Star of India

A fourteen-year-old Scottish stowaway named John Campbell fell from the Star of India's mainmast in 1884 and died three days later. The oldest active sailing ship in the world still sails out of San Diego Harbor, and her crew says Campbell is still on board, tapping visitors on the shoulder.

A fourteen-year-old Scottish boy fell from the top of the mainmast in 1884 and took three days to die. John Campbell had stowed away on the Euterpe (the ship that would later be renamed the Star of India) while she was docked in Glasgow for repairs. The captain could have thrown him overboard. Instead he put him to work. Campbell turned out to be a quick study and a cheerful kid, and the crew seemed to like him. He made spending money off-watch playing games with the other children on board. Then he climbed the rigging one day and slipped. His legs were crushed when he hit the deck a hundred feet below. He was buried at sea.

"Sometimes you'll feel a tap on your shoulder," says Ruby Stith, a living history instructor at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, where the Star of India now lives out her retirement as the oldest active sailing ship in the world. "He liked to play games. That's how he made money on board because he was a stowaway."

The Star of India was built in 1863 on the Isle of Man as the Euterpe, an iron-hulled full-rigged ship designed to haul cargo and immigrants between Britain and India, New Zealand, and California. She has circled the globe 21 times. She still sails, occasionally, out of San Diego harbor, which makes her either a living museum or the oldest working haunted house in the Pacific. Maybe both.

Campbell's ghost is the friendly one. His chosen party trick is the shoulder tap, and visitors report it from all parts of the ship, but mostly near the spot where he fell. When the museum installed a new alarm system on board, it went off every night for fourteen nights in a row. Staff tried everything. Finally one of them stood on deck and said, out loud, "John, you better get used to it. It's not going away." The alarm stopped the next night. That story is one the guides love to tell because it's just matter-of-fact enough to be disturbing. A staff member solved a security problem by negotiating with a dead boy.

Down in the chain room, the mood is different. A Chinese sailor working on the anchor chains was caught as they were being raised, and the massive links crushed him before anyone realized what had happened. His cries for help were swallowed by the noise of the windlass. The spot where he died runs consistently cold even on warm San Diego days, and visitors describe an unpleasant pressure in that room that they don't feel anywhere else on the ship. His name is lost to history, which is its own small injustice. The chain room is named for what killed him, not for who he was.

The galley has a different signature. Cooks and docents report the smell of freshly baked bread coming from the empty kitchen, pots and pans shifting on their hooks, and outlines pressing down into the beds in the officers' quarters when nobody has been sleeping there. Ghost Adventures filmed an episode on board and reportedly experienced nearly everything on the Maritime Museum's list. The episode is still one of the most-watched in the series.

What sets the Star of India apart from other haunted ships is how alive she still is. The Queen Mary is a fixed hotel. The USS Hornet is a museum in permanent berth. The Star of India goes to sea, crewed by volunteers, carrying guests up and down the California coast under the same sails that brought nineteenth-century immigrants halfway around the world. A fourteen-year-old stowaway still walks her decks. A nameless Chinese sailor still holds the chain room. When the ship leaves dock, her ghosts go with her. It's hard to think of a creepier detail on any haunted place page in the state, and it's absolutely true.