Ten Mysterious “Ghost Ship” Stories That Still Keep Us Wondering

Who doesn’t love a creepy and true story that doesn’t have a definitive ending? If you’re a regular reader here like we are, then you no doubt love an unsolved mystery. Even better if it’s true—something that really happened back in history. There’s just something about not knowing, right? The truth is out there, as a famous old television show liked to point out, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll ever learn it.

Today, the unsolved and unsettling topic at hand is the ghost ship. Basically, a ghost ship is a vessel lost at sea with vanished people aboard and no clear indication of what happened. The assumption, of course, is that it sank. But there’s always the possibility that it’s somewhere out there, sailing along on the high seas of this world or the next, full of the ghosts of the dead sailors it failed to bring home on its final earthly voyage…

These are the eerie stories of ten unsolved ghostship mysteries from history. In all ten cases, historians, scary story lovers, and conspiracy theorists alike are pushing to figure out what happened. But considering how long ago some of these incidents occurred, we’ll most likely never know for sure.

Related: 10 Lesser-Known Ships That Sank During Their Maiden Voyages

10 The Young Teazer

The Young Teazer was a notorious pirate ship that wreaked havoc on ships across the Atlantic coastline of Canada in the early 19th century. It was very fast, and its crew was very cunning. They made several notorious raids across the coast of Nova Scotia that netted huge hauls for the pirates on board. Then, one day in 1813, the Young Teazer found itself cornered in Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay by a schooner captained by the legendary Sir John Sherbrooke. The captain wanted justice for the Young Teazer’s dastardly ways. But the pirates thought differently.

Just before the Young Teazer was about to be boarded and its pirates captured, the ship exploded. According to witnesses on Sherbrooke’s boat, the first officer of the pirate vessel was seen lighting a fire in the ship’s magazine. Clearly, the pirates chose suicide as a preferable outcome to whatever lay ahead after capture. Simple, right? Well, it’s what happened after that which has captured the hearts and minds of generations.

See, the fate of the Young Teazer has become Nova Scotia’s biggest and creepiest ghost story. In it, the so-called “Teazer Light” has lived on to this day. Every year on June 27—which was the anniversary of their near-capture and explosion in Mahone Bay—locals swear that they can see an eerie orange glow far out in the water. Sometimes, locals even claim that they can hear the long-dead crew screaming in pain and agony in the foggy night.^[1]

9 The MV Joyita

The American merchant vessel Joyita should have returned home to New Zealand by the middle of 1955. But time passed, and days turned into weeks, and nobody back home heard from the ship or its occupants. Then, tragically, five weeks after its missed return date, the ship was discovered more than 600 miles (966 km) off course in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. It had been completely abandoned. But the strange thing was that no distress signals had ever been received by any other ship. There was no major report of any bad weather in the area during that time.

Even stranger, when the ship was discovered, the people investigating the mysterious wreck found no signs of foul play anywhere on the boat. They also couldn’t find any dead bodies or undeniable proof that something terrible had happened. They did find a doctor’s bag on deck, and a little bit of blood with some bandages nearby. But the presence of that blood alone wasn’t enough to suggest a murder plot or anything more dastardly. It was as if the crew had just… vanished.

Now, those who discovered the ship did note one interesting thing: the presence of a decay-like smell. And while nobody at the time had any idea what happened to the ship or its occupants, that smell more recently hinted to modern-day investigators about what might have happened.

In 2002, a New Zealand academic named David Wright posited a theory after years spent researching the tragedy. According to him, water was likely leaking through a rusted, corroded pipe in the engine’s cooling system over a long period of time. The boat simply took on more water than it could handle, the pipes rotted out, and the ship eventually went down (or partially down) with its occupants perishing.^[2]

8 The Octavius

In 1761, a British ship called the Octavius was loaded up with Chinese cargo. It set sail for London to drop off all that it had in its holds. But it never made it there. The captain wanted to go directly north from China and sail through the Arctic Passage back home. As the crow flies, that was the shortest route to London from the waters off China. There was just one problem: No crow had ever flown that route before. Or anybody else, for that matter. The Arctic Passage had never been successfully sailed in late 1761. But for whatever reason, the captain was just certain that he could do it. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

They set sail northward and then quickly went missing. Nobody heard from the Octavius ever again. And for nearly 14 years, nobody had any clue what had happened. Then, in early 1775, a whaling ship called the Herald came upon the Octavius in icy waters off the coast of Greenland. When the whaling crew figured out what the ship was and who it had belonged to, they recognized its name immediately. They quickly came up to it and boarded to see if they could figure out what happened.

What they found on the Octavius was so terrifying that it is still infamous in the annals of maritime history to this day. The Herald’s crew found the Octavius’s crew all long dead and frozen solid far below the ghost ship’s decks. Like something out of a movie, the captain himself was sitting upright at his desk and frozen solid, too. He’d been in the middle of penning a note on the ship’s log that dated back to early 1762 when he passed.

