As told to Heather Funk Gotlib, Outreach Manager

If you’re here, you probably know about the steam calliope. It’s a REALLY loud organ-type instrument that steamboats would have back in the day in order to announce their presence before the Internet. They’d start playing when they got close to a destination, and you can hear it for ten miles or so. People in these river towns would flock to the shore to see the steamboat coming in when they heard the calliope from far away. 

Now, we play musical requests and some pop music on the calliope and people love it. They also love our calliope player, Martha.

When the boat was leaving the dock last week, I ran into one of our Mates, and he asked me if Martha had told me what happened to her over the weekend. I had just spoken to Martha, but she hadn’t mentioned it. However, we were texting back and forth to coordinate some new calliope songs, and later that afternoon she mentioned that someone told her she had to tell me her story! 

So, it was right before a cruise, and Martha was playing a selection of songs like she usually does. She will come onboard, play a few numbers, and then head home. She was on her way down the stairs to kick off a peaceful evening and cool off from being on the top deck of a steamboat in Kentucky Humidity when she ran into one of our Engineers. 

Our Engineers are in charge of checking the steam pressure and running the engines during a cruise, as well as maintaining the engines, which date back to the 1890s, twenty years before the Belle was even built. When it’s safe to come down and check things out, people are welcome to come down and explore and chit chat with them. However, when we’re taking off, turning, and docking, we use a yellow rope to signal to people that the Engineers are busy so people can’t go down to the engine room yet. 

This engineer asked Martha if she could put the yellow rope up on her way out, so she went over to the top of the staircase to the engine room to do so. At the top of the staircase is a closet, and as Martha came closer, she heard someone kicking and pounding on the door of the closet and screaming “HELP ME OUT! I’m STUCK!” 

Martha RAN to go get one of our engineers to unlock the closet, and they got out the key, opened the door, and found… nothing. This is actually a linen closet full of shelves that a person can’t even fit into. 

I’ve heard stories that our engine room is home to the one angry ghost on the Belle. This is the ghost of a deckhand, who we call Floyd. According to legend, before a Moonlight cruise many decades ago, Captain Winters sent Floyd down to the engine room. He was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, so when the boat was ordered to go “full steam ahead” (yes, that’s where the saying comes from), Floyd was crushed in the paddlewheel… exactly one deck below that closet where Martha heard the trapped entity.