Ghost ships, or phantom ships, make up a big part of the seafaring lore that has been passed
down by sailors and fisherman throughout the years.
The ships are said to be spectral apparitions that materialize on the horizon before quickly
disappearing, and they are believed to be a sign of bad things to come.
The term is also used to describe abandoned vessels that are found adrift with no crew
or passengers, often under frightening and mysterious circumstances.
Whether real stories of these derelict ships or legends about phantom craft trawling the
seas, the following are the ten most famous ghost ships that continue to provoke speculation
and mystery in the nautical world.
10.
The Caleuche
One of the most well known legends of the Chilota mythology of southern Chile describes
the Caleuche, a ghost ship that appears every night near the island of Chiloe.
According to local legend, the ship is a kind of conscious being that sails the waters around
the area, carrying with it the spirits of all the people who have drowned at sea.
When spotted, the Caleuche is said to be strikingly beautiful and bright, and is always accompanied
by the sounds of party music and people laughing.
After appearing for a few moments, the ship is then said to disappear or submerge itself
under the water.
According to Chilota mythology, the spirits of the drowned are summoned to the ship by
the Sirena Chilota, the Pincoya, and the Picoy, three Chilota “water spirits” who resemble
mermaids.
Once aboard the phantom ship, the drowned are said to be able to resume their life as
it was before they died.
9.
The SS Valencia
The SS Valencia was steamer ship that sank off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia
in 1906.
The ship had encountered bad weather near Cape Mendocino, and after drifting off course,
struck a reef and began taking on water.
The crew quickly began lowering lifeboats holding the ship’s 108 passengers into the
water, but several of these capsized, and one simply disappeared.
The Valencia eventually sank, and only 37 of the roughly 180 people on board survived.
Five months later, a fisherman claimed he had found a life raft with 8 skeletons in
it in a nearby cave.
A search was launched, but it found nothing.
Thanks to its dramatic end, the Valencia eventually became the source of numerous ghost ship stories.
Sailors would often claim they could see the specter of the steamer drifting near the reef
in Pachena Point, and to this day the ship is the source of frequent wild theories and
ghost ship sightings.
In a bizarre twist, 27 years after the sinking of the Valencia, one of its life rafts was
found floating peacefully in nearby Barkley Sound.
The “ghost raft” was said to be in remarkable condition, and even still had most of its
original coat of paint.
8.
The Ourang Medan
The story of the Ourang Medan begins in 1947, when two American ships received a distress
call while navigating the Strait of Malacca, off the coast of Malaysia.
The caller identified himself as a member of the crew of the Ourang Medan, a Dutch vessel,
and supposedly claimed that the ship’s captain and crew were all dead or dying.
The messages became jumbled and bizarre before trailing off and ending with the words: “I
die.”
The ships quickly raced to the scene to help.
When they arrived, they found that the Ourang Medan was undamaged, but that the entire crew—even
the ship’s dog— was dead, their bodies and faces locked in terrified poses and expressions,
and many pointing at something that was not there.
Before the rescuers could investigate further, the ship mysteriously caught on fire, and
they had to evacuate.
Soon after, the Ourang Medan is said to have exploded and then sank.
While the details and the overall veracity of the Ourang Medan story are still widely
debated, there have been a number of theories proposed about what might have caused the
death of the crew.
The most popular of these is that the ship was illegally transporting nitroglycerin or
some kind of illegal nerve agent, which was not properly secured and seeped out into the
air.
Others, meanwhile, have claimed the ship was a victim of a UFO attack or some other kind
of paranormal event.
7.
The Carroll A. Deering
Perhaps the most famous ghost ship of the Eastern Seaboard is the Carroll A. Deering,
a schooner that ran aground near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in 1921.
The ship had just returned from a commercial voyage to deliver coal in South America, and
had last been spotted just south of Hatteras by a lightship near Cape Lookout.
It ran aground in the notorious Diamond Shoals, an area famous for causing shipwrecks, and
sat there for several days before any help was able to reach it.
When they did arrive, the Coast Guard found that the ship was completely abandoned.
The navigation equipment and logbook were missing, as were the two lifeboats, but otherwise
there were no signs of any kind of foul play.
A massive investigation by the U.S. government followed, which discovered that several other
ships had disappeared under mysterious circumstances around the same time.
Several theories were eventually put forth, the most popular being that the ship fell
victim to pirates or rumrunners.
Others suggested that mutiny might have been the cause, as the Deering’s first mate was
known to bear some animosity toward its Captain, but no definitive proof has even been discovered.
The mystery surrounding the ghost ship has encouraged wild speculation, and many have
argued that paranormal activity might have been responsible, citing the ship’s passage
through the infamous Bermuda triangle as proof that some kind of otherworldly phenomena might
be to blame.
6.
The Baychimo
One of the most amazing cases of a real-life ghost ship concerns the Baychimo, a cargo
steamer that was abandoned and left to drift the seas near Alaska for nearly forty years.
The ship was owned by the Hudson Bay Company, and was launched in the early 1920s and used
to trade pelts and furs with the Inuit in northern Canada.
But in 1931, the Baychimo became trapped in pack ice near Alaska, and after many attempts
to break it free, its crew were eventually airlifted out of the area to safety.
After a heavy blizzard, the ship managed to break free of the ice, but it was badly damaged
and was abandoned by the Hudson Bay Company, who assumed it would not last the winter.
Amazingly, the Baychimo managed to stay afloat, and for the next 38 years, it remained adrift
in the waters off Alaska.
The ship became something of a local legend, and was frequently sighted aimlessly floating
near the frozen ice packs by Eskimos and other vessels.
