Episode 68 The U.S.S. Yorktown

Major shout out to Adrian Nina who gave me the idea to research this great story. The Fighting Lady (CV-10) U.S.S. Yorktown served in the Pacific theater from 1943 to 1970. It has sat in Charleston Harbour since 1975 in its new mission as a Naval Museum. You can visit her by simply going to Patriot's Point in Mount Pleasant and taking a tour, but there are somethings about this majestic ship you won't see on just any tour.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, folks, this is Jonathan Phoenix, the Carolina Storytellers, coming
to you with an important important message. Okay, this is
an adult podcast, so it shouldn't be listened to by children.
And if you're listening to this, I assume that you're
an adult. And if you're not an adult, that's bad
because some of the things that we cover on this
podcast are topics that really younger ages shouldn't be listening to.

(00:25):
There's murder, there's death, there's blood, guts, and core things
that really they don't want to be exposed to. So
as an adult, I'm gonna ask you to keep the
kids away, but I don't think every one of you
is doing it, So I'm gonna have to do something
to curb this behavior. If you don't stop, maybe I'll
tell your kids where sin is real address this, or
maybe I'll tell them where babies come from, or how

(00:47):
to get a hold of the Easter Buddy and the toothberry,
or maybe I'll just tell them why the mailman always
brings the birthday presents and why Daddy is really mad
about it. So remember, keep the kids away from the
adult material and enjoy the show. This is the Carolina storyteller.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
In the dark ones with shadows, creep stories rise as
the camp art reads John and the voice of hauntsing girl.
With every sale he bends on will and goes whispered
to night's shaws by the fire light of fierce color

(01:32):
lights the caer lot of storyteller joy through the speeching
of thousand five fangles of darknessing night in the night,
the night sales a frightened tread. Every heartbeat a path

(01:55):
we tread, seed expenses.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
What about Welcome back to the Carolina Storyteller, folks, I
am your storyteller, Jonathan Phoenix. I'm really happy to have
you guys here with me again for another spooky Saturday
story time. Today's story isn't so much about one ghost,
more about a place that carries the ghosts with it.

(02:24):
And it's a very interesting story and it's one that
I just feel like has to be told. And what
better time than now. Now. This place is actually very famous.
You may have seen it before. It made a cameo
in the Philadelphia Experiment. I say cameo. It was in
the Philadelphia Experiment. It was in the movie Torah to Torah.

(02:47):
It was one of the ships. I say ship, So
it' should give you a hint of what we're talking about.
That was used for the design for the USS flag.
You know, the Gi Joe's carrier that kids played with.
We're talking about the Essex class carrier, the USS Yorktown,
which since nineteen seventy five has been moored at Patriots

(03:10):
Point in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, just across the Charleston
Harbor from the city of Charleston. And this is a
really famous ship. This ship was It began construction in
nineteen forty one, just around the time that Pro Harbor happened,
you know, when we decided we were going to beef
up our military and the Japanese decided, well we're going

(03:31):
to vomb you. And I can't remember if it was
before or after Pro Harbor, but construction was bigun on it.
During that time, we lost the third ship to be
named the USS Yorktown, and this was CB five. The
Yorktown was taken down and so during its construction, the

(03:55):
name of CV ten was changed to the USS Yorktown.
In April of nineteen forty three, it was officially commissioned.
It did its final checks and its shakedown all the
way up until June, at which point in time it
went and sailed to the Panamat Canal in July and
in August it was in the Pacific Theater and began

(04:16):
doing the raids against Japanese positions in the Pacific for
the remainder of World War Two. During World War II,
it saw several battles, it received several accommodations, and the
Yorktown was present when the surrender of the Japanese happened

(04:36):
on board the USS Missouri in nineteen forty five. So
for two years, Yorktown was a battle hardened ship. They
called her the Fighting Lady. She stayed in Japan actually
a little while after the war to collect all of
our POWs and all of our marines and all of

(04:56):
our men, and then sailed back to ol met to California,
where she brought those men home after serving in some
of the worst battles we'd ever seen in the Pacific Theater.
So in nineteen forty seven, the Yorktown was decommissioned. And

(05:19):
I know you're like, that's really short life for a carrier. Well,
we weren't war at the time, so the Yorktown was
kind of mothball for a little bit taken off off
the battle line. But as you know, we're a warlike country.
So push came to shove and we were getting drawn
back into battles in the Pacific Theater, and the Yorktown

(05:40):
was brought out of mothballs, recommissioned, and retrofitted with new
with new flight decks to accommodate jet aircraft. In nineteen
fifty five, the Yorktown again returned to the Pacific Theater,
where it would serve and for the next fiftheen years,

