More Haunted C-130's

[dirtlooter]

Back in the late 70's, I was a radio man on C-130s. I trouble shot the plane and did whatever needed to get the plane flyable radio wise. Occasionally, we would hear of a plane having ghosts and when we did, we knew what needed to be done. Our HF radios were powerful transmitters that were hooked up to long antenna wires that went from the cargo door area to the tip of the plane. These wires were hooked to a mast that was mounted to the side of the plane and inside these masts were lightening protectors that would sometimes corrode. When they would corrode, they would produce a type of ionized air inside the plane near the mast. I could understand someone thinking that they were seeing a ghost when the pilot transmitted a message. So, we would replace the needed parts and the ghost would be gone.

However, one night while helping a radar man on his job at a plane, we were without power and in the darkness. As we sat in the darkness waiting on a MD3 power unit to arrive, we hear a van drive up. It was the shop that took care of such things as rafts or in this case, parachutes. I quickly told my friend to come with me and we hurried to the back of the plane close to the cargo ramp. I was a lot thinner back thin as was the other guy and we quickly hid behind a couple of the structure ribs of the plane. The man came on the plane with a couple of the chutes (7 total) to hang in their spots in the plane near the door. He seemed a little nervous and was whistling as best as he could. Now back then, the flashlights we had to use were next to useless and very dim compared to what we have today.

So, all he had was this offset military flashlight for light and he had it sticking out his pocket. After he set the 2nd chute in place, I let out a low groan that he could easily hear. Sure enough, he jerked his head and around and asked nervously, "Who's there?" He then shined his weak flashlight back to the ramp but could see nothing and the hurried out to get the next chutes. This time, the nervous man brought all of the remaining chutes in and set them on the floor and after a quick scan with his light, began hanging the others. I waited for one chute to get put on before I let out a deeper moan. My buddy was beside himself as the man hung the remaining chutes in record time and bailed out of the plane. The van started up and he was gone, a few minutes later, the power until arrived and we went to work. My buddy laughed every time he thought about it.

 

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[Professor of Engineering]

Your stories make my day, thank you for sharing!

 

[kingskid1611]

love these stories....

 

[Dave Rishar]

Good stuff, Dirtlooter. I was part of a similar prank, although there was a real ghost associated with it.

On the USS Sacramento, we had a ghost in #1 hold. This hold consisted of five decks of magazines, with both an ordnance elevator and an access trunk passing through the middle. Imagine a square-shaped Cheerio for an idea of the layout. The elevator had open doors facing outboard on either side that were secured when not in use with aluminum panels that slide into them. The trunk also had two watertight doors facing port and starboard that were not quick-acting, meaning that there was a series of dogs (cammed levers) that had to be operated one after the other to open or shut the door. Additionally, each trunk door had a high security lock on it, as we didn't want random people wandering into ammunition spaces for a variety of reasons.

About that ghost: sailors would hear activity on the deck above or below them, even while the trunk doors were locked. I suppose that it was possible for someone to enter the elevator shaft from the maindeck, but then they'd be faced with a rather difficult climb to the magazine deck that they wanted to access, and then they'd need to figure out how to remove those panels from the wrong side (not impossible, but extremely difficult), enter the magazine, and replace them without making any noise, and I'm not sure how someone would have been able to do that as they were rather noisy. Then they'd need to reverse the process to get back out, as there was no way to get out via the trunk if you were locked in. But people would hear those noises, and sometimes they'd look up or down the elevator shaft (the panels would be removed while work was going on in the magazine if ordnance would be going in or out) and see shadows passing in front of the light passing through the joints between the panels. Our first thought was that someone had gotten hold of a key, but those were tightly controlled - the only people that had keys to my hold were myself and the captain, and he wasn't the joking sort. There were a number of times where we'd receive a complaint, post a watch on the door, and I'd unlock one and take a few people in to clear the space. We never found anyone, I'd lock the door on my way out, and then it would happen again a few days later.

