Battleship North Carolina

Night watchman Danny Bradshaw has lived aboard since 1976 and shares the ship with a blond sailor killed September 15, 1942.

Danny Bradshaw has lived on the USS North Carolina since 1976. The job is night watchman, the pay includes a room of his own aboard the ship, and the company is not limited to the living.

Early in his tenure, Bradshaw was headed below deck to check a power box in the galley on a pitch-black night. He reached into the box and felt a gust of cold air and a hand settle on his shoulder. He turned. A sailor was standing in the open hatch a few feet away, hair so blond in the flashlight beam it read as white. When the beam passed through the sailor's body instead of reflecting off it, Bradshaw screamed. The sailor turned his head and wasn't there. Bradshaw has been writing down encounters like that one for almost fifty years. His book "Ghosts on the Battleship North Carolina" is the closest thing the ship has to an official log of the other crew.

The blond sailor is the most frequently seen figure aboard, usually in the washroom on one of the lower decks. Bradshaw believes he died in the attack of September 15, 1942, when a Japanese submarine torpedoed the ship off the Solomon Islands and killed five men. The North Carolina kept firing and kept steaming. She earned 15 battle stars in the Pacific, more than any other American battleship in World War II, and she was commissioned only in April 1941.

What happens on the ship now is mostly mechanical. Hatches that weigh sixty or eighty pounds unlock and swing closed on their own. Lights respond to verbal commands. Compartment doors slam shut at the end of empty passageways. People on guided tours get touched on the shoulder or tapped on the back of the head. Faces appear in portholes where no one's standing. A TAPS crew led by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson filmed a Ghost Hunters episode aboard in 2005 and walked off with enough evidence to call the ship haunted on camera. Ghost Hunters Academy and Fact or Faked each filed the same verdict in subsequent years, which is a rare trifecta for a single location.

The ship is a memorial to the 10,000 North Carolinians who died in World War II, anchored permanently in the Cape Fear River across from downtown Wilmington. Nine levels are open to visitors, from the bridge all the way down to the engine room, and the overnight ghost hunt program sells out regularly. The sign at the gangway doesn't mention the sailors who are still aboard. Danny Bradshaw doesn't need a sign. He's been splitting his watch with them since Gerald Ford was president.