Ghost Ships

Fog rolls in, the horizon narrows, and a silent ship drifts across the bow. We dive into the world of ghost ships, separating verifiable derelicts from enduring legends to understand why the ocean is such fertile ground for fear, folklore, and forensic dead ends. Together we revisit the Mary Celeste with its missing lifeboat and intact cargo, the SS Baychimo wandering the Arctic for decades, and the MV Joyita broadcasting distress into a void. We weigh competing theories—mutiny, piracy, mechanical failure, fraud—and ask what the gaps in each case reveal about judgment, luck, and the split-second choices sailors face.

On the mythic side, we trace the Flying Dutchman as a moral compass disguised as a curse, and set it against global personifications of the sea: Mother Carey and Davy Jones from European lore, Ran and Njord in Norse tales, Thalassa and Amphitrite in Greek tradition, and Yemaya in Yoruba belief. These stories weren’t just set dressing; they were early safety systems that encoded weather sense, risk discipline, and social rules into memorable warnings. We also explore liminal accounts like the Valencia’s skeletal lifeboats and the New Haven phantom ship, where collective vision meets communal grief.

Modern waters still breed mysteries. North Korean “ghost boats” wash onto Japanese shores, a stark outcome of scarcity, distance, and failing navigation. Post-tsunami drifters like the Ryou-Un Maru become hazards, and rumors of secret tests keep submarine folklore alive. Pop culture picks up the signal—Carpenter’s The Fog, maritime X-Files, and time-twisting thrillers—because a ship is the perfect stage for isolation, authority, and the unknown pressing in on all sides. If the sea is a mirror, ghost ships are our reflections, revealing how we manage uncertainty, honor those lost, and teach the next watch to respect the deep.

Enjoy the journey? Tap follow, share with a curious friend, and drop a review on Apple Podcasts to help more listeners find our voyage. Which ghost ship story do you believe—and why?

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
But at least those cults gave us those life held

(00:02):
shorts.
But not the feet, though.

SPEAKER_02 (00:04):
Never the feet.
Never.
If they had the feet, they'dhave pockets as well.
Well, that's the thing, isthey've never seen them.
So they don't have any conceptof them.

SPEAKER_00 (00:12):
Those feet are in a pocket universe.
Ever dance with the devil in theveil of mine.

(01:12):
Uh batting down the m hastmasts, uh the hatches.
Hatches.
There you go.
Get below dick because aspectral.
You've completely abandoned themizzen mast.
I don't even know what a mizenmast is, and I've read all of
Moby Dick, so it should be in myold brain pan there.

SPEAKER_02 (01:32):
The funny thing is there is a scene about this
exact topic in Star TrekGenerations, but we're not going
to do that yet.
When they're inducting Wharfinto when they give him the
promotion, which makes himCommander Wharf instead of
Lieutenant Wharf.
Well, wouldn't he be lieutenantcommander whorf?
Well, technically, yes, butbecause they use Navy rules, if
you are a lieutenant commander,you refer to as commander.

(01:56):
Is that different than prisonrules?

SPEAKER_00 (01:58):
Slightly?
There is an overlap though.

SPEAKER_02 (02:01):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (02:02):
There's just as much the Venn diagram does overlap.

SPEAKER_02 (02:06):
There is just as much I'm not gay, but I'm having
sex with a man sex.
In the Navy.
Exactly.
In the original series, Spocktechnically was Lieutenant
Commander Spock, but he he wasalways called either Commander
Spock or just well, obviouslySpock.
When he was ever, you know,referred to by rank, he was

(02:27):
Commander Spock.
Until Star Trek the MustionPicture, where he was obviously
promoted.
What is Will Riker?
So he was a full commander.
Full commander.
They use navy rules in Star Trekspecifically.
It's not like Battlestar, wherethey mix Navy and Army and Air
Force.
In Star Trek, they go well, theygo, they go enlisted.

(02:49):
Miles O'Brien has a very goodspiel about this in DS9.
You know what?
We probably don't have a ton ofthings.
We don't, so let's not do that.
We'll do that on a differentone.
So, spooky times.
It's one of my favorite songs.
Every time I go to Waffle House,I request that song on the jute

(03:10):
box.
It's from the Spooktown Rats.
Is that one of those BrianSetzer bands that I'm like, uh
uh, I'm done over.
Oh no, no, no.
It's an offshoot.
No, no, it's one of those JackWhite bands that he created it
south by southwest for like 10minutes.

SPEAKER_00 (03:26):
It's called the Kookie Cats.
Parentheses soliloquy in Eminor.

