10.
Ghost Ship in Ireland In 2020 a mysterious ghost ship washed up
on the southwest coast of Ireland with no crew.
The ship was a massive cargo vessel that was propelled into the rocky coast of Ireland
by Storm Dennis but it was completely empty.
Turns out, it had drifted practically around the world until it ended up at its final resting
spot near Cork where it sat for quite some time.
According to the man who finally found it, Barry McDonald from the Royal National Lifeboat
Institution, he said he simply couldn’t believe it!
He was astounded.
He just couldn’t believe such a massive vessel could be washed up on the rocks without
anyone noticing it!
As soon as he saw it, he reported it to the Coast Guard!
The Coast Guard identified the mysterious ship as the MV Alta.
It had been drifting across the Atlantic Ocean with no crew since at least September 2018.
By the time it showed up in Ireland, the crew had abandoned it and it had been drifting
eerily across the ocean for almost two years.
When it was first abandoned, the 10 crew members had to be rescued in the middle of a voyage
from Greece to Haiti.
The crew encountered technical difficulties when the power went out, and they drifted.
They were lost, floating in the ocean for 20 days before the US Coast Guard noticed
them when they got close to Bermuda.
The USCG Cutter Confidence, which was conducting patrols near Puerto Rico, was able to drop
off supplies and get a tugboat out to rescue the crew.
Once everyone was safe, they tried to find the ship's owner.
It was the owner’s job to get another tugboat to pull the vessel away.
But he refused, and after some storms and hurricanes, the ship was left floating at
sea!
One year after the crew was rescued, the Royal Navy ice patrol ship, the HMS Protector, reported
seeing a creepy vessel floating alone in the mid Atlantic ocean.
It was the MV Alta.
Almost a year later, the ghost ship found its resting place in Cork, but people are
encouraged to stay away from it since it is considered to be in “unstable condition”.
9.
Latvian Shipwreck Some locals recently found a suspicious shipwreck
on a Latvian beach that dates back over 200 years.
This creepy ship is 40 feet (12m) long, and according to the experts, could be a lost
warship from Britain’s Royal Navy.
The ship was first discovered by some locals visiting Daugavgriva Beach, just a couple
of miles away from the capital city of Riga.
People came across the beams of the wreckage, then called in the big guns.
Excavators scooped out the sand to see the full scope of the ship.
It proved to be huge, although nobody has yet identified its origins.
The hull appears to have once been plated with copper, which was a technology first
used by the Royal Navy.
As for the rest of the ship, it appears to be made of solid oak.
This was a popular shipbuilding material in Britain until the Victorian era or the mid-1800s.
That leaves it somewhere between 150 and 200 years old.
The Royal Navy may have once used it to patrol the Baltic Sea.
Judging by its size and its copper armor, the navy may have designed it for war.
Or it was a long-distance merchant trade ship.
Either way, it ended up beached on the coast of Latvia, then buried under literal tons
of sand.
The authorities had to dig the entire beach up just to expose the bottom of the ship.
8.
El Caleuche The legend of El Caleuche takes us to the
misty island of Chiloe, in Chile.
Local legends say that now and then at low tide, the wind will carry ghostly music and
the gentle buzzing of low voices out from the fog.
The air along the coast grows cold, and El Caleuche comes sailing out of the mist.
It's a big white sailing ship, brightly lit and joyous with the sounds of partying.
But for the islanders, the ship is an evil omen.
Some people believe it's a living being, and that it lures sailors out into the mist to
be enslaved for all of eternity.
Others believe it has something to do with the spirits of lost sailors.
More wild theories say a group of mystical sorcerers have made magical pacts with traders
and other sailors who worked on the ship whose ghosts have been forced to work for hundreds
of years.
The ship goes by many names, such as the Warlock’s Ship and the Enchanted Ship.
But just how much of the legend is true?
Hard to say of course.
There are so many variations of the legend by now that nobody can agree on what El Caleuche
really is or where it even came from.
Some say the ghostly sailors on the ship are evil, while others say they sail the seas,
helping desperate sailors out of dangerous situations.
