September 25, 2024 • 11 mins
We love our ghost ships here at SYSK and this is one of the better ones. But did it really even exist? Not likely.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.
Chuck and Josh gear up on short Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, this is another fun tale of a ghost ship.
Ghost Ships are just a lot of fun to talk about,
and this is the tale of a ghost ship that
may or may not even exist.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
It's a big one.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
But one thing for sure. One thing is for sure
is that this story has influenced a lot of a
lot of pop culture.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I feel like, yeah, the very least it showed up
as a video game in twenty nineteen, a horror game.
I was watching a four hour YouTube video where this
YouTuber just basically narrated I guess added commentary here there
to this four hour gameplay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Really, you didn't just watch the trailer of the game,
you watched actual I did four hours. I did.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I just I mean I didn't watch the whole four hours. No,
I skipped ahead and it was cute.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oh okay, it was.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Kind of fun. But yeah, I know, I probably watched
five minutes total of the whole thing to skipping around.
But it looks very scary. It looks like a really
cool game. If I played games, I would definitely go
get it. It's called the Man of Madan. And the
reason it's called the Man of Medan is because that's
the English translation from the Indonesian for the name of
the ship, Wrang Madan. Whrang in Indonesian means man, which
(01:29):
is why Orangutans are called that they're forest men. I
think we've said before. So the name of the ship
in English was Man of Madan, which is a city
on Sumatra.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
That's right. And it looks like a very scary game
about people that get upon this scot ship and have
to contend with ghosts. So what happened with the SS
Orang Madan was that, Well, here's the story. It depends
on there's some there's some hinking. It goes on with
(02:00):
the dates, and we'll explain why in a minute. But
either nineteen forty seven or nineteen forty eight, or maybe
even nineteen forty is we'll see. There was a Dutch
freightership named the Orangmudan that's in an SOS picked up
by some nearby ships, including the Silver Star, an American
ship in the Straits of Malacca. Where all that said
(02:21):
was this we float all officers, including captain dead, lying
in chart room and on bridge, probably whole crew dead.
I die.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That is a creepy message. The only way it could
be creeper is if it said we all float down here.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Or I'm right behind you.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You're right. So this was like the SOS the distress
call in that silver Star, like you said, was close
enough that it arrived to help the Orang Madan. And
when it arrived it was you could basically just telp
looking at it that it was a ghost ship and chuck,
before we go into detail, I say that we take
(03:02):
a break. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Oh, an early break? Okay, okay, let's do it. Suspenseful
early break, all right. So, like you said, when they
(03:38):
floated up to this thing, they could tell that something
was awry. There was clearly no activity on the boat.
There was no steam coming from the engines, no smoke.
They said, does someone want to go check and see
what's going on in that thing? And everyone said, not me,
not it, not it. And there was one guy that
was eating some sea rations looked up and what so
(03:59):
he went aboard and what he found supposedly were people
on deck frozen in place, with their fearful looks on
their faces, their eyes wide open, their mouths stretched in
like they were screaming. Even a dog in mid snarl
all frozen. Immediately, I thought of another pop culture thing
(04:20):
this reference. Did you see the seasons this year's True
Detective Night Country? I think so? Right.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
I tried to, and I couldn't make it past the
first episode.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Oh god, it was so good, dude, I know.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
You said that, and I just I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Well, maybe you should watched more than the first episode.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, that's what I'm saying. I didn't see it coming.
I didn't see the contours of it being great. I
actually was like, oh, I can't watch this.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
In your mind's eye. He didn't see how it could
have been good? Possibly after that?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
No, and believe me, I know stuff. I can figure
stuff out.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Well it was did you see enough to see the
influence here for Night Country?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
When they Yeah, I think it was an episode one
where they show up and yeah, it's it's a similar thing.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Sure, yeah, it was part of the thing, part orang Medan,
I think for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, well put oh you want me to take over it?
