From the Mary Celeste and the MV Joyita to the Carroll A. Deering and the SS Ourang Medan, these unsettling stories have haunted the high seas for decades.
History is filled with stories of harrowing shipwrecks. The Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, and the SS Yongala tragically sailed straight into a cyclone in 1911, killing everyone aboard.
However, some of the most chilling stories from the annals of seafaring involve not shipwrecks, but ghost ships, vessels found sailing on the open ocean without a single soul aboard and no signs of violence or distress. With a shipwreck, tragic as it is, at least we often know what happened. But in the case of a ghost ship, we sometimes have no idea.
Perhaps the most chilling among them is the Mary Celeste.
Keystone/Stringer/Getty ImagesAn illustration of the Mary Celeste, perhaps history’s most famous ghost ship.
The 282-ton brigantine set sail from New York on November 7, 1872, en route to Genoa, Italy, with some 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol in its hold. It seemed destined to be a perfectly typical voyage. The ship was under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs, a 37-year-old who had spent most of his life at sea and who had commanded three ships previously. Briggs was joined by his wife, his two-year-old daughter, and a crew of seven men.
As captain, Briggs kept a log of the ship’s voyage as they sailed east. But on November 25, he made his last entry. At some point soon after that date, Benjamin Briggs — and his wife, his child, and his crew — were seemingly just blinked out of existence.
At least, that’s how it looked to the British ship Dei Gratia, which happened upon the Mary Celeste near the Azores a week and a half later, on December 5, and found the ship completely empty. The ship was undamaged and still contained six months’ supplies of food and water.
So what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste? Today, we’ll be discussing the eerie theories surrounding that ghost ship, as well as three others — the MV Joyita, the Carroll A. Deering, and the SS Ourang Medan — whose chilling stories continue to haunt the high seas to this day.
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