(06:01):
during the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, plenty of air
raids were launched from the deck of the Yor Town,
and plenty of battles were fought from that ship, and
plenty of men lost their lives. So this ship had
a lifespan if you think about it as a aircraft carrier,

(06:22):
it had a lifespan that spanned three wars. It was
present for you know, thirty years or more, where it
was just in service out there longer than most almost
thirty years, i'm sorry, longer than most soldiers stayed in

(06:44):
the military for full career, full career. You're retiring in
twenty years. The Yorktown was serving from nineteen forty three
to nineteen seventy with only a six year break in
the middle where it was retrofitted and then sent right
back out to battle. The crew of this ship went

(07:07):
through probably some amazing times. And I'm not to say
that there weren't other crews that haven't had amazing times
since then. But this ship had a legacy that it built.
The name The Fighting Lady stuck with it. So in
nineteen seventy five, the ship was sailed from where it
had been mothballed in Newport's, Virginia to the Charleston Harbor

(07:31):
where it was set up as a historic landmark in
Patriots Point, Mount Pleasant and it was noticed as a
National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty and was put on
the Registry of National Historic Places in nineteen eighty two,
and since then it has sat there and served as

(07:53):
a maritime museum for the Navy, educating young people of
well really people, young people and people who are young
at Hart and anybody who wants to know you can
go and you can walk the halls and the decks
of the Yorktown. You can walk amongst the spirits that

(08:13):
still live there. And I say this because the Yorktown
is one of the few places that everybody agrees is haunted.
Not only has the Yorktown been reported to be haunted
by locals and by tourists, but even the TV show
taps you know, Jason and whatever the other guy's name was,

(08:37):
they went on the They went on the York tourn
They even found ghosts there, and is believed that it's
the one of the few scenes on their show where
there is a believable video of a ghost is from
the episode they did on the USS Yorktown. There have
been reports of many people who have been walking through

(08:58):
the halls of this ship as they tour it and
seeing someone walk down a corridor and turn and just
vanish into where a corridor once was. It's believed that
over time, as the crew and complement of this ship
passed on, they returned to New York Town because for

(09:20):
so long it was their home. And when you think
about it, these US Naval ships really do become like
home for people. You know, they live six months at
a time on the ship, then they're home for a
few weeks, and then they're back out, you know, and

(09:40):
you know, most of these people when you get put
on a ship. You're on that ship, that's your ship,
and you know, your first bid four years, four years
on a ship, you get to know a lot of people.
And then if you're a you know, if you're going
to be a what do they call it, a career
military person, you're going to be on that ship for

(10:02):
eight ten years. The Yorktown had almost a thirty year
service life, probably most of it with the same crew,
maybe a different captain here or there, maybe an exo
got moved out. But I guarantee you the guys that
were running the engine room at least on day one

(10:24):
in nineteen forty three were still running it when it
must be commissioned in forty seven, and the guys that
started running it in fifty five were probably still there
in seventy serving on that ship. So it's understandable, especially
when it had seen so many battles, that there would
be so many spirits associated with the Yorktown. So let's

(10:46):
just get into some of the reported sightings that have
happened on this amazing ship. The first being the yeomen
in the engine room, the one I talked about. As
I said, New Yorktown had been retrofitted and it has
been retrofitted multiple times since to fit more of the

(11:09):
tour esthetic. After all, they don't want people going into
places they don't need to be, and they want to
keep it as contained as possible, so you know, walls
have been put up, things have been changed, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Things were moved around in this ship to make it
work better with how the ship was supposed to be

(11:29):
when it launched jet fighters, and then things were changed
again when the ship was decommissioned and set up as
a museum for the people to see. So you have
this yeoman who people have seen, and there is actually
even a photograph out there that has it's kind of

(11:53):
like an overexposure. It looks like of someone in military
uniform standing in the middle of the engine room. And
people have seen the showman walking through the engine room
and turning and just going right into a wall, like
no explanation, no nothing, just bam right into a wall. Gone.
He's just one of many. If you go up a

(12:16):
few decks near one of the command decks where they
have a learning area where you actually there's this sand
table where you can move stand around. It shows the
topography and everything, and it's it's supposed to teach you
about topography, but also how they identify things in the
military and how some of their systems work. And supposedly

(12:40):
in this room there was a fully uniformed military officer
that would stand there with the children while they were learning,
and he would have his arms crossed and he'd watch
over them. And when astroom that was there at the
time went to leave, they asked the tour guide about
the military man, say he was He never said anything

(13:01):
is He just supposed to stand there. And the tour
guide said, there's no one in You're the only ones here.
There's no one else here there that wasn't somebody there,
And of course they did look for him, and they
did not find him. Granted, the teacher doesn't know what
the uniform looked like, so we don't know if this
was an officer. This was just a regular guy. But

(13:23):
he just stood there and watched as the children played,
and he just didn't It wasn't as if he was
transparent or anything. Just looked like a guy standing there.
During the episode of Taps, they are on the flight
deck and all of a suddenly they see a figure
moving across the flight deck and they there's nobody else there.