SPEAKER_02 (03:33):
He always does names that are way cooler than that.
They're lame, but they're coolerthan that.

SPEAKER_00 (03:39):
Fine.
If you don't like the name ofthe song that came up off the
top of my dome two seconds ago,let it out.
Like David Coulier.
You know, you oughta know.

SPEAKER_02 (03:53):
That was good.
You know what the funny thingwas?
I took my pill and I ate an oldonion ring sitting on the table.
You think I don't know you?
I know you do, and that's why wehave a show.
Alright, so let's get to itbecause I know you have a time.
Crunch.

(04:14):
Like Mojo.
Like Mojo?
Like the X-Men X-Men villain?

SPEAKER_00 (04:18):
The crunch.
The big crunch.
We're talking about threefingers mojo.
Is that the new Taco Bell itemcoming this fall?

SPEAKER_02 (04:29):
One of the big things was that he was right
there butting up to the bigcrunch, which is supposed to be
the antithesis of the big bang.
In the game?
Well, in the X-Men Sega Genesisgame, yes, that was part of the
thing, but in the story, too.
I mean, that's where they got itfrom.
Right there at the end of theuniverse.
He was it was essentially likeDouglas Adams, the restaurant at
the end of the universe.
That's essentially what Mojo'sweird realm was until they

(04:52):
decided it was a pocket universeor something.

SPEAKER_01 (04:55):
Hmm.

SPEAKER_02 (04:55):
Okay.
Look at Mojo the Big Crunch.

SPEAKER_00 (04:58):
I promise, it's right there.
I did.
There's lots of there's Mojo BigCrunch could refer to many
things.
Most notably Mojo Moj Crunch, aline of collectible sensory
toys.
Oh boy.
I don't know what that is.
But I'm gonna find out.

SPEAKER_02 (05:15):
Well, Google is intentionally bad now.

SPEAKER_00 (05:18):
So you know.
ASMR crunchy squishy mojosurprise opening whispered.
Right.
Okay.
Alright, let's run with thatone.
Continue on with this episodethat has nothing to do with mojo
or uh sensory crunches.

SPEAKER_02 (05:36):
Or the big crunch, right?
Let's start with a quote.
This comes from at what?
What?
What were you gonna say?
Me?
Oh, I thought you were gonna saysomething, sorry.
Okay.
You mean the other person on thepodcast?

SPEAKER_00 (05:48):
You're talking to Jim?
Jim Lee?
Is Jim Lee here?
Can we do that?
Uh probably not.
Jim Lee is always here.
In our hearts.
If you touch your chest rightunderneath your clavicle, go
down about three inches, do alittle swirl, and you're gonna
feel a little indention there,that's where Jim Lee is.
At all times.

SPEAKER_02 (06:07):
When you feel a pocket on a strap across your
chest, that's how you know JimLee.

SPEAKER_00 (06:12):
But it gets real fine into the Lifeld territory.
Mmm.
Right.
Well, uh you have to evoke theright name.
You're gonna tip over.
If you speak the ancient tonguebackwards.
I knock I will I sorry the thenyou're in David Lynch territory.
David Lynch, Jim Lee, RobLiefeld.

(06:33):
Do you see a connection?

SPEAKER_02 (06:35):
Three people that have never been in my kitchen.

SPEAKER_00 (06:38):
Sounds like a glitch in the matrix to me.

SPEAKER_02 (06:41):
I can't.
I've never seen him in the roomat the same time.
Case closed.
I'm pretty sure we've seen JimLee and Rob Liefeld in the same
room at the same time.
But somewhere?
Maybe.
Maybe.
You know what?

SPEAKER_00 (06:52):
I mean, at some point, somewhere, someone
probably did.
Have I personally?
I don't think so.
Methinks not.
I don't think they were everboth at a con at the same time
together.

SPEAKER_02 (07:07):
I bet they've been there together.
Come on.
I bet they've been in Comic-Con.
I don't think so.
Comic-Con?

unknown (07:13):
Really?

SPEAKER_02 (07:13):
When when I was there?
I don't think so.
I don't think they were boththere.
Not when you and I have beenthere, but it's just in general.
Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 (07:21):
My reality is only 10 feet in front of me.
So what a typical American youare.
That's how I vote.
That's how I pay my taxes.
That's how I see other people ofother races.

SPEAKER_02 (07:35):
That's exactly right.
So let's continue with this.
Of course I knocked myheadphones out of my ear.

SPEAKER_00 (07:41):
That is number three, if anyone's keeping
count.
That's the third time so far.

