By James Wysong

Travel columnist

updated 11:02 a.m. ET Oct. 30, 2007

James Wysong Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

With the celebration of Halloween comes the telling of ghost stories. They usually contain bizarre, unexplained and oftentimes unbelievable coincidences that send shivers up one's spine. Mine concern the spooky happenings in the realm of air travel, and while I can't confirm every one of the stories, all are very much alive in the world of flight crews.

I got the idea for this column while I was working an all-nighter last Halloween. The crew gathered in the back galley and told air travel ghost stories. We dimmed the lights and kept our voices low so the sleeping passengers wouldn't hear us. The following are the top 13 spooky stories. Trick or treat!

1. A 72-year-old flight attendant (yes, she really was 72) always insisted that someday she would die on a layover in Italy. One day she arrived at the terminal to work her usual flight to Rome, but she was sent home because the flight had been canceled. She passed away the very next day. You see, canceled flights can ruin a flight attendant's plans, too.

2. An especially bizarre story involves a young flight attendant whose family persuaded her to retire after the Lockerbie tragedy. It seems her mother had dreamed her daughter would die in an airplane disaster. The young woman became an accountant, and after years of promotions went to work for a firm in New York. Her office was in the World Trade Center, and she perished on 9/11.

3. When a pair of elderly newlyweds went to Europe for their honeymoon, the husband had a heart attack and died. The wife arranged to have his body brought back in a casket to their new home in Florida. She made the connecting flight but the casket did not; in fact, the airline could not locate it for five days. When the casket was finally found, at the deceased's hometown airport, it was ... empty! One way or another, that man got cold feet.

4. A flight to Europe took off with a crew of four pilots and came back with only three. During a break, one of the pilots wandered off and was never heard from again. The authorities took apart the plane but have yet to solve the case. Authorities determined that the pilot had been suffering from depression and was behind on his alimony payments; they surmised he had slipped off the airplane disguised as a passenger in hopes of starting a new life. But there is no record of him going through customs or immigration, and his bags were all still on board.

5. Many tales of 9/11 coincidences seem to be in circulation these days. The one I find a bit uncanny tells of a father who discussed fears of dying with his son the day before his son was scheduled to fly. His son died on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the west side of the Pentagon, where, incredibly enough, the father worked (that very side). The father survived. He had taken a rare day off to play golf.

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6. Several years ago, a flight crashed shortly after take-off. When authorities recovered the black box, they found that the pilots' last conversation was about the dating habits of the flight attendants working that day. A few years later, two pilots and an off-duty crew member were talking about the details of that tragedy in the cockpit of their own flight just before take-off. They remarked on how hard it must be for families to hear those final words. Shortly after take-off, their own flight crashed, leaving no survivors. The last sentence was, "So we had better make our conversations good for our families." I listened to the black box audio of that flight on the Internet, and am sorry now that I did, as it has haunted me ever since.

7. What about the flight attendant who discovered that her husband, a pilot, was cheating with countless co-workers? The husband mysteriously disappeared, but the investigation was not highly publicized, perhaps because of this unsavory coincidence: The pilot's body was never found, but the flight attendant was famous for bringing homemade sandwiches to work, then generously handing them out to passengers and crew when there was no scheduled meal service. Talk about getting rid of the evidence!

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