HGB Ep. 516 - Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst

Moment in Oddity -  Montenegro Tree Fountain

In the village of Dinosa, Montenegro, there is a unique tree that streams water after heavy rainfalls. Apparently, there is a cavity in the tree that reaches its base and when groundwater from the local springs increases, the water is forced up through the trees' trunk. After hard rainfalls it occurs at quite a rapid rate approximately 5 feet high from the ground, creating quite a spectacular natural fountain. The species of tree is a mulberry and it is estimated to be approximately 100 to 150 years old. The rise in groundwater that helps cause this phenomenon usually occurs in spring or autumn, typically happening once a year. The people of Dinosa have witnessed the tree fountain since the 1990's. Although this isn't the only tree fountain in the world, it is a rare phenomenon which certainly makes it odd.

This Month in History - Premiere of Playboy Magazine

In the month of December, on the 1st, in 1953, Playboy magazine debuted with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Also known by her given name, Norma Jeane, she didn't actually pose for the 'Sweetheart' centerfold in the inaugural issue as many people believed. The first issue of the men's lifestyle and entertainment cover read, "Marilyn Monroe Nude". Hugh Hefner never paid her a single cent, nor did Marilyn give permission for the then four year old photos to be used. As it turns out, the photos were not acquired legally. Back in 1949, Norma Jeane needed money to pay her bills. Lacking a job and cash she posed for Tom Kelley, a pinup photographer. She was paid $50 and the photographer promised that he would make her look unrecognizable. She signed the photos release documents as Mona Monroe. She stated that the reason for her signature and request was, "I don’t know why, except I may have wanted to protect myself, I was nervous, embarrassed, even ashamed of what I had done, and I did not want my name to appear on that model release." Regardless, the photos were sold and just a year after her photoshoot Marilyn Monroe started experiencing her breakout success as an actor appearing in 'All About Eve', 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' and so many other films. Playboy's Hugh Hefner quickly tagged along on Monroe's dress tails (as it were). Hefner maximized his investment after purchasing the rights to her photos and using them in his premiere magazine release as the first Playboy Sweetheart, later to have the moniker of 'Playmate of the month'. Sadly, Marilyn was never paid more than the original $50 for her shoot, never received a thank you or any other compensation while many made millions off her photos. Norma Jeane was urged to deny that the photos were actually of her, but despite the warnings, she confirmed the photos were indeed her and she stated later that they surprisingly helped her career. Ironically, despite not having any real connection with Marilyn, Hugh Hefner was said to have purchased the burial plot next to her for $75,000 back in 1992, stating that "spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up".

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (Suggested by: Samantha Napier)

Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst in Trenton, New Jersey is a very unique military base in that it is the only tri-service base in the United States Department of Defense. All six armed forces branches have units stationed there. The name is derived from the United States Air Force's McGuire Air Force Base, the United States Army's Fort Dix and the United States Navy's Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst. This location was the scene of the horrific crash of the Hindenburg in the 1930s. Several buildings on the base are said to be haunted. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of the place most commonly known as Fort Dix!

The Lakehurst Naval Air Station is located in Manchester Township in New Jersey. This began as Lakehurst Maxfield Field, which was a test range for ammunition being manufactured for the armed land force of Imperial Russia. This was in 1916. During World War I, the United States Army acquired the field and reopened it as Camp Kendrick. In 1921, the United States Navy purchased the property. The Navy decided to use it as an airship station and that is when the name changed to Lakehurst Naval Air Station. This would become the center of airship development in the United States. This work would continue until it was deactivated in 1962 and surprisingly, airship operations were resumed in 2006. In the field behind the large airship hangars is a memorial to a famous disaster that took place here: The Hindenburg Disaster. 

The LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German rigid airship that carried passengers. This class of airship was named for Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934. The Hindenburg class were the longest class of dirigibles. The LZ 129 was the largest airship at that time and was designed by the Zeppelin Company, which was named for German airship innovator Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. The airship was a great success and made ten trips to the United States in 1936. This attracted the attention of American Airlines and they contracted with the Zeppelin Company to have the Hindenburg shuttle passengers from Lakehurst to Newark for connections to airplane flights. On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg was making a landing at Lakehurst when things went terribly wrong. There had been a storm, so the Hindenburg took a bit of a detour. At 7pm, the Hindenburg made its way back to Lakehurst and was coming in for its final approach. The airship was half full with 36 passengers and 61 crew members and running off of highly flammable hydrogen gas. 

A special flying moor was going to be rigged in which the ship would be winched down to the mooring mast. The Hindenburg made a sharp turn because the ground crew wasn't ready, the wind shifted and another sharp turn was made. Water ballast was dropped and six men were then sent to the bow to trim the airship. Mooring lines were dropped and the port line was overtightened and then it seemed as though gas started leaking, there was some static electricity and flames burst out. Eyewitnesses all saw different things, so it's hard to know exactly what happened. The flames spread quickly and the bow lurched upwards and the ship's back broke. The tail crashed to the ground and flames burst from the nose killing 9 crew members. The fire burned for hours. In the end, there were a total of 35 deaths out of 97 people on the airship, including 13 of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew. Many survivors were badly burned.

