USS Edson

A Vietnam-era Forrest Sherman destroyer, now a Bay City museum ship. The forward berthing keeps producing boots in the passageway.

The USS Edson fired her guns in Vietnam. Six gun line deployments, thousands of rounds at coastal targets, Marines depending on her five-inch 54s for naval gunfire support. She came home, got decommissioned in 1988, sat in a reserve fleet anchorage in Philadelphia for a quarter century, and finally steamed, under tow, to Bay City, Michigan in 2012 to become a museum ship. The ghost stories started arriving almost the moment the overnight program did.

The Edson is a Forrest Sherman-class destroyer, commissioned in 1958. She's 418 feet long, almost entirely welded steel, built during the last great push of conventional surface combatants before the missile era rewrote naval design. In 1961 she earned the nickname "the gray ghost of the Vietnam coast" from Marines ashore who appreciated her speed and the accuracy of her gunnery. She was the last of her class in active service, decommissioned thirty years after commissioning, which in destroyer terms is a long life. Thirty sailors died aboard over the course of her career, most of them from non-combat causes: a 1966 boiler room accident that killed two, a man overboard off Okinawa, a heart attack during a night watch, the ordinary attrition of thirty years at sea.

She's docked now at the Saginaw Valley Naval Ship Museum, and the overnight program is where most of the stories come from. Visitors sleep in sailors' berths, which means people are lying in exactly the racks where the ship's crews rested for three decades. A 2017 Bay City Times article described a visitor who woke around 0300 to the sound of heavy boots walking the passageway outside his compartment. He opened the door. The passageway was empty and the other overnight guests were in their racks. The next morning, a docent told him the forward berthing had a reputation.

Crew members and volunteers have compiled their own log. A docent told the same paper she was walking through the mess deck alone in 2016, heard a chair scrape across the deck behind her, and turned to find a chair that had been tucked in now pulled out. Security cameras in the boiler room have picked up what volunteers describe as a shadow moving counter to the overhead lighting's fall, though camera footage of that kind rarely holds up to scrutiny. The ship is steel. Steel expands and contracts in Michigan temperature swings, and old ships creak on their moorings in ways that genuine old-house floorboards don't. A lot of what gets called a ghost aboard the Edson is probably hull working against mooring lines in a Bay City winter.

But not all of it. Volunteers have reported the same details often enough that the museum keeps a guestbook specifically for paranormal reports. One recurring entry: a sailor in dress blues seen on the starboard passageway near officers' country, usually late at night during overnight stays, usually by people who don't know about him beforehand. Another: the smell of cigarette smoke in the CO's stateroom, which was a smoking space when she was active and has been smoke-free for more than thirty years. A visitor in 2019 reported hearing the 1MC (the ship's announcing circuit) click on, then off, with no audible announcement. The 1MC was wired off from ship's power at decommissioning.

Incident versus atmosphere is the useful distinction on a ship like the Edson. A lot of haunted sites run on mood: dim corridors, restored furnishings from the period the ghost is said to have lived in, tour-guide framing. The Edson has plenty of mood, but she also has specific incidents with specific reporters: a named docent, a guest in a named compartment, a dated entry in a logbook. The museum staff take the stories seriously without turning them into the main attraction. The main attraction is still the ship herself, which is the reason anyone should go: one of the last Forrest Shermans afloat, steam propulsion plant intact, combat information center preserved, five-inch guns still swiveling on their mounts.

The Edson almost got scrapped. The Navy put her on the disposal list in 2004, the Bay County museum group fought for her for eight years, and the tow up the St. Lawrence Seaway from Philadelphia to Bay City in 2012 was its own operation. She had to be pulled out under the ice season window, through locks that barely fit her beam, into a river that rarely sees a destroyer. The ghost stories that followed her up north may just be the sailors who came with the steel. Steel has memory. A welded hull that rode out Typhoon Hope in 1979 and a mine incident off Vietnam carries the weight of the men who served on her.