One hypothesis is that the legend is a copy of an older legend, inspired by the European
tales of the Flying Dutchman.
The story found its way to this tiny corner of Chile, and they came up with their own
unique spin on it.
Then again, the ghost ship could also be based on the mysterious disappearance of a real
Dutch ship called The Calanche. 7.
The Kobenhavn Phantom Ship The mystery of the phantom ship the Kobenhavn
goes back to the 1920s.
Shipbuilders originally built the vessel in Scotland and it set off on its first journey
in 1921.
At this point in history, it was the biggest ship the world had ever seen.
430 feet (131m) long, with sails so big they could cover a surface area of nearly 60,000
feet (18,288m).
It also had a massive, 650-horsepower engine hiding below deck.
This was an absolute beast of a ship, and it wowed the citizens of the world as it went
on 9 full voyages in the next decade.
It even circumnavigated the globe two times.
But in 1928 it all went wrong.
On September 21, the ship was preparing to go on another voyage.
Nobody had the slightest notion it would be the ship's last.
75 people were on board, 45 of them young cadets.
They were to unload in Buenos Aires, journey to Australia, and then sail back to Europe.
They docked in Buenos Aires for a full month, then headed for the open sea.
The skipper sent a message 8 days into their voyage saying, “All is well.”
And after that, the Kobenhavn was gone.
It simply vanished and nobody knew what happened to it.
A year later in 1929, a five-masted ghost ship was spotted drifting through the ocean.
A search party was sent to see what it was, but the ship was already gone.
It’s believed the Kobenhavn is still roaming the seas.
6.
Beeswax Wreck The beeswax wreck is a Spanish shipwreck dating
back to the late 1600’s that nobody has found yet!
It's one of the more bizarre maritime mysteries in the US.
People say that the shipwreck is located somewhere off the coast of Oregon.
This Spanish galleon was carrying tons and tons of beeswax in large blocks and candles.
Back when there wasn’t electricity Beeswax was everything so you could have candles for
light!!
After 14 years of research, archaeologists say the ship was wrecked prior to European
settlement and even European exploration so what was it doing so far north and on the
opposite coast of the US from Spain?
It’s most likely the ship was trading between Manila and Acapulco and crashed on the shore
of the northern US.
Later a tsunami in 1700 scattered the shipwreck further north.
Spanish archival records of the galleon trade list only one galleon sailing from Manila
to Acapulco as missing during this time period: the Santo Cristo de Burgos, which left Manila
in 1693 and was never seen again.
We don't know for sure if this is the right ship but we do know what it had in its cargo.
We also know it went down somewhere near Oregon because of all the clumps of beeswax that
people have found washed up on beaches.
All along Oregon's north coast for the last 200 years, people have been finding lost bricks
of beeswax from the same sunken ship with the Spanish seal on them.
The only historical mention of the wreckage is from the fur trader Alexander Henry.
He wrote in 1813 that a local Native American tribe had massive quantities of beeswax that
they were looking to sell.
The Native Americans said they had gotten the beeswax from a shipwreck, but the shipwreck
vanished before anyone else could find it.
5.
Golden Gate Ships In the murky water off the coast of San Francisco,
in the area of the Golden Gate Bridge, there is a whole graveyard of sunken ships.
In fact, according to marine archaeologists, there are at least 300 wrecks within the Golden
Gate National Recreation Area and the surrounding region.
And scientists have seen or investigated only a fraction of these mysterious ships.
Marine researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently
set out to document the lost ghost ships of San Francisco.
They conducted a survey that went on for five days, using a remotely operated vehicle to
identify four major wreckage sites.
James Delgado, with the Maritime Heritage for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries,
says there are so many wrecks because, at one point, this was the busiest and most important
port on the American Pacific Coast.
The sunken ships here date back from 1595 to as recently as 1984.
Discovering four wrecks is hardly documenting all 300.
But it’s a start!
4.
The Flying Dutchman There is no ghost ship anywhere near as famous
as the Flying Dutchman.
But unlike some stories of phantom vessels, the Flying Dutchman is rooted in reality.
It was the year 1641 and Captain Hendrick van der Decken, also known as the Dutchman,
left Amsterdam with a ship full of spices.
