As a Marine, who is only spent a few weeks at a time, temporarily living on and off various ships, I can certainly understand why sailors, in the Navy, those who are

permanently assigned to their ships for as long as three years, might feel like they are living

on a floating prison. You can see them, skulking through the narrow passageways, their hailed faces,

often wearing a grim expression, possibly from the lack of sunlight or the ship's constant maintenance issues with infrequent blackouts and loss of power,

which includes the air conditioning, or the need to conserve water and take short and often cold showers.

Maybe it's the quality of the food.

Or otherwise, it's the inconvenience of suddenly having a bunch of rowdy marines

being crammed onto their formerly quiet and once peaceful ship with them.

But jokes aside, while I have never experienced anything so out of the ordinary on ship myself,

what might cause a cold sensation to run down my spine is to find myself

living on a ship and then finding out that the ship is haunted.

I'm Luke Lamanah, and this is wartime stories. The following account was emailed to me by a sailor named Eric, who at the time this story takes place, around 2011 to 2012, he was stationed on the USS Winston Churchill, an Arleigh-Burk-class destroyer out of Norfolk, Virginia.

With the ship's guided missile destroyer class designation being DDG-81, he and his shipmates affectionately refer to their ship as cell block 81. The following is his story.

It happened while we were in port. We had a shipwide blackout. As a damage control petty officer, it was my job to perform maintenance on the ship. So my chief told me he wanted me to walk around the ship and test some of the emergency lighting while the power was out.

It was simple enough. I would get to explore some new parts of the ship in the dark,

and all I had to do was push a button and see if the lights turned on.

But this was the first time I would be going down to

auxiliary room two.

Now, at the time this story takes place, I was fairly new to the ship,

and I had started hearing some stories about a room on the ship,

an engineering space called auxiliary room two.

And when I first heard the stories, I honestly didn't believe it too much,

...