Spooktastic!   Looking for ghosts on the USS Hornet...

Sunset at the docks at Alameda.... scared, yet??

Well then.  What a spot of luck.  The very last forfeit from the Get Lean and Loopyliscious Challenge was to "spend the night somewhere haunted" - and, by some supernatural soopytastic coincidence - Lori and I found ourselves the very next night already booked for a grown-up sleepover on the USS Hornet, a retired aircraft carrier that's reputed to be one of the most haunted ships in history!  Not just a bit haunted, oh nooo, but Ghost Hunters-worthy haunted... http://www.syfy.com/ghosthunters/episodes/season/s04/episode/e422/u_s_s_hornet

I actually had no idea of its reputation.  We'd booked this little adventure months ago (yes, another voucher offer) and were supposed to have gone back in September, but Penguins and Pyjamas intervened instead, so it got pushed out to November.  So, perfect timing for the forfeit and (like Hantavirus in Yosemite), Lori had spent the time reading up on it and freaking herself out on ghost tales, while I remained blissfully ignorant of the full spectral spectrum of spooky sightings!

Our palatial digs for the night.  Spooks extra.

The ship is moored out in Alameda Point, about 15 miles out from the city, across the Bay Bridge.  We were due to meet at the ship between 5 and 6pm - however, I was a little late in leaving home (I'd woken up that day feeling unwell, and had spent most of the day in bed, conserving energy), so it was a little bit of a rush to get there on time.  But I battled through the rush-hour traffic, and managed to squeak up to the rendezvous point just in the nick of time!  Lori had arrived before me, so I gathered my gear and scampered round to the entrance......to find out that it wasn't, in fact, adult-only night on the USS Hornet.  Yep, there were literally thousands of small people running around, shrieking at ear-piercing volumes and running the risk of wetting themselves with excitement.  *sigh*   As it happened, it didn't turn out too badly, as Lori and I actually had our own private quarters - as we were the only single women on the whole ship, we got our own space away from the hoards of kids, Scouts, parents and single dads having bonding time with their offspring.  Result.

So, just one or two planes X-ed out then....

Before we got taken down to our quarters, everyone had to assemble on deck for a briefing and orientation as to the various rules and regs.  There were a total of about 10 staff or so, and everyone was very friendly, as well as being highly skilled in the art of Little Person Management.  Primarily involves lots of Being Strict With The Rules and Stern Voice Effects - but it seemed to work well enough and, whilst we were there, no kids managed to either overboard themselves, crack their heads open on the concrete floors or fall down the numerous, treacherous stairwells, so I guess they were doing something right.  The other purpose of the orientation meeting seemed to be to allow the ex-military staff members to take the piss out of each other.  The wise-cracks were far to numerous to remember and - though I'm sure they use the same lines every time - everyone seemed genuinely fond of each other.  A couple i remember specifically were the following acronyms: NAVY - Never Again Volunteer Yourself and then MARINE - Muscles Always Required, Intelligence Not Essential.

After orientation, we had about an hour to explore the main deck of the ship before it was time to go down to the mess deck for dinner.  There was A LOT to see and to take in - lots of different planes and helicopters, exhibits and stuff on the walls, insignia and displays to read and to marvel at.   And - as with all things military, there was a healthy dose of juvenile banter on display, as well as double entendre-ness that seemed to run throughout (or maybe that was just me...).  It was just fascinating - unfortunately, far too much to capture, but here are a couple of my favorite pics from our initial wanderings and exploration.   I think the "Nielson Method" one is particularly hilarious - can anyone explain to me why that particular *ahem* man-euver would help anyone with an arm injury???  Perhaps a good old rogering was thought to take the victim's mind off their arm??  Made me giggle anyway.  And obviously this was also before the days of Clearasil, going by the yellowing notice still posted up from the ship's doctor.

OK. OK. This is me being juvenile...

Umm.. well hello there, seaman.  

Err... examine the victim for sand??
On a big aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean?

Lots of spotty sailors, apparently.
 Just as well there were no women about, poor things...

After about an hour of exploring, the siren rang out and it was time to go queue for dinner.  Which took AGES.  About an hour in total.  When we finally got down there, we weren't quite sure why it took so long (it certainly wasn't filet steak being cooked to order) but the food was OK and we were hungry, so we chowed down on our chicken skewers with rice, veggies, salad and a cookie helpfully dropped into said veggies, washed down with copious amounts of coffee (and - alas - no wine).

Racks of stainless steel food trays outside the mess hall

Dressed for battle?  Why, yes.  Thank you.