SPEAKER_02 (07:46):
Yeah, well, they're white they're wired and they're
short, so continue.
Let's start with a quote here.
Note how the ocean heaves andboils, swirling into towers,
vortex coils, with hideouscreatures at every base, bearing
the haunting Kraken's face.

(08:07):
Great ghost ships groan from themist, and balls of light form
fast betwixt the horizon and thesea, spray foam, save us all,
and set sail for home.
Now, could you do it again inVincent Price voice?
Oh man, if I could.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, this is one of my favoriteCreed songs.

(08:29):
I skipped over the Jesus part.
Can you take me deeper?
20,000 fathoms.
So there are few things asmystifying, romantic, and also
terrifying as the wine dark sea.
For most of humankind'sexistence, the vast oceans have

(08:50):
been seemingly unsurmountablechallenge, and yet a thing to be
conquered.
At the same time, which youwould think contradictory, but
something sort of innate inhuman culture.
Its very nature and our attemptsto master its power inevitably
leaves us with tales of rawmystery and humbling horror or

(09:11):
terror.
Which are two different things,by the way.
There are many mythical tales ofthe sea and people's traversing
the sea and how they personifythose powers.
Not just from the Greek or Romanwith Neptune and Poseidon.
There's also the westernizedEuropean tales of Davy Jones and

(09:33):
Mother Carrie, which areconsidered to be married.
Mother Carrie was considered tobe the one who determined the
veracity of the waves and thesea that would overcome you, and
then Davy Jones, her husband,would be the one that oversaw
what happened on your ship.
He was the one that determinedthat kind of thing.
I personally derive all of mynautical folklore from the movie

(09:57):
Splash, but that's just me.
Oh, you mean the documentary?
Filmed in real time.
You know what?
Daryl Hannah's come a long way.
Think about it.
Think about it.
Mother Carrie is an interestingfigure.
It's it's something that likepeople in America really don't
know a lot about, but in the UKand in a lot of Europe, Mother

(10:18):
Carrie is a figure, you know,that like she's the sort of like
manifestation, the thepersonification of storms and
and uh turbulent uh turmoil onthe sea.
Because this is one of theinteresting things about about

(10:39):
this entire phenomenon when Iwas looking into it, and this is
off the dome here the oceanswere something that man felt
like he had to conquer and atthe same time wasn't very good
at doing, but and also at thesame time very good at doing.

(10:59):
It was something that like it'sso overwhelming and so the
forces of nature that are so notonly out of man's control, but
also navigatable because of theof the human species, you know,

(11:25):
you know, ad advanced, you know,problem solving skills that it
felt like it was a challenge toovercome and then doing so
spread the human species aroundthe world.
And yet still seems overwhelmingand and massive.

(11:48):
And so like early uh humanspecies in in almost every
culture in the world has thesemyths, well every culture that
actually deals with the oceanhas have myths and and and
mythology that deals with thethe ocean being personified in

(12:09):
these crazy giant overwhelminguh gods.
When you deal with Greek andRoman mythology, Poseidon is
right there on par with you knowbasically everybody below Zeus.
But in because the Mediterraneanwasn't that big, it wasn't it

(12:31):
wasn't a huge thing.
It was it's a s it's a it's itis kind of a an enclosed small
space.
It's that it I mean theMediterranean really is just
kind of like one of the greatlakes.
It's not really all that big.
But when you deal with theentire ocean, when you're when
you're when you're sailingacross the wine dark sea, it's
overwhelming and yet at the sametime something that man needs to

(12:55):
conquer, he feels.
So it creates these legends andthese mythologies that are I
think I'm not gonna sayuniversal, but in in many, many
cultures that have dared to sailacross the ocean.
Similar.
So I and I'm sure while whileI'm ranting, you looked up

(13:17):
Mother Carrie and and DavyJones.
You, Jake, you.
Oh, uh me.
Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 (13:23):
I thought we were talking about the I'm not
pontificating, I'm talking toyou.
Yeah.
Uh yeah, I mean it actually tookme a little while to find Mother
Carrie.
I found like the sea goddessSedna from the Inuit people,
otherwise known as Mother of theDeep, or Yoruba, the river
goddess of the Yamaya.

SPEAKER_01 (13:43):
Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 (13:43):
That's an diaspora, the Santria, and Kendomble, the
Mother of All, which is like theocean, is like seen as like
taking over everything and allthat they are you know
surrounded by.
Or even the Greek goddessAmphitridi.
I actually don't know the name.
Amphitrip, I think it'sAmphertiti, I think.
A M-P-H-I-T-R-I-T-E.

