A Strange Landing at a Haunted Airport

Oklahoma State Court of Appeals judge Kenneth D. Bacon loved to fly in his open-cockpit Starduster II. On a summer day in 1976, he flew to Kansas alone, and was caught in a bank of black clouds that suddenly appeared, although the forecast was for a completely sunny day. Bacon looked for a place to land, and was shocked to see an enormous airport with runways that looked 7,000 feet long! It was labeled as Habit Field, but he couldn't find a radio frequency, and heard no signal from the tower. Nevertheless, he finally landed and found no one there at all. He described it as an extremely eerie experience. At the next airport over, he was told that "no one lands there." Then they found damage to Bacon's plane that shouldn't have been possible. Read his account of that strange day at Strange Company.  

Of course, I had to know more. Naval Air Station Hutchinson was created in 1942. What was the navy doing in Kansas? Well, it was wartime. The airfield was built on 2,565 acres and the runways indeed grew to 7,000 feet. After the war, the airfield was shuttered, and went into private hands briefly, but then was repurposed for naval training. It became a Kansas Air National Guard Base in 1957. It was closed in 1967. Then it became a commercial airport called H.A.B.I.T. (Hutchinson Air Base Industrial Tract). In the late '70s, it was used for a commercial skydiving operation called Sunflower Field. By the end of the century, it was an oversized glider airport. You can read an extensive history of the airport at this site, starting about halfway down the page, with lots of pictures.