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Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Nerds explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
Ghost Ships
Fog rolls in, the horizon narrows, and a silent ship drifts across the bow. We dive into the world of ghost ships, separating verifiable derelicts from enduring legends to understand why the ocean is such fertile ground for fear, folklore, and forensic dead ends. Together we revisit the Mary Celeste with its missing lifeboat and intact cargo, the SS Baychimo wandering the Arctic for decades, and the MV Joyita broadcasting distress into a void. We weigh competing theories—mutiny, piracy, mechanical failure, fraud—and ask what the gaps in each case reveal about judgment, luck, and the split-second choices sailors face.
On the mythic side, we trace the Flying Dutchman as a moral compass disguised as a curse, and set it against global personifications of the sea: Mother Carey and Davy Jones from European lore, Ran and Njord in Norse tales, Thalassa and Amphitrite in Greek tradition, and Yemaya in Yoruba belief. These stories weren’t just set dressing; they were early safety systems that encoded weather sense, risk discipline, and social rules into memorable warnings. We also explore liminal accounts like the Valencia’s skeletal lifeboats and the New Haven phantom ship, where collective vision meets communal grief.
Modern waters still breed mysteries. North Korean “ghost boats” wash onto Japanese shores, a stark outcome of scarcity, distance, and failing navigation. Post-tsunami drifters like the Ryou-Un Maru become hazards, and rumors of secret tests keep submarine folklore alive. Pop culture picks up the signal—Carpenter’s The Fog, maritime X-Files, and time-twisting thrillers—because a ship is the perfect stage for isolation, authority, and the unknown pressing in on all sides. If the sea is a mirror, ghost ships are our reflections, revealing how we manage uncertainty, honor those lost, and teach the next watch to respect the deep.
Enjoy the journey? Tap follow, share with a curious friend, and drop a review on Apple Podcasts to help more listeners find our voyage. Which ghost ship story do you believe—and why?
But at least those cults gave us those life held shorts. But not the feet, though.
SPEAKER_02:Never the feet. Never. If they had the feet, they'd have pockets as well. Well, that's the thing, is they've never seen them. So they don't have any concept of them.
SPEAKER_00:Those feet are in a pocket universe. Ever dance with the devil in the veil of mine. Uh batting down the m hast masts, uh the hatches. Hatches. There you go. Get below dick because a spectral. You've completely abandoned the mizzen mast. I don't even know what a mizen mast is, and I've read all of Moby Dick, so it should be in my old brain pan there.
SPEAKER_02:The funny thing is there is a scene about this exact topic in Star Trek Generations, but we're not going to do that yet. When they're inducting Wharf into when they give him the promotion, which makes him Commander Wharf instead of Lieutenant Wharf. Well, wouldn't he be lieutenant commander whorf? Well, technically, yes, but because they use Navy rules, if you are a lieutenant commander, you refer to as commander. Is that different than prison rules?
SPEAKER_00:Slightly? There is an overlap though.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:There's just as much the Venn diagram does overlap.
SPEAKER_02:There is just as much I'm not gay, but I'm having sex with a man sex. In the Navy. Exactly. In the original series, Spock technically was Lieutenant Commander Spock, but he he was always called either Commander Spock or just well, obviously Spock. When he was ever, you know, referred to by rank, he was Commander Spock. Until Star Trek the Mustion Picture, where he was obviously promoted. What is Will Riker? So he was a full commander. Full commander. They use navy rules in Star Trek specifically. It's not like Battlestar, where they mix Navy and Army and Air Force. In Star Trek, they go well, they go, they go enlisted. Miles O'Brien has a very good spiel about this in DS9. You know what? We probably don't have a ton of things. We don't, so let's not do that. We'll do that on a different one. So, spooky times. It's one of my favorite songs. Every time I go to Waffle House, I request that song on the jute box. It's from the Spooktown Rats. Is that one of those Brian Setzer bands that I'm like, uh uh, I'm done over. Oh no, no, no. It's an offshoot. No, no, it's one of those Jack White bands that he created it south by southwest for like 10 minutes.
SPEAKER_00:It's called the Kookie Cats. Parentheses soliloquy in E minor.
SPEAKER_02:He always does names that are way cooler than that. They're lame, but they're cooler than that.
SPEAKER_00:Fine. If you don't like the name of the song that came up off the top of my dome two seconds ago, let it out. Like David Coulier. You know, you oughta know.
SPEAKER_02:That was good. You know what the funny thing was? I took my pill and I ate an old onion ring sitting on the table. You think I don't know you? I know you do, and that's why we have a show. Alright, so let's get to it because I know you have a time. Crunch. Like Mojo. Like Mojo? Like the X-Men X-Men villain?
SPEAKER_00:The crunch. The big crunch. We're talking about three fingers mojo. Is that the new Taco Bell item coming this fall?
SPEAKER_02:One of the big things was that he was right there butting up to the big crunch, which is supposed to be the antithesis of the big bang. In the game? Well, in the X-Men Sega Genesis game, yes, that was part of the thing, but in the story, too. I mean, that's where they got it from. Right there at the end of the universe. He was it was essentially like Douglas Adams, the restaurant at the end of the universe. That's essentially what Mojo's weird realm was until they decided it was a pocket universe or something.
SPEAKER_01:Hmm.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Look at Mojo the Big Crunch.
SPEAKER_00:I promise, it's right there. I did. There's lots of there's Mojo Big Crunch could refer to many things. Most notably Mojo Moj Crunch, a line of collectible sensory toys. Oh boy. I don't know what that is. But I'm gonna find out.
SPEAKER_02:Well, Google is intentionally bad now.
SPEAKER_00:So you know. ASMR crunchy squishy mojo surprise opening whispered. Right. Okay. Alright, let's run with that one. Continue on with this episode that has nothing to do with mojo or uh sensory crunches.
SPEAKER_02:Or the big crunch, right? Let's start with a quote. This comes from at what? What? What were you gonna say? Me? Oh, I thought you were gonna say something, sorry. Okay. You mean the other person on the podcast?
