The Ghost of Flight 401
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines flight 401 left New York’s JFK airport and crashed on its approach to Miami, killing 101 of the 176 people on board.
The Miami News, Dec. 30, 1972
The crash is considered unique in aviation history because of where it occurred: in Florida’s Everglades — a sprawling, uninhabited stretch of swampland the size of the state of Connecticut.
The total isolation of the crash scene made rescue efforts nearly impossible. The closest road was almost eight miles away. Helicopters circled overhead, struggling to find stable terrain and becoming stuck in the mud upon landing. Rescuers had to trudge through ankle-deep mud and water to reach survivors, who were sprinkled throughout the swampland amidst dead bodies, tangled wreckage, and swamp creatures.
The crash scene was described as horrific by those who witnessed it.
Things took an eerie twist when the ghosts started appearing.
The Ghosts
After the crash, Eastern Air Lines salvaged as many components as they could — seats, ovens, mechanical equipment — and started installing the recovered items in other planes they owned.
Incredibly, the crews on these planes began seeing ghosts during their flights. Even more incredibly, they identified these ghosts as crew members who’d died in Flight 401, usually Flight Engineer Don Repo.
The Miami News, Dec. 30, 1972
One of the first ghost sightings occurred a few months after the Everglades crash, when a stewardess entered the galley of her plane to grab passengers’ meals. She saw a face staring at her from the oven window and was shocked to recognize it as Don Repo, Flight Engineer killed in the 1972 crash. She summoned another flight attendant and the plane’s engineer, who also saw Repo’s face staring at them.
Amazingly, Repo’s ghost spoke to them: “Watch out for fire on this airplane.”
Repo’s warning proved true: when the plane took off, it lost an engine to fire, and it was considered a minor miracle that the crew was able to bring it back.
Dozens upon dozens of other ghost sightings followed. Pilots, stewardesses, and maintenance workers — all sane and credible people — reported witnessing the ghosts. Stories of ghost sightings started to become legend amongst not just the Eastern flight crew, but the entire aviation industry.
Interestingly, these sightings were only on planes that had received the salvaged parts from the crash.
It was as if the spirits of the deceased crew were connected in some way to the salvaged parts.
Bestselling Author
Bestselling author John G. Fuller began hearing rumors about the ghosts. He spoke to friends and neighbors who worked in the aviation industry — in different roles, for different airlines — and nearly all had heard of the mysterious ghosts that were haunting Eastern flights.
At the time, Fuller was on flights nearly every day as part of a promotional tour for another book, and he took an informal poll of workers on his flights. Almost every crewmember he spoke to had heard of the ghosts — and many sane, respectable airline employees had encountered the ghost and shared some incredible stories with Fuller.
Fuller began his work as a skeptic, looking to disprove the ghost story. “I was conditioned all my life to believe there is no such thing as ghosts,” he wrote in the book’s opening chapter.
Fuller also found evidence that suggested Eastern Air Lines was covering up the ghost sightings.
He learned of one plane where the ghost of dead captain Bob Loft was seen on a flight before takeoff. The entire flight crew had seen him, and the flight was delayed for over an hour as airline officials searched the plane for the ghost.
Stories of this bizarre ‘flight delay due to a ghost sighting’ spread quickly among Eastern employees. A group of curious stewardesses checked out the log book for the flight — FAA regulations require that every incident, minor or major, has to be recorded in a flight’s log book — and they found all pages up to and including the day of the incident were missing. Other flights that were rumored to be haunted were found with missing log book pages, too.
“It makes me mad,” one flight attendant said to Fuller. “I think they’ve got [the logbooks] thoroughly hidden.”
Fuller also learned that Eastern Air Lines adopted an informal policy: anyone who came forward with a ghost sighting was directed to the company psychiatrist, which in turn could lead to their firing. “Any crew members who reported any of the incidents…have been referred to the company shrink,” a flight attendant told Fuller. “So very few will talk about the story anymore. A lot of them feel they’ll be fired or laid off.”
Fuller’s 1978 bestseller
Curiously, a mechanic told Fuller that Eastern Air Lines was going through their fleet of planes and removing any parts that had been salvaged and reused from the Flight 401 crash. All of these parts were perfectly fine and functional. Replacing them was a costly process. So if there was nothing to these ghost stories, why was Eastern going to the hassle of removing all salvaged parts from planes?
