Ghost stories, legends and history of haunted ships
Wyoming’s “Ship of Death” is said to rise from the fog on the North Platte, coated in frost, carrying the corpse of someone about to die. The story traces back to a single 1948 Fate magazine article, and the witnesses, the bureau that recorded them and the timing of Tom Horn’s hanging don’t hold up.
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In September 1679, La Salle’s Le Griffon sailed from an island near the mouth of Green Bay with a hold full of furs and was never seen again: the first ship lost on the upper Great Lakes. Two hundred years later a Detroit writer gave her a curse, and later writers gave her a phantom. Here’s what the record says, what’s folklore, and why the wreck still hasn’t been found.
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The schooner Equator carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the South Seas in 1889, then spent decades as a tender, a survey boat, and a Puget Sound tug before ending up as a ruin on the Everett waterfront. Her ghost story is a single unsourced sentence, and in 2023 the ship herself was taken apart.
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Block Island’s burning ghost ship, the Palatine, started with a real wreck: the Princess Augusta, which grounded in a blizzard in December 1738 after a crossing that killed most of her German emigrant passengers. Here’s what the records show, how wreckers and a poem turned it into legend, and where the victims lie today.
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I went looking for a phantom ship said to haunt the Tillamook Spit, the long finger of sand that closes[…]
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On January 31, 1921, the five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering was found aground on Diamond Shoals with her sails set and her crew gone. There are no ghost sightings, but the mystery has never been solved. Here’s the real history, the theories, and how to visit.
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