USS Midway

Moored at Navy Pier along San Diego's Embarcadero, the USS Midway is not a building haunted by a single tragic event or a house where someone died in the night. It is a 69,000-ton floating city that carried approximately 200,000 sailors across forty-seven years of continuous service, from the final week of World War II through the Persian Gulf War—the longest-serving aircraft carrier of the twentieth century. That kind of history does not sit quietly.

The Midway was commissioned on September 10, 1945, one week after the formal Japanese surrender that ended the Second World War. Named for the decisive 1942 Battle of Midway, the carrier was the first in a new class of large ships featuring an armored flight deck and an air group of 120 planes. At the time of her launch, she was the largest ship in the world, a distinction she held for a full decade. Too massive to fit through the Panama Canal, the Midway was in a class by herself in more ways than one. Her Cold War service began almost immediately. In 1946, she became the first American carrier to operate in midwinter sub-Arctic conditions. The following year, she launched a captured German V-2 rocket from her deck—a trial that helped lay the groundwork for naval missile warfare. She later demonstrated that a carrier could deliver atomic weapons, fundamentally reshaping naval strategy. For ten years, the Midway patrolled European waters with the Atlantic Fleet before a round-the-world cruise brought her to the Pacific in 1955, where she was rebuilt with an angled flight deck to accommodate jet operations.

The Midway's first combat deployment came in 1965, flying strikes against North Vietnam. Her aircraft shot down three MiGs, including the first air-to-air kill of the war, but seventeen Midway planes were lost to enemy fire during that cruise alone. In April 1975, during the fall of Saigon, the Midway served as the floating base for Operation Frequent Wind, rescuing more than 3,000 desperate refugees over a chaotic two-day evacuation. In 1991, she served as the flagship for Persian Gulf air operations during Operation Desert Storm. She was decommissioned in San Diego in 1992. After more than a decade of community effort to secure the ship as a museum, the USS Midway Museum opened on June 7, 2004, and quickly became the most visited naval warship museum in the United States, drawing over a million visitors annually.

The paranormal claims aboard the Midway have accumulated steadily since the ship became a museum, though specifics have historically been kept close by staff and volunteers. The museum's curator, David Hanson—who also leads San Diego's largest paranormal investigation group—has investigated the ship's haunting activity for over a decade and maintains a log of all unusual incidents reported by staff, volunteers, and guests. Hanson prefers the term "paranormally active" to "haunted," noting that the spirits present on the Midway are overwhelmingly benign. He estimates that as many as thirty distinct entities have been recorded on the ship in recent years. Most, he believes, are not ghosts of sailors who died aboard the Midway but rather former crewmen who passed away later in life and returned to the ship out of duty and camaraderie. As Hanson has said of them, if that is their choice to be here, the museum welcomes them.

Hanson's paranormal group has identified several spirits by name. A ghost called Monty inhabits the ship's library. Another named Jerome reportedly occupies the third row, third seat from the left in the Battle of Midway theater. A spirit identified as Chad, believed to have served in the Navy in 1953, was found in one of the ship's storage annexes, along with what investigators described as a swirling concentration of unidentifiable spiritual energy. Even before the ship became a museum, at least two hauntings were reported during active service—one occupying a cold storage food locker in the bow of the fourth deck, another in the Career Guidance Counselor's office near the stern.

Visitors report hearing unexplained sounds echoing through corridors and compartments, sudden drops in temperature on the lower decks and in the engine room, the sensation of being watched or followed in isolated areas like the brig and old storage rooms, and the smell of what some describe as old blood in the sick bay area, accompanied by heavy, oppressive air. Museum mannequins positioned throughout the ship to represent sailors have been reported moving or appearing to speak. A phantom figure in uniform has been seen on the flight deck, vanishing when approached. Interestingly, some of the spirits encountered are not military at all—investigators have also identified female spirits and civilians who appear to pass through the ship without remaining, as though the Midway draws visitors from the other side just as it draws over a million living ones each year.

Today the USS Midway Museum hosts more than 700 events annually, including military ceremonies, film screenings, and overnight educational programs where guests can sleep aboard the carrier. Twenty-nine restored aircraft sit on the flight deck and hangar deck. The self-guided audio tour, narrated by former Midway sailors, leads visitors through more than sixty locations. The ship that once carried atomic weapons and launched rescue helicopters over Saigon now carries schoolchildren, veterans, and tourists through corridors where the living and whatever remains of the dead share the same steel passageways—a floating city that never quite emptied out, even after the Navy was done with her.