Herbert Morrison was broadcasting for WLS radio and here is part of that famous coverage, "It's burst into flames! Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It's fire... and it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning and bursting into flames and the... and it's falling on the mooring mast and all the folks between it. This is terrible; this is one of the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh it's... [unintelligible] its flames... Crashing, oh! Oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. There's smoke, and there's flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here! I told you; it – I can't even talk to people, their friends are on there! Ah! It's... it... it's a... ah! I... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest: it's just laying there, a mass of smoking wreckage. Ah! And everybody can hardly breathe and talk and the screaming. I... I... I'm sorry. Honest: I... I can hardly breathe. I... I'm going to step inside, where I cannot see it. Charlie, that's terrible. Ah, ah... I can't. Listen, folks; I... I'm gonna have to stop for a minute because I've lost my voice. This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed."

The Air Station later hosted the U.S. Navy's first helicopter squadrons and today is used for Naval Aviation programs with two runways that are still in use. Base Realignment and Closure merged the Naval Air Station with two neighboring military bases. One of those was Fort Dix, which started as Camp Dix in 1917 in Wrightstown, New Jersey. This was named in honor of Major General John Adams Dix who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Buchanan. He actually had a long list of accomplishments. Dix was a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and a former United States Senator and Governor of New York. After May 1918, Dix was used as an embarkation camp and then as a demobilization center. This became one of the largest camps in the Northeast and had a history of mobilizing, training and demobilizing soldiers. It was renamed Fort Dix in 1939. This was an all-male base until 1978 when the first female recruits entered basic training there. Dix ended its active Army training mission in 1988 due to Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommendations. It began a new mission of providing training for Army Reserve and Army National Guard Soldiers. 

McGuire Air Force Base was originally known as Fort Dix Airport. It was established in 1937 in Burlington County near Wrightstown in New Jersey. The airport opened to military aircraft in 1941. Seven years later on January 13, 1948 the United States Air Force renamed the facility McGuire Air Force Base. This was in honor of Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire Jr. whom died during World War II in 1945 as he was engaged in an aerial dogfight and giving aid to his wingman. He was given the Medal of Honor and was a second place American flying ace of World War II. McGuire Air Force Base became the Air Force's "Gateway to the East." In 1954, the Military Air Transport Service took over jurisdiction of McGuire AFB and in 1992, the base became part of the newly reorganized Air Mobility Command.

The largest building on Fort Dix had been Walson Army Hospital. We say "had been" because it was dismantled over years and finally demolished in 2018. The hospital opened on March 15, 1960 named for Brigadier General Charles M. Walson and had been built to replace the wooden buildings built during World War II. The hospital was two 9-story ward wings and a 9-story service wing with a 500-bed hospital that could be expanded to 1,000 beds. Medicines and messages were whisked to all floors through pneumatic tubes. Surgical facilities included eight fully equipped operating rooms, X-ray, dental, eye-ear-nose-throat, childcare, neuro-psychiatric, and therapy clinics and an emergency operating room was located near the ambulance entrance. Nurses quarters were completed in 1963 and in June 1965, a $1.3 million construction program began on a two-story addition for clinics and a one-story Air Evacuation Section. During the realignment of 1992, Walson Army Hospital was transferred to McGuire Air Force Base and was renamed Walson Air Force Hospital. In April 2001, the Hospital was closed and as we said, it was demolished by 2018.

There are several locations on the base that are reputed to be haunted. One of the main locations was the  Base Medical Building or Walson Hospital when it still stood. There were reports of people hearing disembodied voices and the lights turning on and off by themselves. Visitors claimed to see floating orbs and experienced sudden temperature drops. The morgue was one of the more haunted areas. At the admittance station on the Dental Floor, a woman was talking to another employee when she saw a figure float behind the employee and she knew they were the only people there. It floated away and disappeared. Another woman saw an apparition and she ran to a door that shouldn't have been locked and it took several tries before the door would finally open and she could run away. She was terrified. 

Dameyon Beamon was a member of the 305th Medical Group at Walson from 1995 to 1997 and he claimed to encounter unexplained things. He said, "I worked nights at the primary care clinic. On many occasions when we would do security checks, the front door that used to be the pharmacy entrance would be unlocked, even if only an hour ago it was locked tight." One night, Beamon and a co-worker went to the ninth floor, which was the former psychiatric ward and they noticed an open window in one of the rooms. Beamon said, "At the precise moment Clark closed the window, the light in the room flickered, turned off and then came back on." There was also an experience for Beamon when he was exploring the old morgue. He was looking at some pictures there when he heard "the sound of a grown man crying."