So I also saw I also saw that the people,
all of the corpses were described as having their arms
outstretched as if they were trying to fend off some
unseen something, But there was no trace of anything on
the ship that would have suggested what had happened to
(05:28):
this crew and the dog. And they hooked up I
guess the toe line from the Silver Star to the
Irang Madan and they started to tow it. But before
it could get anywhere, the thing caught fire and actually
blew up, and so any traits of the Orangmudan and
its mystery sank to the bottom of the Straits of
(05:48):
Malacca and became enshrined in sea shanties from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
That's right, But was this even a real ship at all? No,
we're not going to take it. They can find out.
We're going to talk about it right now.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, I guess we should have done it like that. Shack.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Oh, it's fine. It seems like this probably was completely fabricated.
There's never been a shipping record of that vessel. No
like living human ever came forward and said, hey this
like I was that person eating the sea rations that
got shoved aboard this thing. There were also depending on
when the article came out, there were varying details that
(06:29):
were different, which is always sort of a giveaway that
it could be fabricated.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the fact that there's like different dates,
different locations, that kind of stuff. It's at the very
least the thing's been embellished as we understand it today.
And there was a researcher named Distelle Hargraves who found
the first mention of this story all the way back
in nineteen forty, a good seven or eight years before
(06:53):
the story supposedly took place. This was during World War Two,
and it was a British merchant ship, not an American
ship that came to help out. But the thing that
does you know, bear a resemblance to the following stories,
was that there was the ship exploded and there was
(07:14):
no trace of any thing or any evidence that could
have explained what happened.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, this one was kind of fun because I was
on read it looking at some like theories and stuff
just for fun, and someone said, hey, I think I've
figured this thing out. Like everybody knows this is probably
a hoax, but I think I've actually got the paper
trail and figured out who this was. And I was like,
oh interesting, and I started to read it. It was
(07:40):
Estelle hard Gravees on Reddit Oh really, Yeah, it was
that researcher. I was like, oh, okay, well that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
So what'd she say, what's the explanation.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well, it's the same explanation that we have here, which
is it's late at the feet of one single person,
not just like a bunch of people that like kind
of made up this lore. It was actually at least
Estelle has put it out that it's a reporter named
Silvio Shirley sh e Rli and wrote this thing in
(08:13):
nineteen forty and then wrote about it again in nineteen
forty eight as supposedly the first time that it had happened,
which is and you know, it was the same name,
so it had to be the same person.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Okay, So I guess he's the he's the culprit.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Right, Well, it seems like it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Well, okay, so there were some other parts to this
story that Shirley added. There was a nineteen forty eight
Dutch Indonesian newspaper called Der Locomotif, and this was the
one where we get the story as we kind of
recognize it today. But one of the extra things that
gets left off these days is that there was one
survivor from the Orangmdan who washed up on the shore
(08:55):
of one of the Marshall Islands was found by a
missionary and told the story that the ship was actually
carrying illicit cargo. That's why no one can ever find
any record.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Of the ship.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
It's because they didn't want to be found, and that
the cargo sulfuric acid or nitrogly ghostern or something either
like off gassed and killed the crew or blew the
ship up or both.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
That's right, And this missionary supposedly told this story to
that writer Sylvia Sharley. It's interesting that this article says
like no one can be sure that it was Sharley
who made the nineteen forty report. But I think this
is old because online like this, Cel Hargraves posted like
screenshots of the actual nineteen forty articles with his name.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, but everybody knows she's always headed out for Silvio Sharley.
So can that be trusted in this day and age
of deep fakes in AI and stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Yeah, that's a good point, but it seems like it
didn't even exist at all, And it may be was
this like writer writing about it a couple of times
and embellishing it even more the second time to see
if it gets more steam. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, full steam ahead. So do you want to hear
a little interesting tidbit, a little appendum By the way,
no one knows if this is true, but it's almost
certainly not. And if it is, it's it has taken
on some shapes or you can barely recognize the actuality
of or pick it out. But we based this off
(10:28):
of a house stuff Works article on it correct?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Correct, I went among other things.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
You're right, I went and read an additional article on
all Things Interesting, including some others. But in the all
Things Interesting article it referenced the house stuff Works article
that this was based on. Ergo, the universe will collapse
on it. So amazing, chucks that amazing. I'm not going
to press my look, so I'm just gonna end this now.
