Excerpt:

ALAMEDA – All night, we wandered through narrow, pitch-black hallways, felt the chill on drafty decks, wobbled while descending vertiginous chain-link ladders, listened to the ship creak and groan like an arthritic old duffer rising from a lawn chair.

It was, we must admit, starting to get a little creepy aboard the USS Hornet.

Maybe it was the dank and musty milieu, or the power of suggestion, or the knowledge that more than 300 deaths had occurred on board and 668 Japanese planes were shot down by its servicemen during World War II, but halfway into our four-hour tour of this decommissioned aircraft carrier at the former Alameda Naval Air Station, we needed to revisit our initial steadfast skepticism.