These ghost ships aren’t home to phantom sailors, but they are equally mysterious, with crews that seemingly vanished in thin air.
On November
7, 1872, a captain, his wife, and two-year-old daughter, and seven crewmen set
out from New York to Italy aboard the Mary Celeste. A month later, they
should have arrived, but the British ship Dei Gratia caught sight of
the boat drifting in the Atlantic. The crew went onto the Mary
Celeste to help anyone onboard but found it completely empty.
Six months’
worth of food and the crew’s belongings were still there, but its lifeboat was
gone. The ship’s floor was covered in three feet of water, but that was far
from flooded or beyond repair. It’s become one of the world’s most famous ghost
ships—thanks largely to the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the boat as
inspiration for his short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”—with theories
from pirates to mutiny to murder.
The most
likely explanation is that the captain didn’t know the extent of the damage and
ordered the crew to abandon ship at the first sight of land, but the world will
never know for sure.
The Carroll
A. Deering cargo ship and its ten-man crew successfully made it to Rio de
Janeiro in 1920, despite needing to change captains when its original one fell
ill, but something strange happened on its way back to Virginia. A lightship
keeper in North Carolina said a crewman who didn’t seem very officer-like
reported the ship had lost its anchors while the rest of the crew was “milling
about” suspiciously.
Another ship
spotted the Carroll A. Deering near Outer Banks the next day in an
area that would have been a strange course for a ship on its way to Norfolk,
Virginia. The following day, a shipwreck was spotted, but dangerous conditions
kept investigators away for four days. When they went aboard, they found food
laid out as if they were getting ready for a meal, but the crew’s personal
belongings and the lifeboats were gone.
The federal
government followed leads on pirates, mutinies, and more, but they all came up
fruitless.
3- The Jian
Seng
Some ghost
ships are so mysterious; they barely even have a backstory. In 2006, the
Australian Coastwatch found a ship floating in the sea. It had a broken tow
rope, so being lost while dragged around the water would explain why it was
empty.
But that was
about all investigators could go on. The name Jian Seng was printed
on the side, but there was nothing else to identify the ship. Investigations
found no records of distress signals, no identifying documents or belongings,
and no reports of a missing boat. They couldn’t even figure out who it belonged
to or where it came from. The most they can figure out is that it probably
supplied food and fuel to fishing boats, but that didn’t answer why no one
tried to save it when it broke off.
Fishing
boat High Aim No. 6 left Taiwan on Halloween in 2002, but trick-or-treaters
wouldn’t be the only ghosts. When the Australian Navy came across the ship in
January 2003, something was amiss. The engine was on full throttle and the
main gas tank was empty, but the auxiliary fuel tanks were still full
and untouched. Ten tons of bonito tuna were kept cold, but not a crew member
was to be found.
It was set
to be one of the most mysterious ghost ships of all time until one crew member
was found. The Indonesian fisherman was arrested and confessed that the crew
had worked with pirates to kill the ship’s captain and main engineer, but their
reason is still a mystery.
The Nina yacht’s
crew reached out to meteorologists with concerns about dangerous weather
conditions in 2013, then stopped responding. Given the 70-mile-per-hour winds
and 26-foot-high waves, it seemed obvious that the boat had met its match and
never made it through the storm. A fruitless search effort might have been the
end if it weren’t for a mysterious message.
Three weeks
after anyone had heard from the crew, an undelivered text reached one of the
meteorologists. “Thanks storm sails shredded last night, now bare poles,” it
read, noting that the boat was still on the move. The family of a 19-year-old
girl on the boat took that message as a sign that she was still alive. Their
private search turned up satellite photos that they thought might be of the
missing Nina, though most experts say it was just a large wave.
In 1955,
merchant ship MV Joyita set off on a two-day journey in the South
Pacific. It would never reach its destination. The rescue team’s search turned
out blank, and it wasn’t until more than a month later that another captain
spotted the partially sunken ship. There was no sign of any of the 25
passengers, and an investigation deemed its doom “inexplicable.”
Over the
years, dark theories circulated, from Soviet submariners kidnapping the crew to
Japanese fishermen killing everyone onboard. As recent as 2002, family members
were still researching what could have gone wrong, and one professor insists
the most likely scenario is that a corroded pipe was leaking and flooded the
boat, forcing the crew to abandon ship.
When
Filipino fishermen boarded a seemingly abandoned yacht in 2016, they weren’t
prepared for the sight they would find: the mummified body of a German
sailor. Manfred Fritz Bajorat had been sailing around the world for
about 20 years. He’d last been seen in 2009, although a friend said he’d heard
from Bajorat on Facebook in 2015.
There was no
evidence of foul play, so a year would seem like enough for the warm, salty air
to mummify the body…until an autopsy revealed he’d probably only been dead for
about a week.
In April
2007, two brothers and a skipper set off on a two-month yacht journey around
Australia. Just three days later, the Kaz II was found off the Great
Barrier Reef with a half-empty coffee cup, an open newspaper, and knives strewn
on the floor—but no one aboard.
A coroner
suggested that one of the inexperienced sailors had fallen off and the other
two drowned in their rescue attempts. But that’s just one theory with no
evidence backing it up, so their fate is lost in history.
This Myanmar
ghost ship mystery is a pretty recent one, and one that has most likely been
solved. The Myanmar (also known as Burma) ghost ship was the Sam
Rataulangi PB 1600 freighter, and fishermen found it off the coast of
Myanmar, empty of people and cargo, in August 2018.
Shortly
afterward, though, Myanmar’s navy discovered that the freighter had been on its
way to a ship-breaking plant to be dismantled, being towed by a tugboat when
bad weather hit. The cable connecting it to the tugboat snapped, so the
“Myanmar ghost ship” was abandoned by its crew.
Now, this
ghost ship might be one of the most disturbing of all! The story, which is
unsubstantiated, comes from anonymous accounts of a whaling ship
called Hope. As the story goes, in 1840, the Hope came across
the Jenny, a schooner, completely frozen in ice in the Antarctic Drake
Passage. The crew of the ghost ship Jenny was still on board but
frozen to death. The captain was frozen at his desk, where an open log’s last
entry read: “May 4, 1823. No food for 71 days. I am the only one left alive.”
Sure, the
story of the ghost ship Jenny is most likely at least a little
sensationalized, but could it have a basis in truth? These chilling true
urban legends certainly did.
Bizarre
history facts
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