SPEAKER_00:You're talking to Jim? Jim Lee? Is Jim Lee here? Can we do that? Uh probably not. Jim Lee is always here. In our hearts. If you touch your chest right underneath your clavicle, go down about three inches, do a little swirl, and you're gonna feel a little indention there, that's where Jim Lee is. At all times.
SPEAKER_02:When you feel a pocket on a strap across your chest, that's how you know Jim Lee.
SPEAKER_00:But it gets real fine into the Lifeld territory. Mmm. Right. Well, uh you have to evoke the right name. You're gonna tip over. If you speak the ancient tongue backwards. I knock I will I sorry the then you're in David Lynch territory. David Lynch, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld. Do you see a connection?
SPEAKER_02:Three people that have never been in my kitchen.
SPEAKER_00:Sounds like a glitch in the matrix to me.
SPEAKER_02:I can't. I've never seen him in the room at the same time. Case closed. I'm pretty sure we've seen Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld in the same room at the same time. But somewhere? Maybe. Maybe. You know what?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, at some point, somewhere, someone probably did. Have I personally? I don't think so. Methinks not. I don't think they were ever both at a con at the same time together.
SPEAKER_02:I bet they've been there together. Come on. I bet they've been in Comic-Con. I don't think so. Comic-Con?
unknown:Really?
SPEAKER_02:When when I was there? I don't think so. I don't think they were both there. Not when you and I have been there, but it's just in general. Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_00:My reality is only 10 feet in front of me. So what a typical American you are. That's how I vote. That's how I pay my taxes. That's how I see other people of other races.
SPEAKER_02:That's exactly right. So let's continue with this. Of course I knocked my headphones out of my ear.
SPEAKER_00:That is number three, if anyone's keeping count. That's the third time so far.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, they're white they're wired and they're short, so continue. Let's start with a quote here. Note how the ocean heaves and boils, swirling into towers, vortex coils, with hideous creatures at every base, bearing the haunting Kraken's face. Great ghost ships groan from the mist, and balls of light form fast betwixt the horizon and the sea, spray foam, save us all, and set sail for home. Now, could you do it again in Vincent Price voice? Oh man, if I could. Appreciate that. Yeah, this is one of my favorite Creed songs. I skipped over the Jesus part. Can you take me deeper? 20,000 fathoms. So there are few things as mystifying, romantic, and also terrifying as the wine dark sea. For most of humankind's existence, the vast oceans have been seemingly unsurmountable challenge, and yet a thing to be conquered. At the same time, which you would think contradictory, but something sort of innate in human culture. Its very nature and our attempts to master its power inevitably leaves us with tales of raw mystery and humbling horror or terror. Which are two different things, by the way. There are many mythical tales of the sea and people's traversing the sea and how they personify those powers. Not just from the Greek or Roman with Neptune and Poseidon. There's also the westernized European tales of Davy Jones and Mother Carrie, which are considered to be married. Mother Carrie was considered to be the one who determined the veracity of the waves and the sea that would overcome you, and then Davy Jones, her husband, would be the one that oversaw what happened on your ship. He was the one that determined that kind of thing. I personally derive all of my nautical folklore from the movie Splash, but that's just me. Oh, you mean the documentary? Filmed in real time. You know what? Daryl Hannah's come a long way. Think about it. Think about it. Mother Carrie is an interesting figure. It's it's something that like people in America really don't know a lot about, but in the UK and in a lot of Europe, Mother Carrie is a figure, you know, that like she's the sort of like manifestation, the the personification of storms and and uh turbulent uh turmoil on the sea. Because this is one of the interesting things about about this entire phenomenon when I was looking into it, and this is off the dome here the oceans were something that man felt like he had to conquer and at the same time wasn't very good at doing, but and also at the same time very good at doing. It was something that like it's so overwhelming and so the forces of nature that are so not only out of man's control, but also navigatable because of the of the human species, you know, you know, ad advanced, you know, problem solving skills that it felt like it was a challenge to overcome and then doing so spread the human species around the world. And yet still seems overwhelming and and massive. And so like early uh human species in in almost every culture in the world has these myths, well every culture that actually deals with the ocean has have myths and and and mythology that deals with the the ocean being personified in these crazy giant overwhelming uh gods. When you deal with Greek and Roman mythology, Poseidon is right there on par with you know basically everybody below Zeus. But in because the Mediterranean wasn't that big, it wasn't it wasn't a huge thing. It was it's a s it's a it's it is kind of a an enclosed small space. It's that it I mean the Mediterranean really is just kind of like one of the great lakes. It's not really all that big. But when you deal with the entire ocean, when you're when you're when you're sailing across the wine dark sea, it's overwhelming and yet at the same time something that man needs to conquer, he feels. So it creates these legends and these mythologies that are I think I'm not gonna say universal, but in in many, many cultures that have dared to sail across the ocean. Similar. So I and I'm sure while while I'm ranting, you looked up Mother Carrie and and Davy Jones. You, Jake, you. Oh, uh me. Sorry.
SPEAKER_00:I thought we were talking about the I'm not pontificating, I'm talking to you. Yeah. Uh yeah, I mean it actually took me a little while to find Mother Carrie. I found like the sea goddess Sedna from the Inuit people, otherwise known as Mother of the Deep, or Yoruba, the river goddess of the Yamaya.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00:That's an diaspora, the Santria, and Kendomble, the Mother of All, which is like the ocean, is like seen as like taking over everything and all that they are you know surrounded by. Or even the Greek goddess Amphitridi. I actually don't know the name. Amphitrip, I think it's Amphertiti, I think. A M-P-H-I-T-R-I-T-E. Anyway, she's the wife of Poseidon and the queen of the sea. She's the mother of uh dolphins. There's also Thalassa, the very essence and personification of the sea in Greek mythology. I don't really understand how both of those interact. But those came up before the Cornish Sea Hag Mother Carrie, um which does seem to be a bit more of a Euro-Western version of that personification of the sea.
