Delta King Riverboat Hotel

The Delta King is a boat that goes nowhere. She's a 285-foot paddlewheeler in red and white, bolted to the Old Sacramento waterfront since 1984 and turned into a 44-room hotel. And the staff say her captain never left his post.

No one names him. But employees describe the same man on the upper deck — sitting on the balcony watching the resident theater company run its shows, the way a captain would watch his own boat work. Housekeepers report his footsteps overhead on a deck they know is empty. He walks the promenade in the early hours. Once, in the sound booth, a glass of water tipped over near the soundboard with no one beside it. Small announcements, all of them. The kind a man makes when he's still on duty.

He had plenty of boat to stay with. The Delta King was christened on May 20, 1927, and ran the overnight route between San Francisco and Sacramento — a 10.5-hour run that left at six in the evening, full of jazz bands, gambling, and Prohibition-era drinking. The Navy drafted her in 1940. She finished the war as a hospital ship.

Then she nearly died herself. Towed to the Richmond shipyards for renovation, she sank in San Francisco Bay in April 1981 and sat half-submerged until crews refloated her in June 1982. They towed the wreck up the Sacramento River, restored her, and reopened her on May 20, 1989 — 62 years to the day after she was christened.

He isn't the only one the staff report. A little girl with long blond hair, eight or ten years old, is said to run the second-floor halls giggling, leaving child-size footprints on the deck boards by morning. There's talk of a crewman named Pierre down in the engine room, though no one can give him a last name or a date.

But the captain is the one who recurs. A man watching his boat do its work, on a boat that hasn't gone anywhere in forty years.