The Ghost Ship SS Ourang Medan And Its Terror-Stricken Crew
Twitter/Haunted History BCA recreation of what the SS Ourang Medan may have looked like.
The tale of the SS Ourang Medan is unlike those of other ghost ships.
For one, historians are unsure if it ever existed.
The legend of the vessel first emerged in the 1940s, when stories circulated in various newspapers around the world about a mysterious ship that had been discovered in the Strait of Malacca, near modern-day Indonesia.
The specific details of the story vary depending on the source, but a popular version claims that another nearby ship picked up a disturbing SOS message from the Ourang Medan: “We float. All officers, including the captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead… I die.”
An American vessel called the Silver Star investigated the distress call, and when the rescuers happened upon the Ourang Medan, they found the entire crew dead on the ship under bizarre circumstances. Chillingly, everyone’s faces were reportedly frozen in terror — even the dog’s face.
Even more shocking, when the Silver Star tried to tow the Ourang Medan to port, the vessel allegedly caught fire and then exploded before the rescuers’ eyes. Stunned, they watched in horror as the destroyed ship sank.
But as bone-chilling as this story is, no official record of the Ourang Medan has ever been found. Furthermore, no evidence of a shipwreck like that one has been located in the Strait of Malacca, or anywhere else.
It’s possible that this story is nothing more than a myth. However, it’s a legend that’s endured for decades, and it’s inspired countless theories as to what happened to the doomed sailors (if they really existed).
Some accounts suggest that if the ship was real, it may have been carrying dangerous materials like potassium cyanide and nitroglycerine during or right after World War II, which led to both the deaths and the explosion.