After dinner, it was then time to really explore and wander round the ship by ourselves, trying to navigate the coolest parts of the ship, while simultaneously avoiding the highest density of children.  By and large, we actually did pretty well and, at times, it felt like P&P, where we had vast sections of the Academy of Science all to ourselves.  One place we did get snagged into a veritable tsunami of annoying-ness was the engine room, where there were kids everywhere, pushing and shouting, being loud and obnoxious.  Lori has an even lower tolerance for that kind of thing than I do (yes, I know, you didn't think that possible, right?), so we high-tailed it out of there, pronto!!  We saw lots of cool stuff and it was just fun to wander around and discover parts of the ship like the Battle Dressing Station, the Torpedo room, the Catapult room, the hospital and sick bay, the Second in Command bridge, the officer's mess hall and quarters, the dental facility (shudder), the Prison (double shudder) as well as the exhibits from times gone past, including a very cool to scale hand-built replica model re-enacting the first ever landing of a plane on top of a ship (you've got to wonder what the reaction to that was when the first entrepreneurial spirit suggested it....).   In the midst of all the guns and machinery and cold steel and pipes and hardware, there were very endearing touches of humanity and humor present, to remind you that real people once lived - and died - aboard this ship, and were subject to such extreme conditions of stress and fear that we can only imagine.

Cute little painting on a big b*stard missile loader.  

I wonder what's behind this door??

Proof (no pun intended) of a healthy
ribald sense of humor on board

The catapult that launched the planes from the deck.
Guess which side of the ship it was on?

Solitary confinement.
Still bigger than your average Manhattan apartment..

Umm... can you let us out now...err.. please??

Awaiting orders in the officer's Ready Room

Yes, ma'am - right away....

Where Bogart got his start...

Little known factoid - the Mafia were
early investors in aircraft carrier technology

Biggles coming in for the first ever carrier landing

After a couple of hours, it was almost 10pm, so was time to return up to the main deck (called the Hangar Deck) and gather together to listen to one of the guides, Chad, tell us some spooky ghost stories!!  Rather than sit in the nice comfy chairs in front of the TV, he led us through into a part of the ship where many sailors had lost their lives during a tsunami, when the front part of the ship was broken off because of the huge waves, and many were swept out to sea and drowned.

There are many, many stories of mysterious goings-on and spooky happenings.  Even though I'm not very big into all that stuff, it did start to nibble away at your consciousness in the end and you found yourself straining to hear whether you just heard something unusual or doing a double-take to see if that really was something just on the fringes of your vision.  Here below is some more info about the ship as well as some of the more famous ghost stories from a local author.  There are no doubt countless more episodes of "what was that?" "did you say something?" and "hello, who's there?" than i'd have time to regale....

"The USS Hornet CV-12 is the eighth US ship to carry the Hornet name. The first was commissioned in 1775 and battled the British in the Revolutionary war. The second Hornet commissioned in 1805 gained fame in America's battle against the Barbary Pirates and landed Marines on the shores of Tripoli. The seventh Hornet (CV-8) launched 16 Army B-25s to strike the Japanese home islands in one of the most daring raids in the history of warfare, the "Doolittle Raid". She went on to fight at the Battle of Midway and was lost to an overwhelming air attack at the Battle of Santa Cruz.

The infamous haunted Bunk 11

The eighth USS Hornet, the one currently docked in Alameda, was commissioned in 1943 at the height of the war in the Pacific. She quickly became one of the most highly decorated ships in the Navy. She destroyed 1,410 Japanese aircraft and destroyed or damaged 1,269,710 tons of enemy shipping. Ten Hornet pilots attained "Ace in a Day" status. She supported nearly every Pacific amphibious landing after March 1944 and struck the critical first hits in sinking the super battleship Yamato. Her pilots are also credited with the first strikes against Tokyo since the 1942 Doolittle Raid. During the cold war the Hornet had the honor of recovering astronauts from both the Apollo 11 and 12 missions.

Her impressive record did not come without cost. An aircraft carrier, in times of war or peace, is a dangerous place. Sailors have walked into aircraft's spinning props, been sucked into their air intakes, and blown off deck by their exhaust. Dropped ordnance has exploded, burning and maiming sailors. Snapping flight arrest cables are known to have decapitated at least three men on the USS Hornet. All told, in her 27 years of active service, more than 300 people lost their lives aboard ship. The majority claimed during combat, others from these horrendous shipboard accidents, still others from suicide. The USS Hornet has the dubious honor for having the highest suicide rate in the Navy. 

