Ghosthunting Maryland. Michael J. Varhola

      USS Torsk is believed by some to be haunted by the ghost of a sailor drowned while trying to get back into the submarine before it submerged.

      … these sites are usually inhabited by the spirits of those who died tragically aboard the vessel. Generally, the ghosts aboard follow many of the same rules of their haunted house cousins, although they usually haunt much smaller venues and must restrict their activities considerably. In addition, [they] seem to possess a uniform sadness.

      —W. Haden Blackman, The Field Guide to North American Hauntings

      INNUMERABLE VESSELS have passed through Baltimore harbor over the more than three centuries that the city has served as one of the most important ports in North America. Some of these have come to stay for good and, like historic buildings, have been restored and can today be visited at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Also like historic buildings, a great many of them—all storied vessels and in several cases veterans of combat in foreign seas or other harrowing action—have ghost stories associated with them. And many of them, even those that are not “officially” occupied by ghosts, participate in “haunted ship” events around Halloween.

      I most recently visited the Inner Harbor and its haunted vessels in June 2009, with my friend Brendan Cass and his mother Susan Cass. That was by no means my first time, however, and ever since I first visited Baltimore as a child nearly four decades ago, and as the various ships have come and gone, I have increasingly come to know them and the ghosts that haunt them.

      USS CONSTELLATION

      Perhaps the most haunted ship in the Inner Harbor—also, probably not coincidentally, the oldest—is USS Constellation. Just how old is not entirely clear, however, and a passionate debate has raged for years over whether the ship actually dates to the late eighteenth century or the mid-nineteenth century. Some explanation is in order.

      In 1797, the U.S. Navy launched USS Constellation—its first ship with that name—a 1,265-ton frigate built in Baltimore that was 164 feet long, 41 feet wide, with a draft of 13 feet, 6 inches, a crew of 340, and armament consisting of thirty-eight twenty-four-pound long guns. For more than five decades, this vessel served the United States around the world, participating in missions throughout the waters of Africa, South America, the West Indies, the East Indies, Hawaii, and the Mediterranean. USS Constellation was, in fact, one of the ships that carried U.S. Marines “to the shores of Tripoli” in North Africa in 1805. It was active in several wars, defeating a number of powerful warships in the 1798–1800 Quasi-War with France and participating in the Barbary Wars, the Seminole Wars, and the War of 1812. By 1853, it had reached the end of its useful service, and it was dismantled at the Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. Its name, however, was never stricken from Navy records.

      That year, the Navy began construction of a slightly larger sloop-of-war that apparently incorporated elements of USS Constellation and was underwritten in part with funds allocated to rebuild the earlier vessel. Commissioned as USS Constellation in 1854, this fourteen-hundred-ton ship was 179 feet long, 41 feet wide, had a draft of 21 feet, and carried a crew of 240 and armaments consisting of sixteen eight-inch shell guns and four thirty-two-pound pivot guns. It served in actions off the coasts of Spain, Cuba, the Congo, and Turkey, and fought in the Civil War, against Confederate commerce raiders in the Mediterranean and blockade runners in the West Indies and along the Atlantic coast of the southern United States. Used in various training and ceremonial roles in the decades following the Civil War, USS Constellation was finally decommissioned in 1933—but was briefly and incredibly returned to service as an admiral’s relief flagship during World War II!