Unlike many of the ghost-plane stories reported across the Dark Peak's wartime crash sites, the Bleaklow Bomber rests on an unusually well-documented real event. On 3 November 1948, a United States Air Force RB-29A Superfortress named Over Exposed, an aircraft that had previously flown reconnaissance missions over the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, was flying from RAF Scampton to Warrington in Cheshire when it lost its way in low cloud. It struck the summit of Bleaklow at Higher Shelf Stones, 1,600 feet up on one of the highest and most exposed parts of the Peak District, and was destroyed in the impact. All 13 crew members on board were killed.
The wreckage of the aircraft has never been fully cleared and remains scattered across the crash site to this day, a genuinely striking sight for walkers who make the trek up onto the moor, and the site has become the focus of an annual pilgrimage by local people who come to pay their respects to the crew, marked now by a simple shrine and a memorial plaque maintained through that ongoing local care rather than any official heritage body.
Alongside the real, physical memorial, the site has generated its own ghost story. One visitor, walking towards the crash site with their three children, reported that all four of them separately saw an aircraft flying very close to the ground nearby: it made no sound, appeared from nowhere, was visible for only a few seconds, and was seen only as a dark outline shaped like a bomber, without any visible markings or windows, before it passed behind a ridge and vanished. The sighting fits a recognisable pattern of ghost-plane reports across the Dark Peak's various wartime crash sites, but this one is unusual in having a firm, fully documented historical event and a named aircraft and date behind it, rather than the vaguer wartime associations found at some nearby sites.
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