Tales of the Occult

You may have heard sailors are an exceptionally superstitious lot, but you really don’t believe it until you see grown men, many with six or more years of higher education, chanting and waving chicken bones in an attempt to get an MG to start up correctly. And they’re not playing around; on my first boat there was a standing order not to touch the little rubber gremlins stashed in a certain troublesome piece of Nav gear in the overhead outside Radio. The only time the gear seemed to break was if someone messed with the gremlins, so after a while we just accepted the fact that not everything you need to know is written in the tech manual.

My second boat was haunted by two different ghosts. The first was some dead officer we were supposed to bury at sea. They gave us his ashes in a jar, and for some reason they ended up stowed in a locker outboard some switchgear in the engine room. Unfortunately, we missed our opportunity to do the burial (bad weather, which also screwed us out of the follow-up swim call) and the jar somehow was overlooked when we turned over to the other crew. It was only after they turned back over to us, and we went out on patrol, that the weird, creepy shit started happening.

First, that switchgear became the bane of our existence. Grounds we couldn’t isolate, fuses that would just blow for no reason, and one huge AC breaker that would just trip (and sometimes fail to close) seemingly at random. Then the ghost started screwing with us directly.

Almost all of the watchstanders in upper level reported strange happenings. They’d take their logs, hang them up, and the clipboard would mysteriously vanish, only to reappear a second later. Many of us would be walking along and suddenly find ourselves in a pocket of cold air, much, much colder than the rest of the engine room (that part was actually okay, especially during drills). Sometimes you’d get this creepy sensation like someone was watching you, but you were all alone. At least three guys said they’d felt someone tap them on the shoulder; when they spun around, no one was there.

Like I said, the old bastard was just fucking with us.

It was during one of our little troubleshooting sessions on the breaker that we found the urn while looking for a place to stash some parts. We took it up forward and almost immediately all the weird stuff stopped happening back aft. When gear started breaking up forward, the crew pretty unanimously demanded we get rid of the ashes ASAP. Since we couldn’t surface where we were, they ended up using the TDU. Probably not as ceremonious as it should have been, but better than admitting we’d “misplaced” the remains for over a year.


The second ghost got triper’d on with a lube oil pump a few patrols later. The lower level watches kept seeing someone wearing a blue poopie suit darting around in lower level; at first they thought it was the EWS or ERS, but when they’d go to check, no one was there. This ghost didn’t do much more than play peek-a-boo, so it became a generally-accepted part of life at sea. Since it liked being back aft so much, we even toyed with the idea of qualifying it, but the Eng wouldn’t sign the card when it was filled out.

When we pulled back in, the rumor we heard was that either an electrician or a mechanic had been electrocuted by the pump on some other boat, which is why it ended up in the shop before we got it. I was never able to substantiate this (we’re usually told when something bad like that happens on another boat as sort of a morbid cautionary tale), but both crews continued to see the ghost up until we went in the yards. Even a ghost can’t stand being in the shipyard for long.