True Unexplained Stories of Ghost Ships

TL;DR

Several famous ghost ship legends — from the Flying Dutchman to the Cass 2 — are examined, revealing scientific, historical, and still-unexplained causes.

Key Points

• 1.The Flying Dutchman likely stems from real VOC shipping disasters near the Cape of Good Hope. Dutch captain Bernard Faulka, who suspiciously fast-completed Java trade routes in the 1600s, inspired the legend; a 'Fata Morgana' mirage effect scientifically explains sightings of ships appearing and vanishing.
• 2.The Flying Dutchman was reportedly seen by the future King George V aboard HMS Bacchante. The prince and brothers spotted it roughly 183 meters away, but that same day a watchman on the ship fell to his death — and his brother Prince Albert Victor was later suspected of being Jack the Ripper.
• 3.The Octavius ghost ship story is a 20th-century fabrication built on earlier legends. The ship's name cycled through 'Jenny' and 'Gloriana,' with 1828 and 1862 published log entries nearly identical in detail but placing the frozen-crew scenario in opposite polar regions.
• 4.The SS Orang Medan's mass-death distress call ('I die') traces back to a single unreliable freelance journalist. Sylvio Scurly first published the story in 1940, describing sealed mystery boxes leaking hydrogen cyanide gas; no ship by that name appears in official documentation.
• 5.The Cass 2 catamaran vanished in April 2007 off Queensland, Australia with its engine still running and a laptop open. The coroner theorized a tangled fishing line caused one man to fall overboard, prompting others to jump in instinctively — none were wearing life jackets and none could swim well.
• 6.HMS Resolute, sent to find the lost Franklin Arctic Expedition, became a ghost ship itself. Abandoned in 1854 after getting stuck in ice, it was found drifting freely a year later; the US bought it for $40,000, returned it to Britain, and Queen Victoria had it scrapped into the Resolute Desk now used by every US president since Rutherford B. Hayes.
• 7.The SS Baychimo drifted crewless around Alaskan and Canadian waters for 38 years after being abandoned in a 1931 Arctic storm. Occasionally boarded by explorers and once trapping Alaskan natives for 10 days, it was last widely sighted in 1969 near Point Barrow and has never been found since.
• 8.El Caleuche is a South American phantom ship rooted in centuries-old Chiloé Archipelago folklore. Pre-Spanish native mythology blended with Catholic missionary teachings to create a legend of a party ship crewed by wizards and zombies; only two professional sailor sightings from 1909 and 1911 were documented, amounting to little more than glimpsed lights.