Bunker Down

By Emily Harnett

In our new issue, Emily Harnett shares a real-life ghost story of hidden bunkers, secret wars, and narrowly averted nuclear disaster.

IT’S EASY TO SEE how the men of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing might begin to believe in ghosts. They worked, after all, in a concrete vault buried deeper than the dead. Down there, the floors of the command center hung from the ceiling on giant metal springs to absorb the shock of a Soviet strike. And so, these missileers—members of the Air Force who seldom saw the sky—spent much of their days quite literally in suspense. Remember, as well, that there wasn’t much to do on a twenty-four-hour alert. You could play cards; you could shoot the shit; you could watch all the soaps on TV. You could go a little crazy. You understood that a place so difficult to enter was also difficult to escape, and what had happened to the guys at the place they called “The Ghost Site” was proof of that.

The 1965 fire at silo 373-4 in Searcy, Arkansas—which housed one of the fifty-four Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed by the Air Force between 1963 and 1987—remains to this day the most lethal missile accident in American history. Although there’s some dispute as to how it started, according to the official Air Force report, a crew member was welding in the silo when his blowtorch nicked a nearby hydraulic line. The fluid caught fire, shooting up flames and sending smoke billowing through the facility. Within minutes, the fire had snuffed out much of the available oxygen. The lights went out, and in the darkness and confusion, many of the airmen who reached the escape hatch went the wrong way, descending deeper into the silo. Fifty-three of them—all but two—suffocated in the smoke. Many died clustered around the ladder to the hatch, where, after their bodies had been removed, their silhouettes remained visible, traced on the floor in soot.

“This summer, I went out to site 373-4 to determine what, if anything, remained there to be seen.”

Missile silos are creepy places by design, but 373-4 really did feel off to a number of the guys who worked there in subsequent decades. It freaked them out, these men who were used to working in freaky conditions. Things kept happening that they couldn’t explain. Lights would turn on for no reason; an elevator would arrive with no one on it. Today, they trade stories on blog posts and message boards, remembering how, in the morning, the mist at the site was as high as your waist; how, as you walked across the gravel topside, you’d swear you heard someone’s footsteps crunching behind you. At some point, someone painted the words “The Ghost Site” by hand over a mural of a haunted house on the silo’s blast door.

Today, many former Titan II sites aren’t indicated on any public map, but missile nerds have helpfully posted the coordinates of the silos online. This summer, I went out to site 373-4 to determine what, if anything, remained there to be seen. From Jacksonville, Arkansas, I plugged the coordinates into Google Maps and drove fifty miles through cattle farms until I arrived at a blue historical marker at the corner of a gravel road. The sign, across the street from a tractor repair shop, bore the fifty-three names of the men who died in 1965. But it revealed nothing of what caused their deaths, nor where they had died: the missile silo was some distance down the road, beyond a cattle guard and a NO TRESPASSING sign. Standing at an uncertain remove from the place it means to commemorate, the marker does little to conjure the nearness of the past. Mostly, it gestures at a lost material history—the disappearing architecture of the Cold War.

But disappearance isn’t the right word to describe the vanishing of places that were never quite visible to the public in the first place. Even when the sites were active, Soviet intelligence often had a more precise idea of where America’s land-based missiles were stationed than many of the people who lived alongside them. 

Continue reading “Bunker Down,” an essay by Emily Harnett, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.