Atomic ghost stories or folklore?

Factual Questions
1

I have a question I have wondered about for some time now, so I’m going to brave the forum. It’s October, and a good time to discuss ghost folklore, and this comes to my mind every year during the late summer and fall.

Are there any ghost stories or tales of hauntings related to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I have done a little searching and have not come up with much. The bombings were the kind of horrific event that you would think would inspire that kind of thing.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am always interested in hearing the stories or folklore - you learn a lot about people’s fears and culture from them. Atomic history has been a fascination of mine for a long time; I’ve always wondered about this particular aspect of it.

I’d also be interested in any similar stories relating to any form of atomic history in the USA or anywhere else.

2

I have no cite, & only a vague recollection, that a Japanese philosopher speculated that atomic weapons can destroy the Human soul.

That’s as close as I can get.

3

There is a novel that uses a related idea as a key part of its plot (though it isn’t exactly a ghost story). Unfortunately, giving the name of the novel would constitute a spoiler since the reveal of what caused the phenomena in question occurs some distance into the book. But if you’re really curious the novel is…

The novel is Psychlone by Greg Bear.

Brief summary

[spoiler]The military enlists a group of psychics to investigate an unknown phenomena that is causing large groups of people to go into murderous rages; entire towns are literally killing themselves.

They eventually determine that the phenomena (the Psychlone of the title) is made up of the souls of a group of US prisoners of war that were being held in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. The bomb damaged their souls in some way and has prevented them from “moving on”, they have gone insane and are trying to strike back at the country that they feel was responsible for what happened to them.

The novel ends with the development of a weapon that can literally destroy souls and the realization of what such a weapon means.[/spoiler]

4

I’m not familiar with that phenomenon.

5

I can’t think of any Japanese stories, either fictional or purportedly factual, of Hiroshima or Nagasaki related hauntings. However, some Western writers have suggested that earlier Japanese ghost folklore has helped shape elements of their reactions to the bombing.

Thus John Dower’s essay “Japanese Artists and the Atomic Bomb” (in his collection Japan in War and Peace) argues that traditional Japanese ghosts often behave like zombies, shuffling forward in a slouched fashion. He then sees this specific imagery picked up in accounts and paintings that depict the victims: columns of the blinded staggering through the devastated streets like “processions of ghosts”.
Meanwhile, Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life, on the psychological impact and aftermath of the bombings, suggests that the fairly universal notion of the not properly buried being the “homeless dead” forced to walk the world as ghosts is a component of the “survivor guilt” seen amongst those who didn’t die. But he makes only a fairly rudimentary attempt to tie this to particular Japanese beliefs.

Both Dower and Lifton note the way that remembering the dead from the two attacks has become tied up with the existing August Bon festival, which is a sort of parallel to All Souls Night/Day of the Dead. Hence the ceremonies of marking the bombings using the traditional paper lanterns on the rivers.

6

Yup, it’s a sea story. :smiley:
Seriously, AFAIR, all the events I’m about to recount actually happened.

I used to be in the Navy, and served in the enginerooms on the USS Virginia CGN38. She was a nuclear powered guided missile cruiser, and had two reactors.

She also was inhabited by a mischievous spirit we called “Mr. Happy.” Mr. Happy made bad things happen in the enginerooms. For most part it was the normal crap that always gets blamed on ghosts: parts wearing out too fast, idiots turning the wrong valve, over filling a potable water tank. Stupid stuff that no one would really assign responsibility to a spirit.

But, the story was, that there was a need for “good juju” to keep Mr. Happy within the bounds of reasonable behavior. Good juju was supplied in the form of cleaned chicken bones, kept in part of the dead space within the Reactor Plant Control Panel. No one officially took notice of the chicken bones, of course. Placating a mythical spirit with good juju was not the sort of thing that happened in Rickover’s Navy, even if the old man had been dead for some years by that time.

So, for most of my three years aboard the ship, the chicken bones were in the RPCP, and Mr. Happy was kept to the minor stuff I’d mentioned above.

