A red-headed sailor in white is said to walk the decks of Battleship Texas, the world's last surviving dreadnought. Investigators photographed a vapor that vanished in the next frame, and caught a faint yes on tape. The one man killed aboard her was 21.
Battleship Texas is the world's last surviving dreadnought, and for 74 years she sat at the San Jacinto Battleground outside Houston with a red-headed sailor walking her decks. The description never changes: a young man in a white sailor's suit, in a uniform that went out of style long ago, standing near a ladder. Sometimes smiling. He has never been matched to anyone who died aboard.
For years the state turned down every request to spend a night looking for him. "We've probably gotten dozens of phone calls," the ship's manager, Andrew Smith, said. The problem was always the same one. "Typically, they want to explore areas of the ship that aren't safe for the general public to go into," Smith said. "They want unfettered access."
KHOU's report has a Houston group called SPIRE aboard overnight in March 2010, the first ever allowed, working inside the state's limits instead of demanding the run of the ship. "It wasn't a conventional investigation," member Tammie Farrar said. "We didn't have the run of the whole ship."
Nothing happened while they were standing in the room. It was days later, going back through the photographs, that they found it: one frame of an interior compartment with a white cloud hanging up among the ceiling pipes and cables. The next shot, taken seconds after, is clean. That, the group argues, is what rules out steam or smoke. Rick Oestmann still wouldn't call it a ghost. "Vaporous anomaly," he said. "Best way I can describe it." Underneath their own voices on the recorders, they say, is a very faint sound they hear as somebody answering yes.
Days later, two college volunteers were repainting the very compartment SPIRE had worked in. "I haven't seen any ghosts," Chelsea Givings said.
In 34 years of service, through two world wars, Normandy, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Texas lost exactly one man to enemy fire. On 25 June 1944, off Cherbourg, she traded shots with a German coastal battery, and a shell struck the fire-control section of her conning tower. The National WWII Museum records that the 8-inch armor held. The round ricocheted upward instead, driving shrapnel and heavy rivets into the pilot house and throwing everyone on the bridge to the deck. Quartermaster 3rd Class Christen Christensen was at the wheel, at the front of the bridge, nearest the blast. One leg was torn off. He died the same day.
The sailor people report is not him. The red hair, the white suit, the smile at the ladder belong to no one the ship's records account for, and every published version of him traces back to one paragraph of ghost-tour copy from Haunted Rooms America, repeated near-verbatim by Houston TV stations ever since. That paragraph names no witness, no deck, no date.
Christensen has all of it. Find a Grave gives him a name, a birthday in February 1923, and a plot number at Long Island National Cemetery. He was 21 years old. Nobody has ever reported seeing him.
