In Brief
The USS Yorktown is a WWII aircraft carrier moored as a war memorial at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Visitors, staff, and even police keep reporting sailors in period dress uniform in her passageways, and in 1985 one man opened a door onto a whole room of them.
The Full Story
People keep meeting sailors aboard the USS Yorktown who should not be there. They wear WWII-era Navy dress uniform, and they vanish around the bulkheads. The Yorktown is a wartime aircraft carrier moored as a museum ship at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, across the Cooper River from Charleston.
In September 1985, a visitor named Joe Caldwell opened a door to the ship's dentist bay, several decks down, and found several men in period dress uniforms standing inside. They stopped and stared at him. An attendant told him no authorized personnel were aboard that day.
This Yorktown, hull number CV-10, carries a dead ship's name. The Navy meant to call her the Bonhomme Richard, then renamed her in 1942 to honor the first Yorktown, CV-5, sunk at Midway that June. "The Fighting Lady," named for the one that went down. The ghost story sits inside that inheritance of loss.
The most common report is footsteps, footfalls crossing compartments that are empty when anyone goes to look. Past that, the accounts run the length of the hull. A Bulldog Tours group heard a voice come out of the engine room yelling at them to get out, into a space they had no clearance to enter. A volunteer named Don Bommarito heard a door slam behind him in a passageway and watched a shadow run across it. Women on tours say cold, unseen hands grab their shoulders. Two shadow figures recur often enough to have earned names: Shadow Ed, near the shipyard museum, and Shadow Sam, a solid figure in dark Navy uniform on the hangar deck.
The gentlest of the reports is also the strangest. A 13-year-old girl standing in the fo'c'sle, up in the bow, said someone leaned in close and whispered "Happy Birthday" in her ear. It was, that day, her birthday.
In early February 2012, Syfy's Ghost Hunters closed the carrier to the public, cut all power to the ship, and split an eight-person team into pairs to search her in the dark. The museum's executive director, Mac Burdette, said his staff called it some of the most compelling evidence in the show's history.
Burdette was careful about the dead. "We hold the men who served and died aboard the Yorktown in the highest esteem," he said, "and we would never, ever do anything to disrespect their service." The museum runs ghost tours aboard her now, after dark, into the sealed compartments where the uniformed men keep turning up.