Then we were getting ready for a visit from the Nuclear Mobile Training Team, an inspection team that helped nuclear powered ships get ready for the Nuke Navy’s regular Operational Safeguards Reactor Exam (ORSE). Now, the ORSE is a cast-iron, gold-plated son-of-a-bitch of a evaluation, involving major lack of sleep, many, many drills, and observed evaluations for all the crew, and especially in the enginerooms.

So, NMTT sets itself up to be even harder. On the theory that the best training scenarios are those that are more difficult than the real thing will be.

Well, this was going to be the last NMTT visit to the Virginia, because she was slated to be decomissioned as part of the 1990s ‘Peace Dividend.’ The Captain and the Chief Engineer were both determined that there would be no slacking in our crew because of that dead-end destination. And so a lot of people were cleaning things up that hadn’t been cleaned in years.

And the Reactor Controls Division LPO for #2 Engineroom took the chicken bones out of the RPCP. Since, of course, it was nothing more than superstition. IIRC he did this the day before, or the day that NMTT embarked.

Whichever day it was, the first full night that NMTT was onboard we had a reactor scram in #2 plant. The cause of that was never found, IIRC.

The next day during a series of observed evolutions #2 plant scrammed again, because of a failed component in one of the reactor control panels. Which made for a much more interesting observed evolution, IMNSHO. If more stressful. (I was in the middle of an observed primary coolant sample at the time, so I remember that pretty vividly.)

Finally, that night, in the middle of the night, one of the circuit breakers in the electrical plant failed. Under normal operations we had both reactor plants up, and the power generated in one plant would be used to supply electricity for the forward power loads, and the other plant would be used to supply electricity to the after power loads. (Calling the popwer loads forward and aft is a bit of a misnomer - both went through the length of the ship, so that even if one power system failed there would be some lighting, and other electrical supply available.) This circuit breaker was the main cross connect breaker between the two power systems.

The way it failed was unique in the experience of everyone on board. It failed so that the electromagnet that would normally close the breaker (For those not familiar with electrical power conventions: when a circuit breaker is said to be open, there’s no current path through it; when a circuit breaker is closed current can pass through it.) when it was put into operation was trying to close the breaker. Since this was being done during normal operation, the two power plants were not in phase - which means that trying to cross-connect them was bad. The currents across the breaker were so high that the emergency disconnect on the breaker opened it.

And as soon as it cooled down again, the original malfunction tried to close it again. The currents were such that it was closing for on the order of 1 second, or less. And the cool down portion of the cycle was only another 1 or 2 seconds.

This went on for about 30 seconds, with no one in either engineroom really understanding what was going on, except that electrical power loads were spiking very, very high, on both systems. This affected the power to the reactor plant panels, again - and the safety features there decided something wasn’t kosher. So this time both plants scrammed.

There’s a term for a ship that doesn’t have either engineroom up while at sea: Dead In the Water. For those of you who have never been to sea, a ship’s stability is usually augmented by it’s motion through the water. Similar in effect, if not cause, in how it’s easy to stay up on a bicycle while it’s in motion, but hard while stopped. When a ship is DIW it wallows like a pig. And almost everyone who might be susceptible to seasickness will be suffering. Half the NMTT team woke up puking, or so the Officer’s Mess stewards passed on to us later.

Those of us down in the plants were trying to figure out what happened. The emergency diesels came on as designed, so we had some power, but we had to find and correct the fault in the electrical system before we did anything else. However, it was pretty clear that the problem had to have had something to do with the cross connects between the two power systems, so when the roving electrician got to the breaker room, and found a small fire going on, we had the problem pretty much localized.

After about two hours, we got the failed circuit breaker rendered safe. And the breaker bars had to be removed and replaced before the breaker could be returned to service because the current spikes had been so high that they kept welding together when the breaker was shut, then being pulled apart by the disconnect mechanism. We restarted the plant. And were muttering about how obnoxious Mr. Happy was being those days.

Oh, did I mention? The cross-connect portion of the electrical system was official part of #2 Engineroom.

That lunchtime, I think it was, the mess decks served chicken. The chicken bones were back in the RPCP before supper time, providing good juju to keep Mr. Happy quiet.

That was the last time we had any unplanned scrams aboard the USS Virginia.

So, not precisely a ghost, but there are some sailors from that cruise who will swear that chicken bones are good juju, and one needs good juju to keep the reactor plants from scramming.