Fort Stevens State Park

Site of the only WWII enemy shelling on the U.S. mainland. Campers report a phantom soldier near Battery Russell and bugle calls at dawn.

On the night of June 21, 1942, Imperial Japanese submarine I-25 surfaced off Fort Stevens and fired seventeen shells from its deck gun at Battery Russell. Captain Akiji Tagami had picked the wrong target. The fort's artillerymen never got permission to return fire because the sub was plotted as out of range, and the shells fell mostly into sand, scrub, and a baseball backstop. No one was hurt. But Fort Stevens became the first military installation on the U.S. mainland to take enemy fire since the War of 1812, and the soldiers who lived through that bizarre night kept telling the story for the rest of their lives.

The fort is older than that incident, and so are its ghosts. Construction started in 1863 to defend the river mouth during the Civil War, named for Isaac I. Stevens, a general and former Washington Territory governor. Three wars passed through the place. Soldiers cycled in and out of an isolated coastal posting where drinking was the main pastime, and at least one of them died strangely enough that his death is still arguing with itself in the records.

Private August Stahlberger of Battery C, Second United States Artillery, died at the fort in 1868. The first explanation was that he'd fallen into the river drunk and drowned. Then someone changed the official cause of death to blows from person or persons unknown. A drowning became a murder, the murder was never solved, and Stahlberger went into the fort cemetery the same year it opened. He's said to wander the grounds where he was killed, a detail that survives because nobody can prove or disprove it 150 years later.

A young soldier in uniform turns up regularly near Battery Russell, the World War II concrete fortification that took those Japanese shells. Witnesses describe him at attention near the old gun positions, sometimes patrolling slowly along the ramparts. He looks solid until you walk toward him. By the time anyone closes the distance, the rampart is empty and the air feels colder than it did a moment before. Inside the bunkers and tunnels, people report shadowy shapes at the edge of vision, footsteps echoing on concrete, voices in passages where nobody is speaking.

The campground is where the stories pick up volume. Fort Stevens State Park is one of the busiest campgrounds on the Oregon Coast, several hundred sites packed into the woods around the old battery, and a steady fraction of campers come back with something. Footsteps crunching gravel around a tent late at night. Belongings moved while they slept. A tent zipper undone in the morning that they're sure they closed. At dawn, a few campers have heard what sounds like a distant bugle playing reveille, or boots in marching cadence, a phantom roll call for soldiers who were mustered out of the U.S. Army a long time ago.

Lights show up too. Small moving points of light cross the old parade grounds and weave through the trees at dusk, described by witnesses as searching, tracking, deliberate. Photos taken at the guardhouse and Battery Russell come back with orbs in them, evidence skeptics dismiss easily and believers hold onto tightly. At least one camper has reported seeing a figure pacing inside an empty yard.

No single Fort Stevens account is airtight. The place has just been collecting them for a century and a half, across cavalry posts and concrete batteries and tent rings and half a dozen wars. The interpretive signs cover the artillery and the I-25 and the chronology of three wars. The campers who come back with stories are reading a different layer of the same site.