Image by Mia-Maria Wikström from Pixabay

When you hear the words "Ghost Ship" what comes to your mind - is it the Flying Dutchman or maybe the Queen Mary or any of the other ships that are said to be haunted? In nautical terms a "Ghost Ship" is a sea going vessel that is found without a crew and with no explanation of what happened to the crew. So let’s look at some of the famous and recent ghost ship and the mysteries surrounding them that have been explained.

The first one is one of the most recently reported ghost ships that was sited in Miami Florida and it is the "Joe Cool". The 47 foot sport fishing boat was found doing circles and dragging its anchor on the Florida Straits around 30 miles north of Cuba. The crew of four and the two passengers that had chartered the boat were missing. So at the time the Joe Cool was towed into Biscayne Bay by the Coast Guard it was a ghost ship. The Coast Guard would soon find one of the life rafts with the two passengers in it adrift around 12 miles from where the Joe Cool was found. After the police interrogated the two men and disbelieved their stories they were charged with the murder of the crew. I want to start with this one because it was a ghost ship for only a few hours but the media ran with it as being a ghost ship for almost a day before the rest of the story came out.

Here is another one from 2007 - a 12 meter catamaran named the "Kaz II" which was found off the coast of Queensland unmanned. It was found with the sails up (one was badly damaged) and the engine running but without the three man crew. To add to the mystery, the radio and GPS were working, there was a laptop that was on and there was a meal set to eat but no clue as to the location of the crew. Also all the survival equipment including three life jackets and the emergency beacon where found onboard but again, not one clue to where the three men were and what happened. Many of the people involved in finding the ghost ship and the search for the crew say it was like they just got up from dinner and stepped off the world. The Kaz II, as far as I know, is still considered a ghost ship and the fate of the crew is still a mystery even though they are presumed dead by the authorities.

In the article I read from the Times Sydney they looked into the weather and also the type of seas that could be expected and ruled out any cause that could be linked to natural occurrences. So what happened to the three men, did they all three decide to go swimming during their meal, did one fall overboard and the other two fall in trying to save the first? I don’t think so. Is this a case of high seas abduction by aliens? It is hard to say without doing an investigation and going over the ship from an ‘outside the box’ point of view. This includes looking for things that the police and the Coast Guard would not look for like radiation and any costal reports of strange lights in the general area. I would hope that one of the local paranormal investigators would look into this ghost ship and the next one also.

In 2003 the "High Aim 6" a 65ft fishing trawler was found adrift off northwest Australia with no sign of its twelve man crew. It was last seen 2500 miles near the Marshall Island. The High Aim 6 was found undamaged with plenty of food and fuel onboard as well as three tons of spoiled fish in its hold and no sign of its crew. One explanation that was given but never proven was that the crew was killed by Indonesian pirates while it was near the Marshall Island. If this was true why not use the ship till the fuel was exhausted then abandon it to the sea? As you can see by the dates of these examples of ghost ships that this it is not something that only happened in the past.

Now for some historical ghost ships that you may have heard of like The Mary Celeste. 1872 this 100ft brigantine was found in the Atlantic Ocean unmanned and under full sail heading for the Straits of Gibraltar. There are some that speculate that the ship was doomed from the start due her first captain’s death at the very beginning of its maiden voyage and the fact that she colluded with another vessel in the English Channel. Several years after this she was wrecked in a storm in Glace Bay in 1867. After she was fixed and changes were made to the ship the new owners changed the name of the ship to the Mary Celeste. I can not verify the name change but if the circumstances are true, this may be where the superstition comes from that it is bad luck to change the name of a ship.

The Mary Celeste set sail November 5, 1872 under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs from New York to Genoa, Italy. The captain and crew numbered ten total which included the captain’s wife and daughter with a cargo of no drinking alcohol. On December 4^th or 5^th of the same year the Mary Celeste was sighted by the ship Dei Gratia that had set sail from New York only 7 or 10 (sources differ on the date) days behind the Mary Celeste. The Dei Gratia was commanded by Captain David Morehouse who knew the captain of the Mary Celeste. While the Dei Gratia’s was under full sail heading for the Straits of Gibraltar her crew observed the Mary Celeste for over two hours. Even though the Mary Celeste was flying no distress signals they had decided that she was adrift.

It was decided to board the Mary Celeste so the Chief Mate Oliver Deveau led the small party. He found the ship in generally good condition except that he was said to say that he found the whole ship was a “thoroughly wet mess.” It was reported that there was only one operable pump and water in every compartment and around three and a half feet of water in the hold. The fore-hatch and the lazarette were both open and the only lifeboat appeared that it had been launched not torn away from the ship. They found the clock was not functioning and the compass was destroyed but the sextant and the marine chronometer were missing. This evidence lead to several opinions as to what had happened to the crew.  One opinion was that the occupants thought the ship was sinking and abandoned her in the lifeboat. Some thought that the crew had opened the hatches because of fumes and all had taken refuge in the lifeboat until the fumes had cleared. Once in the lifeboat. It was believed that the rope (that was their life line to the ship) broke which stranded them in the lifeboat while the ship continued to sail away. Another explanation was that some type of sea monster had taken the crew and that was why there was so much water on the ship. There has been no conclusive explanation of what had happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste.

