Thursday, October 12, 2017

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Paranormal Folklore - "U.S.S. Forrestal Ghost"


 This article comes from The Shadow Lands, reprinted and shared with permission.

MAYPORT NAVAL STATION, Fla. (AP) -- Ghosts are fine, traditional thingsto have around ancient English castles, but the Navy says rumors of one stalking the depths of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal have spooked a few sailors. Flickering lights. Bumps in the night. Locked doors opening. Voices on disconnected telephones. And a vanishing figure in a khaki uniform. The figure's even got a nickname: George. At least that's what some of the men say aboard the Forrestal, in its fourth month of a six-month deployment in the Indian Ocean and the North Arabian Sea.

They were interviewed by Lt. James E. Brooks, who detailed the story of the ghost in a 12-page news release issued last month. The report about George hasn't ruffled any Navy feathers, Mayport Navy spokesman Lt. Park Balevre said Thursday. "I thought it was cute. I think most people did." "What Lt. Brooks had in mind was a fluff piece to show the lighter side of the Navy," said Balevre. But according to Brooks, some sailors don't think the ghost story is at all cute.

George lurks in two of the ship's below-the-waterline storage areas, one of them a former morgue, spooked sailors claim. "I've got one guy working for me now who refuses to go down there alone. Our last chief petty officer in charge, who has since transferred, refused to go down there at all," says Petty Officer Daniel Balboa, in charge of the officers' mess. "I've never seen any ghosts but you can hear weird things down there," said Balboa. "I was taking inventory one night and heard a noise like deck grating being picked up and dropped," he recalled. "I'd turn around and look but didn't see anything. When I turned around to begin my work again, the noise started again." One night, Balboa said, he was checking temperatures in food-storage freezers and kept finding open doors he had shut behind him. "It is impossible for anyone to open the reefer (refrigerator) doors from the outside, behind me. To open them from the outside requires a key since the doors lock automatically. "I had the only key with me. That incident puts me on the verge of believing," he said. Some say the ghost is a chief killed during a 1967 flight deck fire that killed 137 sailors in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam, Brooks wrote. Others guess he's a pilot whose body was once stored on the ship. Petty Officer James Hillard hasn't ventured into the haunted areas since he saw George last year while checking out odd footsteps. "He was wearing a khaki uniform, like an officer or chief would wear," he says. He followed the apparition into a compartment but "there was nobody in there, and I swear that is where he went," Hillard said. Mess Specialist 2nd Class Gary Weiss saw a khaki-clad ghost go down a ladder to pump room No. 1. Whoever went down into the pump room never came out and the ladder is the only access, he said. Hillard said he once was helping move supplies when a telephone that was reportedly disconnected kept ringing. "The phone rang and I answered it. This time there was a faint voice calling, `Help! Help! I'm on the sixth deck!' Rumor had it that a crew member was killed down there. I'm very scared to go down there alone. If I do, I get out of there as fast as I can," Hillard said. Others are dubious. "I think it's the guys' imagination," said Senior Chief Petty Officer James Williams. "I'm not superstitious but when I go down there by myself, I find it uneasy. When that happens, your imagination is going to play tricks on you."

Copyright, 1988. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.



See more from The Shadowlands at www.theshadowlands.net.

The picture in the article here isn’t related to post, I just need some eye candy. Got it from Google Images.
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