See full version: The Creepiest Ghost Ships Ever Found
This list includes stories of real ghost ships that were found floating on the open ocean without their crew. Sometimes there’s an explanation for what happened, but many times there isn’t. If you’re afraid of the ocean, you should probably steer clear of this list, it’s going to absolutely terrify you.
The trip from Samoa to Tokelau was only supposed to take 48 hours. The MV Joyita was carrying twenty-five people, and somehow, over the course of two days, they all disappeared.
On January 31, 1921, the boat was spotted after it ran aground off the coast of Cape Hatteras, NC. The water was too dangerous to approach at the time, but when rescue crews arrived on February 4, they found the ship abandoned. The crew’s belongings were gone, along with the ship’s navigation equipment and logs. Its two lifeboats were missing. [links]
In addition, abandoned ships, which are found adrift, left desolated under fearsome and cryptic circumstances, are also included in this category.
Since then, many a fisherman has claimed to witness ghost ship sightings with human skeletons even after many decades post sinking.
However, it only stays for a few moments, and then suddenly disappears or submerges itself under the water. Three Chilota ‘water spirits’ – the Sirena Chilota, the Pincoya, and the Picoy – who resemble mermaids, summons the spirits of the drowned.
A more recent ghost ship, the Jian Seng, was found in 2006. It had a broken tow rope and there was no crew on board and there was no piracy or damage. But what made things stranger was that nobody came forward to claim the boat. Nobody looked for the boat and nobody searched for it. When a crew tested the engines to investigate, they were completely useless. Even today, people still don’t know where the boat came from or who it belonged to, or why no-one has ever come forward to claim it. more
In this more recent case of a real ghost ship, a yacht was found adrift in Filipino waters in 2016. The captain, Manfred Fritz Bajorat had gone missing from 2009 to 2016 and so it was assumed by many that he was dead. No-one was sailing the ship and although it the weather was poor the ship was seemingly seaworthy. But what was even stranger was that the captain was still aboard, still sitting at his desk, reaching for his phone – but his body was entirely mummified, which led the crew that had boarded his boat to believe that he had died some years before. Once his body had been autopsied it was discovered that Bajorat has died only a week before. So why and how had his body mummified completely in just a week? Why had Bajorat stopped contacting family and friends for seven years?
In 1948, a newspaper article claimed that there was a survivor of the wreck, and he had confessed that the ship had been smuggling sulfuric acid and that the fumes had been to blame for the death of the crew. more
This is one of the more unusual ghost ship stories, in part because it’s widely debated whether or not this ship even exists. But it’s so strange that we simply have to share it. In 1947 the cargo ship reportedly was damaged whilst sailing in Indonesia, rendering it unsafe to sail. When a crew boarded the ship in order to rescue those still aboard, they found the entire crew dead. One would have expected that the crew perished due to unsafe conditions at sea, or perhaps due to drowning – but the strangest thing of all was that the men were found with their faces frozen in expressions of horror; their arms outstretched as though reaching for an unseen being. Once the rescue crew boarded the vessel, a fire abruptly started and they had to leave the Ourang. It was later discovered that a message had been sent from the boat saying, “All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” Later on, another message was apparently sent, simply saying, “I die.”
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Hicks does a great job of weaving the course of the ship’s life and its passengers together toward the tangled mystery at the heart of the affair. He gets to the mystery at roughly the halfway point and spends the rest of the book explaining the aftermath, the various theories, and his own proposed solution. Some more thoughts: more
The whole case can leave a reader feeling tormented by the mystery. It is a truly eerie tale, but in the end, Hicks provides an appropriately reasonable and mundane explanation for the disappearance. No one will ever truly be able to prove or disprove the truth behind the sad fates of the Mary Celeste’s vanished crew, but the theory advocated by Brian Hicks is not only plausible, even likely; it, most importantly, respects the memories of the crew. . more