Ghost ships

Historically, the term has been used to refer to reported sightings of apparitions over water that have appeared in the form of maritime sailing ships, often after having previously been known to have sunk, or to derelict vessels found floating with no crew. In fiction, ghost ships have often been vessels crewed by some manner of spectral or non-living beings.

The Flying Dutchman :

According to folklore, the Flying Dutchman is a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes glowing with ghostly light. If she is hailed by another ship, her crew will often try to send messages to land, to people long since dead. The sight of this phantom ship is reckoned by seafarers to be a portent of doom.

Jian Seng:

The Jian Seng is a ghost ship, an 80 meter tanker of unknown origin that was spotted drifting 180km south-west of Weipa, Queensland in the Gulf of Carpentaria by an Australian Coastwatch aeroplane in 2006. Photographs were taken and analysed at the Australian Customs Service, who dispatched the Australian Customs vessel Storm Bay immediately.
The Storm Bay arrived during the night and waited until morning before launching a tender to board the vessel which was drifting in uncharted waters. There was no sign of recent human activity found aboard, nor any signs that it had been engaged in illegal fishing or people smuggling. A spokesman for Australian Customs addressed the media on March 24, 2006 stating that they had been unable to obtain documentary evidence of its registration or origin port at this stage, but materials recovered indicated the vessel was the Jian Seng, though the name and identifying features had been painted over.
A large quantity of rice was found on board, leading the boarding party to believe the vessel was probably used as a resupply ship for fishing boats with food and fuel in waters outside the Australian exclusive economic zone which had broken tow and drifted to its current position. The boarding party asserted that it had been adrift for an exceptionally long time before being found, and that the engines were inoperable and incapable of being restarted. The boarding party also reported that it was drifting slowly southwards. The ship had been extensively stripped, suggesting that it may have been on its way to a scrapyard when its towline broke.
The patrol boat Storm Bay monitored the ship for several days before a decision was made to tow it to the nearest harbor. A salvage tug towed the ship to Weipa, on Cape York, and oily water on the ship which posed an environmental hazard was removed. Since no owner of the ship could ever be located, it was towed to deep water on April 21, 2006 and scuttled.

Bel Amica

The Bel Amica is a ghost ship discovered off the coast of island of Sardinia near Punta Volpe on August 24, 2006. The Italian Coast Guard discovered the ship without having any apparent crew on board. The crew boarded the vessel and steered it away from rocks and shallow waters which it was headed towards. Once inside, they discovered a half-eaten meal of Egyptian food, French maps of North African seas, a pile of clothes, and the flag of Luxembourg.
The ship has been described as a "classic style" schooner never seen in Italy before.[1] It also was found never to have been registered in Italy nor any other country as the investigation was being done. The only identification aboard the ship was a wooden tablet or "plaque" as described in some papers that read "Bel Amica", a likely misspelling of "Good Friend" (the phrase needs an additional "L" to read properly in modern Italian).[2]
Shortly after the original reports, Italian newspapers reported the owner had been found. Franc Rouayrux, from Luxembourg, was identified as the owner of the vessel. It had been left anchored in deep water for somewhat nebulous reasons, and the owner stated that he had expected to return to the yacht after returning home to address an emergency. The Italian press reported that an attempt to avoid steep taxation of luxury vessels may have been involved.[3]
Many reports at the time identified the Bel Amica as a schooner. This term is frequently associated with sailing ships from the pre-steamship era; however, it is simply a technical name for the layout of the sails. Schooners of many sizes are in current production. The misidentification of this modern yacht as an antique ship deepened the mystery and probably contributed to the brief international interest at the time.

High Aim

High Aim 6 was a ghost ship found drifting in Australian waters, an obscure and rarely covered mystery from 2003. The ship is known to have left the port of Liuchiu in Taiwan on October 31, 2002. The owner of the ship, Tsai Huang Shueh-er, spoke last with the captain in December 2002. The ship was found without its crew on January 8, 2003. What happened after the last communication remains unknown. The Vessel was registered in Taiwan and flew an Indonesian flag.[1]The vessel was found drifting in calm waters approximately 80 nautical miles east of Rowley Shoals inside the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone. The crew was missing. There was no evident reason for the abandonment: no sign of distress was found, and the crew's personal effects remained on board. The High Aim 6 had plenty of fuel and provisions and no sign of a struggle could be found. Initial concerns that the ship had been carrying illegal immigrants were dismissed when the contents of the hold proved to be rotting fish. The ship was equipped for long-line fishing.
When the ship was first sighted five days before being boarded, its motor was running and it was underway. At the time of the boarding, the engine was dead and the rudder was locked, causing the ship to drift in one direction.
The High Aim 6 was towed to Broome, where subsequent forensic examination was conducted. Despite a search of some 7,300 nautical miles, no trace of crew was ever found.

