The Most Mysterious Unexplained Shipwrecks and Ghost Ships | Unveiled

The Most Mysterious Unexplained Shipwrecks

The ocean is an enchanting place, but it can also prove dangerous, merciless and deadly. For thousands of years now, humans have “sailed the seven seas”, but not every voyage gets to where it was supposed to go… and the ocean floor is littered with wrecked ships and lost souls.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the most mysterious and unexplained shipwrecks in the world.

In 2010, a shipwreck turned up in just about the last place you might expect - in the foundations of the World Trade Center, in New York. During the construction of the Nine Eleven Memorial and Museum, workers were surprised to find the wreck of a long, wooden boat, which was then sent to Columbia University for analysis. In 2014 it was announced that the ship could be dated all the way back to the American Revolution, and was made of white oak trees from Pennsylvania cut down in 1773. The leading theory as to how the boat came to be buried underground in the middle of Manhattan is that it was once part of an effort to build a landfill as a way of extending the Manhattan shoreline… but it’s not a watertight explanation, because it could have also sunk years before the landfill’s construction. In either case, we don’t know for sure the identity of the ship or what happened before it was put to use propping up a city.

In most cases, though, shipwrecks either appear in (or are believed to be in) a more predictable location - under the sea. And a lot of the time they’re identifiable, too… not that that makes them any less mysterious! The Mary Celeste is one of the most famous ghost ships in history, notorious for the fact that we still don’t know why she was abandoned or what happened to her crew. She was found empty and adrift near the Azores Islands in 1872, but with food supplies and cargo intact. The sails were a little damaged, but she was otherwise in good, working condition. The only things missing were a lifeboat and the crew, none of whom were ever seen again. To this day, the mystery of why they abandoned ship endures, without a definite answer. The most prominent (and perhaps most logical) theory is that they wrongly believed the boat was going to sink, maybe due to faulty instruments… but there have also been other theories put forward, including suggestions of paranormal activity.

But the story of the Mary Celeste doesn’t end with just the unsettling nature of its discovery. After it was brought back to harbour, it went through numerous owners and captains, but earned a reputation for being cursed because many of her captains died. That reputation went as far as the ship’s final captain, Gilman C. Parker, who attempted to commit insurance fraud by over-insuring the Mary Celeste and purposefully scuttling her. The crime was eventually uncovered and Parker was ordered to repay the insurance claims… but, in keeping with Mary Celeste tradition, he died just three months later. As for the ship, well, it plain disappeared - her wreck has never been definitively located, nor do we know if she was recycled as salvage.

There have been other ships found eerily empty, too… such as in 1917, when the Zebrina, a schooner, was found on the French coast also without her crew. Since this apparent “ghost ship” appeared during the First World War, most leading theories contend that the crew were at some time taken aboard a U-boat… and that that U-boat was then sighted and sunk with them on it. Nevertheless, the wreck of the proposed U-boat has never been found, nor have the remains of the crew. But, neither the Mary Celeste nor the Zebrina are believed to have been empty for long before they were discovered…. And this isn’t the case for all ghost vessels.

The SS Baychimo, a Swedish-built steamship that at one time sailed along the coasts of Canada and Alaska, is one such ship. She was abandoned by her crew in 1931 after getting stuck in pack ice. Unlike the crews of the Mary Celeste and the Zebrina, those on the Baychimo weren’t ill-fated; they were well-prepared and able to take shelter nearby, eventually getting rescued from the Arctic Circle by air after deciding their ship was doomed. But remarkably, the Baychimo somehow drifted through the ice for the next thirty-eight years, without anybody onboard - earning it the moniker “The Ghost Ship of the Arctic” or alternatively, “Alaska’s Phantom Ship”. Nobody was ever able to properly salvage the wreckage, and the boat was last seen in 1969, once again stuck in ice. After that, the sightings stopped, and presumably she finally sank… but her wreck has never been located, and it’s still a mystery as to how she was able to survive for so long after abandonment.

