Ghost ship

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The Mary Celeste in 1861, when she was still Amazon was

Ships that have been found abandoned at sea or, actually believed to have been lost, reappear or are sighted under mysterious circumstances are referred to as ghost ships. A similar case is recorded from an airship .

Incidents

seafaring

Selection of known historical incidents

  • One of the most famous ghost ships is the Mary Celeste , which was found floating between the Azores and Portugal in 1872 without a crew . There was no trace of the ten people on board. It was later speculated that inadvertently produced ethanol vapors (the cargo consisted of raw alcohol in barrels) had forced the crew to plan (temporary) escape in a dinghy, but that the ship drifted away, preventing the crew and passengers on board from returning .
  • The five-masted gaff schooner Carroll A. Deering is a ghost ship of the 20th century . On the return journey from Rio de Janeiro to Newport News , the schooner was found stranded under full sail on January 31, 1921 in the diamond shallows at Cape Hatteras . No member of the crew of eleven was on board or was later found, all lifeboats had disappeared, as had the navigation devices. Only the ship's cat was found when the US Coast Guard entered the ship. Despite intensive search operations and investigations by several US federal agencies, it was never possible to determine with certainty what had happened on board. The crew disappeared without a trace; the wreck itself lay aground until it was largely destroyed by explosions in March 1921, as it was viewed as a danger to shipping.
Baychimo trapped by the pack ice (around 1931).
  • Another well-known ghost ship was the Baychimo . The cargo steamer, measured at 1,322 GRT, supplied, among other things, remote settlements in the Canadian Northwest Territories and Alaska and was trapped in the pack ice in October 1931 , whereupon the crew abandoned the ship. In the following years and decades, most recently (allegedly) in 1969, the drifting ship, which had presumably been temporarily released from the pack ice, was sighted again and again. However, a search operation in 2006 brought no result.
  • One case of a ghost ship that has been solved is that of the German two-masted schooner Seeschwalbe , which verifiably sank in a storm off Memel on October 23, 1921 and whose crew was rescued. A week later, the wreck stranded on the Curonian Spit . An examination of the wreck revealed that the decrepit wooden hull broke open due to the hard impact on the seabed and the stone ballast fell out. The wreck then floated up again due to its load of wood and covered around 100 km within a week.
  • The so-called Ourang-Medan incident has not yet been fully clarified . Allegedly, the freighter Ourang Medan was found floating southeast of the Marshall Islands with a dead crew on board in June 1947 , but sank shortly after being found by an explosion on board. However, since the sources of the incident are very poor and the few facts mentioned show in some cases considerable discrepancies , it is not certain whether the incident ever occurred.
The half-submerged wreck of the Joyita (November 1955)
  • In November 1955 , in the Fiji archipelago , off the coast of Vanua Levu , the American cargo and fishing boat Joyita , a 21 m long former yacht, was found floating with a heel and a deck half submerged in the water. The 16 crew members and nine passengers had disappeared without a trace. Ultimately, the incident could not be resolved with certainty, but various theories have been put forward, according to which both a mutiny and a pirate attack or a sudden flooding could be responsible for the incident. The Joyita was later repaired and put back into operation.
  • The case of the Portuguese coaster Angoche remains unresolved to this day . The ship was found floating off the Mozambican coast in April 1971 ; there is still no trace of the 23-man crew to this day (2014). The Portuguese government blamed the Mozambican underground and independence movement Frente de Libertação de Moçambique for the incident, but this could never be proven.
  • At the end of October 1974, the sugar-laden Norwegian coaster Gullstryk was found stranded on Bill Reef at Juist . The position lights were on, there was no crew on board. According to Norddeich Radio , the freighter had run into distress off the Dutch coast a week earlier and the six-person crew had been picked up by another Norwegian ship:

“When asked, experts described as 'at least unusual' the fact that the damaged vessel could drift for several days without a crew on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world from the Dutch coast to Juist without the responsible authorities having been notified. The Emden water police only found out about the incident after the rescue work had started on Friday. "

