👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9477
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USS Salem (CA-139)
USS Salem (CA-139) is a location reputed to be haunted in Massachusetts, US. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is USS Salem (CA-139)?
- Location
- Massachusetts, US
- Type
- Ship
- Coordinates
- 42.244, -70.97
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is USS Salem (CA-139) said to be haunted?
USS Salem (CA-139) is the last heavy cruiser the United States built and, by her museum's account, the only one preserved anywhere. She lies at Pier 3 of the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the yard that laid her keel on 4 July 1945. In ten years of service she made seven Mediterranean deployments as flagship of the Sixth Fleet and never fired her guns in anger. The ghost story sold aboard her rests on four days of August 1953, when she was the first American ship to reach the Ionian islands after an earthquake that killed 476 people and injured 2,412. The museum's own paranormal page states that no record exists of how many civilians she treated, then estimates well over a thousand, many of them mortally hurt. The Navy's contemporary accounts describe provisions, medicine, water and collected clothing, with the badly injured flown out by the Air Force. The oldest datable trace of the haunting is a Halloween attraction advertised on the museum's website in 2001, at eight dollars for adults.
What is the history of USS Salem (CA-139)?
The Navy's own reference work compresses the ship's origin into one sentence, and misspells the sponsor's surname halfway through it: “The third Salem (CA-139) was laid down on 4 July 1945 by the Bethlehem Steel Co., Quincy, Mass.; launched on 25 March 1947; sponsored by Miss Mary G. Coffey, sister of the Honorable Edward A. Coffee, Mayor of Salem, Mass.; and commissioned on 14 May 1949, Capt. John C. Daniel in command.” The keel went down at the Fore River Shipyard a month before Hiroshima, and by the time the hull touched water the war the Des Moines class had been designed for was eighteen months over. Salem is moored today at the pier where she was built.
Her whole career fits inside the decade that followed. The Naval History and Heritage Command sets out the pattern: “Salem made her first ‘Med’ cruise in May-September 1950. Subsequent annual deployments took place in March-September 1951, April-September 1952, April-October 1953, May-September 1954 and May-September 1955.” Each of those cruises began with the same handover, Salem relieving her sister Newport News or Des Moines as flagship of the Sixth Fleet and being relieved by one of them in the autumn. In 1956 she was made “permanent” Sixth Fleet flagship with a homeport at Villefranche, and the Suez crisis diverted her to Rhodes on 14 May before she had finished the crossing. She was still abroad for the Jordan crises of April and August 1957, and the Lebanese request for aid of 15 August 1958 bought her a last reprieve from the breakers' queue.
The fourth deployment is the one the ship is now sold on. Three earthquakes hit the Ionian islands in four days in August 1953. The Significant Earthquake Database of the United States National Centers for Environmental Information records a magnitude 6.3 shock on 9 August, a surface-wave magnitude 6.8 shock at Asprogerakas on 11 August at 03:32, and the destroying one at 09:23 on 12 August between Lixouri and Argostoli: surface-wave magnitude 7.2, maximum intensity X, 476 dead, 2,412 injured and 30,439 houses destroyed across Kefalonia, Zakynthos and Ithaca. DANFS gives Salem four sentences on what followed: “Her fourth deployment was marked by Exercise Weldfest and by emergency relief work after an earthquake devastated the Ionian Islands. Salem was the first American ship to arrive on the scene, and provided humanitarian aid in the form of relief supplies and assistance from 13 August until her own stocks ran low four days later.”
The Bureau of Naval Personnel described the operation two months later, in the October 1953 issue of All Hands, under the headline “Armada Aids Quake Victims”. It named eleven American ships with Salem at their head, one more than the ten its own opening line claims, among them the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, the cruiser Baltimore and the LSD Casa Grande, and it described what the fleet actually did: “The U.S. warships donated all their provisions to the stricken Greeks except for enough rations and the minimum other supplies to enable the ships to rejoin other units of the Sixth Fleet. Aboard the ships the men responded to an appeal for old clothing. Shoes, old uniforms, underwear and socks were collected.” The seriously hurt left by air: “Also assisting in the rescue operations were a helicopter and two amphibious planes of the U.S. Air Force which evacuated hundreds of the more seriously injured islanders.” The Marines went in with bulldozers to open a path inland.
Salem was decommissioned on 30 January 1959 and, in the NHHC's phrase, “remained in ‘mothballs’ there for over three decades” at Philadelphia. She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 12 July 1991 and donated to the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum on 13 October 1994, “the last of the three-ship class, Des Moines and Newport News having been dismantled and scrapped.” The museum dates its own ceremony precisely: “On 14 May, 1995 – 46 years to the day since her original commissioning – Salem was re-commissioned – this time as a member of the Historic Naval Ships Association.” The museum calls her “the world's only preserved heavy cruiser”.