SPEAKER_02:You could also trace that exact archetype to the goddess Ron from Norse or Germanic mythology. She was believed to be married to Jotun Iger, which we could kind of pair with Davy Jones. And we'll get to what Davy Jones is here in a moment, but he's the he's the king and personification of the sea, or Poseidon, and it was believed that those who died at sea would not go to Valhalla or Hell, but instead be captured in Ron's net and belong to her. So we get a lot of this romantic idea of this calling of the sea, and then if you die at sea, it's because you were called there, not because you were an idiot. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00:Strangely, uh, to get to get a little nerdy, which I mean this is this podcast that reminds me the Voyager episode where the half Klingon engineer Bolana Torres. Yes, she has this vision of her mother, who she kind of uh mother kind of left her to be with her dad and dislikes her mother, but her mother is like trapped on this in-between uh a paradise and a hellish existence that's just kind of stuck on this boat on these choppy seas, kind of like on the river sticks in a way. Yep. Or it kind of it kind of feels like a a Viking ship that's just constantly adrift at sea, um, that can never actually land. It's purgatory. Progress on with their journey.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. In Star Trek Davio specifically do a really good job of combining especially with Klingons, basically after the original series, they do a really good job of combining Viking mythology and Catholic mythology and you know, some Eastern mythology, actually. Yeah, I know exactly which episode you're talking about, where it's the ship of the dead. Ship of the dead.
SPEAKER_00:No, I know, which is I don't think that'll come up like that.
SPEAKER_02:Oh no, this won't come up at all here in a moment. So But you're right, because there there are also even in Norse mythology you have a god named Njord, a sea god who is believed to calm the sea and wind, making it traversable for people to sail to whichever destination they sought, and helping fishermen with their bounty and a patrion of sailors. These are kind of universal throughout all cultures that are seafaring. And these things all have really fun. I don't want to say fun. It's not a Tim and Eric episode. Fascinating? Intriguing. Yes, intriguing. Even entertaining? Yes. And in these also are legends about the ships themselves. And what we're gonna focus on today is about ghost ships, which mean a lot of things to a lot of people in different ways. I think specifically we're gonna talk about haunted ships or cursed ships in that sense. Because ghost ships are actually a thing, a category in nautical terminology, are real but not in a supernatural way. But we're gonna talk about haunted ships or phantom ships.
SPEAKER_00:That's funny because when I I was trying to do a little bit of research for this episode, and as I was doing it, I I I came upon the question: what kind of ghost ship does he mean? Is he talking a Mary Celeste? Fair question. Or is he talking a flying Dutchman? Yes. Unfortunately, everything I looked up was the more of the Mary Celeste variety. Mm-hmm. So it's not going to be very effective. Uh, but uh continue.
SPEAKER_02:On the cursory look into this, into the the research into this, it was very limited as far as what the West considers actual ghost ships or phantom ships, which by definition loosely are vessels that are found derelict at sea with no crew aboard and nothing to explain what happened to them. Well, no living human crew. Sure, yes. And if if something other than that had happened, we would know about that, because that would be crazy. The thing is, ghost ships are a real phenomenon. They have inspired horror-infused stories and wild theories. This did happen many, many times. More times than even is documented, actually. Wait till we get to the North Korean stuff. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:We're just so we're all clear on this. Are we discussing haunted phantom-esque ships that people have encountered over the years? Or are we discussing ships that have been found that have been strangely abandoned by said crew and have been left adrift in the ocean? Both. Or both. Okay. Right. And we're gonna try and figure out well, we're not gonna figure anything out, but no, we will have hard answers. This is a a science-based program, and we will come to a conclusion. Yeah, all we do is math, baby. Yeah, that's why I'm so good at this.
SPEAKER_02:That's why we're both so good at this. So, what I really want to focus on, the idea that there are real ghost ships, and then sort of get into which ones are the mythical ones, which ones are actually supernatural or perceived supernatural. Because there are a few that are just like, oh, this boat washed up and there was nobody aboard because they all killed themselves or jumped off board or whatever. That happens. That is what technically in real life is called a ghost ship. But then there are also ships that are ghost ships because they are, well, let's just say populated by ghosts, but are ruled by the dead and the damned. There you go. There it is. So man, let's so let's go back to Ancient Samaria. Before Ankadoo was hanging around and saw Tiamat lying about and I like to pronounce it in Kidu because it doesn't sound as lame, and that's how Patrick Stewart pronounces it in the episode Darmok, which is a great Star Trek episode. Darmak Edgelada Tanagra. They were at Tanagra. Man, they know. Uh Sika when the walls fell.
SPEAKER_00:Shaka when the walls fell. Fine, fine. I didn't get it a hundred percent right. Alright. Why don't you nail me to the friggin' cross? That's the important part, though. It was a learning experience because we wouldn't have gotten to Shaka when the walls fell. If I hadn't mistaken See? You see what I'm doing there?
SPEAKER_02:The most famous go ship, obviously, would be the Mary Celeste. It left New York in early November 1872, bound for Italy. It was a merchant brigantine, and then nothing was heard from it until it was spotted drifting alone with no crew in the Atlantic on December 5th of the same year. And if I remember right, there was still place settings for crew.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, so when they found it, many months after it had it had uh set out, no one was on board. The ship had taken on some water, but not enough to be of any real concern to sinking. The cargo was mostly in touch. The last ship's log was from nine days before, on November 25th, and made zero mention of any problems. The remains of a recently prepared meal for a child were found on board. The captain and his wife and his daughter and then the crew. They were transporting denatured alcohol.
SPEAKER_02:That was Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. They only had a crew of seven, but it was undisturbed. And he hadn't made a log in his captain's log in ten days. There was a lifeboat missing.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, there was a small lifeboat missing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, this was discovered by the uh De Gratia off the Azore. It was completely seaworthy. So what happened?
SPEAKER_00:There are theories that um, you know, during the salvage hearing followed, court officials proposed possible drunken mutiny, even though the alcohol cargo was not drinkable, possible murder and piracy by the captain of the De Gratia, there's a possible murder suicide by the captain of the Mary Celeste himself, and even possible an insurance scam cooked up by the two captains who were suspected to have been friends. Hmm. But nobody really knows.
