Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 5 min readIn 1881 the Ellen Austin, a 210-foot American schooner, reportedly found a derelict ship in the Atlantic, put a prize crew aboard, and lost them too. It is one of the most famous ghost ship stories ever told — and no one has ever found the original report.
About 5 min readIn October 1917 the three-masted sailing barge Zebrina left Falmouth for Saint-Brieuc with five men and a cargo of coal. Two days later she was found aground on the French coast — undamaged, her galley fire still burning, her table laid — with no crew aboard.
About 5 min readOn 8 January 2003 a Taiwanese longline fishing boat was found drifting off Western Australia with a full hold, fuel, provisions, and the crew’s belongings — but no crew of ten. A search of 7,300 nautical miles found nothing, and the only man ever traced claimed the captain and engineer had been murdered.
About 5 min readAbandoned in the Arctic ice in 1931, the steamer Baychimo refused to sink. For 38 years she was sighted again and again along the Alaskan coast — boarded, stripped, and left to drift — until the last sighting in 1969. No wreck has ever been found.
About 5 min readOn 4 March 1918 the USS Cyclops left Barbados for Baltimore with 306 crew and passengers and 10,800 tons of manganese ore. She was due on 13 March. She never arrived — no distress call, no wreckage, no survivors. It remains the largest non-combat loss of life in US Navy history.
About 5 min readIn March 2006 an Australian patrol plane found an 80-metre tanker drifting in the Gulf of Carpentaria with no crew, no flag, no papers, and its name painted over. Nobody ever came forward to claim it — and nobody could say where it came from.
About 4 min readIn October 1955 the MV Joyita sailed from Samoa with 25 people aboard and never arrived. Five weeks later she was found drifting, flooded and listing — but still afloat, and completely empty.
About 4 min readOn 31 January 1921, a five-masted schooner ran aground off Cape Hatteras with her sails still set — and not a soul aboard. Her log, her lifeboats and her eleven crewmen were gone. A federal investigation closed in 1922 without an answer, and none has ever come.
About 4 min readIn June 1947 — or February 1948, depending on who tells it — a Dutch freighter supposedly sent a dying distress call from the Strait of Malacca, and was found with her whole crew dead. No registry, no wreck and no crew list has ever been found. This is a story about a story.