The next historical ghost ship is the SS Valencia an iron hulled passenger steam ship that wrecked off the coast of Vancouver in 1906. This one has aspects of two of the different types of ghost ships the first is that 27 years after the wreck its lifeboat number five was found adrift in Barkly Sound. The lifeboat was in good condition with much of the paint still intact but there was no explanation to how it mad it to the location it was found. The official death toll from the federal report was 136 with only 37 men surviving the wreck. The SS Valencia’s dramatic end and large loss of life spurred many ghost stories in the area to include a phantom ship. In 1910, several sailors claimed to have seen a ghost ship (phantom ship) that resembled the SS Valencia near Pachena Point, which leads us to the next type of ghost ship.

So far we have looked at several of the missing crew types of ghost ships. Let’s look at the specter of the high seas… the phantom ship. A phantom ship is another term for a ghost ship and I will us it to keep the two separated, but in some cases the lines between the two may get blurry. I have heard many stories of ships that have been seen at sea with no crew and when a boarding was attempted the ship just disappeared. Like the burning ship of Northumberland Strait that has been seen off the coast of Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island in Canada. This phantom ship is said to appear as a three masted sailing ship on fire that will suddenly vanish. Some of the stories of this burning ship have included rescue attempt launches but none ever got close to the ship before it disappeared. The stories of the burning ship are interesting but it is not the most famous phantom ship. We have to talk a little about the most famous phantom ship and that would be the Flying Dutchman.

There are many different stories about this phantom ship and most say that the ship can never go home and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. She is almost always spotted from afar either as a silhouette or glowing with a eerie unworldly light. The sight of this phantom ship is believed to be an omen of doom in some of the seafarers’ superstitions. There are many different sources that have many different ideas about the real name of the ship and where it hailed from and who captained her. Some of the stories relate that the original ship was of Dutch origin and a plague broke out onboard and no one would let the ship come to port and because of this the crew soon died sailing from port to port. Some say that it is a curse placed on the captain and crew because of some heinous crime that they committed so they will sail for all eternity. There is one story that says that the captain’s pride cursed the ship because he failed to yield to bad weather. In his pride he stated that he would rather sail for all eternity than to seek save harbor. This one is also why they say that you will only see the Dutchman in foul weather. There were many reported sightings of the Dutchman in the 19^th and 20^th centuries by sailors of different nationalities. One sighting was reported by Prince George of Wales in 1880. He was on a three year voyage on a 4000 ton corvette the HMS Bacchante off the coast of Australia with his brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales and their tutor Dalton. In Dalton’s journal he said that, “… at 4:00 AM the Flying Dutchman crossed our bow” and that over 13 members of the crew had see her. He described the Dutchman with a strange red light and the ship all aglow. The Dutchman sails into the category of the phantom ships of history but is it a haunted ship or a apparition itself?

This leaves the last type of ghost ship and that is the ship that is still in this reality but is considered haunted. Just about any large ship could and probably does have ghost stories associated with the ship. Many of the wartime ships of WWII were said to have the ghost of a worker in-between the inner and outer hull. Most of the stories say that a worker was trapped between the hulls and died and his spirit would still try to do his job of hammering rivets. These stories circulated mostly when the ship was in service and were based upon a strange noise coming from the space between the hulls. Many different TV shows have done investigations on the RMS Queen Mary and other war time ships that are not in service. There are many reports of paranormal events taking place on these ships and a lot of anomalous picture evidence supporting the claims that the ships are haunted. In my opinion any ship that has had a death onboard could be haunted, not to say that any ship that has had a death onboard is haunted. Having a death onboard the ship does not automatically make the ship haunted - it just makes it a possibility.

In one of the case studies I read on a decommissioned war ship in England the ship was thought to be haunted by one of her captains. The Captain in question did not die onboard the ship but the ship was his life and after his death the smell of his pipe returned to the bridge. The ship was his home, the one place that he put his life and spirit into. I have not personally investigated a ship haunting, ghost ship or phantom ship but from my research and the investigations I have done on dry land I have an opinion on all these phenomena.

A haunting can be place specific like a bit of history replaying over and over again which could be a explanation of the phantom ship phenomena. We get a glimpse of the past event because of the residual energies that have lingered because of the traumatic event. This could help to start a base of an investigation into a phantom ship. You would have to research the location of the sightings for any historical records of any traumatic event with the type of ship in question. That could be very difficult because of the way records were kept and the lack of eye witnesses to the original event. Many of the locations where a phantom ship has been sited was also the place where many different ship wrecks occurred over the years with many of the same type of ship involved. So for a phantom ship investigation I would just work with local lore and as much as I could with historical records that I find near the location of the sightings. Finding the time and date the ship was seen by others will optimize my chances of viewing the phantom ship myself. In regards to a ship that is said to be haunted, I would handle this just as I would any investigation on dry land. The ship is just like a house or building where there have been people living and possibly dying within its space. One thing to consider is that a modern ship almost always has two elements that you would look for in a dry land investigation (water and iron). Is a modern ship more likely haunted because there is water under it and iron all around it? In my opinion it is hard to say with our current level of technology in the field of paranormal investigation. And finally what brought us to this point about the ghost ship and where all these people have gone over the years. Have they been abducted by aliens, eaten by sea monsters or is there a time door that is out there that takes them away? Many of the same questions are brought up about the Bermuda Triangle and Dragons Triangle and are never answered. The oceans of our world are vast areas that been charted and explored but not totally understood. We are still finding animals and natural phenomena that we did not know existed. I am glad that there are still some mysteries in the world of today and that there are still things that we can not explain in the conventional way. So on your next trip to the beach look into the area’s maritime museum and see if there are any stories of ghost ships that could wet your investigational appetite. Just remember to always be safe in all your investigations and use caution and common sense.