SPEAKER_02:Does this not smack of the Amityville horror? How so? Well, this mysterious thing wrapped in sort of horror myth, though kind of explainable. And maybe a murder suicide, maybe a famicide type thing, or maybe for money. That kind of mystery. Do we really know what happened there?
SPEAKER_00:Even though it probably isn't supernatural, but maybe I mean I think you actually have physical evidence of murders taking place, and you have a suspect, you know, that we believe did the thing, as opposed to this where it's you have to come up with some type of connection because essentially what we have is missing people in an abandoned boat. And you have to try to come up with a reason why. Now, maybe if it was just the husband and his wife and the daughter on the boat, the family, you know, murder suicide that might but you also had the crew on the boat too. There didn't seem to be much that was missing, so they didn't like what monetarily is there to gain by leaving the boat adrift all intact.
SPEAKER_02:There was one lifeboat missing, but one. Only one. And that's not gonna carry everybody on board. Yeah. If the crew mutinied, what were they getting away with? And and how would they do so? Unless they rendezvoused with another boat, which I mean that's really difficult to do, and what are they gaining? Because they didn't take anything. That's the real mystery there. I mean, if there were no lifeboats missing, it would be a real ghost story. But there's one, and that makes it a real human mystery. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But there are many books and documentaries that have researched and pontificated on the Mary Celeste over the years. It's not necessarily the first ghost ship, but it is an early famous one that has many errors to title throughout the years after that. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02:It's such a fascinating subject that it's sad that some of the most famous ones don't really fit into it as well as you'd want them to. But the SS Bacimo, or 10 years from 1921, when it came under the ownership of the Hudson's Bay Company, which by the way just went out of business after oh like 375 years or whatever, the cargo ship SS Bacimo sailed across the Arctic Circle, carrying furs and goods from trading ports on Canada's north coast. In October 1931, it became trapped in pack ice, which, you know, in the days of climate change, they don't have that much anymore, off the coast of Alaska. It was completely stuck and had no chance of breaking out of the ice before the actual flow of the ice and the ocean would crush the ship. At that point, there was just a skeleton crew of 15, but they were evacuated by plane. Now, the men who stayed to hope to wait out the winter by living in a wooden shelter near the boat, which is kind of where you get the show The Terror, the first season. They're kind of conflating this and a different thing we're going to talk about in a second. They went through a whole cycle of blizzard and storm, and when they came out, this moored ship was gone. They thought it sunk, which, I mean, would make sense because they had horrible storm conditions. But in fact, the machimo was afloat, had somehow broken free of the ice, and had been spotted by local hunters. They tracked it down, retrieved its cargo, and then also just took the fuck off. Because what do they care?
SPEAKER_00:They thought it wouldn't it wasn't seaworthy anymore. It would just sink. They abandoned it.
SPEAKER_02:But it never did. And for decades, it was spotted all over the Arctic waters, just floating from place to place. Various people tried to board the vessel and maybe salvage some of the well salvage the ship itself, but they were never able to, mostly because the uh, you know, the weather and the basic conditions of the Arctic at that point. And so it was never actually captured. The last confirmed sighting of it was in 1969. There have been rumored spottings of it ever since, but who knows if those are real? But from essentially 1931 to 1969, it floated around, bouncing around like a pinball in the Arctic, with no crew, but no one able to go on board. Weird. Indeed, sir, indeed. Even more so than the Mary Celeste, or that one. I think the most famous of these phenomena is probably the Flying Dutchman.
SPEAKER_00:Well, isn't the Flying Dutchman a bit of the other type of ghost ship?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So the Flying Dutchman is the other type of ghost ship, where it is probably apocryphal, it is definitely a legend, and it does have parallels in other cultures, in other mythology. It may or may not be real, but it does serve as warning to sailors as they traverse the sea. It's based on a myth, it was a warship unable to make port, and so it was doomed to sail the oceans for all time. And to see it is a portent of doom. It was first mentioned in literature in the late 1700s, often through thick mist and fog emerges. George V and his brother Prince Albert Victor apparently spotted the ship off the coast of Australia in 1881. But nobody really thinks other than those inbred idiots. It's more of like an archetype in nautical folklore, though it's inspired poems, stories, and an opera by Wagner. And of course, is then later tied to the Western legends of Mother Carrion and Davy Jones. Specifically, if this helps you, in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie movies, Davy Jones was the captain of the Flying Dutchman, yada yada yada. This is also something I think that inspired John Carpenter's The Fog a bit. This is an example of the mythological version of the ghost ship.
SPEAKER_00:And preying on the superstitious nature of sailors on the sea. If you happen to see the Flying Dutchman, it was thought of as an ill omen.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Signaling, you know, oncoming disaster or gruesome death for whoever saw it.
SPEAKER_02:Which is kind of the part of the myth of Mother Carrie. If you saw certain seagulls at a certain time before disaster, they referred to them as Mother Carrie. Chickens or Mother Curry's birds, and that meant that there was incoming doom, and basically mythologizing actual weather patterns, or at least perceived weather patterns of the ocean, which is really, really typical with nautical folklore. It's farmer's almanac logic about the ocean. That's an example of the mythical side of that. Now there are other legitimate what we would consider ghost ships, like the MV Joida, which is a fascinating and quite frankly baffling tale. It's a yacht-turned commercial vessel that disappeared in the South Pacific in 1955. It sets out from Samoa in October of that year with 25 passengers and crew. Its destination was the Tokelau Islands, which is about 300 miles away, and it never reached its destination. But five and a half weeks later, it was discovered, more than 600 miles off its course. Still afloat, partially submerged, no one was aboard, four tons of cargo, the ship's logbook, and navigational equipment were all gone. And yet, the radio had been tuned into the international distress signal, but no SOS had ever been received by anyone. It was in international waters, so multiple governments did investigations, but there are theories piracy, jumping ship because of some mechanical failure. There are theories that say they were kidnapped by a Soviet submarine, or murdered by a Japanese fishing fleet, which, I don't know, man. If you've ever seen how they wail, oof. Yikes. January 1921, the Carol A. Deering, a five-masted schooner built for speed. Like me, baby. Directly after the First World War, the world was sort of rebuilding its economy. It was spotted off the coast of North Carolina. Now, the weird thing was it was headed for the Diamond Shoals, the so-called graveyard of the Atlantic. It's one of those Bermuda Triangle type mythical places that don't really exist, but things just happen to happen in that area. It took several days for anybody to get on board, but everyone was missing. And all lifeboats were gone. Okay, alright, I'll give you that one. There was steering damage. There was an actual communication with the ship that someone had made on the mainland, and it determined that the anchors had been lost, but no one knows why they actually left. Once again, mutiny, collision with another boat, piracy, nobody really knows. There are theories that say it was hijacked by rum runners, actual bootleggers from the Prohibition era. Once again, Russian saboteurs. It's always either Russian or Soviet, right? I mean, that's always been our boogeyman. And of course, then they bring up the Committee Triangle, which is its own thing. Now, the intriguing thing about that one is there was a message in a bottle. An actual, not sting-related, message in a bottle that washed up on shore that claimed it had been captured by a quote, an oil burning boat. And then they figured out it was just some kids doing a hoax. Or a sting. It might have been sting. Probably sting. Probably sting. Well, it could have been the rest of the police. It's still sting related. It's sting related. It's sting adjacent. I really don't know.
