Maureen instructed them to, the imager’s screen showed a strange distortion hovering a few feet away. Maureen suddenly fell down and began to cry out as she rolled around on the ground. The team got on the ground with her and encouraged Maureen to fight whatever was attacking her. This worked and all went quiet. When they looked for the creepy distortion again with the thermal imager, they could not find it. The member of their team who was operating the imager is a professional firefighter who has been fully trained in the use of the sophisticated device. He told me he has never seen anything like that distortion before.
As we were all about to call it a night, it happened again. Maureen Wood started to behave strangely. She threw off her handbag and began growling with a twisted look on her face. She almost backed into the quarry pool. Because we were standing at the bottom of the ledge, the fall wouldn’t have been much, but the water is very deep. She and anyone else who may have jumped in to pull her out could have drowned. Ron and Christopher had to tackle Maureen and take her to the ground to stop her from going into the water. As they held her down, calling her back from whatever force was attacking her, Ron dislocated one of his fingers. While all this was happening, I was shooting video in infrared. As I watched the whole event unfold through the camera’s view screen, I noticed a strange little light appear behind the group as they huddled around Maureen on the ground. The light lasted for thirteen seconds before it disappeared. I walked right up to the spot where the point of light was, and I found nothing on the ground, such as broken glass, that could account for what I’d seen.
The Lady of The Ledge haunts the old Assonet quarry.
We packed all of the team’s equipment into my vehicle, and I drove Ron Kolek, Maureen Wood, and another female member of their team back to the Reservation. Christopher Balzano and the other three male members of Ron’s expedition walked back along the road under the light of the full moon. When Christopher and his party reached the parking lot, they reported another sighting of the weird distortion. As they were walking along State Forest Road, the three members of Ron’s team estimated that they were not too far from the area where they had seen the distortion earlier that night. Even though they weren’t in exactly the same spot, they felt it was worth a shot. They turned on the thermal imager and began scanning the forest. As they scanned the forest, the distortion reappeared. As before, the anomaly started off as a head-sized blob, but grew rapidly. As it grew, it began to move towards them. Christopher told me later that he could not explain what he had seen on the thermal imager’s screen. He only had a few seconds to observe the distortion because the three brave members of the New England Ghost Project took off running down the road with the imager in hand. In the world of ghosthunting, we call a panicked reaction like this “pulling a Scooby-Doo.”
CHAPTER 4
USS Salem
QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS
AFTER 102 YEARS OF SHIPBUILDING HISTORY, the Fore River shipbuilding facility in Quincy, Massachusetts, was closed down in 1986. In 1993, thanks to the dedicated efforts of local officials and volunteers, the location was reopened as the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum. It was decided that the proper centerpiece for this heritage site should be a naval vessel that was actually built and laid down at the old shipyard. Through negotiations with the United States Navy, the museum was able to obtain the USS Salem (CA-139) out of Philadelphia where it had been in “mothballs” for thirty-five years. The Salem finally returned home to Quincy, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1994. On May 14, 1995 (the forty-sixth anniversary of her original commissioning), the USS Salem was re-commissioned as a member of the Historic Naval Ships Association.
The Des Moines class heavy cruiser was found in remarkably good condition, even though the ship’s interior should have been badly corroded from all the years it sat idle. Years ago, budget cuts forced the U.S. Navy to order the shutdown of all the dehumidification systems that were protecting their deactivated ships from rusting away while in storage. It is believed that somewhere along the chain of command, someone may have disregarded those orders and allowed the dehumidifiers on the Salem to continue running, perhaps out of love for the old lady. This action (or inaction) protected the ship from years of damaging moisture. It has been estimated that this heavy cruiser, in her present condition, could be made seaworthy and combat-ready in only eight months. This is a pretty amazing fact, especially when one takes into consideration that the Salem was launched in 1947.
At seven hundred feet in length and seventy-seven feet at her beam, the Salem is quite an intimidating battlewagon. Armed with nine eight-inch guns, twelve five-inch guns, and eighteen three-inch guns, this heavy battle cruiser once packed a powerful punch. However, in its ten years of service, the Salem never fired a shot in anger. During the Cold War, the USS Salem played more of a diplomatic role while operating as flagship for the Second Fleet in the Atlantic and for the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
She was the first ship to respond to the massive earthquake that devastated the Ionian Islands off Greece in 1953. The ship’s crew helped rescue civilians from the terrible destruction and evacuated the injured to the Salem for emergency treatment. Unfortunately, many of those people were too badly hurt and they passed away while onboard. It is believed that some of the ghosts haunting the vessel are lost souls from that horrible tragedy in Greece.
The ship’s wardroom served as the officer’s mess and conference room. There has been a great deal of paranormal activity experienced in this area of the ship.
I was invited to take part in a paranormal investigation of the USS Salem by two colleagues of mine, Kathy Caslin and Eric LaVoie. Don DeCristofaro, a former sailor, gave us a tour of the ship. Don is currently serving as a tour guide for the USS Salem and has come to accept the ghosts that haunt the ship’s passageways and cabins. I asked Don about the victims who died aboard the Salem during the humanitarian mission in Greece and whether he thought their deaths might be a source of the paranormal activity that’s been reported throughout the ship since it opened as a museum. Don replied by saying, “The women and children who are entities aboard the ship, it’s only natural to assume they are Greek civilians. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would be surprised if there was a ship in the history of the United States Navy that saw no action, but saw as much death as the Salem.”
On a much brighter note, there were over twenty successful births delivered by the ship’s medical staff. Sadly though, there were also a number of mothers and babies lost during childbirth due to the trauma they had suffered in the earthquake. The ship’s surgery is felt by some to be haunted by the spirits of those women and their infants who died on the operating table. People have reported hearing female voices coming from inside the surgery, and some claimed to have seen a dark form, like a person’s shadow, moving around in the room’s confined space.
An incident that took place in the ship’s wardroom during a previous investigation also appears to support the belief that there are spirits of women haunting the Salem. In the summer of 2010, Don DeCristafaro was assisting a ghosthunting group whose founders are also husband and wife. The team had decided to use the wardroom as their base of operations for the night, despite the fact that one of the two psychics who works with them had said she felt “something strange” about the room. Perhaps they should have listened to her psychic intuition because as Don said, “Things got so bad in here we had to turn on all the lights and call the husband on the radio to come get his wife because she kinda’ puddled.”
What Don meant by “bad” was that the atmosphere in the room got very heavy. A short while after the husband had left with the other half of their group to investigate the lower decks, the wardroom became very active
