In Brief
Aboard the Battleship North Carolina, berthed in the Cape Fear River at Wilmington, the most frequently seen figure is a blond sailor in a lower-deck washroom. Three national paranormal shows filmed here and each one came away convinced.
The Full Story
The figure people see most often aboard the Battleship North Carolina, the WWII memorial berthed in the Cape Fear River across from downtown Wilmington, is a young sailor with blond hair. He turns up in a lower-deck washroom and heading down the narrow passageways. The ship's longtime night watchman, Danny Bradshaw, who has lived and worked aboard since 1976, says the hair looks like white flames.
He is believed to be one of five men who died here on September 15, 1942. A torpedo from the Japanese submarine I-19 struck the port side off the Solomon Islands and tore a hole roughly 32 by 18 feet just forward of the armor belt. A crewman wrote that it felt "as though a giant had put his hand against the port side and shoved us with all his might sideways through the water." Five sailors were killed and 23 wounded. The crew counter-flooded compartments on the opposite side to fight the list, and the ship kept steaming at 29 knots as though nothing had happened. She would finish the war with 15 battle stars, the most of any American battleship.
The five who died that day were Albert Geary, Ingwald Nelson, Leonard Pone, William Skelton, and Oscar Stone. No record ties any of those names to the figure in the washroom. That link is the story people tell, not a fact anyone has documented.
Bradshaw has written that the encounters run on long after the war. Hatches unlock and swing shut on their own. Lights answer a spoken command. People report being touched in empty compartments, and a second sailor is said to have died in the washroom, where the temperature drops without reason. Bradshaw cataloged years of it in a 73-page book he published himself in 2002, a private log of a ship he has watched over since the Ford administration.
Three national television crews came to test the place. Ghost Hunters filmed aboard in 2005 and caught an EVP near the brig; the investigators followed a moving shadow to a loose bulkhead bracket they found swinging on its own. Ghost Hunters Academy spent two nights here in 2009. Fact or Faked investigated in 2012 and put it plainly on air: "There is definitely something paranormal happening on the USS North Carolina." Three separate shows, three separate verdicts, all the same.
The ship opened as the state's WWII memorial on April 29, 1962, dedicated to more than 11,000 North Carolinians who died in the war. Five of them never came home from one September night, and the watchman who has stayed aboard the longest keeps seeing one of them in the dark.
