Overboard

Today's tour of the Cabinet reveals the story of one man who can't seem to escape his destiny, while another tale is full of nothing but escapes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Charlie grew up with

(00:28):
an eye for the other world. As a child, his
favorite nanny would entertain him for hours with eerie, dramatic
tales of ghosts and monsters and things that go bump
in the night. And these stories left their mark on him,
a mark that would be visible for the rest of
his life. Later on, as an adult, he would profess
no interest in the supernatural world, and yet those ghosts

(00:51):
seemed to follow him around and haunt him. Once, on
New Year's Eve in eighteen sixty three, he came face
to face with those forces during a game with his children.
They had built an elaborate set of wooden rods in
black fabric, but something about it troubled Charlie. A few
days before, he had been at the funeral of a
dear friend, and maybe it was all that black cloth

(01:13):
or the shape of the shadows on the wall, but
something about that game reminded him of that somber gathering.
Then again, perhaps Charlie was ignoring the spirit world he
had grown up so aware of, because the following month,
terrible news reached his home. Charlie's son, Walter, it seems,
had passed away while serving with the British military and India.

(01:34):
It had taken a long while for the news to
reach him. Though the date of his son's death was
New Year's Eve eighteen sixty three, there were other moments
that brought the world beyond the veil a little closer
to Charlie's life. Once, in eighteen fifty one, he stood
nearby as his father was operated on to remove kidney stones.

(01:56):
The procedure failed, and Charlie's father died soon after. A
short while later, Charlie awoke in the middle of the
night and swore he saw the figure of his father
sitting at the foot of his bed. He once claimed
that the spirit of his wife's sister, a woman he
had loved deeply before she died at a young age,
actually followed him around for a while. Charlie claimed that

(02:19):
she would be fully visible to him, but no one
else could see or hear her. The spirit world, it seems,
was a tricky realm. Few had the experiences that Charlie claimed,
and while he might not have sought it out, he
seems to have had an open mind about it all.
It's true Charlie did grow out of his passion for

(02:39):
the other world, but the spirits never really gave up
on him. His adulthood was filled with great success and
punctuated from time to time with these ghostly moments. From
what I can tell, they did much to influence everything
he went on to create. Charlie was a writer, you see,
and a writer who frequently allowed ghost story used to

(03:00):
slip into his creations. While he's mostly known for the
tales without them, he wrote at least twenty ghostly tales
during his six decades behind the desk, and we're grateful
for all of them because Charlie's ability to see through
the veil and into the world beyond our own has
brought us wonderful moments of entertainment that are still with
us over a century and a half later. Just who

(03:24):
was this writer born with a knack for seeing the
things that most of us are completely blind to. He
was a literary giant, a champion of serial publication, and
the creator of some of the most beloved characters in
English literature. Without him, we wouldn't have one of the
most famous ghosts of all, the Ghost of Christmas Past.

(03:48):
Let's all be thankful that Charles Dickens had an open mind.
There's a narrow strip of sea off the coast of

(04:09):
Wales called the Manet Straight. It cuts through the land there,
separating the mainland from the island of Anglesey. Thanks to
the way the tides flow through the straight, shipwrecks are
much more common there than other areas along the coast,
and shipwrecks have a way of leaving debris for us
to find, like wood and cloth and stories. In December

(04:32):
of sixteen sixty four, a large boat containing eight one
passengers was crossing the Straight when the tide rushed in
and capsized them. Out of the entire list of passengers,
only one person managed to survive and swim to shore,
a man named Hugh Williams. Over twenty years later, another
boat was crossing the straight, this time with sixty people

(04:53):
on board. It was December, again, a season known for
its bad weather, so it shouldn't surprise us that a
storm blew in and capsized this boat as well. Everyone
on the ship perished in that accident, everyone that is,
except one man. His name was Hugh Williams. Thirty five

(05:14):
years later, in eighteen twenty, a third boat capsized while
crossing the Strait. According to the reports, there were twenty
five people on board, and all but one of them died.
I'm wondering if you can guess his name at this point.
That's right, Hugh Williams. It's one of those stories that
makes you scratch your head. How can three shipwrecks happen

(05:34):
over the span of a century and a half in
the very same location, and each of them have a
single survivor who share the same name. It's too good
to be true in a sense, poetic and coincidental, and
seemingly scripted by fate herself. But there are good reasons
why we shouldn't be surprised. For one, the Strait is
infamous for the number of shipwrecks that occur there, and

(05:57):
that means between sixteen sixty four and eighteen twenty there
were a lot more accidents than just the three involving
Hugh Williams. Dozens of ships went down in those waters,
perhaps hundreds, making the coincidence a bit less odd. Yes,
it's odd that there was only one survivor in each
of these tales, but that's not uncommon either. In fact,

(06:18):
another boat sank in the same place in eighteen forty two,
taking fourteen souls with it and leaving one man alive.
His name, though, was Richard Thomas, not Hugh Williams. It
might also be helpful to know that the name Hugh
Williams was incredibly common in Wales. Is it extraordinary so
many of the soul survivors shared the same name, Sure,

(06:40):
but it's not the work of something supernatural, just the
laws of probability working in their favor. Sometimes people survive,
and given enough instances, common names are going to appear
on the list more often. The story changed a century
or so later. Time has a way of doing that,
of course. On light tenth of nineteen forty, while cruising

(07:02):
through the Straight, a fishing boat struck a German mind
the detonation toward the ship apart, taking the lives of
everyone on board. Everyone that is, except for two men,
not one, but two. The older of the pair was
named Hugh Williams, as you were probably guessing. But it's

(07:23):
the other name, the man's nephew. In fact, that should
surprise you, his name was also Hugh Williams. I hope
you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

(07:43):
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.