Visitors to the engine room of the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi keep meeting a courteous young sailor named Charlie, who explains the turbines and is gone when they turn around. No guide by that name works aboard the Blue Ghost.
Visitors to the engine room of the USS Lexington, the aircraft carrier moored as a museum in Corpus Christi, Texas, keep meeting a sailor named Charlie. He is young and well-mannered, with piercing blue eyes, and he wears a white Navy uniform of a cut the museum no longer issues. He walks people through the turbines with more expertise than any staffer, answers what they ask, and then they turn around and he isn't there.
No guide named Charlie works on the ship. No guide is assigned to the engine room at all.
The Lexington was a ghost long before he was. In December 1943, off Kwajalein, a Japanese torpedo bomber hit her on the starboard side of the stern, killed nine men, wounded 35, settled her five feet by the stern and knocked her out of the rest of the Marshalls campaign. Japan announced she had been sunk. That, the National Historic Landmark nomination says, was "the first of several such claims that led to the carrier's nickname 'Blue Ghost.'" The museum credits the broadcasts to Tokyo Rose. And she looked the part: the only Essex-class carrier to serve the whole war without dazzle camouflage, painted solid Navy Blue until 1945.
Then on 5 November 1944, off the Philippines, a flaming Japanese aircraft came down near her island. Fifty men were killed or missing and 132 injured, the island gun platform was destroyed, and the signal bridge was heavily damaged. The major fires were under control inside 20 minutes. She kept flying operations anyway, and sank an enemy heavy cruiser before the day was out.
Charlie, the story goes, was an engine-room operator killed in that attack. Nothing supports it. He has no surname, no rating, no muster entry, and a search of the museum's own former-crew directory turned up no match. The landmark nomination puts the 5 November damage topside, at the gun platform and the signal bridge, nowhere near the engine spaces.
The museum sells the haunting anyway. Its Blue Ghost Paranormal Overnight Investigation walks guests through "six different sectors or 'hot spots' on the ship, where you will hear the stories of 'Charlie' and others, exactly where they took place," then puts them to bed in a berthing compartment and serves a continental breakfast in the morning.
Ghost Hunters filmed aboard in 2007. Museum historian Judith Whipple told the team that a visitor had watched a man in a WWII naval uniform vanish on the hangar deck, and that she and a colleague, alone aboard, once heard a male voice say "Hey." A damage-control officer named Andy Cardiel said he had heard screaming on the graveyard shift. What the team came away with was thin: high electromagnetic readings in one passageway, audio of a cough and a scream. They left saying they couldn't be positive the ship isn't haunted, while agreeing that it probably isn't.
The one voice they recorded in the engine room was a woman's. There was no woman on that deck.
