In Brief
The USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides," is the oldest commissioned warship still afloat — and still crewed. The sailors who served aboard her in our own century say the dead crew never left, and they weren't joking about it.
The Full Story
The USS Constitution sits in Boston Harbor, an active U.S. Navy ship with an active-duty crew, and one of those sailors once watched a cannonball move on its own. Petty Officer First Class Pete Robertson served aboard from 2001 to 2004. He described a 24-pound cannonball rolling across the deck — left, then right, then back to where it started — while the ship sat dead still in the water. "There was no way the ship moves that way," he said. "It was moving in ways a cannonball just shouldn't move."
She is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, launched in Boston's North End in 1797, one of six frigates Congress authorized to build the new Navy. Paul Revere supplied more than 8,000 pounds of copper fasteners for her hull. She never lost a battle. In 1812 her crew beat the British frigate Guerriere so badly that sailors watched cannonballs bounce off her oak sides, and the nickname stuck: Old Ironsides. By 1830, when the Navy wanted to scrap her, a poem saved her instead.
The dead she carries are real. Lieutenant William Bush, the first U.S. Marine officer killed in combat, was shot through the cheekbone boarding the Guerriere.
The modern crew talks about the old one in the present tense. "We took ghosts so seriously on Constitution," Robertson said. "Unless you were a brand new crewmember, you didn't mess around with that stuff. You didn't even try to scare each other because people were terrified — a lot of people were terrified to stand watch on the ship."
Standing watch is the thread that runs through every story aboard her. As one often-repeated tale goes, a young visitor pulling overnight duty was woken before dawn by a ragged sailor in old clothing, telling him it was his turn at watch — though nobody else on the ship could place the man.
Former Seaman Allie Thorpe served aboard from 2002 to 2005. She never saw anything. But she always felt a presence — "like somebody was walking up behind you and blowing on your neck." In a brick barracks about 100 yards from the ship, she said, a rocking chair left dead center in a room would go "from sitting completely still to a full on rock on its own."
Not everyone aboard buys it. Margherita Desy of the Naval History and Heritage Command has been through the magazines, the hold, the cabins. She's never felt a thing she couldn't pin on the equipment or the creak of old wood.
Which leaves the cannonball, on a deck that wasn't moving, witnessed by a sailor on watch.
