During the years after the crash, stories began circulating that employees of Eastern Air Lines had seen ghosts of the dead crew members aboard other L-1011 aircraft. These stories speculated that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged and refitted into other L-1011s, and the hauntings were seen only on the planes that used the spare parts. Eastern Air Lines reportedly removed all the salvaged parts from their L-1011 fleet, and the ghost sightings stopped.
According to Robert J. Serling's 1980 book "From the Captain to the Colonel: An Informal History of Eastern Airlines", the claim that wreckage from Flight 401 was installed and later removed from other aircraft was false, and no Eastern employees had ever claimed to have seen or believed in the alleged ghost sightings.
A number of movies, books, and television documentaries about Flight 401 have promoted the false ghost stories.