After a year off, spurred by the government shutdown, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Kukui is once again a haunted ship. Here’s how the crew was preparing for the return of Sitka’s long-standing Halloween tradition:
At the stern of the Kukui, four Coast Guard crew pour fake blood onto a white sheet. Gabe Fortin’s hands are stained with the red goo he’s using to draw a ring around a big X, like a cult circle.
“We’ve been trying it for a long time, and so you can see there’s all kinds of dead bodies everywhere,” Fortin says.
A Tyvek suit stuffed with rags lies flat on the deck. The protective coveralls are splattered with blood made from beet juice.
“He was late to his [midnight] watch, so he got punished,” Fortin jokes. “My idea is like a cult execution theme where we’re doing a ritual to do something, maybe to give us power.”
Fortin says crew members will circle around him while he chants into a microphone. He’s still workshopping what he’ll say as the cult leader.
“I have to come up with an appropriate chant,” he says.
That’s just one scene that will be featured on the Kukui for Sitka’s annual haunted ship. Down on the buoy deck, black plastic tarps line the sides to prevent any passerby from peering in.
“We’re going for somewhat of a chainsaw massacre theme down here,” says Steven Calcaterra who’s in charge of the scene on the buoy deck. As people make their way past coffins and dummy corpses, they’ll be running from scare actors wielding chainsaws.
It’s still a work in progress. The crew has just two days to throw everything together.
“I was doing a round of the ship, seeing how everything was going, and I was very pleasantly surprised coming to the buoy deck, seeing everybody working together,” says Anjali Friedman, the ship’s morale officer.
Friedman says it’s all a team effort. One crew member holds a coffin door open while another trims it with an electric saw. Another group spray paints two big pieces of cardboard they plan to hide behind.
Inside the cutter’s halls, black tarps cover up windows so it’s dark, except for the eerie red glow of emergency lights.
“Here we’re gonna have a fog machine and we’re gonna black this out and kind of have it like a claustrophobic space. Here’s a jump scare opportunity,” Friedman says.
They’ll be using props collected over the years from previous crews and decorations donated by the community.
The sick bay is like an operating room straight out of a horror movie. Strobe lights shine on a table littered with bloody limbs. But Michael Overstreet, the commanding officer of the Kukui, says they don’t need donated props for this area.
“We have all of these limbs and things as part of our normal medical training that we do,” Overstreet explains.
The haunted ship was a job requirement Overstreet says he only found out about once he stepped in for the previous commanding officer. But he’s learned just how much Sitkans love the annual tradition. Especially after calling off the haunted ship last year because of the government shutdown.
“There’s a lot of pent up demand from the community, so they’re all excited to get back on board Kukui and and come here for the frights,” Overstreet says.
Friedman says Halloween is her favorite holiday, so she’s thrilled to be in charge of the haunted ship — cults, chainsaws, and all. And if her crewmates feel differently, she says they have no choice.
“They must work,” Friedman jokes.
But many seem devoted to their work. Like Fortin, the cult leader, whose hands will probably be stained by the beet juice blood till November.