SPEAKER_00:That's right, history books, you got stung.
SPEAKER_02:I will kill him! Then there's, of course, the SS Orang Midan. This one's a weird one. It is a weird one. But it might be an urban legend. I mean nobody really knows. No ship of that name ever appeared on official records or shipping registers. According to the story, it was a Dutch ship that passed through the Strait of Malacca off of Indonesia in the 1940s when its radio operator set out a frantic SOS claiming the officers were dead and the remainder of the crew were too, before transmitting one final chilling message I die. The problem is we don't know if that was even a boat. A rescue ship with all like post haste went to the scene. But when they got there, supposedly, the Aurang Madan was adrift with no crew aboard, no signs of life, but the bodies of the crew were strewn about the ship, fixed with expressions of terror, though no visible injuries or cause of death. And before the ship could be investigated, apparently a fire engulfed the ship, and the rescuers had to get clear before it would have exploded, which sent the ship into oblivion like a 90s action movie. And I'm not sure how much there is to this one, but it is maybe the coolest one.
SPEAKER_00:It is cool. They were possibly smuggling dangerous chemicals. And that the leaked substances, possibly in the form of toxic gases, led to the crew's demise, which might have put them in the positions they were found, but also without any visible signs of injury, and then would have also led to a spark igniting an explosion that would sink the boat, thus never knowing. Again, that's all hearsay, it's all speculation. We don't truly even know if this boat or this incident ever happened. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I hate to do this again, but Star Trek is basically a naval, you know, story. There is an episode of the original series which is essentially this: the Tholene Web, in which they discover the USS Defiant. They go on board, it's adrift, they go on board, all the crew are dead, splaying out with looks of terror on their faces, and no one knows what happened. And as Kirk and Spock are trying to figure out what occurred, the ship is slowly drifting in and out of our reality, apparently. So eventually, instead of exploding, it disappears, and they have to get away from. I mean, it's it's literally the same story. I mean, and I'm pretty sure that's what the I haven't looked it up. This is off the dome, but I'm pretty sure that's what they're drawing this from, is that story. And it's actually kind of a really pivotal story in the Trek lore that people don't want to talk about, but I do. But real, true mythical ghost stories.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's one of those that blurs a line between this happened and their reports, and then they're like, you know, urban myth and nautical legend. And that's where you kind of get, you know, other stuff, you know, like uh where it blends. It's the combining of myth between a Mary Celeste and a flying Dutchman, where there seems to be elements of both. Something like the like the SS Valencia. This was one of the most tragic maritime disasters in history. In 1906, this was a passenger steamed ship. Unfortunately, when it was sailing around the coast of Vancouver Island, it struck a reef and quickly began to sink. Over a hundred passengers and crew died that day on that ship, with only a handful of survivors able to escape. But in the years that have followed, many fishermen and sailors have supposedly reported sightings of a ghost ship in the distance that resembled Estes Valencia, complete with lifeboats full of skeletons drifting nearby. But that's one of the true ghost story coming from a real boat that did have a disaster, but it has led to a ghostly urban legend tale. Because being on the water, you know, and this has happened for thousands of years, there's a lot of strange things that people report on the open waters and trying to make sense of things. And maybe there are ghost ships, you know, maybe there are other mysterious things, and that's that's where we get legends of sea deities, of large creatures, of strange lights, weird fog, odd ocean and weather phenomenon surrounding possible sightings of things, and you try to make sense, especially the the less you know.