- Nordwest-Zeitung of November 4, 1974, p. 4

Incidents since 2000

  • In January 2003, the Malaysian-registered fishing trawler High Aim 6 was found floating off the coast of the Australian state of Western Australia without a crew . The last radio contact between the master and the owner (both from Taiwan) had existed relatively recently in the Marshall Islands 6500 km away . Soon after, the ship was reported missing. In addition to sufficient supplies of food and fuel, a cargo of several tons of rotting fish was found on the ship. Only the seven toothbrushes found in the accommodations were evidence of the mostly Indonesian team. There was no evidence of a fight or cargo theft.
  • Another well-known case off Australia occurred three years later. In March 2006, the floating tanker Jian Seng was found off the coast of the Australian state of Queensland . The home port of the 80 m long ship could no longer be determined because both the name and home port had been painted over on the stern. However, it was found that the ship must have been abandoned for a long time. Since no one made claims to the tanker and no owner could be determined, the Jian Seng was finally sunk in April 2006.
  • In the Mediterranean there was an incident in August of 2006. The driving historicizing sailing ship replica Bel Amica was found by the Italian coast guard off the coast of Sardinia . The 20 m long two-master had been completely abandoned by its crew. The name Bel Amica is considered to be unsecured, but the ship was named on the basis of a plaque that was found on board with this designation. However, there was no entry in any ship register about a schooner of this name, and the owner and home port could not be determined. The incident or how many people were on board and what caused them to leave the ship could not be conclusively clarified.
  • April 2007: The Australian coast guard found the 12 m long catamaran Kaz II off the coast of the Australian state of Queensland . There was no trace of the three crew members, although the computers on board were switched on and the engine was running. The incident could not be finally clarified.
  • (9th) November 2008: A (South) Korean fishing boat discovered the partially burned-out and drifting Taiwanese trawler Tai Ching 21 near the Phoenix Islands belonging to Kiribati . A crew of 29 was missing, as were 3 life rafts and 1 lifeboat. A search for the area by 2 aircraft was unsuccessful. The captain had made one last satellite phone call 12 days earlier; no emergency call was heard. It can be assumed that the crew left the ship because of the fire and then perished on the high seas.
  • On March 24, 2012, Canadian sea scouts discovered the Japanese ghost ship Ryōun Maru , which had been missing since the tsunami of March 11, 2011. The fishing vessel, which was in poor condition but still buoyant, had drifted across the Pacific for more than a year . On April 5, 2012, it was sunk by the US Coast Guard to prevent shipping hazards or running aground.
  • At the beginning of 2013, the formerly Soviet passenger ship Lyubov Orlova , built in the 1970s, was towed on its way to a scrapping yard in the Dominican Republic after the towing connection broke. Since then the ship has drifted around as a ghost ship on the North Atlantic; In the meantime, however, there is speculation that the ship may have sunk in an unknown position.
  • In 2020 the cargo ship Alta ran aground near the Irish town of Ballycotton (County Cork). After an irreparable technical defect, the crew was taken off board in 2018 before an approaching storm. Since then, the ship has been drifting on the Atlantic without a pilot and largely undiscovered .

North Korean ghost ships

  • Between October and December 2015 , a total of twelve wooden boats, possibly fishing vessels, were stranded on the west coast of Japan, including near Wajima , that were in a considerably rotten condition. On board the boats, the Japanese coast guard found a total of 22 heavily decayed, partly skeletonized bodies (ten on board a boat alone) and, in one case, six human skulls. The exact origin of the wooden cutters, which must have been at sea for a long time, has not yet been clarified with absolute certainty. However, it has been speculated that it could be refugee boats or fishing vessels from North Korea .
  • In 2016, 66 boats presumably of North Korean origin with dead bodies on board were driven to the west coast of Japan. It was not always possible to determine whether the partly skeletonized corpses were fishermen who had died or were refugees.
  • In 2017, a record number of more than 100 driverless North Korean fishing boats were found off or on the coast of Japan. With the rising winter wind from the northwest from November, the cases increase. The causes are seen as follows: North Korea has leased fishing rights in coastal areas to China, so that North Korean fishermen go further out into international or even illegally into Japanese waters. Food shortages in the country are driving fishermen, fuel and provisions run out, engines fail, fishermen die of exhaustion and hypothermia.
  • In 2019, according to the daily Yomiuri Shimbun, at least 156 ghost ships suspected of originating from North Korea were driven to Japan.

Other explanations: piracy and insurance fraud

Nowadays “ghost ships” suddenly disappeared and unexpectedly found again can represent cases of insurance fraud or modern piracy . The Panamanian-flagged ship Tenyu disappeared on the night of September 27, 1998 in the Strait of Malacca with a cargo of aluminum worth two million euros. After a three-month search, it was finally tracked down in the Chinese port of Zhang Jiagang, but completely unrecognizable, rebuilt, repainted and given a new name. It was now called Sanei 1 , a name that had been adopted from an actual Japanese ship and was even issued with legal papers in Honduras . Sixteen new Indonesian seamen were on board and although three of them were later identified as participating in a gang of pirates that hijacked the Anna Sierra in 1995 , the crew members were not convicted. The Tenyu's original crew is believed to be dead.

aviation

A “ghost ship incident” is also known from an airship. The US Navy airship L-8 landed on August 16, 1942 with a slack hull, engine control switched on, intact cabin with open door and no trace of the crew on a street in Dale, California. The whereabouts of the two-man crew who were to patrol San Francisco could never be cleared up. The airship was repaired and put back into service.

