Ghosthunting Southern New England. Andrew Lake
good condition, even though the ship’s interior should have been badly corroded from all the years it sat idle. Years ago, budget cuts forced the U.S. Navy to order the shutdown of all the dehumidification systems that were protecting their deactivated ships from rusting away while in storage. It is believed that somewhere along the chain of command, someone may have disregarded those orders and allowed the dehumidifiers on the Salem to continue running, perhaps out of love for the old lady. This action (or inaction) protected the ship from years of damaging moisture. It has been estimated that this heavy cruiser, in her present condition, could be made seaworthy and combat-ready in only eight months. This is a pretty amazing fact, especially when one takes into consideration that the Salem was launched in 1947.
At seven hundred feet in length and seventy-seven feet at her beam, the Salem is quite an intimidating battlewagon. Armed with nine eight-inch guns, twelve five-inch guns, and eighteen three-inch guns, this heavy battle cruiser once packed a powerful punch. However, in its ten years of service, the Salem never fired a shot in anger. During the Cold War, the USS Salem played more of a diplomatic role while operating as flagship for the Second Fleet in the Atlantic and for the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
She was the first ship to respond to the massive earthquake that devastated the Ionian Islands off Greece in 1953. The ship’s crew helped rescue civilians from the terrible destruction and evacuated the injured to the Salem for emergency treatment. Unfortunately, many of those people were too badly hurt and they passed away while onboard. It is believed that some of the ghosts haunting the vessel are lost souls from that horrible tragedy in Greece.
The ship’s wardroom served as the officer’s mess and conference room. There has been a great deal of paranormal activity experienced in this area of the ship.
I was invited to take part in a paranormal investigation of the USS Salem by two colleagues of mine, Kathy Caslin and Eric LaVoie. Don DeCristofaro, a former sailor, gave us a tour of the ship. Don is currently serving as a tour guide for the USS Salem and has come to accept the ghosts that haunt the ship’s passageways and cabins. I asked Don about the victims who died aboard the Salem during the humanitarian mission in Greece and whether he thought their deaths might be a source of the paranormal activity that’s been reported throughout the ship since it opened as a museum. Don replied by saying, “The women and children who are entities aboard the ship, it’s only natural to assume they are Greek civilians. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would be surprised if there was a ship in the history of the United States Navy that saw no action, but saw as much death as the Salem.”
On a much brighter note, there were over twenty successful births delivered by the ship’s medical staff. Sadly though, there were also a number of mothers and babies lost during childbirth due to the trauma they had suffered in the earthquake. The ship’s surgery is felt by some to be haunted by the spirits of those women and their infants who died on the operating table. People have reported hearing female voices coming from inside the surgery, and some claimed to have seen a dark form, like a person’s shadow, moving around in the room’s confined space.
An incident that took place in the ship’s wardroom during a previous investigation also appears to support the belief that there are spirits of women haunting the Salem. In the summer of 2010, Don DeCristafaro was assisting a ghosthunting group whose founders are also husband and wife. The team had decided to use the wardroom as their base of operations for the night, despite the fact that one of the two psychics who works with them had said she felt “something strange” about the room. Perhaps they should have listened to her psychic intuition because as Don said, “Things got so bad in here we had to turn on all the lights and call the husband on the radio to come get his wife because she kinda’ puddled.”
What Don meant by “bad” was that the atmosphere in the room got very heavy. A short while after the husband had left with the other half of their group to investigate the lower decks, the wardroom became very active with sound and movement. Don told me, “At one point, the psychic called out, ‘where are you?,’ because it seemed like there were things in every corner of the room.”
There was a loud noise from the far side of the room, and when the team looked to see what had caused the racket, they found a chair tipped over on its side. Don and the four investigators then withdrew from the wardroom and stepped out into the passageway. As they stood close together, trying to take in what was happening, they heard a woman let out a loud moan. Don said, “It was so loud that all five of us turned and said, ‘what the hell was that!’” The ghosthunters’ audio recorder captured the mournful wail, making it hard to dismiss as over-active imaginations and rattled nerves.
This is not the only unexplainable sound that Don has heard on the ship. In fact, his first ghostly encounter on the Salem was the unmistakable sound of a barking dog. Don and a co-worker named Katy were the only two people onboard as they went about closing the museum down for the night. Katy waited for Don on an upper deck as he climbed up the steep ladder from the ship’s combat information center (CIC), which is located in the bowels of the ship. The CIC is not featured on public tours because it is accessed via a long ladder with steel rungs. When Don reached the top of the ladder, he looked at Katy, wondering if she could hear what he was hearing: a dog barking down below in CIC. By the time he climbed back down into the ship’s belly, the barking had stopped and there was no dog to be found. Don informed me that many of the Greek refugees brought their pets with them when they were evacuated to the Salem.
Another active area that has a strong connection to the deaths of the Greek civilians is located below one of the crew’s berthing quarters and is referred to as the “butter room.” It is called this because it is a walk-in refrigerator where the ship’s supply of eggs and butter were stored. This cold storage room made an ideal place to store the bodies of the civilian casualties who passed away while onboard. Don told me that he has never seen or heard anything in the butter room himself, but others have reported hearing voices and felt very uneasy while investigating this onetime morgue.
There are reasons to believe that some of the paranormal activity aboard ship is related to the spirits of sailors. One possible ghost could be a sailor who fell to his death in the ship’s elevator shaft while working to prepare the deactivated ship for storage. A possible psychic link that may also be allowing the spirits of other sailors to haunt the ship is the permanent display of items from the Salem’s sister ship, the USS Newport News (CA-148). This museum-within-a-museum is a heartfelt tribute to the Newport News’s service to our country and her tragic loss of twenty crewmen during the Viet Nam conflict. There is a theory in paranormal research that suggests that objects can hold psychic energy from people who had a strong connection to that item while they were still alive.
The ship’s surgery. People have reported seeing shadowy figures moving about in this confined space. Female voices have also been heard here.
A male figure has been seen a number of times in the chief petty officers’ mess. People have caught only fleeting glimpses of this man, so there are no clues as to his identity. Shadowy figures have also been sighted in the crew’s mess. Two unrelated psychic investigators picked up on a male entity in the crew’s mess. Both psychics described the entity as being a verbally abusive seaman who doesn’t want people to be in that area of the ship. When Don was first told this, he openly challenged the aggressive spirit with the fact that he, Don, was a sailor too and he wasn’t afraid of anyone. Nothing happened, so he left it at that. However, a few months later, when the second psychic sensed this rude spirit, Don was singled out. This is what he told me:
I was here in the mess with a group; we had been in here for a little while when their psychic said, “He’s here now and he’s laughing at us. He thinks we’re the funniest thing ever.” And then she said, “He hates you.” And I said, “Me?” She said, “Yeah, he says you think you’re tougher than him, and he’s telling me to get you out of here.” So, I’m just standing there, and then she says to me, “You’re ready to go, aren’t you? You look real pissed off.” I didn’t know what she was talking