The Reality Check:

1775: The Octavius, an English trading ship returning from China, was found drifting off the coast of Greenland in 1775. The captain's log showed that the ship had attempted the Northwest Passage, which had never been successfully traversed, in 1762. The ship and the bodies of her frozen crew apparently completed the passage after drifting among the pack ice for 13 years.

1872: The Mary Celeste, perhaps the most historically famous derelict, was found abandoned between Portugal (mainland) and Portugal's Azores archipelago. It was devoid of all crew, but was completely intact. While Arthur Conan Doyle's story "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" based on this ship added some strange phenomena to the tale (such as that the tea found in the mess hall was still hot), the fact remained that the last log entry was 11 days prior to the discovery of the ship.

1921: The Carroll A. Deering, a five-masted cargo schooner, was found stranded on a beach on Diamond Shoals, North Carolina. The ship's final voyage had been the subject of much debate and controversy (see main article), and was investigated by six Departments of the US government, largely because it was one of dozens of ships that sank or went missing within a relatively short period of time. While paranormal explanations have been advanced, the theories of mutiny or piracy are considered much more likely.

1931: The Baychimo was abandoned in the Arctic Ocean when it became trapped in pack ice and was thought doomed to sink, but remained afloat and was sighted numerous times over the next 38 years without ever being salvaged.

1933: A lifeboat from the 1906 wreck of the passenger steamship SS Valencia off the southwest coast of Vancouver Island was found floating in the area in remarkably good condition 27 years after the sinking. Sailors have also reported seeing the ship itself in the area in the years following the sinking, often as an apparition that followed down the coast.

1948: Many ships responded to the desperate Morse code messages from the Dutch freighter Ourang Medan. The ship was found adrift off Indonesia with all of its crew dead. The boarding party found the entire crew "frozen, teeth baring, gaping at the sun." Before the ship could be towed to a home port, the ship exploded and sank. The reason for the deaths are still unexplained today.

1955: The MV Joyita was discovered abandoned in the Pacific.

2003: High Aim 6 - was a ghost ship found drifting in Australian waters with no crew on board. Despite an extensive search, no trace of the crew was ever found.

2006: The tanker Jian Seng was found off the coast of Weipa, Queensland Australia in March. Its origin or owner could not be determined and it was scuttled in April.

2006: In August the "Bel Amica" (which is one "L" short of the modern Italian spelling of "Good Friend") was discovered off the coast of Sardinia.The Coast Guard crew that discovered the ship found half eaten Egyptian meals, French maps of North African seas, and a flag of Luxembourg on board.

2007: A 12-metre catamaran, the Kaz II, was discovered unmanned off the coast of Queensland, northeast Australia in April[4]. The yacht, which had left Airlie Beach on Sunday 15 April, was spotted about 80 nautical miles off Townsville, near the outer Great Barrier Reef on the following Wednesday. When boarded on Friday, the engine was running, a laptop was running, the radio and GPS were working and a meal was set to eat, but the three-man crew were not on board. All the sails were up but one was badly shredded, while three life jackets and survival equipment, including an emergency beacon, were found on board. A search for the crew was abandoned on Sunday 22nd as it was considered unlikely that anyone could have survived for that period of time.

In film

In 2003, Walt Disney Pictures released the first film in the trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean, the plots of which involve the ghost ships The Black Pearl and The Flying Dutchman. The films are based on the Disney theme park attraction of the same name.

The 2002 horror film Ghost Ship involves a stranded Italian ocean liner named Antonia Graza, lost at sea since 21 May 1962. The ship is boarded by a salvage crew, who shortly afterward encounter the ghostly apparitions of murdered passengers.

In 2001 the Sci Fi Channel broadcast Lost Voyage, a Sci Fi Pictures original film about the return of a derelict luxury ship, the Corona Queen, missing 25 years earlier, investigated by the son of one of the missing passengers.

The 1997 science fiction film Event Horizon involved a spaceship that had taken an experimental voyage into another dimension, only to vanish with no trace. It returns to our solar system seven years later with no crew, life support not operating, and the recordings of the flight scrambled. The investigating team soon encounters an alien presence brought back from the other dimension.

Numerous episodes of the various Star Trek series deal with abandoned ships discovered adrift. Notable examples are "The Tholian Web" (Star Trek), "The Naked Now", and "Booby Trap" (Star Trek: The Next Generation).

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