The story
USS Salem, a Des Moines-class heavy cruiser launched from Quincy's Fore River Shipyard in the late 1940s, served as a flagship in the Mediterranean and Atlantic before decommissioning, and she survives as the world's last preserved heavy cruiser, moored at Quincy, Massachusetts, as the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum — steps from the yard that built her and hundreds of other warships. Nicknamed 'the Sea Witch', she never fired her guns in anger, yet her haunted reputation is among the strongest of America's museum ships: overnight investigations and television features have made her sick bay, engineering spaces and berthing decks famous, with visitors, volunteers and investigators describing figures in passageways, voices and footsteps on empty decks, banging from sealed compartments, cold spots and touches — lore that tellers link variously to her humanitarian service after a deadly 1953 Greek earthquake, when her spaces served the injured and dead, and to the shipyard generations of Quincy. These accounts should be presented as investigator and visitor reports, the real dead of her service era treated with respect. Museum opening and event details should be confirmed from official pages.