SPEAKER_02:70% of the planet is covered by the ocean. Only if you're using math, though. Oh, and I believe in that Arabic shit. All math is created by anyway, uh the uh a vast majority of the planet is covered by the ocean, which is intimidating and overwhelming. And yet man has this weird, and by man I mean humankind, it has this proclivity to try and conquer that which it doesn't already have domain. And so, you know, hit or miss, humankind, when challenged that much, will come up with myth that explains its failure or success. There's so much in nautical folklore about luck and about fortune, about well, if I didn't succeed, it's because of the gods. Some god or some practice that I did or didn't do. You know, like if a cat was on board your ship that was good fortune or bad fortune, depending on which culture it is, or the color of the dawn, or the color of the sunset, or whether you see a seabird at what time during the day or night. You know, humankind has always had this proclivity for assigning meaning to things that not necessarily don't have meaning, but like trying to figure them out. And oftentimes it's reactionary and not really thought out. But I don't think there's anything that is more symbolic of this than nautical folklore. Even just the fish story. Somebody telling a fish tale. Look at Jaws, or like a story that's said in fucking New England, or the Loch Nest Monster, or all these things that are exaggerated ideas of what you saw or what you did, or where you were that explain whether you've failed to conquer your goal or not. It's such a vast thing that overwhelms mankind that they have to explain their successes or failures through metaphor or sometimes excuses, to be honest. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Many of these ships and tales are just like stories in the Bible, where they are apocryphal stories that try to send a message of how to live your life and what to do, whether that is something like the Flying Dutchman, which in most popular accounts, the captain, Captain Van Der Decken, as he was trying to get around the Cape of Good Hope during a frocious storm, supposedly rashly pledged his undying fealty to God or possibly the devil, and in this rash action, doomed and condemned him and his mate in the ship to sail on forever, unable to find safe harbor, you know, kind of giving you an idea of, you know, well, don't make such rash decisions. Or you have the story of the Lady Lava Bond or Louvabond. This is the legendary schooner alleged to have wrecked on the Goodwin Sands off the Kent Coast, southeast of England, on February 13th, 1748, and supposedly is said to reappear there every 50 years as a ghost ship. Although there are no records of the ship or its supposed sinking. But the story goes that the ship was at sea on February 13th because her captain, Simon Reed, possibly Simon Peel, had just been married and was celebrating with a cruise. According to several accounts, they were heading to Portugal. Despite the longstanding sailor's superstition that it was bad luck to bring a woman on board, Reed had brought his bride Aneta with him on the ship. But according to legend, the first mate, John Rivers, an apt name, a rival for the hand of the captain's young wife Anetta, was pacing on the decks in jealous anger. And while the captain, his wife, and their guests were celebrating the marriage below deck, the first mate seized in a fit of jealous rage, casually drawing a heavy club like belaying pin from the rail, the mate walked softly up behind the crew member at the wheel and struck him dead with one crushing blow. Rivers then seized the wheel and steered the ship onto the treacherous Goodwin Sands, killing everyone aboard. And supposedly the first time it was the Phantom version of the Lavy Lava Bond, Lady Lava Bond, was on February 13th, 1788, and recorded by two ships, the Edinbridge, and I it doesn't say what the other ship was, so uh who knows? That's a the nice recounting of the tale there. The Goodwin Sands are England's most fertile grounds for ghost ships, and are also location of other legendary island of Lomiya. The Lady Lavan shares the area with two other phantom vessels, a liner called the SS Montrose and the Shrewsbury, which was a man of war. But again, it's a legend that then tells sailors maybe this is not something you should do. The myth of having a woman on board would lead to problems and thus disaster during a maritime scenario. Same thing as if you were reading the Bible, you know, in something Leviticus, where it's like, hey, don't eat pork, you know, or or don't sow two crops near each other. These were things to help people avoid disease or or famine, but are later codified into a practice and a belief system that far outlasts and outpaces the nugget of wisdom that it meant to house and sustain hundreds of years ago.
SPEAKER_02:You've sort of nailed something on the head there. That's absolutely true, especially when you know society, technology, practices even surpass the need for those legends. That's when they become folklore. When they're not needed anymore, they're considered myth. There are legends in certain European cultures where it's like a swamp hag is gonna grab you if you lean too close to the water after dark or whatever. It's like, well, that's what parents told their kids so their kids wouldn't fucking fall into the fucking river or whatever, you know, like when they weren't uh being attended to. I mean, that's the same thing. In a modern sense, in a more I'd say nihilistic sense, the modern legend of the candy bars with razor blades or needles in them or whatever in Halloween. That's based on some other cultural uh bullshit that didn't really happen. But it's the same idea.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and you can find out more of that stuff in our urban legends episode.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, nice try.
SPEAKER_00:Way back when we did do that.
SPEAKER_02:The idea of cautionary tale that is part and parcel with that entire thing.
SPEAKER_00:In ancient sailing times, probably having a woman, especially a solitary woman, on board with a crew at sea of swarthy men months on end, that probably would lead to problems. Probably not in the form of divine retribution, but there's a difference between it's a good idea not to do this and we should develop a mythos behind not doing it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, right. Just on its surface, that one's pretty easy. It's like, what are those dudes going to do? They're not gonna be like, man, I'm gonna reevaluate who I am as a person, right? They're gonna be like, Well, we shouldn't have brought that bitch on board, huh? Right? I mean, isn't that I mean that's what they're gonna do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And so that becomes this legend, and then it becomes romantic. Then they're like, we should never have a woman on board, she's a portent of uh bad things to come or whatever. Or you could have just not been an asshole collectively, but you're not gonna re-examine that. There's no introspection going on there.
SPEAKER_00:No, and it's probably a good idea to just take away any possibility of something bad happening. True. Just say that they're bad luck, and then don't have them on board, so you don't have to, I don't know, worry about, you know, uh sexual violence and jealousy and mutiny and things that might not go well on a ship.
