The USS Indianapolis Survivors and the Voices in the Water

Shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, having just delivered components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian, was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea. The ship rolled over and sank in twelve minutes. Of her complement of 1,196 officers and men, roughly 900 made it into the water alive. What followed has become one of the most harrowing episodes in the history of the United States Navy.

For nearly five days, the survivors drifted without rescue. The Navy did not realise the Indianapolis was missing. There were no ships in pursuit, no scheduled rendezvous to be missed, no SOS picked up by friendly ears. The men in the water faced exposure, dehydration, salt-water poisoning, and repeated attacks by oceanic whitetip and tiger sharks. By the time a routine patrol aircraft spotted the survivors on the morning of August 2 and rescue operations began, only 316 men were left alive. The remainder had been claimed by the sea.

The catastrophic loss became a touchstone of American military memory, and the long ordeal of the survivors in the water has continued to produce reports of paranormal experience that span eight decades.

The Voices in the Water

In the immediate aftermath of rescue, debriefing reports collected by the Navy contained numerous accounts of what survivors described as “voices in the water,” heard during the second and third nights of the ordeal. Most of these were treated by medical officers as the products of hallucination brought on by salt-water psychosis and severe dehydration, conditions well documented in the literature of shipwreck survival. Several survivors, however, insisted across the rest of their lives that the voices had been distinct, identifiable, and on at least some occasions clearly the voices of shipmates known to be already dead.

One frequently cited account came from Seaman First Class Loel Dean Cox, who told oral historians that on the third night he had heard his friend Robert call out to him by name from the darkness, when Robert’s body had been seen drifting away on the first morning. Other survivors reported voices warning them of approaching sharks, urging them to keep paddling, or simply naming the men in the water who had not yet died. Skeptical historians have argued that these reports are best understood as the projections of grieving men under unimaginable stress. The survivors who lived long enough to be interviewed by historians and filmmakers from the 1970s onward generally rejected this interpretation.

The Wreck Site

The wreck of the Indianapolis was located in August 2017 by an expedition led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen aboard the research vessel Petrel, lying some 5,500 metres beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea. The discovery brought renewed attention to the loss and prompted a fresh round of accounts from divers, researchers, and submariners associated with the work.

Several members of the Petrel team reported unexplained electrical interference with their remotely operated vehicles during operations at the site, of a kind that had not occurred at the team’s other deepwater wreck investigations, including the Lexington and the Hood. Whether this represented a genuine anomaly or simply the difficulty of operating sensitive equipment at extreme depth has not been definitively established. Survivors and family members who have attended commemorative events at sea above the wreck site have on numerous occasions reported a sense of presence, the sound of voices on the wind, and in a small number of cases the sight of figures in the water at the moment of the wreath-laying.

For the broader pattern of vessels lost in similarly dramatic circumstances and producing later reports of residual hauntings, see our entries on the Lusitania memorial at Cobh and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Captain’s Story

A separate strand of the Indianapolis paranormal record concerns Captain Charles B. McVay III, who survived the sinking only to be court-martialled for failing to zigzag his ship under combat conditions. McVay was the only American captain in the Second World War to be convicted in connection with the loss of his ship in action. The conviction effectively ended his naval career, and he received hate mail from grieving families for the rest of his life. In 1968 McVay shot himself at his home in Litchfield, Connecticut.

In the decades following his death, members of the Indianapolis Survivors Association reported what they described as visitations from McVay during their annual reunions. Several survivors recounted being addressed by the captain in dreams, and a number described seeing him briefly at the periphery of formal commemorations, dressed in his service uniform. In 2000, a campaign led by survivor Maurice Glenn Bell and supported by the historian Hunter Scott resulted in a Congressional resolution exonerating McVay, signed by President Clinton. Survivors who attended the formal exoneration ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard reported a profound and unexpected sense of release, which several explicitly described as the captain’s spirit at last being able to rest.

A Living Memory

Of the 316 survivors of the Indianapolis disaster, all but a small handful are now dead. The Indianapolis Survivors Association continues to operate, run primarily by descendants and historians, and the wreck itself is recognised as a war grave under United States Navy regulations. Reports of paranormal experience associated with the loss have not diminished as the original generation has passed. If anything, they have intensified, as new generations of researchers, filmmakers, and naval personnel have come into contact with a story that, more than seventy-five years after the fact, has refused to fade quietly into the historical record.

Sources

• Stanton, Doug. In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
• Newcomb, Richard F. Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the Navy’s Greatest Sea Disaster. New York: Henry Holt, 1958.
• USS Indianapolis Survivors Association oral history archive, Indianapolis, Indiana.
• Vulcan Inc. Petrel Expedition Reports, 2017-2019.