But as he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, a storm ensnared him and his crew.
The crew begged the Dutchman to reverse course, but he pushed them straight into the gale.
Some say he was drunk, others say he was just completely insane.
No matter the case, the ship sank and thus was born the legend of the Flying Dutchman.
Starting in the 18th century and going on for 250 years, sailors continued to report
seeing the Flying Dutchman at sea.
And it is never a good thing because it was always right before a great catastrophe.
Whenever a ship went down during a storm, someone always claimed to have witnessed the
Dutchman coming out of the fog in the minutes before the disaster.
But believe it or not, it was the opera that put the Flying Dutchman on the public radar.
This was a famous ghost ship in marine circles, but it became popular culture in 1843 thanks
to Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. 3.
The Lyubov Orlova The Russian ghost ship the Lyubov Orlova became
famous in 2014 when it showed up out of nowhere on a collision course with the British coastline.
The Russian ship, named after a famous Russian actress from Soviet cinema, had been drifting
aimlessly through the ocean for a full year.
It was a 300-foot-long (91m) vessel built over four decades ago, serving most recently
as an expedition cruiser.
The ship’s builders had built the hull to withstand sea ice, making it ideal for long
journeys through the Arctic and Antarctica.
In 2010, the Canadian authorities confiscated the ghost ship over debts.
Instead of paying off those debts, the crew deserted the ship.
The owner went missing in action, and the Lyubov Orlova was abandoned.
It was tied up in Canada for two years, then towed to the Dominican Republic.
But as she was being towed to the Dominican, the line broke, and she was released out into
the wild, a ship without a crew and nowhere to go.
2.
Baltic Sea Shipwreck At the bottom of the Baltic Sea, underwater
archaeologists have discovered a different kind of ghost ship.
This one is 500 years old and in pretty awful shape.
It’s called the Gribshunden, and it was once the flagship of King Hans of Denmark.
It was so big and so mighty people called it a floating castle.
Historical records show the ship sank back in 1495 along with a crew of soldiers and
noblemen.
We don't know exactly how many were lost, but considering the size of the vessel, it
was probably a lot.
The reason the Gribshunden is such an incredible find is that shipwrecks this old rarely exist.
There's something called a shipworm, a type of saltwater clam, which usually goes to work
eating the wood of sunken vessels until everything is gone.
The only thing that prevented this ship from being completely savaged by the worms was
the low salt level of the brackish Baltic Sea.
This helped to preserve the vessel, which archaeologists say is a treasure without a
price!
The ship is still in extremely rough shape.
There isn't much left except chunks of timber covered in barnacles and clams.
But it is relatively intact, and it should give archaeologists a unique look at the end
of the Middle Ages when floating castles helped modernize society.
1.
Ancient Maya Slave Ship Researchers have identified what could be
the most disturbing ghostly wreckage yet.
Just off the coast of Mexico, researchers found the remnants of a steamboat from the
19th century sitting on the ocean floor.
The ship was hardly recognizable, totally in ruins and overgrown with marine plant life.
It’s also mostly disintegrated.
Researchers with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History were able to document
and identify the ship.
They linked it to a violent and terrifying chapter in the country's history.
Historical documents show the vessel is called La Union, and that it was used for the illegal
transportation of enslaved Maya people during the late 1800s.
Between the years 1855 and 1861, documents show La Union was used to capture and transport
around 30 Maya people every month to the island of Cuba, where they were taken as slaves to
work on sugarcane plantations.
The ship was even active during the Caste War of Yucatan.
For those who don't know, this was the war that started in 1847 when the Maya peasants
rebelled against the Spanish-speaking landowners who subjugated them.
The war ended in 1901 with around 300,000 deaths.
As for the ship, it went down on September 19, 1861.
It was on its way to the Caribbean island when its boilers exploded.
Its wooden hull was set on fire and about half of everyone on board was killed.
Now it's in pieces on the bottom of the ocean, a grim reminder of Mexico's dark past.
What’s the spookiest ghost ship?
Let me know which one creeped you out the most in the comments and thanks for watching!
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