Short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, and welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.
Chuck and Josh gear up on short Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, this is another fun tale of a ghost ship.
Ghost Ships are just a lot of fun to talk about,
and this is the tale of a ghost ship that
may or may not even exist.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
It's a big one.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
But one thing for sure. One thing is for sure
is that this story has influenced a lot of a
lot of pop culture.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I feel like, yeah, the very least it showed up
as a video game in twenty nineteen, a horror game.
I was watching a four hour YouTube video where this
YouTuber just basically narrated I guess added commentary here there
to this four hour gameplay.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Really, you didn't just watch the trailer of the game,
you watched actual I did four hours. I did.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I just I mean I didn't watch the whole four hours. No,
I skipped ahead and it was cute.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oh okay, it was.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Kind of fun. But yeah, I know, I probably watched
five minutes total of the whole thing to skipping around.
But it looks very scary. It looks like a really
cool game. If I played games, I would definitely go
get it. It's called the Man of Madan. And the
reason it's called the Man of Medan is because that's
the English translation from the Indonesian for the name of
the ship, Wrang Madan. Whrang in Indonesian means man, which
(01:29):
is why Orangutans are called that they're forest men. I
think we've said before. So the name of the ship
in English was Man of Madan, which is a city
on Sumatra.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
That's right. And it looks like a very scary game
about people that get upon this scot ship and have
to contend with ghosts. So what happened with the SS
Orang Madan was that, Well, here's the story. It depends
on there's some there's some hinking. It goes on with
(02:00):
the dates, and we'll explain why in a minute. But
either nineteen forty seven or nineteen forty eight, or maybe
even nineteen forty is we'll see. There was a Dutch
freightership named the Orangmudan that's in an SOS picked up
by some nearby ships, including the Silver Star, an American
ship in the Straits of Malacca. Where all that said
(02:21):
was this we float all officers, including captain dead, lying
in chart room and on bridge, probably whole crew dead.
I die.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That is a creepy message. The only way it could
be creeper is if it said we all float down here.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Or I'm right behind you.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You're right. So this was like the SOS the distress
call in that silver Star, like you said, was close
enough that it arrived to help the Orang Madan. And
when it arrived it was you could basically just telp
looking at it that it was a ghost ship and chuck,
before we go into detail, I say that we take
(03:02):
a break. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Oh, an early break? Okay, okay, let's do it. Suspenseful
early break, all right. So, like you said, when they
(03:38):
floated up to this thing, they could tell that something
was awry. There was clearly no activity on the boat.
There was no steam coming from the engines, no smoke.
They said, does someone want to go check and see
what's going on in that thing? And everyone said, not me,
not it, not it. And there was one guy that
was eating some sea rations looked up and what so
(03:59):
he went aboard and what he found supposedly were people
on deck frozen in place, with their fearful looks on
their faces, their eyes wide open, their mouths stretched in
like they were screaming. Even a dog in mid snarl
all frozen. Immediately, I thought of another pop culture thing
(04:20):
this reference. Did you see the seasons this year's True
Detective Night Country? I think so? Right.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
I tried to, and I couldn't make it past the
first episode.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Oh god, it was so good, dude, I know.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
You said that, and I just I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Well, maybe you should watched more than the first episode.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, that's what I'm saying. I didn't see it coming.
I didn't see the contours of it being great. I
actually was like, oh, I can't watch this.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
In your mind's eye. He didn't see how it could
have been good? Possibly after that?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
No, and believe me, I know stuff. I can figure
stuff out.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Well it was did you see enough to see the
influence here for Night Country?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
When they Yeah, I think it was an episode one
where they show up and yeah, it's it's a similar thing.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Sure, yeah, it was part of the thing, part orang Medan,
I think for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, well put oh you want me to take over it?
