The Moment of Connection

Roberto Clemente, legendary baseball player and humanitarian, enters the picture

Welcome to Family Ghosts! The post below will make the most sense if you have read The Woman in the Teal Dress and A Face in the Clouds first. I’d strongly recommend reading them before diving in. This is the third and final post in my set-up for my ghost investigation.

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I misled you in my last post. Yes, I first read about Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in an elementary school library book. However, I undersold this plot point. The Ghosts of Flight 401 was a formative ghost story for me. All told, I probably read that chapter close to 50 times. There was no parallel to it in the classics, like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series or Bruce Coville’s Book of Ghosts: Tales to Haunt You. It entered my ghost story repertoire and I trotted it out when I wanted to impress an audience. 

I think I had an innate sense that the story was scary because everyone would eventually fly in a plane. Incidentally, my interest in Flight 401 coincided with another accident that happened in the Florida Everglades around the same time. In 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 crashed a mere two miles from the site of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 and the two were often compared in the media. Melted jewelry, found a few years later in the swamp, couldn’t be conclusively attributed to either crash because of how close they were in proximity.

Little did 1996 Sam know that she was setting up 2012 Sam for one hell of a story.

The Clues

After I finished watching the wedding video with my grandparents in 2012, I got to work trying to find out more about Muriel and what plane crash she was in. Here are the clues I had to go on from Grandma:

1. Muriel worked in New York and was going to Florida for “business” the week between Christmas and the new year. Imagine me saying “business” while winking at you.

2. At her funeral, parts of her body were possibly missing. There was an implication that she didn’t die in the plane crash itself, but in the aftermath (read: alligators). 

3. Muriel died the same weekend as Roberto Clemente, a legendary Pittsburgh Pirate player and humanitarian.¹ Grandma confirmed that Clemente’s plane crash and Muriel’s were not connected.

The Investigation

Thanks to my intense education on Pittsburgh baseball and my proficiency in Googling things, I knew that Clemente’s death put me at December 1972. 

I started Googling Muriel’s name, including the four variations of her last name that I was aware of: Abrams, Abram, Abraham, and Abrahams. I tried appending “plane crash” and “accident” to my Boolean searches. No results.

Undeterred and very experienced in snooping, I decided to try identifying airliner crashes that happened in December 1972 instead. I navigated from the bottom of Clemente’s DC-7 crash Wikipedia page to a list of “Aviation accidents and incidents in the United States in 1972.”

A familiar name jumped out at me: Eastern Airlines Flight 401, right next to the DC-7 crash article stub.

After reading through the Flight 401 Wikipedia page and fondly remembering what a freaky little kid I was, I decided to peek at the Flight 401 passenger list. Based on Grandma’s clues, the timing and the location fit. I found a passenger list, then did a ctrl-f search for Muriel’s last name and all its variations. 

That’d be crazy, right? If she was on this flight that was part of a ghost story that was a major piece of my childhood…

The search came up empty. I felt defeated. This was the only flight that fit and she wasn’t there. I thought about her often, but I was stuck. Every once in a while, I’d try the Boolean search again or poke around at other crashes that didn’t match the Clemente Timeline.

I had made a rookie mistake: I failed to ask Grandma to reconfirm Muriel’s last name. This is Snooping 101. One night, on the phone with Grandma, we were going over my investigation again and I mentioned all the last names I had tried. Grandma paused and then said,

“Muriel changed her last name to something completely different in the years before she died, no one really knew why…” I felt a sweat break out under my arms.

“I think her last name was Ames.”

I hung up the phone with a feeling of anticipation and dread. As long as I couldn’t find her name, I had a little spark in me that hoped maybe she was out there somewhere living a new life. In this gap of time between seeing her in the video and searching for her online, my affinity for Muriel had only grown. I was 26 in 2012, and she would’ve been 32 in 1972. I was starting to come into my own and feel the full force and possibility of adulthood. I figured maybe she was feeling the same way in 1972. Hopeful, vibrant, invincible.

I followed my gut and decided to bypass the Google searching and go back to the passenger list of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 and try again, this time with Muriel’s new last name.

And there she was.

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Up next: What am I investigating?

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Strange Distractions

An occasional feature where I recommend something weird, spooky, or unusual.

As I was proofing this post on Saturday morning, I happened to look out our front window and saw the back of a man wearing a Roberto Clemente jersey. We live in Chicago, not Pittsburgh. Is it a sign?

1. My Grandma is a New Yorker by birth but has picked up the Pittsburgh tradition of telling time using major Pittsburgh events as a cultural touchstone. It’s also worth mentioning that my Grandpa was a major, lifelong Pirates fan and Clemente’s death affected him deeply.