In Haunted Summer, one of the characters sees a spectral World War II-era Japanese plane flying along the cost near the Washington-Oregon border. One of the accidental discoveries I made when I was doing research for the novel is that the Japanese really did launch a couple of attacks on the Pacific Northwest during World War II during 1942. They had developed a way to put bomber planes inside of 350-foot-long submarines. They would surface, reattach the wings, and launch the planes on their bombing runs. The mission of the pilot was to drop incendiary bombs on the forests to start fires, but it didn’t work because Oregon had had a rainier summer than usual, and the forests were too wet for the fires to spread. This is a link to one of several articles about the attacks: http://www.historynet.com/japan-bombed-oregon.htm. Nobody on land died as a result of the bombing runs. The Japanese did launch fire balloons, balloons with bombs attached, in 1944. A 26-year-old minister’s wife and five children were killed by one of them when they came across it unexpectedly during a weekend outing. They were the only Americans killed on the mainland during World War II. That was a tragic story that didn’t make it into my book.
The bombing run story has a moving epilogue: Nobu Fujita, the pilot who flew the bombing missions in 1942, visited Brookings, Oregon, several times after World War II. He presented a samurai sword to the city, and it is on display in a library there. After his death, Fujita had some of his ashes scattered near Mt. Emily where he had dropped one of the bombs.