Merrian Carver: The Cruise Ship Passenger Who Vanished Into Thin Air
YouTubeMerrian Carver’s family is outraged by how Royal Caribbean treated her 2004 disappearance.
In 2004, without telling her family, 40-year-old Merrian Carver boarded a Royal Caribbean cruise to Alaska. On the second day of the seven-day cruise, she vanished without a trace — but no one told her family or the authorities.
“In effect, Merrian vanished from the Earth,” her father told ABC.
Ever since his daughter disappeared, Kendall Carver has struggled to understand exactly what happened on her final voyage. He found that she boarded the cruise ship while her daughter was staying with her ex-husband and vanished just two days into the voyage. But though a crew member noticed her disappearance, he was told to keep quiet.
YouTubeTo the fury of her family, no one on the ship reported Carver missing, despite noticing her disappearance.
“The steward reported Merrian missing daily for five days to his boss,” Kendall told CBS. “And his boss said, ‘Just go do your job,’ and that’s it. So no action was taken.”
To make matters worse, the cruise crew never reported Merrian Carver missing. Instead, they gave most of her belongings away to charity.
“They got rid of most of her stuff,” Kendall Carver told ABC. “A gold wristwatch, all her clothes were gone, vanished… She was gone. And the purse had her name, Social Security number, and everything. They just put it in storage, did nothing.”
Though Royal Caribbean settled out of court with the Carver family, they also claimed that Merrian Carver probably took her own life. “Ms. Carver had emotional problems and had attempted suicide before, which she appears to have done on our ship,” they said in a statement reported by ABC.
But to Kendall Carver, who founded the International Cruise Victims Association before his death in 2019, Merrian’s fate remains a mystery. “Do I know what happened to Merrian?” he said, according to ABC. “God only knows.”