The crew members of the Herald were understandably terrified at what they had found. They rushed off the ship in haste, never to return. Scared of the spirits that may have populated that ghost ship and could be after them, they sailed away. Nobody ever saw the Octavius again.^[3]

7 The Lady Lovibond

In February of 1748, just before Valentine’s Day, the Lady Lovibond was sailing the high seas off the coast of England. The occasion was a celebratory ride home to reach land for the captain’s wedding. There was a problem, though, as the captain would come to find out during the journey: his bride-to-be was actually in love with his best friend. Horrified and enraged at the betrayal, the captain turned his anger onto the ship and its occupants. He rammed the ship onto a spit of land near the Goodwin Sands, running it aground and destroying it. All aboard were killed in the subsequent wreck.

Since then, over the last 300 years, there have been many sightings of the Lady Lovibond. Multiple captains piloting their ships near the Goodwin Sands over the past three centuries have claimed to have nearly collided with a ghost ship that suddenly appeared out in the water before them. Others thought they saw a ship off in the distance that had run aground, but when they reached the scene to investigate, they couldn’t find any wreckage or survivors.

The most notable of all those ghost ship sightings happened more than five decades after the Lady Lovibond’s tragic end. One day, locals on the coast in Kent saw a ship with three masts heading full-speed straight for the Goodwin Sands. Knowing what was about to happen, they sent out a rescue party for the inevitable crew members who would be thrown into the water. But when rescue ships got to the Sands, there was nothing there. No wreckage was ever found.^[4]

6 The Flying Dutchman

If you’ve ever heard of any ghost ship, it’s probably the Flying Dutchman. For centuries now, the Flying Dutchman has been a piece of very popular folklore in the Netherlands. According to that ages-old tale, a cursed sea captain was doomed to forever sail around the Cape of Good Hope in far southern Africa with no end in sight. He had been struggling to round the cape during a terrible storm, and he bargained with the gods above that if he could round it safely, he’d give anything.

Well, as the story goes, he gave his soul for the passage. For eternity, the doomed captain and his ill-fated ship were tasked with floating out in their oceanic purgatory. Through the centuries, that supposed ghost ship has reportedly been seen again and again by sailors from all kinds of countries.

It was Dutch sailors, obviously, who first claimed that they’d seen the ghost ship appear out of nowhere in the middle of a storm just off the southern tip of Africa way back in the early 19th century. Then, through the rest of the 1800s, several other Dutch ships claimed to have seen this mystery vessel. They weren’t the only witnesses, though. Several German ships also had sailors who reported the existence of this alleged ghost ship in the waters off Africa.

In 1835, one Dutch ship’s log stated that they were in the middle of a bad storm when, out of nowhere, the Flying Dutchman appeared in the water before them with all its sails unfurled and “bearing down on them.” In 1881, a separate ship’s log claimed that the the Flying Dutchman had passed them by with an eerie red light coming from it. Over the next several decades, two other ships also reported seeing an unknown ship in the area that was inexplicably flashing an eerie red light. Do you believe the tales? We do…^[5]

5 The SS Valencia

The SS Valencia was carrying 108 souls on board in 1906 when it got caught in a terrible storm off the coast of Canada’s British Columbia. Rescue boats rushed in, and lifeboats from the SS Valencia itself were deployed. But sadly, only 37 of the 108 passengers survived the awful storm and subsequent sinking. But here’s where things get weird: for the next four years, the Valencia was regarded as a normal (and sad) shipwreck until 1910, when people began to claim that they’d seen a “phantom ship” drifting through the area.

The Seattle Times was the first newspaper to report those sightings. Their journalists reported that British Columbia locals on land and fishermen just out at sea were all seeing lifeboats carrying skeletons. Naturally, the locals there remembered what had happened to the Valencia four years earlier. They assumed that the ghost lifeboats were connected to it in some way. Creepy, right? Well, it gets even creepier!

In 1933—nearly three full decades after the SS Valencia wrecked in bad weather—its No. 5 lifeboat was found completely intact in British Columbia’s Barkley Sound. Despite almost thirty years of (theoretically) being exposed to the elements and the harsh and salty sea water, the lifeboat was completely intact and entirely unharmed. The rest of the wreckage of the Valencia was later found near a 100-foot (3.5-meter) high bluff jutting out into the ocean. But nobody could ever explain how that lifeboat came away completely untouched. Nor how it lasted like that for so many years out in the harsh oceanic elements.^[6]

4 The Ourang Medan

In June 1947, a British vessel named the Silver Star was sailing through the Straits of Malacca in Southeast Asia. Abruptly, they received a mysterious distress signal. It was coming from a Dutch freighter named the Ourang Medan. The contents of the message itself were bone-chilling to the British officer who first heard the worrying communication come through. It said: “All officers, including captain, are dead lying in chart room and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” Silence came across the line for a moment after that, and then another message came through that needed only two words: “I die.” And that was it.

The Straits of Malacca were a very busy shipping lane then as they are now, so several ships in the area picked up the same distress signal. But it was the Silver Star that was the closest and reached the Ourang Medan first. When they got there, crewmen from the Silver Star boarded the Dutch freighter. They found the crew’s bodies strewn about on the decks, all dead and with all their faces fixed in cries of terrible pain. Even the ship’s dog had been killed. But it wasn’t clear what killed them; the bodies were unharmed, there was no blood, and there was no sign of any kind of attack.