(14:06):
Anyway, she's the wife ofPoseidon and the queen of the
sea.
She's the mother of uh dolphins.
There's also Thalassa, the veryessence and personification of
the sea in Greek mythology.
I don't really understand howboth of those interact.
But those came up before theCornish Sea Hag Mother Carrie,
um which does seem to be a bitmore of a Euro-Western version

(14:33):
of that personification of thesea.

SPEAKER_02 (14:36):
You could also trace that exact archetype to the
goddess Ron from Norse orGermanic mythology.
She was believed to be marriedto Jotun Iger, which we could
kind of pair with Davy Jones.
And we'll get to what Davy Jonesis here in a moment, but he's

(14:56):
the he's the king andpersonification of the sea, or
Poseidon, and it was believedthat those who died at sea would
not go to Valhalla or Hell, butinstead be captured in Ron's net
and belong to her.
So we get a lot of this romanticidea of this calling of the sea,

(15:17):
and then if you die at sea, it'sbecause you were called there,
not because you were an idiot.
You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 (15:24):
Strangely, uh, to get to get a little nerdy, which
I mean this is this podcast thatreminds me the Voyager episode
where the half Klingon engineerBolana Torres.
Yes, she has this vision of hermother, who she kind of uh
mother kind of left her to bewith her dad and dislikes her

(15:47):
mother, but her mother is liketrapped on this in-between uh a
paradise and a hellish existencethat's just kind of stuck on
this boat on these choppy seas,kind of like on the river sticks
in a way.
Yep.
Or it kind of it kind of feelslike a a Viking ship that's just
constantly adrift at sea, um,that can never actually land.

(16:11):
It's purgatory.
Progress on with their journey.

SPEAKER_02 (16:14):
Yeah.
In Star Trek Davio specificallydo a really good job of
combining especially withKlingons, basically after the
original series, they do areally good job of combining
Viking mythology and Catholicmythology and you know, some
Eastern mythology, actually.
Yeah, I know exactly whichepisode you're talking about,
where it's the ship of the dead.

(16:36):
Ship of the dead.

SPEAKER_00 (16:37):
No, I know, which is I don't think that'll come up
like that.

SPEAKER_02 (16:39):
Oh no, this won't come up at all here in a moment.
So But you're right, becausethere there are also even in
Norse mythology you have a godnamed Njord, a sea god who is
believed to calm the sea andwind, making it traversable for
people to sail to whicheverdestination they sought, and

(17:00):
helping fishermen with theirbounty and a patrion of sailors.
These are kind of universalthroughout all cultures that are
seafaring.
And these things all have reallyfun.
I don't want to say fun.
It's not a Tim and Eric episode.
Fascinating?

(17:22):
Intriguing.
Yes, intriguing.
Even entertaining?
Yes.
And in these also are legendsabout the ships themselves.
And what we're gonna focus ontoday is about ghost ships,
which mean a lot of things to alot of people in different ways.
I think specifically we're gonnatalk about haunted ships or

(17:42):
cursed ships in that sense.
Because ghost ships are actuallya thing, a category in nautical
terminology, are real but not ina supernatural way.
But we're gonna talk abouthaunted ships or phantom ships.

SPEAKER_00 (17:57):
That's funny because when I I was trying to do a
little bit of research for thisepisode, and as I was doing it,

I I I came upon the question: what kind of ghost ship does he (18:03):
undefined
mean?
Is he talking a Mary Celeste?
Fair question.
Or is he talking a flyingDutchman?
Yes.
Unfortunately, everything Ilooked up was the more of the
Mary Celeste variety.
Mm-hmm.
So it's not going to be veryeffective.
Uh, but uh continue.

SPEAKER_02 (18:22):
On the cursory look into this, into the the research
into this, it was very limitedas far as what the West
considers actual ghost ships orphantom ships, which by
definition loosely are vesselsthat are found derelict at sea
with no crew aboard and nothingto explain what happened to

(18:42):
them.
Well, no living human crew.
Sure, yes.
And if if something other thanthat had happened, we would know
about that, because that wouldbe crazy.
The thing is, ghost ships are areal phenomenon.
They have inspiredhorror-infused stories and wild
theories.
This did happen many, manytimes.

(19:03):
More times than even isdocumented, actually.
Wait till we get to the NorthKorean stuff.
It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 (19:10):
We're just so we're all clear on this.
Are we discussing hauntedphantom-esque ships that people
have encountered over the years?
Or are we discussing ships thathave been found that have been
strangely abandoned by said crewand have been left adrift in the

(19:30):
ocean?
Both.
Or both.
Okay.
Right.
And we're gonna try and figureout well, we're not gonna figure
anything out, but no, we willhave hard answers.
This is a a science-basedprogram, and we will come to a
conclusion.
Yeah, all we do is math, baby.
Yeah, that's why I'm so good atthis.