Timeline: the documented record of USS Salem (CA-139)
- 4 July 1945 Keel laid at the Bethlehem Steel Co. yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, a month before Hiroshima and two months before the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay.
- 25 March 1947 Launched, sponsored by Miss Mary G. Coffey, sister of the mayor of Salem, Massachusetts — the name DANFS spells twice, and differently, in the same sentence.
- 14 May 1949 Commissioned with Capt. John C. Daniel in command. The museum adds that the order had been placed on 14 June 1943 and that the commissioning took place at the Boston Navy Yard.
- 17 May 1950 Relieves her sister Newport News as flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, the first of seven such deployments.
- 12 August 1953, 09:23 Surface-wave magnitude 7.2 earthquake between Lixouri and Argostoli, maximum intensity X: 476 dead, 2,412 injured and 30,439 houses destroyed, after foreshocks on 9 and 11 August.
- 13-17 August 1953 Salem is the first American ship on the scene and gives out relief supplies and assistance until, in the words of DANFS, “her own stocks ran low four days later”.
- October 1953 All Hands, the Bureau of Naval Personnel magazine, publishes “Armada Aids Quake Victims”, naming eleven American ships and crediting the evacuation of the badly injured to one Air Force helicopter and two amphibious aircraft.
- 30 January 1959 Decommissioned after ten years of service and laid up in the reserve fleet at Philadelphia, where she stayed for over three decades.
- 12 July 1991 Stricken from the Naval Vessel Register, by then the last survivor of a class whose other two ships had been scrapped.
- 13 October 1994 Donated to the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum at Quincy and moored at the yard that built her; re-commissioned as a museum ship on 14 May 1995, forty-six years to the day after the first time.
- 26 December 2001 (page captured) The oldest datable trace of the ghost trade: the museum's own site advertises a Halloween attraction aboard on 19-21 and 26-31 October, “Adults - $8 & Kids - $5”, under the slogan “SURVIVAL NOT GUARANTEED!”, with the masthead already reading “The Sea Witch”.
- 31 August 2016 Boston Magazine announces Ghost Ship Harbor, more than 60,000 square feet of haunted attraction aboard, tickets from $29.99, and quotes founder Matt DiRoberto on the choice of venue: “For us, it was really important to try to find something that was haunted.”
- 10 October 2018 Halloween decorations catch fire aboard; CBS Boston reports the Coast Guard attributing the blaze to “festive decorations” and no injuries. The attraction closed for the season and its website never announced another one.
- 15 October 2019 Travel Channel broadcasts “Ship of Anguished Spirits”, the third episode of Most Terrifying Places; the museum links to it from its paranormal page as the ship's television credential.
Is there a rational explanation for USS Salem (CA-139)?
The haunting has a single documented origin, and it is the museum's own sales page. Under “Paranormal Experience”, the site explains where the dead came from: “In August of 1953 there were 113 recorded earthquakes in Greece. The worst of these was on August 12, when a quake measuring 7.2 on the surface wave magnitude scale shook the Ionian Island region. With no medical facilities of any consequence, ships from several navies sprung into action. The largest of these ships was Salem. While no record exists of the number of civilians she treated over the course of her 4 day stay, the number is estimated to be well over a thousand, and of those thousand many suffered mortal injuries.” The sentence disposes of itself: no record exists, and then a figure is given anyway. The arithmetic finishes the job. The whole disaster, across three islands and three shocks, produced 476 dead and 2,412 injured in the American federal earthquake database; a thousand casualties treated aboard one cruiser in four days would be more than two fifths of every injured person in the Ionian islands, and “many suffered mortal injuries” would have to come out of a death toll that Greek and American seismology assigns to collapsed houses.
The two contemporary Navy accounts describe a different operation. DANFS says “relief supplies and assistance”. All Hands, writing in October 1953 with the fleet's own reporting in front of it, says provisions, drugs, water and collected clothing, with the badly hurt flown out by an Air Force helicopter and two amphibious aircraft. The index to volume 22 of the United States Navy Medical News Letter, which covers 10 July through 25 December 1953 in 3,443 words, has no entry for Greece, the Ionian islands or the earthquake, while the same index carries 26 uses of “medical” and 12 of “hospital”. That silence proves nothing on its own about what the sick bay did in those four days; the deck logs for August 1953, Record Group 24 at the National Archives, would settle it, and this article was written without them.
The ship's dead sailors are asserted with no name and no date anywhere in the material consulted, and DANFS records no accident, collision or fatality in ten years of service. Nothing here is attributed to any crewman of the Salem, because nothing found gives one.
