USS Midway Museum (CV-41)

According to a USS Midway Museum blog post titled 'Spirits of the Midway' and a 2017 Genea-Musings program writeup describing curator David Hanson's presentation 'Ghosts of the USS Midway,' Hanson has served as the museum's curator since December 2004. As leader of San Diego's largest paranormal research group, he keeps a log of unusual incidents reported by staff, volunteers, and visitors and has authorized historical investigations of the ship.

Hanson explicitly prefers the term 'paranormally active' rather than 'haunted,' arguing that 'haunted' carries negative implications and that most of the activity aboard is residual-energy recordings or returning-crew presences rather than active human-soul intelligences. He has estimated approximately thirty entities aboard, the majority of whom he believes are not people who died aboard the ship — Midway's combat-era casualty count was unusually low for a carrier of her tenure — but rather former crew who passed away later in life and returned out of loyalty.

Two specific reports recur in his materials and in regional paranormal sources. The first concerns a Navy-uniformed man seen near the engine room area. The second is associated with a food cold-storage locker in the bow of the fourth deck; during an early investigation an EVP recording is reported to capture a voice asking 'What is the name of this ship?' Other reported phenomena include disembodied voices, sudden cold spots in interior compartments, and the sound of footsteps and equipment moving in empty berthing areas.

The museum no longer permits structured paranormal investigations aboard but treats the lore openly through the curator's published materials. Lore here is unusually well-anchored for a museum ship: multi-source, named-curator-attributed, with a documented institutional log and decades of staff-and-volunteer reports.