In 1970 the cornfield bomber incident occurred . A pilotless jet fighter landed with retracted landing gear and without a cockpit cover in a field near Big Sandy in Montana / USA. The engine was still running and the radar was still active. A police officer who called the local air base and asked how to shut down the plane was advised to wait. It took another hour and 45 minutes to run out of fuel. However, the incident was easy to resolve. Shortly beforehand, the Convair F-106 machine , actually a fighter and not a bomber, went into a spin during an exercise, so that the pilot was forced to exit using an ejector seat. Immediately afterwards, however, the pilotless aircraft stabilized its attitude, flew several miles and then touched down on its stomach on the field. It was recovered and put back into use, today it is in a museum.

media

Ghost ships are also a popular subject in films, literature, and musical works. They are often a popular object in connection with pirates. Some ghost ship stories refer to the "notorious" Bermuda Triangle , where more ships are said to have been lost in an unexplained manner than anywhere else in the world. According to statistical data from the Lloyd’s insurance agency in London on April 4, 1975, however, no more ships have been lost here since 1955 than in areas of comparable size.

Ghost ships in musical works

Ghost ships in movies

Ghost ships in TV adaptations

Illustration to Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale The story of the ghost ship
  • The Buccaneers , episode The Ghost Ship
  • Kobra, take over (alternatively: Impossible mission ; English OT: Mission: Impossible ), episode 132: The ghost ship
  • the King George in Sea Quest , Season 1, Episode 9: Knight Of Shadows
  • MacGyver , Season 3 Episode 4 The Ghost Ship
  • Supernatural , Season 3 Episode 6 Dawn
  • Navy CIS , Season 5 Episode 6 The Ghost Ship (Chimera)
  • Stingray Command , Episode 8 The Ghost Ship
  • Wickie (1972), season 1, episode 25: The ghost ship

Ghost ships in fiction

Ghost ships in the audio book

  • Rainer Gülk (Ed.): The ghost ship. Scary stories. Der Hörverlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-89940-469-6 (1 CD).

literature

  • Olaf Fritsche: Are there really ghost ships? - The truth behind the marine myths . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 2018, ISBN 978-3-499-63253-2 .
  • Vincent Gaddis : Ghost Ships. The Bermuda Triangle and other unsolved riddles of the seas , Heyne, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-453-00634-8 .
  • Hellmut Hintermeyer: Puzzling Sea. Downfalls, superstitions, phenomena, legends. Pietsch, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-613-50409-X .
  • Klaus Reuter: Typhoons, drifting, ghost ships . Hoch, Düsseldorf 1977, ISBN 3-7779-0212-8 .
  • Eigel Wiese: The ghost ship. The true story of Mary Celeste. Europa, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-203-75103-8 ; as paperback: Bastei Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2003, ISBN 978-3-404-64195-6 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Ghost ship  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Ghost Ships  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Reuter: Typhoons, drifting, ghost ships. Hoch Verlag, Düsseldorf 1977, ISBN 3-7779-0212-8 .
  2. ↑ Author says he's solved MV Joyita mystery, 47 years later . In: NZ Herald . March 29, 2002, ISSN  1170-0777 ( nzherald.co.nz [accessed November 23, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Ghost ship mystery deepens , CNN World, January 14, 2003.
  4. ↑ Mysterious yacht found empty off millionaire's playground . ( scotsman.com [accessed November 23, 2018]).
  5. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6574547.stm
  6. ↑ Hopes dim for 29 Asian fishermen bbc.co.uk, November 25, 2008, accessed December 29, 2017.
  7. ↑ Full of rats: Former cruise ship floats ownerless in the Atlantic. In: Spiegel Online . February 7, 2013, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Drifting Russian ship may have sunk 700 miles off coast . March 1, 2013 ( irishexaminer.com [accessed November 23, 2018]).
  9. ↑ Storm Dennis sends abandoned cargo ship to Ireland , Maritime Industry News, February 17, 2020.
  10. ↑ Mairi Mackay, CNN: Ghostly ships full of bodies wash up in Japan - CNN . In: CNN . ( cnn.com [accessed November 23, 2018]).
  11. ↑ Mysterious Finds: Corpse Ships washed up on Japan's coast. In: Spiegel Online . December 1, 2015, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Cleve R. Wootson Jr .: "A 'ghost ship' washed ashore in Japan, and clues point to North Koreans" , Washington Post, November 27, 2017.
  13. ^ Riddle about corpses on board orf.at, December 29, 2017, accessed December 30, 2017. - With reference to 6 sources.
  14. ↑ Another “ghost ship” washed up in Japan orf.at, December 29, 2019, accessed December 29, 2019. - With a picture of a broken wooden fishing boat with - according to the coast guard - 7 heavily decayed corpses, Korean characters, washed up on the island of Sado , 900 km away from North Korea.
  15. ↑ Tale of a Modern Pirate Gang ( Memento from May 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (English).
  16. ^ Piracy in Asian Waters , Die tageszeitung , June 16, 2000.
  17. ↑ skygaze.com
  18. ↑ IMDb
  19. ↑ IMDb
  20. ↑ IMDb
  21. ↑ IMDb
  22. ↑ IMDb
  23. ↑ IMDb
  24. ↑ IMDb
  25. Jump up ↑ Wickie and the Strong Men (1972) Season 1, Episode 25: The Ghost Ship. In: fernsehserien.de. Retrieved August 8, 2016 .
  26. ↑ Magdalena Petit in the Spanish language Wikipedia