SPEAKER_02 (19:52):
That's why we're both so good at this.
So, what I really want to focuson, the idea that there are real
ghost ships, and then sort ofget into which ones are the
mythical ones, which ones areactually supernatural or
perceived supernatural.

(20:13):
Because there are a few that arejust like, oh, this boat washed
up and there was nobody aboardbecause they all killed
themselves or jumped off boardor whatever.
That happens.
That is what technically in reallife is called a ghost ship.
But then there are also shipsthat are ghost ships because
they are, well, let's just saypopulated by ghosts, but are

(20:35):
ruled by the dead and thedamned.
There you go.
There it is.
So man, let's so let's go backto Ancient Samaria.
Before Ankadoo was hangingaround and saw Tiamat lying
about and I like to pronounce itin Kidu because it doesn't sound

(20:55):
as lame, and that's how PatrickStewart pronounces it in the
episode Darmok, which is a greatStar Trek episode.
Darmak Edgelada Tanagra.
They were at Tanagra.
Man, they know.
Uh Sika when the walls fell.

SPEAKER_00 (21:09):
Shaka when the walls fell.
Fine, fine.
I didn't get it a hundredpercent right.
Alright.
Why don't you nail me to thefriggin' cross?
That's the important part,though.
It was a learning experiencebecause we wouldn't have gotten
to Shaka when the walls fell.
If I hadn't mistaken See?
You see what I'm doing there?

SPEAKER_02 (21:32):
The most famous go ship, obviously, would be the
Mary Celeste.
It left New York in earlyNovember 1872, bound for Italy.
It was a merchant brigantine,and then nothing was heard from
it until it was spotted driftingalone with no crew in the
Atlantic on December 5th of thesame year.

(21:53):
And if I remember right, therewas still place settings for
crew.

SPEAKER_00 (21:59):
Yes, so when they found it, many months after it
had it had uh set out, no onewas on board.
The ship had taken on somewater, but not enough to be of
any real concern to sinking.
The cargo was mostly in touch.
The last ship's log was fromnine days before, on November
25th, and made zero mention ofany problems.

(22:20):
The remains of a recentlyprepared meal for a child were
found on board.
The captain and his wife and hisdaughter and then the crew.
They were transporting denaturedalcohol.

SPEAKER_02 (22:30):
That was Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, and
their two-year-old daughter.
They only had a crew of seven,but it was undisturbed.
And he hadn't made a log in hiscaptain's log in ten days.
There was a lifeboat missing.

SPEAKER_00 (22:47):
Yes, there was a small lifeboat missing.

SPEAKER_02 (22:49):
Yeah, this was discovered by the uh De Gratia
off the Azore.
It was completely seaworthy.
So what happened?

SPEAKER_00 (22:57):
There are theories that um, you know, during the
salvage hearing followed, courtofficials proposed possible
drunken mutiny, even though thealcohol cargo was not drinkable,
possible murder and piracy bythe captain of the De Gratia,
there's a possible murdersuicide by the captain of the
Mary Celeste himself, and evenpossible an insurance scam

(23:18):
cooked up by the two captainswho were suspected to have been
friends.
Hmm.
But nobody really knows.

SPEAKER_02 (23:25):
Does this not smack of the Amityville horror?
How so?
Well, this mysterious thingwrapped in sort of horror myth,
though kind of explainable.
And maybe a murder suicide,maybe a famicide type thing, or
maybe for money.

(23:46):
That kind of mystery.
Do we really know what happenedthere?

SPEAKER_00 (23:49):
Even though it probably isn't supernatural, but
maybe I mean I think youactually have physical evidence
of murders taking place, and youhave a suspect, you know, that
we believe did the thing, asopposed to this where it's you
have to come up with some typeof connection because
essentially what we have ismissing people in an abandoned

(24:10):
boat.
And you have to try to come upwith a reason why.
Now, maybe if it was just thehusband and his wife and the
daughter on the boat, thefamily, you know, murder suicide
that might but you also had thecrew on the boat too.
There didn't seem to be muchthat was missing, so they didn't
like what monetarily is there togain by leaving the boat adrift

(24:31):
all intact.