Username grydberg wrote, "I have a great story from Ft. Dix haunted hospital. I was stationed at Ft. Dix from late 1997-mid-1999. One summer day in 1998, my friend and I decided to go check out the top 5 floors. We took the freight elevator, because the patient elevator stops after the 4th floor. We went to the 9th, then 8th floor with nothing abnormal, as soon as we stepped off the elevator on the 7th floor, the psych ward, things got strange. First of all, the temp dropped, not enough to see our breath, but there was a drop, the lights were flickering like crazy, and my friends brick walkie-talkie was going crazy. He thought someone was trying to get a hold of him, but no one responded, then we heard the patient elevators close, and we jumped back in the elevator. We went back to the 7th floor about 45 minutes later, and everything was normal. The lights were lit, and the temp was normal. We checked things out, and did not see anything abnormal. There are stories of babies crying, and a real neat story of the floors on the OB floor being freshly mopped. There is a mop and bucket that was left up there, and the floor will be wet, with foot steps across it, and the mop and bucket are dry. I also worked with a girl, and she was in the back of the lab, and she saw an image of a person walking behind her in the computer screen, when she turned around, no one was there. The last is an inquiry. I heard that there was a "super-soldier" being created in the sub-basement. Supposedly right after Vietnam War, the basement was quickly cemented in, and to this day, there is a crawl space, and the suspended ceiling is still there. I would like more information if someone can find it. The last story is of the morgue. I had keys to the morgue, so we would go down and check things out. The lights never work, they continuously flicker, and you can feel a presence when you lay down in the cooler. We would lay down on the morgue table, and be pushed back into the cooler. I did this only once, because I felt like someone was lying next to me."

The Garden Terrace had once been a Teen Center. A boy aged around 15-years-old has been seen walking around the Garden Terrace and people know that he isn't human because he fades away. He is usually seen wearing jeans, a blue jean jacket and a red hat. He has blonde hair. Username Stubbly Dooright wrote, "One night, on a late Friday night, another friend and myself were pulling out of a street, and at the intersection of that street into another, noticed a young man in blue jeans and a blue jacket with a red cap, walking across. I remember pointed out to my friend how I thought that the cap didn't go with his outfit. My friend was driving and so when she slowly pulled to a stop, after the young man crossed the street we were driving on, I looked at the young man, to see if he would turn his head to see if we were too close. I would have. Anyways, I noticed that he didn't and I thought that was strange. I then turned my head, where my friend looked at him and then she told me she saw him fade away. I didn't think that happened, and said that being dark and woods around the area, he must have ran into the woods. She accepted that explanation, but with reluctance."

The Airfield where the Hindenberg crashed and burst into flames is also haunted. The dead were taken to the nearby Hangar 1, which may be one of the reasons why the hangar is said to be haunted. At the Airfield, people feel creepy and sad. Some people have claimed to hear disembodied voices shouting, “She’s afire!” outside the hangar. The Second Deck in the hangar is a place where people have experienced unexplained activity. On one quiet weekend, there was only one person in the hangar and he heard voices coming from a corner of the Second Deck. He walked over and could clearly make out music and voices speaking a language he believed to be German. They seemed to be coming from the other side of a door, so he opened it and all the noise immediately stopped. The hangar is said to create its own weather conditions sometimes. One time there was a ground mist that was about four feet tall around three o'clock in the morning. There was only one employee in there and he saw two heads bobbing above the mist on the far end of the hangar and it gave him chills and sent him running out. He locked up and went home. A nightwatchmen was on duty and he heard someone call his name in Hangar 1. There was no one else there and he saw a figure moving towards him and he noticed that this figure had an ashen face. The spirit called his name again and then walked right through him. He ran out of the Hangar and never returned. 

Ghost Hunters visited on Season 5, Episode 26. In the Hangar, Dustin Pari was investigating with Britt and Dustin heard something walk above him. They also saw a figure in the Hangar in the far right corner where most of the activity is alleged to happen. Kris and Amy investigated in there after them and they went into some upper offices that the guys didn't go into and they got a very oppressive feeling in there that caused them fear. Then they felt like something flew over the top of them. A light went off and the ladies heard noises like a man grunting or clearing his voice. Kris said she had never been that freaked out on an investigation before. Grant and Jason saw a figure that looked like it was going up some stairs and then they heard what sounded like 15 people making noise together. They called for the figure to come on down and then they saw the figure look over the railing and then it was gone. In the Medical Building, Amy and Kris kept seeing a light turn on and off at the end of the hallway.

There have been stories that people have seen the Jersey Devil around the base. Most of these reports came in during World War II. Housing units have reports of weird sightings. One that is called Kennedy Court had residents who reported glowing red eyes that peer at them from the nearby woods at night. The trails near the housing units are said to have no wildlife and no sounds are heard. There definitely seems to be some weird stuff going on at this base. Is Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst haunted? That is for you to decide!