SPEAKER_02:The ghost ship of New Haven. It's where the settlers of New Haven collectively saw a vision of a ghost ship in the aftermath of a storm. A guy named Theophilus Eaton, Stephen Goodyear, and various merchants commissioned the construction of a 150-ton ship in Rhode Island. Its maiden voyage was rocky. In the winter of 1647, it was unusually cold and the water had frozen over. They hacked the ice with axes and saws for three miles to create a channel so they could bring the ship up through the Long Island Sound. But even after that ship was freed from the ice, it still had to be towed. And then when they saw how gross the ship had gotten and how awful the whole situation was, the Reverend John Davenport, who apparently was sort of like the patriarch of that town, is to have said, quote, Lord, if thy pleasure to bury these our friends in the bottom of the sea, they are thine. Save them. So they did it anyway, and the ship sailed for England with a cargo that included wheat, peas, various furs, and, of course, writings from the aforementioned Davenport and Thomas Hooker. The following spring, no news of the ship had reached the colony. The settlers began to think of it as lost. And in June, a thunderstorm came from the northwest. An hour before sunset, the colonists saw a vision of a ship in the sky. The ship sailed against the wind with full sails for half an hour. Spectators had a detailed view of the ship and watched as it gradually vanished from mast to hull, leaving a cloud of smoke, which soon dissipated. And the settlers concluded that their prayers had been answered and God had given them a vision of their ship's fate. This is all recounted by Reverend James Pierpont in Oh boy, Cotton Mathers, Magnalia Christi Americana, and boy Cotton, we should do a whole episode on Cotton Mather. Uphologists claimed that this is actually a UFO sighting. This was included in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1950 1858 poem, The Phantom Ship. So this is well documented. It's another one of those a bunch of people saw something weird. Like the Arizona Lights or the or what have you, and then they didn't know what to think of it. Oh, that ship was missing. Maybe it was that. I imagine. That brings up a lot of other questions, like what was it? Was it that ship? Nobody knows. You know, a lot of ghost ships are literally just ships that people find that are just sort of abandoned, just floating out there. The HMS Uratus, which was a 26-gun Royal Navy Corvette, which was the victim of one of the biggest disasters in Britain's Navy ever in 1878. And she basically was an ill-fated training cruise. Only two lived. Jesus. Yeah. Okay, so this is fascinating. Essentially what happened with this one was it was found adrift, and it had capsized near the Isle of Wight. This is from a weather report in the Midland Naturalist. The violent but brief atmospheric disturbance, which was the cause of the catastrophe, appears to have advanced from the northwest and reached the north of England about 10 AM, taking a southeasterly course. Snow began to fall at Leicester about 145 and was followed by a strong gusty wind, but in an hour all was over. The situation of the Uridus, but a short distance of the southeastern high cliffs, behind which chalk downs rise to a height of 800 or 900 feet, will sufficiently explain the way in which the squall took the vessel by surprise. The vessel was screened from it until it burst into a steep slope of the land in full fury. It basically wrecked at the Isle of Wight. Two of the ships, three hundred and nineteen crew and trainees survived, most of which were not carried down with the ship but died of exposure in freezing waters. One of the witnesses to the disaster was Winston Churchill. How so? Uh he was a toddler who was living in Ventnor with his family at the time, and basically looking over the cliff, and they saw the thing wreck.
SPEAKER_00:Wild.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. This one is interesting. This one is listed in this because it had multiple disasters. Like it wrecked more than once and killed almost all of its crew, including 281 lives the second time it voyaged out. So that's that's real fun. You can get into maritime disasters. This is a varied and diverse topic. But we're just talking about the West. Briefly, let's get into the East. Every year, dozens of empty vessels from North Korea wash up on Japanese shores. I did come across as this was weird. It deserves its own thing almost. The Japanese government has no idea why. Some of their uh reasoning is that they they're fishermen who died of exposure or starvation because they have no material support, or they just ventured out too far into international waters. They just wasn't enough for them to get fish enough to survive because it's really overfished there. North Korea specifically often goes out for king crabs, squid, and sandfish, which I didn't know was a thing. And a lot of them are nationalized, or there's soldiers or sort of army adjacent. They export a lot of their stuff because of all the sanctions and the way they're closed off. Essentially what happens is they have no GPS, they have no material support inland, and they're kind of desperate, and so they keep venturing further and further out into the waters. Inevitably, they fail and they die. The crazy thing is that they just disappear. The crew are just gone. There are theories that they defect, which is possible. You've heard that with Cuba and Haiti and things like that, but if they do defect, it's probably to Japan. Then there's the Ryu Unmaru, not the Kobiashumaru, but the Ryu Unmaru, which is a Japanese fishing boat that was washed away from its mooring at Emorari Prefecture in March 2011 because of an earthquake in tsunami. It was spotted a year later by the Royal Canadian Air Force, about 150 nautical miles off the coast of British Columbia. It entered US waters. After salvage attempts failed, they just sunk it. The Coast Guard sunk it on April 5th to prevent it from becoming a quote hazard to navigation. I mean, there are thousands of things we can go into with ghost ships. Basically anything that we didn't even get into a lot of the Soviet or Russian ones. There was a U-boat during World War I, the SMUB-65, who went on six war patrols, sank six merchant ships, and sank the British sloop HMS Arbutus. It was lost off of Padstow Cornwall on or after the 14th of July, Bastille Day, 1918, where all crew was on board. But there were reports that had been seen in other places. There was questioned whether or not that was the real ship. The ocean is so mysterious and so deep and so dark. How many fucking Twilight Zone episodes are about this?
SPEAKER_00:And how many military things do we not even know about? Where they just don't say anything. I mean, I'm pr I'm sure a lot of these submarines go missing and we just never know or hear about, because they're meant to be clandestine. That's their entire role.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, my dad still claims to this day that he was on vacation with his family, they were in like I don't know, somewhere in the southwest, you know, they went to a famous lake, and that they were there to sort of like taking it all in and a and a submarine out of nowhere just came up out of the water in a place where it shouldn't have been, you know what I mean? Sort of an Area 51 type like scenario.
SPEAKER_00:Is this one of those there's a passage in this lake, the underground?
SPEAKER_02:I think what he was getting at Because how else is it gonna get there? I think it was just like being tested in the middle of the desert, because that's what the US did. Gotcha. And they fucking put it in there because they thought no one was there and it was really deep. And they were like, oh, we're gonna test this nuclear submarine or whatever. And of course, that kind of thing sparks legend and myth. When you see things like that, especially when you're a kid, of course that's gonna spark that kind of thing. Oh, let's not forget the uh Yong Yu Singh number 18, which is a Taiwanese fishing vessel, was found adrift and unoccupied near the Midway Atoll after losing contact. The Taiwanese government claimed that it was due to a weather event. It was a tuna fishing vessel built in 2001. It carried a crew of 15, and it well documented. On January 2nd, 2021, the entire crew was gone. This is an official report by the US Coast Guard. A lifeboat was missing, as were all at that point, 10 crew. It seemed to be damaged by what looked like a collision. Nine of the crew members were Indonesian and the captain was Taiwanese. There was no signs of physical altercations, blood, or explosions, they said. Structural damages found on the hull, indicating the boat was underwent strong wind waves and multiple directions. Here's where it gets weird. In July 2025, two workers on a day trip to the Aran Islands, Ireland, reported the discovery of a message in a bottle written in Indonesian, requesting help on behalf of three stranded crew members of the Yu Young Singh No. 18. The message stated that the crew had been lost since December 2020 and cited the name of the ship's captain. The message was then turned into police and subsequently publicized mostly on Reddit, sparking debate about whether or not it was real. So this is how we get this kind of myth. I mean, that's how you get the terror, a fucking great show, which is, you know, a fictionalized version of real lost ship. Not just one ship, two ships. You have these moments that are real, that are tangible, that then have mysterious things happen to them, but also, in conjunction to that, sort of reinforce this mythology we have about the sea itself. You combine those things, and then we get things like the Bringer Triangle, the Mary Celeste, the Flying Dutchman. The Titanic really never fit into that. Isn't that weird? Because like that's like the biggest maritime disaster of all time. There are actual survivors, yeah, that's true. The coolest of which, by the way, was the chef. The chef? Oh yeah. So the chef was a notorious drunk, an epic alcoholic. The reason he survived was because his blood alcohol level was so fucking high that he didn't freeze in the waters of the Atlantic. Crazily, in a one in a bajillion scenario, survived another maritime disaster because his blood alcohol was so high.
