The Mary Celeste
On November 7, 1872, a captain, his wife, 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 the ship at the first sight of the land, but the world will never know for sure.
The Carroll A. Deering
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.
The Carroll A. Deering was built in Bath, Maine, in 1919 by the G.G. Deering Company for commercial use. The owner of the company named the ship after his son. One of the last large commercial sailing vessels, the ship was designed to carry cargo and had been in service for a year when it began its final voyage to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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.
OCTAVIUS
SS OURANG MEDAN
The ship didn’t seem to have suffered any damage itself. That is why the Captain of the Silver Star ordered the S.S. Ourang Medan to be towed back for salvage. When the ships were tied together, the smoke was seen to be coming from the No.4 cargo hold of the freighter.
The name of the ship that found the Ourang Medan is never mentioned, but the location of the encounter is described as 400 nautical miles (740 km; 460 mi) southeast of the Marshall Islands.
The second and third articles describe the experiences of the sole survivor of the Ourang Medan crew, who was found by an Italian missionary and natives on Taongi Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
The man, before perishing, tells the missionary that the ship was carrying a badly stowed cargo of oil of vitriol and that most of the crew perished because of the poisonous fumes escaping from broken containers. According to the story, the Ourang Medan was sailing from an unnamed small Chinese port to Costa Rica and deliberately avoided the authorities.
The survivor, an unnamed German, died after telling his story to the missionary, who told the story to the author, Silvio Scherli of Trieste, Italy. The Dutch newspaper concludes with a disclaimer:
The Jian Seng
Some ghost ships are so mysterious, that 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