The crew of the Silver Star began to investigate further, but before they could make out any real hypotheses, they began to smell smoke. Quickly, they abandoned the ship on their escape vessel. It was fortunate that they did that, too, because just seconds after they pushed away from the Ourang Medan to return to their ship, the freighter exploded. In its wake, there was nothing left but thousands of pieces of debris. The ship was so thoroughly decimated that any further investigation was impossible.

To this day, nobody has any idea what happened to the Ourang Medan and its crew. Conspiracy theorists point to the location of the incident and the time period, wondering whether the ship was carrying biological weapons in some way related to the recent end of World War II. But nothing has ever been proven. For now, and likely forever, the fate of the Ourang Medan will remain a mystery.^[7]

3 The Eliza Battle

On March 1, 1858, the steamship Eliza Battle caught fire on the Tombigbee River—which runs as the water border between the states of Mississippi and Alabama. It was loaded with more than 1,200 bales of cotton for a trip down the river. But at some point that evening, as it was making its way through the water, a very strong wind began to blow across the river. Somehow, some of the bales of cotton came alight with a spark. And in what seemed like an instant, the entire ship and all 1,200 bales of cotton had caught fire. Before anyone could do anything, flames engulfed the ship.

Terrified passengers and crew members alike were forced to jump overboard. Sadly, 33 people were killed in the fire and/or in subsequent drownings amid the chaos. And while the tragedy itself was one of the worst maritime disasters in the history of both Mississippi and Alabama, the aftermath was even more eerie.

To this day, people in the area swear that they have seen the Eliza Battlefloating down the river. As they tell it, the ghost ship floats by while wreathed in fire. And if you listen closely, you can supposedly hear the sounds of 33 souls screaming out and calling for help. Is it just us, or is the hair standing up on the back of your neck, too?^[8]

2 The Mary Celeste

Let’s wrap things up with one of the most famous ghostship stories of all time. In November 1872, a ship called the Mary Celeste set sail from New York bound for Italy. It was being captained by a man named Benjamin Briggs. He had eight shipmates on board along with him, as well as his wife and daughter. But less than a month later, on December 4, the Mary Celeste was randomly found abandoned and adrift in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

A British ship called the Dei Gratia was the one that had come upon her. When they sailed up, they saw that the Mary Celeste was completely intact, with no damage to the actual boat. Plus, when they boarded it, they found that the ship had enough food and water to make it through six more months of sailing.

To make things even more confusing, the ship’s logbook was written through November 24—and then abruptly stopped. But the log notes were totally normal up to that point. And even more eerily, there was one thing missing from the Mary Celeste: its lifeboat. The sailors of the Dei Gratia rooted around a bit more and eventually discovered that the crewmen of the Mary Celeste had all left their smoking pipes out in the abandoned ship. Seeing that, he hypothesized that the occupants left in a hurry.

But it’s not clear why they left. And it’s also not clear why they left absolutely everything behind. Any storm bad enough to ditch the boat would have caused major damage to its hull, and there was none. Everything on board the ship was left perfectly intact and sea-ready. It was just as if Briggs, his family, and his entire crew had simply… vanished. Through the years, many theories have been put forth, including mutiny, murder, and a crewman gone mad. But none have ever been confirmed. And likely, none ever will be.^[9]

1 The Carroll A. Deering

On January 29, 1921, the schooner Carroll A. Deering was heading home to Virginia after a long trip down to Barbados in the Caribbean. As it passed a lightship overseer along the coast of North Carolina, the captain of that watch vessel noticed that the Carroll’s crew seemed to be wandering around idly on the deck. The lightship’s overseer called out to the Carroll A. Deering, and a crew member on board yelled back that they had lost their anchors. That was concerning, of course, but also a somewhat regular occurrence.

However, just days later, another ship—the SS Lake Elon—again spotted the Carroll A. Deering floating up the coast of North Carolina. In his logbook, the Lake Elon’s captain wrote that the Carroll’s crew was behaving strangely, and the ship was steering out on a “peculiar course.” Two days later, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered the Carroll A. Deering. It had run aground along the Outer Shoals of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The weather was too bad for the Coast Guard to sail in for a better look, but they did notice that the Carroll was missing her lifeboats.

A few days later, after the weather improved, the Coast Guard returned to investigate. There, they were shocked at what they found. The Carroll’s lifeboats were indeed gone, as were all the personal items and papers of every single crew member who’d been on board at the time—as if nobody had ever been there at all. But even stranger than that was the discovery of a full meal prepared, cooked, and perfectly laid out for the entire crew. It sat completely untouched. Coast Guard officials had no idea what to make of that careful preparation followed by the crew’s disappearance.

In the end, conspiracy theorists have long had a field day with the Carroll A. Deering. Some say rogue Russian spies kidnapped the sailors. Some say the crew mutinied, and everybody was tossed overboard to their deaths. And some even say that the Bermuda Triangle is to blame. What say you?^[10]