SPEAKER_02 (24:32):
There was one lifeboat missing, but one.
Only one.
And that's not gonna carryeverybody on board.
Yeah.
If the crew mutinied, what werethey getting away with?
And and how would they do so?
Unless they rendezvoused withanother boat, which I mean
that's really difficult to do,and what are they gaining?
Because they didn't takeanything.
That's the real mystery there.
I mean, if there were nolifeboats missing, it would be a

(24:56):
real ghost story.
But there's one, and that makesit a real human mystery.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (25:02):
But there are many books and documentaries that
have researched and pontificatedon the Mary Celeste over the
years.
It's not necessarily the firstghost ship, but it is an early
famous one that has many errorsto title throughout the years
after that.
Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 (25:19):
It's such a fascinating subject that it's
sad that some of the most famousones don't really fit into it as
well as you'd want them to.
But the SS Bacimo, or 10 yearsfrom 1921, when it came under
the ownership of the Hudson'sBay Company, which by the way
just went out of business afteroh like 375 years or whatever,

(25:41):
the cargo ship SS Bacimo sailedacross the Arctic Circle,
carrying furs and goods fromtrading ports on Canada's north
coast.
In October 1931, it becametrapped in pack ice, which, you
know, in the days of climatechange, they don't have that
much anymore, off the coast ofAlaska.

(26:02):
It was completely stuck and hadno chance of breaking out of the
ice before the actual flow ofthe ice and the ocean would
crush the ship.
At that point, there was just askeleton crew of 15, but they
were evacuated by plane.
Now, the men who stayed to hopeto wait out the winter by living
in a wooden shelter near theboat, which is kind of where you

(26:23):
get the show The Terror, thefirst season.
They're kind of conflating thisand a different thing we're
going to talk about in a second.
They went through a whole cycleof blizzard and storm, and when
they came out, this moored shipwas gone.
They thought it sunk, which, Imean, would make sense because
they had horrible stormconditions.

(26:44):
But in fact, the machimo wasafloat, had somehow broken free
of the ice, and had been spottedby local hunters.
They tracked it down, retrievedits cargo, and then also just
took the fuck off.
Because what do they care?

SPEAKER_00 (26:59):
They thought it wouldn't it wasn't seaworthy
anymore.
It would just sink.
They abandoned it.

SPEAKER_02 (27:04):
But it never did.
And for decades, it was spottedall over the Arctic waters, just
floating from place to place.
Various people tried to boardthe vessel and maybe salvage
some of the well salvage theship itself, but they were never
able to, mostly because the uh,you know, the weather and the
basic conditions of the Arcticat that point.

(27:26):
And so it was never actuallycaptured.
The last confirmed sighting ofit was in 1969.
There have been rumoredspottings of it ever since, but
who knows if those are real?
But from essentially 1931 to1969, it floated around,
bouncing around like a pinballin the Arctic, with no crew, but

(27:48):
no one able to go on board.
Weird.
Indeed, sir, indeed.
Even more so than the MaryCeleste, or that one.
I think the most famous of thesephenomena is probably the Flying
Dutchman.

SPEAKER_00 (28:02):
Well, isn't the Flying Dutchman a bit of the
other type of ghost ship?

SPEAKER_02 (28:05):
Yes.
So the Flying Dutchman is theother type of ghost ship, where
it is probably apocryphal, it isdefinitely a legend, and it does
have parallels in othercultures, in other mythology.
It may or may not be real, butit does serve as warning to
sailors as they traverse thesea.

(28:26):
It's based on a myth, it was awarship unable to make port, and
so it was doomed to sail theoceans for all time.
And to see it is a portent ofdoom.
It was first mentioned inliterature in the late 1700s,
often through thick mist and fogemerges.

(28:47):
George V and his brother PrinceAlbert Victor apparently spotted
the ship off the coast ofAustralia in 1881.
But nobody really thinks otherthan those inbred idiots.
It's more of like an archetypein nautical folklore, though
it's inspired poems, stories,and an opera by Wagner.
And of course, is then latertied to the Western legends of

(29:12):
Mother Carrion and Davy Jones.
Specifically, if this helps you,in the Pirates of the Caribbean
movie movies, Davy Jones was thecaptain of the Flying Dutchman,
yada yada yada.
This is also something I thinkthat inspired John Carpenter's
The Fog a bit.
This is an example of themythological version of the

(29:34):
ghost ship.

SPEAKER_00 (29:35):
And preying on the superstitious nature of sailors
on the sea.
If you happen to see the FlyingDutchman, it was thought of as
an ill omen.

SPEAKER_02 (29:44):
Right.

SPEAKER_00 (29:45):
Signaling, you know, oncoming disaster or gruesome
death for whoever saw it.

