Pics on page.CASTLE - History’s hulking metal shells draw crowds of thousands each year at Castle Air Museum, triggering the imagination of visitors wondering whose faces once stared out from the cockpits of the old warbirds.
For most, their daydreams are nothing more than flights of fancy, no pun intended.
But a few believers in the paranormal think a face is still staring from the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress called “Raz’n Hell,” an aircraft made up of parts of three B-29s gathered at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake in 1980.
“I’d like to think of myself as an open-minded person and I know there are a lot of things we can’t explain,” said Tom Cavallero, former crew chief of the plane. “There are a lot of interesting planes here and this one has its celebrity in the fact that it’s haunted.”
Soon after “Raz’n Hell” was pieced together, workmen and museum officials began relating stories about spooky happenings in and around the old plane.
And whether or not you’re a believer, word about the plane has made it famous.
“People have actually stopped and asked if this is the haunted plane, so the story is out there,” Cavallero said.
Karen Machen, executive assistant at the museum, said a man working to restore the aircraft got a little spooked after asking his friend to hand him a wrench.
“He thought his partner handed him the wrench, but he was somewhere else, smoking a cigarette,” Machen said.
The man Machen thinks may have handed the wrench to the workman is “Arthur,” a ghost whose name was said to have been spelled out one night long ago during a session on a Ouija board.
Another story goes that passers-by who thought that the crew was trying to restore the plane’s electrical system drove by late at night and saw that all the lights were on, Machen said.
The next day, those passers-by congratulated the crew, only to be informed that the electrical system had not yet been restored.
Machen said she even captured a wavery image of Arthur while photographing the planes.
“I don’t think he’s causing any harm to anybody,” she said. “He’s just not at peace yet. He’s not ready to rest.”
Some other believers turned up for a ghost hunt at Castle earlier this month, when members of Ghost Trackers, an organization dedicated to “the research and investigation of ghostly activity,” and members of the Central California Paranormal Investigators joined forces.
And while the team walked Castle’s grounds beneath a full moon from about 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., the ghostliest hours were between 10 p.m. and the early morning hours.
“The theory is that the veil between the earth plain and the other world is thin during a full moon, and during those hours,” said Jackie Meador of CCPI.
Meador and her husband, Mark, used videotape in an attempt to catch footage of potential ghostly energy, while Gloria Young and Jim Carter of Ghost Trackers used a Geiger counter and an electromagnetic field detector to record any unseen traffic.
“We saw at least one entity that we believe might be something,” Mark Meador said. “We saw something unexplainable.”
That unexplainable something showed up on videotape that recorded and reportedly captured the images of a “sprit” that cannot be seen by the naked eye, Meador said.
“Basically, what we’re looking for is a manifestation of spirit energy,” Jackie Meador said.
That energy, she added, usually shows up in the form of orbs or lights.
And Meador believes that “Arthur” sticks around because he likes the digs.
“I think that’s where he’s comfortable,” she said. “It’s probably where he’s happiest.”
Meador said that the crew of Ghost Trackers picked up readings on their Geiger counter inside the cockpit of the plane, in which the other crew videotaped for hours.
“Raz’n Hell” was a bomber during World War II, when it carried 20,000 pounds of bombs into battle, Cavallero said.
“There’s no way we can know every battle these planes were in,” he said. “Not just this plane, but all the planes out here have stories both heroic and tragic.”
rynner said:I know nothing about airport ghosts, but I was born in Middlesex and lived in Hounslow until I was 8, so I did a websearch on Hounslow Heath, which was the site of what (in those postwar years) became Heathrow Airport. I was surprised how much history the place has.
There has been flying from there since 1919 or earlier, but before that it was a haunt of highwaymen, including Dick Turpin. For hundreds of years there were also gunpowder factories along the nearby River Crane, and Oliver Cromwell infested the area too. Of especial interest to me, the first baseline for the Ordnance Survey mapping of Britain was laid out on the heath.
Spudrick68 said:Are there many WWII airfields still in existence? I have one of the Ghost Stations books didn't know there were eight.
Currie, Jack. Echoes in the Air: A Chronicle of Aeronautical Ghost Stories.
ISBN: 9780859791632
Binding: Paperback
Dimentions: 234mm x 156mm
Pages: 288
Photos/Illus: b&w photographs and illustrations throughout [Apparently highly atmospheric according to reviews of the previous edition]
Time for some light summer reading? Need a book to take to the beach? Echoes in the Air, the last book by the late Squadron Leader Jack Currie, fits the ticket.
These are all stories of ghosts and ghostly events, most of them stories of young airmen killed during the Second World War and whose spirits -- so it would seem -- were not able to find rest.
...[these] are the ghosts of men or women whose lives ended suddenly, untimely and violently, with their hopes and dreams remaining unfulfilled...and these are the ghosts that continue to appear, however intermittently, usually near the places where they died....
Currie intends this as "a serious exploration of the subject" and his book is delightfully devoid of ghouls and goblins and demons. These are simply stories of what people, many people, report having mysteriously seen and heard-- visions that can only be described as ghostlike.