Then there were the intercoms. They didn't work by the time that I'd gotten there, but occasionally we'd hear an indistinct male voice talking through them. After my sailors had complained enough, I got an electrician to take a look at them to see what the problem might be. Maybe there was another circuit bleeding through to them or something. The electrician assured me that this was impossible, as they were de-energized and had been for some time. In fact, the wires that should have been powering them had been removed years earlier and they were not connected to anything, even each other. We never did figure that one out.

It got to the point where my crew was getting difficult to manage. They'd refuse to enter the magazines alone. My leadership skills were nonexistent back then and I responded with anger: "Oh, so there's a ghost down there? You're worried that somebody died in my magazine? Well, if somebody did, it was a sailor. If you see a damn ghost down there, hand it a paintbrush. It'll know what to do with it. In the meantime, get your ass in that magazine and get to work."

The story gets a bit more detailed than that, but we're here for a prank, aren't we? I just wanted to set the stage for this one. Everyone on the ship knew about this ghost, including the fuel guys. They didn't have any business in the magazines, but there was a tank of bunker oil underneath the hold and the gauges for it were located at the very bottom of the trunk. Once per hour, some unfortunate watchstander would have to go all the way down there to get readings from it. That was the guy that I wanted to prank. He came through on a fairly predictable schedule, so this was an easy one to set up: I gave my keys to one of my sailors and had him lock me in the magazine deck one level above the bottom and then leave, with instructions to come back after the prank to let me out. He (and the rest of my crew) were welcome to fiddle around at the top of the trunk to watch the festivities. Once locked in, I waited and listened for the watch stander to make his way down to the bottom; in the meantime, I loosened all of the dogs on the door that I was behind so that I could operate them quickly and violently.

The watchstander went down to the bottom deck. Once I heard him coming up the ladder to my deck, I quickly threw the dogs open two at a time until they were all open, and then I began throwing my weight against the door. The lock kept it from opening, but each time that I hit it, it slammed against that lock. From the watch stander's point of view, the door undogged itself in a matter of a second or two - two dogs at a time, simultaneously - and then began crashing against the hasp of the lock. I heard him hesitate for only a moment, and then he ran up that ladder all the way to 2nd deck in what must have been some sort of a record. My people let me out of the magazine shortly after and we all had a pretty good laugh, but I eventually tracked the guy down and explained what had happened - I didn't want him getting into trouble for refusing to go down there, and the incident had frightened the man pretty badly. It actually took some convincing to make him understand that it was me; he'd been convinced that his division had brought me in to talk him down, and that the ghost had been responsible.

The funny thing was, I was fairly good friends with one of the other guys in that division. He claimed to have actually seen the ghost, although he hadn't known it at the time - he'd thought that it had been one of our guys, albeit out of uniform. (Dungarees and sideburns, which had both been phased out in the late nineties.) He went on to say that he'd spotted the guy in one of the old cruise books in the barber shop from the seventies. That ghost even had a name if the story was to be believed - Lewis, although I don't remember the first name. Later, we both got orders to shore duty at the same time and the ship dropped us off in Sasebo, where we spent a week just hanging out while waiting for our flight back stateside. During that week, I asked him point blank if he'd been screwing with me with his ghost story. That would have been the time to come clean, but he stuck to his guns. He just may have been telling the truth about Lewis.

Over a decade later, I found myself talking to some paranormal investigators while touring Starvation Heights. (Google it. This post is already too long.) Sacramento had by then been reduced to razor blades and soup cans, and I was mildly curious about what happened to a shipboard ghost after the ship had been scrapped. I don't remember being particularly satisfied with any of their answers. I never encountered Lewis directly, but if any of you do, ask him what happened to him after they broke Sacramento. I still want to know.

 

[dirtlooter]

There is just something about when opportunities present themselves for a prank that you or I just can't ignore. I am sure that there are countless more stories similar to ours out there. that was a pretty good one too. Jerry