So I also saw I also saw that the people,
all of the corpses were described as having their arms
outstretched as if they were trying to fend off some
unseen something, But there was no trace of anything on
the ship that would have suggested what had happened to
(05:28):
this crew and the dog. And they hooked up I
guess the toe line from the Silver Star to the
Irang Madan and they started to tow it. But before
it could get anywhere, the thing caught fire and actually
blew up, and so any traits of the Orangmudan and
its mystery sank to the bottom of the Straits of
(05:48):
Malacca and became enshrined in sea shanties from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
That's right, But was this even a real ship at all? No,
we're not going to take it. They can find out.
We're going to talk about it right now.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, I guess we should have done it like that. Shack.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Oh, it's fine. It seems like this probably was completely fabricated.
There's never been a shipping record of that vessel. No
like living human ever came forward and said, hey this
like I was that person eating the sea rations that
got shoved aboard this thing. There were also depending on
when the article came out, there were varying details that
(06:29):
were different, which is always sort of a giveaway that
it could be fabricated.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the fact that there's like different dates,
different locations, that kind of stuff. It's at the very
least the thing's been embellished as we understand it today.
And there was a researcher named Distelle Hargraves who found
the first mention of this story all the way back
in nineteen forty, a good seven or eight years before
(06:53):
the story supposedly took place. This was during World War Two,
and it was a British merchant ship, not an American
ship that came to help out. But the thing that
does you know, bear a resemblance to the following stories,
was that there was the ship exploded and there was
(07:14):
no trace of any thing or any evidence that could
have explained what happened.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, this one was kind of fun because I was
on read it looking at some like theories and stuff
just for fun, and someone said, hey, I think I've
figured this thing out. Like everybody knows this is probably
a hoax, but I think I've actually got the paper
trail and figured out who this was. And I was like,
oh interesting, and I started to read it. It was
(07:40):
Estelle hard Gravees on Reddit Oh really, Yeah, it was
that researcher. I was like, oh, okay, well that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
So what'd she say, what's the explanation.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well, it's the same explanation that we have here, which
is it's late at the feet of one single person,
not just like a bunch of people that like kind
of made up this lore. It was actually at least
Estelle has put it out that it's a reporter named
Silvio Shirley sh e Rli and wrote this thing in
(08:13):
nineteen forty and then wrote about it again in nineteen
forty eight as supposedly the first time that it had happened,
which is and you know, it was the same name,
so it had to be the same person.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Okay, So I guess he's the he's the culprit.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Right, Well, it seems like it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Well, okay, so there were some other parts to this
story that Shirley added. There was a nineteen forty eight
Dutch Indonesian newspaper called Der Locomotif, and this was the
one where we get the story as we kind of
recognize it today. But one of the extra things that
gets left off these days is that there was one
survivor from the Orangmdan who washed up on the shore
(08:55):
of one of the Marshall Islands was found by a
missionary and told the story that the ship was actually
carrying illicit cargo. That's why no one can ever find
any record.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Of the ship.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
It's because they didn't want to be found, and that
the cargo sulfuric acid or nitrogly ghostern or something either
like off gassed and killed the crew or blew the
ship up or both.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
That's right, And this missionary supposedly told this story to
that writer Sylvia Sharley. It's interesting that this article says
like no one can be sure that it was Sharley
who made the nineteen forty report. But I think this
is old because online like this, Cel Hargraves posted like
screenshots of the actual nineteen forty articles with his name.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, but everybody knows she's always headed out for Silvio Sharley.
So can that be trusted in this day and age
of deep fakes in AI and stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Yeah, that's a good point, but it seems like it
didn't even exist at all, And it may be was
this like writer writing about it a couple of times
and embellishing it even more the second time to see
if it gets more steam. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, full steam ahead. So do you want to hear
a little interesting tidbit, a little appendum By the way,
no one knows if this is true, but it's almost
certainly not. And if it is, it's it has taken
on some shapes or you can barely recognize the actuality
of or pick it out. But we based this off
(10:28):
of a house stuff Works article on it correct?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Correct, I went among other things.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
You're right, I went and read an additional article on
all Things Interesting, including some others. But in the all
Things Interesting article it referenced the house stuff Works article
that this was based on. Ergo, the universe will collapse
on it. So amazing, chucks that amazing. I'm not going
to press my look, so I'm just gonna end this now.
Short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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