SPEAKER_02 (29:50):
Which is kind of the part of the myth of Mother
Carrie.
If you saw certain seagulls at acertain time before disaster,
they referred to them as MotherCarrie.
Chickens or Mother Curry'sbirds, and that meant that there
was incoming doom, and basicallymythologizing actual weather
patterns, or at least perceivedweather patterns of the ocean,

(30:14):
which is really, really typicalwith nautical folklore.
It's farmer's almanac logicabout the ocean.
That's an example of themythical side of that.
Now there are other legitimatewhat we would consider ghost
ships, like the MV Joida, whichis a fascinating and quite
frankly baffling tale.

(30:34):
It's a yacht-turned commercialvessel that disappeared in the
South Pacific in 1955.
It sets out from Samoa inOctober of that year with 25
passengers and crew.
Its destination was the TokelauIslands, which is about 300
miles away, and it never reachedits destination.
But five and a half weeks later,it was discovered, more than 600

(30:58):
miles off its course.
Still afloat, partiallysubmerged, no one was aboard,
four tons of cargo, the ship'slogbook, and navigational
equipment were all gone.
And yet, the radio had beentuned into the international
distress signal, but no SOS hadever been received by anyone.
It was in international waters,so multiple governments did

(31:20):
investigations, but there aretheories piracy, jumping ship
because of some mechanicalfailure.
There are theories that say theywere kidnapped by a Soviet
submarine, or murdered by aJapanese fishing fleet, which, I
don't know, man.
If you've ever seen how theywail, oof.
Yikes.
January 1921, the Carol A.

(31:40):
Deering, a five-masted schoonerbuilt for speed.
Like me, baby.
Directly after the First WorldWar, the world was sort of
rebuilding its economy.
It was spotted off the coast ofNorth Carolina.
Now, the weird thing was it washeaded for the Diamond Shoals,
the so-called graveyard of theAtlantic.

(32:01):
It's one of those BermudaTriangle type mythical places
that don't really exist, butthings just happen to happen in
that area.
It took several days for anybodyto get on board, but everyone
was missing.
And all lifeboats were gone.
Okay, alright, I'll give youthat one.
There was steering damage.
There was an actualcommunication with the ship that

(32:24):
someone had made on themainland, and it determined that
the anchors had been lost, butno one knows why they actually
left.
Once again, mutiny, collisionwith another boat, piracy,
nobody really knows.
There are theories that say itwas hijacked by rum runners,
actual bootleggers from theProhibition era.
Once again, Russian saboteurs.

(32:45):
It's always either Russian orSoviet, right?
I mean, that's always been ourboogeyman.
And of course, then they bringup the Committee Triangle, which
is its own thing.
Now, the intriguing thing aboutthat one is there was a message
in a bottle.
An actual, not sting-related,message in a bottle that washed
up on shore that claimed it hadbeen captured by a quote, an oil

(33:07):
burning boat.
And then they figured out it wasjust some kids doing a hoax.
Or a sting.
It might have been sting.
Probably sting.
Probably sting.
Well, it could have been therest of the police.
It's still sting related.
It's sting related.
It's sting adjacent.
I really don't know.

SPEAKER_00 (33:20):
That's right, history books, you got stung.

SPEAKER_02 (33:24):
I will kill him! Then there's, of course, the SS
Orang Midan.
This one's a weird one.
It is a weird one.
But it might be an urban legend.
I mean nobody really knows.
No ship of that name everappeared on official records or
shipping registers.
According to the story, it was aDutch ship that passed through

(33:44):
the Strait of Malacca off ofIndonesia in the 1940s when its
radio operator set out a franticSOS claiming the officers were
dead and the remainder of thecrew were too, before
transmitting one final chillingmessage I die.
The problem is we don't know ifthat was even a boat.

(34:05):
A rescue ship with all like posthaste went to the scene.
But when they got there,supposedly, the Aurang Madan was
adrift with no crew aboard, nosigns of life, but the bodies of
the crew were strewn about theship, fixed with expressions of
terror, though no visibleinjuries or cause of death.

(34:28):
And before the ship could beinvestigated, apparently a fire
engulfed the ship, and therescuers had to get clear before
it would have exploded, whichsent the ship into oblivion like
a 90s action movie.
And I'm not sure how much thereis to this one, but it is maybe

(34:49):
the coolest one.

