WITH OR WITHOUT the pipe guy, Mystic Seaport is a ghost town this morning. It's early on a rainy June day, during a summer when gas prices have put a notable damper on family outings to Mystic. (The name, which lends a puzzling New Age cast to the town's more resolutely unmystical undertakings—e.g., Mystic Tile & Carpet—comes from the Pequot word missi-tuk, meaning a type of river.)

I've been wandering the gravel streets, talking to staffers dressed as coopers and captains' wives. I'm hearing about ghosts, but not much about the Morgan. The staff will tell you that the Joseph Conrad, another of the museum's ships, is also haunted, as is the historic Buckingham House and the Membership building, where the late Mildred Mallory, perhaps an early feng shui buff, occasionally rearranges items in the lounge.

The Morgan, my final stop, is a glorious, black-flanked, three-masted sailing ship, just over 100 feet long. She slept 30, in the way a prison cell in South America might sleep 30. Twenty-two bunks are crammed into the tiny crew's quarters, or forecastle

Could a six-foot ghost haunt a whaleship with five-foot ceilings? "I guess he was like this bendy ghost," says Morgan interpreter Steve Purdy.

(pronounced fock-sull), one deck down and right next to the blubber room, at the bow of the ship. The captain and his mates dined and slept in the relatively luxurious but still cramped captain's quarters, at the other end. The top deck housed the kitchen and an outdoor stove for boiling down blubber, while the bottom deck, or hold, was for storage.

Right now, the blubber room is quiet. Fifty feet long and half as wide, it's empty except for some atmospheric casks, an anchor chain, and a lighted plaque that names various Mystic Seaport donors. I'm down here with staff interpreter Steve Purdy, who fills me in on what took place in this room. Basically, as he puts it, "the dividing of the blubber up." The fat was lowered from the deck above and cut into boilable strips. A whaling ship stayed at sea until the hold and much of the blubber room were filled with barrels of whale oil—up to 2,000 of them. Since a sperm whale yielded, on average, 40 to 50 barrels, and months could pass between kills, it was not uncommon for a whaling ship to be at sea for three or four years.

It's awfully cramped in here, which makes me wonder about the six-foot ghost, because the ceiling beams of the blubber room are just over five feet high. When I ask Purdy about this, he seems perplexed. "I guess he was like this bendy ghost," he says.