Things Get Weirder
As he investigated further, Fuller learned of all sorts of otherworldly attempts that had been made to contact the ghosts — some that produced incredible results.
Fuller interviewed two Eastern pilots who claimed to be psychic mediums, people who believe their minds can be used as channels of communication between the living and the dead. They told Fuller a story of contacting Repo during a séance. The pilots explained to Repo that he was dead, urging him to stop clinging to the earthly world and proceed with his further spiritual development.
Unbeknownst to the pilot psychic mediums, another deeply religious flight engineer named Dick Manning was on a flight when two stewardesses became deeply shaken after they claimed they saw Repo’s ghost. After landing, Manning proceeded to sprinkle holy water (symbolic of the blood of Christ) around the galley while praying for Repo. The temperature inside the empty plane dropped to near-freezing, and he claims he saw Repo’s ghost appear, then a light, then nothing.
Fuller searched the Everglades for wreckage from the plane and brought the bits of debris to a group of mediums from the Arthur Ford Institute. Without telling the mediums where the wreckage came from, the mediums “read” the debris and recalled startlingly accurate images from the crash and the pilots involved.
Lastly, Fuller bought a Ouija board to communicate with Repo’s ghost. The interactions with the ghost through the Ouija board, described at the end of Fuller’s book, are remarkable.
“Spell out your name, please,” Fuller said near the beginning of the first session.
DON REPO, came the response on the Ouija board.
What was the basic cause of the crash?
NOSE GEAR
Fuller held a news article in his hand, an obituary of Repo. He began asking the board detailed questions about Repo’s life and family, and the answers that came back on the Ouija board were correct every single time. Bizarrely, the entity (or whatever was communicating through the board) had a sense of humor: after the Ouija board spelled out the name of two of Repo’s daughters, Fuller asked for the names of the other two. SEE THE NEWS CLIP IN YOUR HAND, came the response.
The entity’s humor was evident in a second Ouija board session, too. “What are your reasons for coming back?” Fuller asked. In response, the board spelled out: TO PLAY GAMES TODAY and DON LIKES TO CLOWN AROUND AND GAG.
Fuller asked technical questions about the plane that crashed, too — things that only someone who was familiar with the operation of a jumbo jet would know. Every time the response from the Ouija board was the correct answer.
Fuller eventually told Repo’s wife and daughter (Alice and Doalyn) of his communication with Repo’s ghost through the Ouija board. Intrigued, they participated in a Ouija board session and the supposed spirit of Repo communicated with them both, relaying intimate details about their lives and answering all their questions correctly. Their Ouija board session ended with a heartfelt message from the spirit:
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU MORE ALICE I LOVE DOALYN TOO
In Closing
Paranormal experts believed that Repo’s ghost was appearing for two reasons: first, because of the quick and traumatic way he died, his spirit might not have fully realized he was dead. Second, he might experience guilt feelings from the crash, which would motivate him to return to try to atone for the damage.
It’s interesting that, around April 1974, the sightings of Repo’s ghost stopped. This was right around the time the two pilots and flight engineer performed separate “exorcisms” on the plane and encouraged Repo’s ghost to leave the physical world.
Students of the paranormal claim that there is a direct relationship between physical objects and spirits. They call it psychometry. This is why mediums typically request a piece of clothing or item that belonged to the deceased when they try to contact them — the object acts like a link for connecting the medium with the spirit.
Psychometry, if it’s indeed a real phenomenon, could explain the connection between the dead crewmembers and the salvaged parts from Flight 401.
Upon release, Fuller’s book was a massive success and peoples’ interest in the ghost stories of Flight 401 endured long after its release. Nearly a decade after the crash, Eastern Air Lines still was dealing with the rumors that their planes had once been haunted.
AP, August 28, 1980 — Stories about the haunting of Eastern Air Lines still endured almost a decade after the crash of Flight 401.
UPI, Sept 3, 1980
In 1978, a TV movie based on the Eastern Air Lines ghost was released. Pure, glorious 1970s cheesiness right here.
So what do you think? Were dead crewmembers from Flight 401 visiting other Eastern Air Lines flights? Or were the people who witnessed the ghost simply mistaken?