Other Arctic ships haven’t been so lucky. Sir John Franklin’s so-called “lost expedition” of 1845 had two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, both fitted with an extensive array of modifications to weather the harsh Arctic climate. The ships were last seen in Baffin Bay, between the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Greenland, but then they disappeared for good. Thanks to subsequent expeditions to the region, researchers have been able to put together a pretty grisly picture of what may have happened… it’s thought that both ships also became trapped in polar ice, but this time the sailors all died while trying to walk across the ice to safety. Before then, they’re believed to have survived two winters on King William Island, but their food supplies ultimately went bad, so it’s suggested that some members of the crew, during the later stages, even resorted to cannibalism.

While the bodies of some of the lost sailors were found, the wrecks of the Terror and Erebus were long thought to be lost – until 2014 when the Erebus was found. Two years later, following a tip off from an Inuit hunter named Sammy Kogvik - who said that he’d seen a mast sticking out of the ice - the Terror was also discovered. Altogether though, it still took one-hundred-and-fifty years to piece together what happened to Franklin’s expedition with even a little bit of confidence, and to this day it remains unclear why the two ships got trapped in ice in the first place; they were both modified and built so precisely that it really shouldn’t have happened. Was it the route Franklin chose, an unavoidable tragedy, or something else entirely?

Of course, there have also been countless times when we’ve never found even a hint of a wreck at all, even when we know there’s one out there somewhere. The Bermuda Triangle is infamous for seemingly swallowing up ships and planes, and few are as famous as the USS Cyclops, which disappeared without a trace in 1918. On a journey from Brazil to Baltimore, the Cyclops was last seen during an unscheduled stop in Barbados. It was initially believed that she, too, was sunk by a World War One U-boat, but the German Navy never claimed such an attack. The next-best theory is that the Cyclops sank due to a violent storm, although others think the widely disliked (and reportedly violent) captain of the ship may have had something to do with it…

Whatever the cause, the loss of the Cyclops is still the largest non-combat loss of life in the history of the US Navy; all 306 people on board were ultimately declared dead. Efforts to find the doomed ship have so far been unsuccessful, but what makes the fate of the Cyclops even stranger is that two of its sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, also disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, never to be seen again. They both vanished in late 1941 within two or three weeks of each other. By this point, both ships were owned by the Canadian Merchant Navy, and since Canada entered World War Two in 1939, two years before the Proteus and Nereus were last seen, most believed that they were also sunk by German forces – but, again, Germany has never claimed attacks on them, either. All three ships, the Cyclops and her sister vessels, were enormous for their time, yet we haven’t been able to relocate any of them.

Finally, if finding shipwrecks is clearly difficult enough when we know when and where they sank, it’s an even harder task when we’re not even sure if the ship we’re looking for is real. The Ourang Medan is one such legendary ship, and its strange story was first told in newspapers around the world in the 1940s. According to various reports, the SS Ourang Medan was in the Indian Ocean when it released a disturbing distress call which was picked up by passing ships; notably the American vessel, the Silver Star. The distress call, in Morse code, explained that everybody on board the Ourang Medan was dead. The Silver Star allegedly then went to investigate and found a ghost ship filled with frozen corpses, their faces all showing fearful expressions… but, and here’s the twist, the ghost ship then exploded and sank before it could be towed to port. Unsurprisingly, theories abound about the alleged accident, including one idea that the Ourang Medan had been carrying dangerous chemicals that may have poisoned the crew. However, in the years since, investigators have found no reference to any ship named “SS Ourang Medan” on any official records, and the Silver Star, while it did exist, never officially logged such an encounter. Which leaves us today, well, totally baffled… We still don’t know where the myth originated from, how much of the story is based on truth, or even if the Ourang Medan was a real ship? If it was, then it means that one day some unfortunate soul could stumble across quite a haunting wreck.

Right now, there are an estimated three million shipwrecks in the ocean. Some of them are accounted for, some of them aren’t. A lot of them have incredible stories to tell, but the secrets of many could forever be held by the sea. But those are the world’s most mysterious, unexplained shipwrecks.