It was boarded several times, but weather conditions always made salvaging it nearly
impossible.
The Baychimo was last sighted in 1969, again frozen in the ice off of Alaska, but it has
since disappeared.
The ship is believed to have sunk in the intervening years, but recently a number of expeditions
have been launched in search of now nearly 80-year-old ghost ship.
5.
The Octavius
Although it is now considered more legend than anything, the story of the Octavius remains
one of the most famous of all ghost ship stories.
The tale dates back to 1775, when it is said that a whaling ship called the Herald stumbled
across the Octavius floating aimlessly off the coast of Greenland.
Crewmembers from the Herald boarded the Octavius, where they discovered the bodies of the crew
and passengers all frozen solid by the arctic cold.
Most notably, the crew found the ship’s captain still sitting at his desk, midway
through finishing a log entry from 1762, which meant the Octavius had been adrift for 13
years.
According to the legend, it was eventually discovered that the captain had gambled on
making a quick return to England from the Orient via the Northwest Passage, but that
the ship had become trapped in the ice.
If true, this would mean the Octavius had completed its passage to the Atlantic as a
ghost ship, its crew and captain long dead from exposure to the elements.
4.
The Joyita
The Joyita was a fishing and charter boat that was found abandoned in the South Pacific
in 1955.
The ship, along with its 25 passengers and crew, were en route to the Tokelau Islands
when something happened, and it was not until hours later that the Joyita was reported overdue
and a rescue attempt launched.
A massive air search was undertaken, but it failed to find the missing ship, and it was
not until five weeks later that a merchant ship stumbled upon the Joyita drifting some
600 miles off its original course.
There was no sign of any of the passengers, crew, cargo, or life rafts, and the ship was
damaged and listing quite badly to one side.
Further inspection by authorities found that the ship’s radio was tuned to the universal
distress signal, and a search of the deck uncovered a doctor’s bag and several bloody
bandages.
None of the crew or passengers was ever seen again, and the mystery of what happened has
never been revealed.
The most popular theory is that pirates killed the passengers and threw their bodies overboard,
but other claims have included everything from mutiny and kidnapping to insurance fraud.
3.
The Lady Lovibond
The UK has a long tradition of legends about ghost ships, and of these the Lady Lovibond
is perhaps the most famous.
As the story goes, the Lady Lovibond’s captain, Simon Peel, had just gotten married, and decided
to take his ship out on a cruise to celebrate.
He brought his new bride along—going against a longstanding seafaring belief that bringing
a woman on board a boat is bad luck—and set sail on Feb. 13, 1748.
Unfortunately for Peel, his first mate was also in love with his new wife, and after
watching the celebrations, the man became overwhelmed with rage and jealousy and intentionally
steered the boat into the deadly Goodwind Sands, a sand bar notorious for causing ship
wrecks.
The Lady Lovibond sank, killing all those aboard.
As the legend goes, ever since the wreck the Lady Lovibond can be seen sailing the waters
around Kent every 50 years.
It was sighted in 1798 by a few different ship captains, as well as in 1848 and 1898,
when it supposedly appeared to be so real that some boats, thinking it a vessel in distress,
actually sent out life rafts to help it.
The Lady Lovibond was again seen in 1948, and while there were no confirmed sightings
on its most recent anniversary in 1998, it continues to be one of the most well-known
ghost ship legends in Europe.
2.
The Mary Celeste
Undoubtedly the most famous of all the real-life ghost ships, the Mary Celeste was a merchant
ship that was found derelict and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872.
The ship was in a seaworthy condition, with all its sails still up and a full store of
food in its cargo hold, but its life boat, captain’s log book and, more importantly,
the entire crew, had mysteriously vanished.
There was no sign of a struggle, and the personal belongings of the crew and cargo of over 1500
barrels of alcohol were untouched, seemingly ruling out piracy as a possible explanation.
In the years since its bizarre discovery, a number of theories have been proposed regarding
the possible fate of the Mary Celeste’s crew.
These include that those aboard were killed by a waterspout, that the crew mutinied, or
even that eating flour contaminated with fungus led all the passengers to hallucinate and
go mad.
The most probable theory remains that a storm or some kind of technical issue led the crew
to prematurely abandon the ship in the lifeboat, and that they later died at sea.
Still, the mystery surrounding the Mary Celeste has led to much wild speculation, and others
have proposed everything from ghosts to sea monsters and alien abduction as possible explanations.
1.
The Flying Dutchman
In maritime folklore, no ghost ship is more famous than the Flying Dutchman, which has
inspired numerous paintings, horror stories, films, and even an opera.
The ship was first mentioned in the late 1700s in George Barrington’s seafaring book Voyage
to Botany Bay, and since then its legend has continued to grow, thanks to numerous sightings
of it by fisherman and sailors.
As the story goes, the Flying Dutchman was a vessel out of Amsterdam that was captained
by a man named Van der Decken.
The ship was making its way toward the East Indies when it encountered dangerous weather
near the Cape of Good Hope.
Determined to make the crossing, Van der Decken supposedly went mad, murdered his first mate,
and vowed that he would cross the Cape, “even if God would let me sail to Judgment Day!”
Despite his best efforts, the ship sank in the storm, and as the legend goes, Van der
Decken and his ghost ship are now cursed to sail the oceans for all eternity.
To this day, the Flying Dutchman continues to be one of the most-sighted of all ghost
ships, and people from deep-sea fishermen to the Prince of Wales have all claimed to
have spotted it making its never-ending voyage across
the oceans.