What can be dated is the trade. On 26 December 2001 the museum's website was already advertising a Halloween attraction aboard the ship on 19-21 and 26-31 October, “Adults - $8 & Kids - $5”, with the line “SURVIVAL NOT GUARANTEED!”. In 2016 the haunt went industrial: Ghost Ship Harbor took over more than 60,000 square feet of the vessel, and its founder Matt DiRoberto told Boston Magazine on 31 August what the selection criterion had been — “For us, it was really important to try to find something that was haunted” — while the attraction's own site added a disclaimer that “Ghost Ship Harbor makes no guarantees” about seeing a ghost. A fire among Halloween decorations on 10 October 2018 ended that season; CBS Boston reported that the Coast Guard blamed “festive decorations” and that nobody was hurt, and the operator's site, still online in July 2023, never advanced past its own notice of closure. The domain now serves an unrelated foreign gambling page.
Meanwhile the same museum publishes a ship history — 369 words of narrative and a table of guns and boilers — in which the words ghost, haunted, spirit and earthquake appear zero times. The story that fills the paranormal page is absent from the history page of the same website. A frequently repeated claim that the ship appeared on Syfy's Ghost Hunters could not be tied to any episode: the series' episode list carries ships named North Carolina, Lexington and Hornet, and no Salem. The Travel Channel episode the museum links to is datable: “Ship of Anguished Spirits”, third of Most Terrifying Places, first broadcast on 15 October 2019, whose published synopsis speaks of a decommissioned warship without naming her.
Can you visit USS Salem (CA-139)?
The museum sits at 549 South Street, Pier 3, Quincy, Massachusetts 02169, inside the former Fore River Shipyard, and its directions name a landmark rather than a gate number: “Use Quincy Shipyard entrance across from Pete's Bar & Grille.” The published telephone is 617-479-7900. The season, as advertised on 7 September 2026, runs “April 18 – November 22, 2026 – Saturdays & Sundays and Fridays during July & August. Closed Saturday, July 4, 2026.” Opening is “10AM – 4PM (Last Admission 3:00PM)”.
Admission is $20 for adults, $15 for active military, veterans and seniors over 65, $15 for children aged 4 to 12, and free under 4. The museum takes part in the Mass Cultural Council's Card to Culture scheme: “EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare cardholders can purchase $5 tickets per person.” Groups of ten or more are asked to book ahead, and guided tours are “subject to tour guide availability”.
Public transport is by bus, and the nearest rapid-transit station is Quincy Center. The museum's own instruction: “USS Salem is accessible by public transportation via 220, 222, and 225 bus routes from Quincy Center MBTA Station. Bus stops are approximately at ten minute walk to the museum.”
The tour goes down into the hull — “Visit one of the ship's four engine rooms and sit in the captain's chair on the ship's bridge”, and on into the Combat Information Center — which means warship ladders and hatch coamings; the museum publishes no accessibility statement, and group access to the library and archives is by appointment only.
The ghost hunts are a separate product run by an outside group. The Greater Boston Paranormal Associates advertise five-hour investigations “on select Friday and Saturday nights from 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM for $50 per person”, equipment included, with a list that runs from electro-magnetic field detectors to “Grid Emitting Lasers”. The price was $45 when the same page was archived on 11 August 2020. As of 7 September 2026 that page still announced the 2025 season, so anyone after a date has to write to the address given on it.
Sources consulted
- Naval History and Heritage Command, «Salem III (CA-139)» — Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS), 2015 archive
- Bureau of Naval Personnel, «Armada Aids Quake Victims» — All Hands, no. 440 (October 1953), 1953 newspaper archive
- National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA), «Significant Earthquake Database: Greece, 1953 (events of 9, 11 and 12 August)» — NCEI/WDS Global Significant Earthquake Database, 2026 report
- United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum, «A Rich History of Shipbuilding and Naval Duty (ship history)» — uss-salem.org, 2026 web
- United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum / Greater Boston Paranormal Associates, «Dare to Experience the Paranormal Aboard Our Ship» — uss-salem.org, 2026 web
- United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum, «Plan Your Visit: admission, schedule and directions» — uss-salem.org, 2026 web
- Madeline Bilis, «This Haunted Ship in Quincy Is the Stuff of Nightmares» — Boston Magazine, 31 August 2016, 2016 newspaper archive
- CBS Boston, «Halloween Decorations Catch Fire On USS Salem» — CBS News Boston, 10 October 2018, 2018 newspaper archive
- United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum, «USS Salem CA-139 'The Sea Witch': Haunted Ship (archived capture of 26 December 2001)» — Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2001 archive
- Ghost Ship Harbor, «Ghost Ship Harbor home page with the closure notice of 24 October 2018 (archived capture of 22 July 2023)» — Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2023 archive
- Naval History and Heritage Command, «USS Salem (CA-139): ship overview and photographic holdings» — NHHC Photography Collection, 2020 archive
- Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, U.S. Navy, «United States Navy Medical News Letter, Vol. 22 (10 July - 25 December 1953), Index» — NavMed 369, 1953 report
- TheTVDB, «Most Terrifying Places, season 1 episode 3: 'Ship of Anguished Spirits' (15 October 2019)» — TheTVDB episode record, 2019 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-09-07 · How we verify our content
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