A Ghost Story
Drive onto the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard located in the northern San Francisco Bay Area, head south and you will drive by many handsome brick buildings located in the heart of the first US naval base on the Pacific. Some sit vacant, some are occupied by businesses, and one is home to a ghost. Lieutenant Commander (LCDR) Samuel Wilson was serving as the executive officer on board USS Ashuelot on the United States Navy’s Asiatic Station. On August 1, 1879, he suffered an epileptic fit and died. Three days later he was buried with full military honors in Japan. For unknown reasons his body was exhumed 3 years later and brought back for burial in the Mare Island cemetery. This process went awry, and it appears that the spirit of Samual Wilson was not happy.
Wilson entered the Naval Academy as a midshipman in 1861 as the United States was embroiled in the Civil War, our Nation’s bloodiest war. His eighteen years of service would take him to Mare Island Naval Shipyard and then to the other side of the world where his path would briefly cross with former President Ulysses Grant. Grant had led the Union Army to victory during the Civil War and served as the 18th U.S. president from 1869 to 1877. In 1879 LCDR Wilson reported to the gunboat USS Ashuelot as the Executive Officer as she lay at anchor in Yokohama Bay Japan. By then, President Grant was completing a two-year long world tour where he was celebrated in an astounding array of nations. That tour had progressed across the globe to Asia and President Grant was being transported from port to port in Vietnam, China and Japan on board the USS Ashuelot, LCDR Wilson’s new command. It was a plum assignment where he would be able to rub shoulders with the most famous man in the world; however, it was to be short lived. LCDR Wilson reported aboard on July 20th and he was then recorded in the ships log to be absent without leave (AWOL) for the next four days. Then, six days later he was dead of what was recorded as apoplexy. LCDR Wilson was buried with full military honors in Yokohama three days later and President Grant left the Ashuelot to continue world tour aboard the warship USS Richmond two weeks after LCDR Wilson’s death, and there the story should have ended, but it didn’t.
For unknown reasons, three years after the burial LCDR Wilson’s remains were exhumed to be re-buried in the Mare Island cemetery. The Navy reported that LCDR Wilson’s ex-wife requested his body be brought to Mare Island; however, she denied ever requesting such a thing. According to a 1930 story in the old “Vallejo Chronicle,” Lt. Cmdr. Wilson’s body hadn’t been buried long when it was exhumed and was shipped aboard the USS Iroquois “well packed in three boxes.” The Iroquois was to be decommissioned and laid up at mid-channel off Mare Island, so her armament was shipped off to the ordnance storehouse, a two-story brick structure built in 1870 that exists to this day. Seven years went by, and his ex-wife decided to send a headstone to the shipyard to mark her former husband’s grave in the cemetery. Things began to unravel when yard officials were unable to locate the grave of LCDR Wilson. Then, his former wife traveled to Mare Island to find the missing body of her former husband. The search eventually located those three boxes in the ordnance storehouse where they had apparently been stored and forgotten. LCDR Wilson’s earthly remains were finally interred in the Mare Island cemetery, but even that wasn’t the end of the story.
It seems Lt. Cmdr. Wilson either liked the ordnance storehouse or resented having been left there for seven years. Whatever the reasons, strange sounds were heard from the building, the fire alarm rang for no reason, and ghostly figures were reported moving around. In addition, an unusual pattern of unexplained accidents happened within the building. The strange occurrences so frightened the workers in the building that they successfully petitioned the Shipyard Commander to have the building illuminated inside and outside both day and night. The practice of illuminating the building when empty only lasted for several years, but workers were still reporting the building as haunted well into the 1980’s.
Dennis Kelly