It is, perhaps, the Hornet's tragedy soaked history that has caused it to become America's most haunted ship. Crew and visitor alike have reported an amazing number of strange incidents, sightings, and sounds. Doors opening and closing by themselves, tools that vanish only to reappear after a long search, objects that move across floors or fall off shelves without reason, spectral sailors that move through the ship as if carrying out orders from another age, toilets that flush themselves, eerie presences felt, and feelings of being grabbed or pushed when no one is around.

For the December 2000 issue of Naval History Magazine, Lily MacKenzie interviewed several people associated with the ship. One of them was an electrician named Derek Lyon-McKeil. Lyon-McKeil, originally skeptical of ghosts and the paranormal, described an incident that occurred during fleet week in 1995 when "five or six" volunteers were staying aboard the ship:

"We'd all just bunked down, and we had a rule. No exploring. All of a sudden, I heard this banging noise like someone was opening the hatches who shouldn't have been. Peter Clayton, our supervisor, came charging around, saying, "Okay, who's sneaking around opening hatches?" We realized that everyone in the group was there. As we were all standing there staring at each other, we heard it again. At that point, we were pretty secure. It couldn't have been anyone who'd gotten aboard."

Another member of that same group, Keith LaDue, had another encounter several years later while painting atop a scissor lift.

"I was like at 28 feet, stretched to the maximum. I was up there until about 8:30 at night, and I was by myself on the ship.

I wanted to finish the section I was working on before I left. When I had still about two to three gallons of paint left in my machine, I started hearing voices, aircraft crews talking shop talk, dropping tools, and working on airplanes, talking about the airplanes they were working on, and parts, and home.

I thought, 'Wait a minute, come on guys, I'm almost done for the night. Can you let me finish? Let me get down from here. This is really starting to spook me.' And it stopped."

The experiences of Lyon-McKeil and LaDue are not isolated incidents. A San Jose Mercury News article by Dana Hull describes a gathering of more than 200 that turned out on the ship to hear from a local psychic, Aann Golemac of Alameda. Nearly 40 people, many self-proclaimed skeptics, described similar experiences. One of them, Alan McKean, said:

"I'm not a true believer in all of that stuff. But I saw what I saw. One day I saw an officer in khakis descending the ladder to the next deck. I followed him and he was gone. I have no explanation for it."

Golemac describes the spirits of the Hornet as cohesive and positive, and they are making themselves known because they want the restoration work to continue and they want their stories to be told. 

Our visit to the USS Hornet was largely uneventful but there were several parts of the ship below decks where we did get a very uneasy feeling. We ventured into one section of crew quarters that was lit only indirectly by a red light at the end of a corridor. This generally would mean that you weren't supposed to be there but I took a few steps in just to get a feeling for the place.

The Hauntmistress, being the consummate chicken that she is, would not go in. The room was cold. Not necessarily abnormally cold as the ship is made of steel and it was a cool day but enough that you would notice it was cooler than other parts of the ship we had come through. It was also quiet. Again, not something you would generally notice but with a ship full of visitors walking about it stood out in my mind.

Hello?  Is there anyone there?

While I stood there in the near darkness soaking up the atmosphere and trying to see what was in this room I got the strong feeling that I wasn't alone. 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. I got the strong impression that somebody, something was moving toward me or perhaps circling around me. I backed up toward the hatch I came through and stepped out. The Hauntmistress grabbed me and pulled me away as she started to get nervous.

Like I said, it was uneventful, nothing actually happened but a very odd experience in that one part of the ship. Imagination? Probably, but that's what makes it fun.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not the USS Hornet is a proud reminder of our nation's heritage and worth a visit for this alone. Who knows, maybe you'll be counted among the lucky ranks of those that the ghosts of the Grey Lady reveal themselves to.

If that has whetted your appetite, there are plenty more stories here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~drmiles/ghost_stories.html

As it happened, I don't think we saw anything although, as Chad was telling us his ghost stories in the Wardroom, we did see a white light appear from nowhere and trace across the back wall for 3-4 seconds, and then disappear.  There was a frission of excitement in the room ("did you see it??!") and - who knows - it might have been a spiritual encounter, but i reckon it was more likely to be one of the kids messing with their torch and trying to fool everyone instead.

Anyway, after about an hour of ghost stories, it was time to flick the lights back on and head off to bed.   Or so we thought.  Instead, we discovered that obviously Chad had taken Lori and myself under his wing because - for the next hour or so, we found ourselves being given a private tour of all the cool places in the ship we'd either missed earlier cos they'd been infested with kids, or those that weren't on part of the regular tour schedule!  It was a very cool experience - we got to see the Central Intelligence Command center which was fascinating, with all its screens and radars and blinky lights lit up.  We also got a tour of the outside of the ship too, and went all the way up to the upper deck, outside the control room, where we were treated to a fantastic view of the Bay, all lit up and beautiful in the cool, clear night.  I could even see, across the Bay, the ball park - well within reach, according to Chad, of one of the large bore guns the ship carried.

