him fully. But after four years of hanging out on a dark ship with nary a rattle, it was a hard story to buy.
On my very last visit, the ghost came to see me.
I took my kids, who had come to know Danny over the years, to say goodbye as we headed off to our next duty station in Hawaii.
The kids left for the car with my husband as Danny and I took one last walk around the vessel. He wanted to show me the place on board where a medium had recently felt the ghost’s presence.
It was night. We were alone - of this I’m sure. As we walked, I heard whistling.
“Danny, please, are you trying to scare me,” I said as I rolled my eyes at him.
Danny stopped walking. He could barely move as he whispered, “Allison, I can’t whistle.”
The whistling began again. Danny was standing in front of me hardly breathing and definitely not whistling.
Danny turned white. I felt sick. The hot, sticky, night summer air turned cold.
After four years of listening to Danny tell me about ghosts chasing him up and down the length of the ship, I suddenly believed. I suddenly was terrified.
And as quickly as it came, the whistling, the cold, was gone.
“Danny,” I said. “We don’t need to see the room.”
“No,” he replied. “No, we don’t.”
Do you have a good military ghost story to share? Send it to us!
