- Title: The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401
- Author: Burnham Holmes. He also authored the Contemporary Perspectives book about Nefertiti, plus books about the Third Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, Edward Hopper, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez and George Eastman. In May of this year, he retired from Castleton University in Vermont. As Emily Ely wrote for the student newspaper, the Castleton Spartan: "After nearly three decades of teaching, mentoring, and storytelling, English professor Burnham Holmes is retiring, leaving behind a legacy that’s impossible to summarize with a single title. 'Oh, a man of all the wonders. He is insane. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met,' said junior Nickels Thomas. That sentiment echoes across generations of students and colleagues who have learned from Holmes, not just about writing or speaking, but about life itself." Holmes is also on Instagram. His most recent post calls poet Frank O'Hara his "Lodestone."
- Cover and interior illustrator: Abel Navarro
- Publisher: Contemporary Perspectives Inc.
- Year: 1979
- Pages: 48
- Format: Hardcover
- Topic: On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, traveling from New York to Miami, crashed into the Florida Everglades.1 There were 101 fatalities, including the three cockpit crew members, and 75 survivors. Then came the ghost stories. As Wikipedia explains, "In the months and years following the crash, stories began circulating that numerous employees and passengers of Eastern had reported sightings of deceased crew members ... sitting aboard other [Lockheed] L-1011s. ... These stories speculated that the sightings were connected to the fact that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged after the investigation and refitted into other L-1011s. The reported hauntings were said to be seen only on the planes that used the spare parts." There was a 1976 book, The Ghost of Flight 401, by John G. Fuller, and a TV movie in 1978 (starring Ernest Borgnine and Kim Basinger) that helped the ghost stories become even more widespread in the late 1970s, perhaps leading to the publication of this middle-grade book, which I remember reading at the wonderful C.E. McCall Middle School library in Montoursville in the early 1980s.
- Excerpt #1: The heavy clouds and cold air were only the first of many strange incidents aboard the Eastern plane. A stewardess on plane 318 saw something that looked like a cloud. It formed near where she was standing. At first, she thought it was only water vapor condensing. It could have been caused by a change in temperature. But the cloud wasn't like anything she had ever seen before. Little by little, the features of a human face took shape in the cloud.
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- Excerpt #2: In none of the stories about the ghost captain and second officer was anyone hurt — in fact, quite the opposite. Some airline people even wanted to work on planes where Loft and Repo had appeared. They felt safe. They felt that the ghosts would protect them from harm.
- Excerpt #3: Very few people today have ever really seen ghosts, but there have been many legends and stories throughout history of people who have. Until Flight 401, never had so many different people — at different times — actually witnessed the appearances of the same ghosts.
- Reviews and memories: I couldn't find any reviews of this book on Goodreads, Amazon, Kirkus, Newspapers.com or Google search. And that's weird, because I know of lot of kids from my generation read this book, and used copies now sell for a pretty penny. I did find a 2022 Facebook post in the Vintage Airliners group. One commenter states, "I was a young guy when I read the book and it totally gave me the creeps." But it's not 100% clear whether he's talking about Fuller's book or Holmes' book. Maybe this post can become the go-to site for folks who want to remember and comment upon Holmes' book. Please comment!
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My copy was circulated quite a bit at the public library in tiny Duncan, Arizona (in the southeastern part of the state) between 1987 and 2003. So perhaps millennials have some thoughts, too.
Previous Contemporary Perspectives books covered on Papergreat:
- This House is Haunted!
- The Case of the Ancient Astronauts
- Visions of the Future: Magic Boards
- The Abominable Snowman
(Note: Those four books are all Contemporary Perspectives Inc. (CPI) books distributed by Raintree Children's Books, Milwaukee. The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401, which follows the same format, was not distributed by Raintree. Instead, it was distributed by Silver Burdett Company of Morristown, New Jersey. Purely speculative on my part, but I wonder if Raintree didn't want to be associated with such a recent and horrific air disaster and its subsequent exploitation for ghost stories. I held some long misgivings about doing this post for that reason.)
Somber footnote
1. I can't help but connect old books to current events. The 1972 crash site of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in the Everglades is only about 20 miles from the newly constructed Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp.
Writing for the Guardian yesterday, columnist Moira Donegan noted: "It has long been a feature of Trump’s regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s style of masculinity."
Andrew O'Hehir, the executive editor of Salon, wrote a July 6 column about Alligator Alcatraz that featured the subhead: "Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history." O'Hehir writes: "To describe this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or actual fascism, is accurate enough. But it’s most definitely who 'we' are in 2025. If we claim that such a thing is 'un-American,' then we’re the ones who haven’t paid attention to history."
And the Miami Herald reported this morning that hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges in the United States are already being held under tents and in chain-link cells at Alligator Alcatraz: "The information ... suggests that scores of migrants without criminal records have been targeted in the state and federal dragnet to catch and deport immigrants living illegally in Florida," the Herald notes.