VERY COOL!!  Central Intelligence Command center

Such pretty lights....

Finally, our impromptu tour came to an end (just as well - it was nearly 1am and i was knackered - especially given i was already feeling sub-par), so Lori and I headed back to our bunks in 5th Division quarters.  All the lights were out except for those in the bathrooms and our quarters, so looking through into the adjoining Enterprise Berthing, all you could see was the spooky red glow of the emergency lighting and the combined breathing sounds of a thousand tuckered-out Scouts.  (oh - and here's another tid-bit for you - do you know what the Navy call sleeping bags?  Fart sacks.  A guaranteed crowd-pleaser, that one...).  But, fortunately we weren't in an area of "high activity" so i wasn't too freaked out but Lori still took her hair out of her ponytail just to be on the safe side (apparently ghosts are big hair-pullers, who knew?) and we both decided an Ambien was in order.  After getting ready for bed (including a trip to one of the tiniest toilet seats i've ever seen), it was time for lights out.   And I gotta tell you - even though nothing at all happened - it was a little creepy.  Going to sleep bathed in a red glow is just spooky in and of itself - thank goodness i wasn't trying to sleep in the "highly active" part of the ship.

It wouldn't just have been farts in my sack, that's for sure....

Anyway, WE SURVIVED!!  The Extremely Loud Reveille Siren went off at 7am to rouse us all from our slumbers - I'd actually been awake for a little while, needing the loo, but for some reason didn't feel all that comfortable getting up in the middle of the night for a pee.  Less fear than laziness, I think (honest).  But up we got, and once more headed down to the Mess Hall for a breakfast that was truly terrifying in its additive-loaded carbohydratey-ness.  I guess that's what kids eat for breakfast I suppose.

Pretty cool....

Then it was time to pack our bags up, stow them on the Hangar Deck once more and continue our explorations until it was time for the Closing Ceremony.  One exhibit I hadn't spent much time looking at the day before was the Quarantine Unit that was used to collect the astronauts from the original moon landing when they came back down to earth.  It was basically a glorified aluminium trailer but - until a couple of missions had come back successfully to earth, folks were worried in case the astronauts would bring back some unknown space bug.  So the astronauts were collected at sea by the USS Hornet and then subjected to medical tests for the next 30 days or so in this quarantine facility until they were deemed fit and posed no risk to the rest of mankind.  So, as you'd expect, the ship has a lot of NASA paraphernalia and is very proud of the role it played in that mission - and rightly so.  It was fascinating.

Don't drop it!!

Then it was time to go aboard up to the Flight Deck and watch some fairly cute looking Scouts perform the Flag Ceremony and for everyone (except *ahem* me) to swear allegiance to it.  Everyone was presented with a certificate for having completed the Live Aboard program (I'm going to put mine next to my Segway PhD) and the program was over.

Except it wasn't.  Because we then got an encore private tour from Chad again - this time again taking us to see various gun towers, Second in Command rooms plus a fascinating tour of the Admiral and Captain's private quarters, as well as the Dining Room that President Nixon ate in, while he was on board to welcome back the astronauts.  We also got a personal tour (particularly for Lori) of the dental facility on board (OUCH OUCH OUCH) as well as the sick bay and hospital.

Whoo-hoo! Let's take this baby for a spin!!

After about an hour, I think Chad had exhausted the number of places to take us - plus he was getting called on his radio to return to deck, so we thanked him sincerely for his time and returned to the Hangar Deck where we spent our last few minutes on the Flight Simulator.  Which was a bit lame, to be honest - it wasn't a flight simulator at all, but a bad theme park ride.  And which also smelt like ass.  The dude behind me with an extremely gob-shitey kid cracked one off, just as the lady was closing the door to the ride, so Lori and I spent the next few minutes gagging into our scarves as we tried to filter out the smell.   Come ON!  You really think no-one is going to notice you farted in a sealed space the size of a large car?  Sheesh.

And, with that farty finale, it was time to bid our fond farewells to the Hornet and thank everyone for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  All in all, a really fun experience!

Ding ding!!  All aboard, cap'n!!

The on-board torture chamber

What every hip dentist in the 40's was using
 - asbestos dental floss, of course!

Haunted teeth

Teeth-time

The doctor will see you now...

WE'RE ALIVE! Post-haunting, cranberry mimosas
to celebrate emerging in one piece