SPEAKER_00:That is nuts.
SPEAKER_02:But very true. Charles John Joklin, he was the chief baker aboard the Titanic. He survived the ship's sinking and became notable for having survived the frigid water for having an exceptionally long time before being pulled into the collapsible B lifeboat with virtually no ill effects. He survived the Titanic disaster and was one of the few crew members reported to testify at the British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry into the sinking. He's portrayed in at least two movies, in A Night to Remember and in Titanic. He was portrayed by Chris Pornell in the fourth season premiere of Drunk History in 2016. Alright. There's also a concept of the metaphysical ghost ship in writing, in poetry, and in literature, where the ghost ship represents the vessel that we wish we had but didn't exist, or the thing that left us behind on the shore. There's a lot to that on top of already the sort of romanticized maritime language that we already use. And mythology we already use. And we haven't even gotten into the movies, like Ghost Ship. I'm not gonna say good, but at least watchable movies, which does have the most brutal opening sequence of any horror movie I think anybody's ever seen.
SPEAKER_00:Pretty awesome, honestly. It is awesome. It's a Final Destination meets Saw kind of uh opening.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the biggest body count, I think, of any opening horror movie ever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Brutal, and they show everything. Quite frankly, there aren't a lot of good movies about this topic. There's Carpenter's the Fog, which is great. It's not as much about the ship as it is the town. You have things like Triangle, but that's more about time travel. Mm-hmm. There's a great X-Files episode about this, where they sort of travel back in time onto a ship. I don't think it's a Titanic specifically, but it's that kind of ship.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're not even getting to something like the Philadelphia experiment.
SPEAKER_02:Oh man. We can do a whole episode just on that. Or the final countdown.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Europe does need its whole episode. That is a good movie. It's been a long time. Some of this is that they're just ships. It's no longer a prevalent way to travel or something that for most people they interact with. You know, it's it's just for kind of fishermen. You have the few rich people who travel or the people that live in places that um boats they have easy access to, but it's just not a prevalent thing anymore the way that I think it used to be. Especially when it was like your modus operandi to get any long distance.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, which is sad because I'm like it's actually a better and cleaner way of traveling than flying, but it does take longer.
SPEAKER_00:People don't like that too much. Yeah. Convenience. The whole concept of ghost ship is it's this the spooky mystery of the ocean and the open water itself. You transfix that to a physical mode of transportation or recreation or workplace and And it does take on that creepy feel. And especially when you have these real life incidences that can't be explained that we only have to question and wonder about, it leads to that eerie sense of the unknown and the inexplicable.
SPEAKER_02:Like fog itself. You can't see through it. You don't know what's in there, but you know things are there. I think it's part of the mythos. It's such a romantic mythos. It's such a romantic idea. And it's because, I think, because the oceans are so vast and so overwhelming and so powerful that man, who thinks that they've mastered the natural world, and somehow does manage to navigate the oceans, is still also at the same time overwhelmed and often defeated by such an overwhelming force that it creates this mythology, which is in and of itself its own complicated issue. I think that's kind of the heart of the whole thing, the heart of the ocean. What's that stupid thing in Titanic home?
SPEAKER_00:I've never seen Titanic, so I don't know.
SPEAKER_02:What? Are you kidding me? I kid you not. I don't even like that movie, and I've seen it like a thousand times. Because my dad loves that shit, so I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's one of those things where it's like I've seen so many bits of it. I never wanted to see it, and so I kind of avoided it, and now it's a badge of honor kind of thing. If I can say I've never seen Titanic.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah. Well, I'm with you on some of that. And until not too long ago, I had never seen Top Gun for the same reason.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, from what I've seen of Titanic, and I've seen Top Gun many times, I'd much rather see Top Gun again. I know. That's some sweaty, homo erotic action.
SPEAKER_02:Sage Wisdom. Sage Wisdom. If you wouldn't mind liking and subscribing, preferably on Apple Podcasts, because that's the best way for us to be seen and heard. It is the way the algorithms work, not the eurythmics, but the algorithms. The eurythmics work in a completely different fashion, I've seen uh broken down mechanically. We would really appreciate it. So please make sure you do that. And thank you for joining us, as always, because usually it was just Jake and I screaming at the wall or each other. So having an audience means a lot. Why don't you broadcast it? Well, you look like a tourist. Skip, put that away. So we're flipping and reversing it? Yeah. Okay. Well, we do really appreciate that. And we do appreciate you tuning in. Every person that listens is now our best friend. And we're probably gonna stalk you online or call you constantly asking you in the middle of the night why you don't love us anymore. Which is probably gonna happen. So, Jake, what what should they do in the interim between those events?
SPEAKER_00:If they could kindly clean up after themselves to some reasonable degree, tip their bar staff, their waiters, the wait staff, their DJs, KJs, uh AJs, BJs. If they also need to tip their captain, gotta get you home safely, otherwise you might end up part of a ghost ship yourself. But until that creepy day comes, we would all like to say, God speed! Fair whistle. I got nothing. I'm Jake.
SPEAKER_02:Well, fuck me then.
SPEAKER_01:Please go away.