(13:45):
But then they actually ran across this flight deck. This
flight deck is like six seven hundred yards long. It's
it's a huge ship, understand it. Running along this ship
is very hard, and they go looking and there's nobody there, nobody.
They actually ran into what was I believe it's called

(14:05):
the Medal of Honor Room, which is a closed off
area in one of the hangars that they set up
to celebrate Medal of Honor recipients. And there's nothing there,
absolutely nothing Near one of the fighters that they have
on display. They saw a man once trying to climb

(14:26):
into the fighter. He was dressed as a pilot, he
had all the equipment that an old pilot would have,
and when they went to stop him, he was gone.
He just wasn't there. He wasn't in the plane, he
wasn't on the ground. He was gone. Next up we have,

(14:48):
and this is one of the most interesting ones, is
that people swear they've seen someone in the Apollo a
capsule the USS Yorktown one of its other more famous
entries into history. They're the ones that went and got
the Apollo eight capsule when it came back down to Earth.

(15:09):
So they rescued an Apollo capsule, and there is a
thing there in the museum where you can, you know,
climb into an Apollo capsule. I don't know if it's
the actual capsule or if it's a replica, but you
can sit in the Apollo capsule and imagine what it's
like to be an astronaut coming back down to Earth
after you've been in space for five six days, you know,

(15:31):
and you're getting parachuted down to Earth a mock Jesus,
you know. It's just an amazing opportunity to have to
sit there and see this piece of history. But people
swear that they have seen someone in what looks like
some kind of uniform around and in the capsule, even

(15:53):
though there's no one there dressed like that. Understand, these
tour guides mostly they're not really dressed in a military uniform.
They are there to just tour you around. And it's
become such a phenomenon that there is actually a ghost
tour of the York Town that meets a Patriots Point
at last for an hour and a half and they

(16:14):
go through and they tell you where all of these
ghost sightings are, and you get a chance to go
and look for all of these ghosts. And it's like
thirty seven dollars a person to go on this tour,
and people go every all the time just to go
up to the York Town and spend an hour and
a half walking around this beautiful ship. And I say

(16:40):
beautiful because it really is a beautiful work of engineering
for a ship that size. And when you see how
big the ship is, you don't really appreciate the size
of an aircraft area until you're standing below one looking
up and going, oh my god, because it is just massive.

(17:04):
These were floating cities. They had you know, laundry rooms,
they had mess halls, they had medical suites, they had
a break they had places to store all kinds of
all the stuff that they needed to take for the
Marines with them when they were taking the Marines in
the battle. They had the planes that had to be
kept in hangers, they had fuel storage, all of this

(17:26):
stuff in this massive ship that was set to go
out and for people to live on for six months
at a time during wartime and you know, if not longer,
you know, And this massive thing, and people to this

(17:46):
day are going and trying to find the ghosts on it,
and every day somebody swears they've seen something new, something interesting.
So that's our story for it today. And it might
not necessarily be a story so much as it is
history of a place, not really a place, but a

(18:07):
ship that's in a place. It's a mobile place, you
get what I'm saying. I hope you guys enjoyed that story,
and I hope that if you do come to Charleston,
South Carolina, and you ever do get down here, I
hope that you visit the Patriots Point Naval Museum. You
could see the Yorktown. They also have a submarine there

(18:27):
and a couple of other ships and some planes and everything,
and it is really a great educational experience and a
way to see how far we've come and where we
came from and maybe where we're going as far as
the American military is concerned, and to see what the

(18:48):
people who came before us had to do to protect
and serve this country. Because regardless of where you stand
on or where you stand on everything else, the men
and women who died on that ship and who died
fighting for freedom do deserve your respect, and they do
deserve the accolades that they earn in service to the country.

(19:11):
So that's our story for tonight. I really hope you
guys enjoyed it. Remember, you can support this podcast by
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(19:35):
So just to hint there, Valmont's going to be dropping
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but it's a dollar a month to get the Valmont
Pass to be able to listen to Valmont two weeks

(19:55):
before everybody else. I'm just saying it might be worth it.
Thanks for tuning in, folks. I really appreciate he appreciate
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The Carolina Storyteller. That's our show. Stay spooky, my friends.

(20:16):
We'll see you next time.