IT'S TOO BAD the Morgan's crew are coming through in gibberish, because whalers had grisly stories to tell. Bagging whales was big-game fishing taken to its illogical, frequently lethal extreme. Hooking a whale by harpoon—the killing happened later, with a lance—was done at close range, by a six-man whaleboat whose crew sometimes flanked their quarry within arm's reach. The moment the harpoons were sunk, the oarsmen would scramble to put distance between themselves and the peeved cetacean. While it was typical for a harpooned whale to take off at top speed, pulling the boat on a "Nantucket sleigh ride," some whales managed to identify the source of their pain and attack the boat, thrashing it to pieces with their flukes.

Or worse. "With its long underjaw, a sperm whale could easily bite a whaleboat in two, ‘chawing' it in its powerful jaws and sometimes taking an arm or a leg or two in the process," wrote the late Mystic Seaport curator John Leavitt in his book The Charles W. Morgan. (In fact, the Morgan lost a crewman this way.) When the whale kill was over, six men with oars had to tow a 50-ton corpse all the way back to the ship.

Tonight, life aboard the Morgan isn't quite so exciting. While the sensitives carry on in the forecastle, Laird explains the sound recordings he's been collecting. He says his team will often see spikes in the infrasound range, which human hearing cannot detect. I ask how they can be sure that what he's picking up is coming from paranormal, rather than normal, sources of infrasound. Whales, for example, communicate in infrasound. "We do a lot of scrutiny with it," says Miller.

Laird nods. "This was set up by a guy who knows what he's doing."

I suggest that, if there's a ghost onboard, it's the ghost of a whale. As for the pipe smoker, I have an intuition about that. In fact, I'm getting a name. I'm getting Mike... Mike... O'Farrell.

Mike O'Farrell is Mystic Seaport's PR man. I don't mean to be a bunghole, but I wonder if the combination of sinking museum revenues and dependable media interest in the supernatural made a trumped-up ghost story a tempting proposition. Along these lines, I tried to get a look at the three "almost verbatim" letters from the visitors who said they saw an old-timey figure with a pipe. Laird didn't return my calls about this. When I asked O'Farrell about it, he said the people had stated they "didn't want anything shared."

I find this odd. People who believe they've seen or felt a ghost are always coming up to me at readings, wanting to share stories. Is this ghost a phantom? I can't prove it. It's just a feelin' I got.