There is "Lindholme Willie", also known as "Pete the Pole", who died when his Wellington crashed into a bog; his specter was spotted regularly around his airbase for years afterward until his body was finally recovered and buried. There is the crew who abort a landing because they suddenly see a suburban neighborhood where their airfield had been only a moment before; and the residents of a suburban neighborhood who, almost forty years later, suddenly hear the bomber about to land. There is Sergeant Sinclair who died waving his arms on a runway in 1944 and could be seen, a pale figure in the distance, still waving his arms there for years afterward. There is the haunting of his old squadron commander by the ghost of a pilot forced to fly the fatal mission he did not want to make. There are icy fingers and sudden apparitions and unexplained coincidences and many more mysterious visitations.
Supernatural or not, these stories will make you lift your head, look around, and think a bit.
http://stonebooks.com/archives/980802.shtml
I thought that was the Sandhurst entrance examAre there many WWII airfields still in existence? I have one of the Ghost Stations books didn't know there were eight.
To join the RAF you need to answer three questions-
1. What do you breathe?
2. What do you have on your head?
3. Where does a rat live?
Put the three answers together- air hair lair. 'Air hair lair, you're in."
I'll get my coat.![]()
I live in N.E. England, Durham Tees Valley Airport is Haunted. Used as an RAF Base during Second World War. sightings & stories go as follows
[...]
- Thornaby, a town a few miles from Middlesbrough & was an RAF Base during the war has ghosts of Pilots at the old snooker hall, burglar alarms going off at all hours, footsteps & even snooker games & `banter` going on even when theirs no one around.
As a result of its wartime record, 419 Squadron became one of the most decorated units under the RCAF during the war. Over a span of roughly three-and-a-quarter years it logged 400 operational missions (342 bombing missions, 53 mining excursions, 3 leaflet raids and 1 "spoof") involving 4,325 sorties. One hundred and twenty nine aircraft were lost on these operations.
Personnel of No. 419 (Moose) Squadron, RCAF, with an Avro Lancaster B.X aircraft, Middleton St. George, England, 1944
Between January 1943 to March 1944, 419 Squadron was involved in over 200 sorties involving 2400 crewing operations losing 59 aircraft, a rate of one in every 40. 415 men were either killed or taken POW during those 15 months, averaging 4 crews a month. The average crew survival rate was between 2 and 3 months when about 20 missions would be flown. In general mining operations were relatively safer missions. In particular the attacks on German cities intensified from early October when more than 100 crews were regularly dispatched to bomb Frankfurt, Mannheim, Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig and Nuremberg. During March 1944 there was much mining as described earlier, but this was the precursor to 6 Group's 118-crew attack on Nuremberg at the end of the month when it was to suffer its worst lost of thirteen aircraft in a single sortie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/419_Tactical_Fighter_Training_Squadron
THE TEESSIDE GHOST
by Barney Concannon
Since November 1969 when British Midland started to operate the Teesside-London service, there has been a requirement to night-stop crews at Teesside. The nearest and most convenient hotel accommodation, no more than 150 yards from the terminal building, was the St.George Hotel. Very soon this hotel previously the Officers' Mess of R.A.F. Middleton St. George became a home-from-home for many British Midland crews.
Over the years both Flight Deck and Cabin crews have enjoyed many a convivial evening - after the day's work was done, of course - in the salubrious confines of the hotel bar and the not so salubrious west wing. The decoration and quality of the fittings of those freezing rooms at the far end of the West wing were, in those early days, not of the best. The so-called central heating often failed to supply any heat at all, and it became a regular occurrence to request an electric convector heater from reception. Sometimes even the addition of these failed to take away the chill, and extra blankets were needed. The excuse from the management was that those particular rooms were at the 'end' of the central heating system. Perhaps that also accounted for the rusty brown appearance of the water when we ran a bath or tried to clean our teeth! And what about those black bits of God-knows-what floating in the water?
The lack of telephones in the rooms meant that Cyril, the night porter, was entrusted with the task of awakening the early crew. This he did with a personal call, together with that almost forgotten English custom - the morning cup of tea. The friendliness of the hotel staff, from the manager down, far outweighed the minor inconveniences and the St. George soon became one of Midland's most popular night-stops. Friendly relations were quickly established with the local users of the bar facilities, including a large proportion of the airport staff, who would call in for a drink or two, or sometimes more, on their way home. An old piano in the corner of the room would frequently tinkle out a medley of old tunes into the early hours, accompanied by a raucous chorus of the more serious drinkers. It mattered not if you didn't know the words - Cyril would supply a song-sheet! One could say that a good time was had by all - well, nearly all. There was always 'The ghost'!
We soon began to hear stories of a ghostly figure, dressed in lightweight flying overalls, who was reputed to have been seen wandering the corridors of the cold west wing. Occasionally, usually in the early hours, he would visit guests in their rooms. This phantom, apparition, call him what you will, was supposedly the ghost of an RAF pilot whose aircraft had crashed into the then Officers' Mess in the early 50s. Of course, everyone loves to hear a good ghost story, and no doubt the stories floating about the bar have been more than a little embellished with the passage of time. But the stories still continue and the visitations have not ceased. My last recorded incident happened in mid 1988. 1 shall not entertain you with the stories. My aim is to give you the facts as reported to me by the persons involved and the official data concerning the accident itself. You must judge for yourself.
http://www.freewebs.com/barne/articles.htm
Sounds like...your avatar...One of the old research and development buildings is reportedly haunted by phantom footsteps and an apparition of a figure dressed in brown and wearing a large hat.
Sounds like...your avatar...
That's an excellent article, James. Lots of Dambuster connections too. Perhaps more researchers should investigate Derbyshire - it could prove more interesting than photos of orbs, or things that go bump in the night!