SPEAKER_00 (34:50):
It is cool.
They were possibly smugglingdangerous chemicals.
And that the leaked substances,possibly in the form of toxic
gases, led to the crew's demise,which might have put them in the
positions they were found, butalso without any visible signs
of injury, and then would havealso led to a spark igniting an

(35:12):
explosion that would sink theboat, thus never knowing.
Again, that's all hearsay, it'sall speculation.
We don't truly even know if thisboat or this incident ever
happened.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (35:24):
I hate to do this again, but Star Trek is
basically a naval, you know,story.
There is an episode of theoriginal series which is

essentially this (35:31):
the Tholene Web, in which they discover the
USS Defiant.
They go on board, it's adrift,they go on board, all the crew
are dead, splaying out withlooks of terror on their faces,
and no one knows what happened.
And as Kirk and Spock are tryingto figure out what occurred, the

(35:54):
ship is slowly drifting in andout of our reality, apparently.
So eventually, instead ofexploding, it disappears, and
they have to get away from.
I mean, it's it's literally thesame story.
I mean, and I'm pretty surethat's what the I haven't looked
it up.
This is off the dome, but I'mpretty sure that's what they're
drawing this from, is thatstory.

(36:14):
And it's actually kind of areally pivotal story in the Trek
lore that people don't want totalk about, but I do.
But real, true mythical ghoststories.

SPEAKER_00 (36:25):
Yeah.
It's one of those that blurs aline between this happened and
their reports, and then they'relike, you know, urban myth and
nautical legend.
And that's where you kind ofget, you know, other stuff, you
know, like uh where it blends.
It's the combining of mythbetween a Mary Celeste and a
flying Dutchman, where thereseems to be elements of both.
Something like the like the SSValencia.

(36:48):
This was one of the most tragicmaritime disasters in history.
In 1906, this was a passengersteamed ship.
Unfortunately, when it wassailing around the coast of
Vancouver Island, it struck areef and quickly began to sink.
Over a hundred passengers andcrew died that day on that ship,
with only a handful of survivorsable to escape.

(37:09):
But in the years that havefollowed, many fishermen and
sailors have supposedly reportedsightings of a ghost ship in the
distance that resembled EstesValencia, complete with
lifeboats full of skeletonsdrifting nearby.
But that's one of the true ghoststory coming from a real boat

(37:30):
that did have a disaster, but ithas led to a ghostly urban
legend tale.
Because being on the water, youknow, and this has happened for
thousands of years, there's alot of strange things that
people report on the open watersand trying to make sense of
things.
And maybe there are ghost ships,you know, maybe there are other

(37:51):
mysterious things, and that'sthat's where we get legends of
sea deities, of large creatures,of strange lights, weird fog,
odd ocean and weather phenomenonsurrounding possible sightings
of things, and you try to makesense, especially the the less
you know.

SPEAKER_02 (38:10):
70% of the planet is covered by the ocean.
Only if you're using math,though.
Oh, and I believe in that Arabicshit.
All math is created by anyway,uh the uh a vast majority of the
planet is covered by the ocean,which is intimidating and
overwhelming.
And yet man has this weird, andby man I mean humankind, it has

(38:33):
this proclivity to try andconquer that which it doesn't
already have domain.
And so, you know, hit or miss,humankind, when challenged that
much, will come up with myththat explains its failure or
success.
There's so much in nauticalfolklore about luck and about

(38:53):
fortune, about well, if I didn'tsucceed, it's because of the
gods.
Some god or some practice that Idid or didn't do.
You know, like if a cat was onboard your ship that was good
fortune or bad fortune,depending on which culture it
is, or the color of the dawn, orthe color of the sunset, or

(39:15):
whether you see a seabird atwhat time during the day or
night.
You know, humankind has alwayshad this proclivity for
assigning meaning to things thatnot necessarily don't have
meaning, but like trying tofigure them out.
And oftentimes it's reactionaryand not really thought out.
But I don't think there'sanything that is more symbolic

(39:39):
of this than nautical folklore.
Even just the fish story.
Somebody telling a fish tale.
Look at Jaws, or like a storythat's said in fucking New
England, or the Loch NestMonster, or all these things
that are exaggerated ideas ofwhat you saw or what you did, or
where you were that explainwhether you've failed to conquer

(40:02):
your goal or not.
It's such a vast thing thatoverwhelms mankind that they
have to explain their successesor failures through metaphor or
sometimes excuses, to be honest.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (40:16):
Many of these ships and tales are just like stories
in the Bible, where they areapocryphal stories that try to
send a message of how to liveyour life and what to do,
whether that is something likethe Flying Dutchman, which in
most popular accounts, thecaptain, Captain Van Der Decken,
as he was trying to get aroundthe Cape of Good Hope during a
frocious storm, supposedlyrashly pledged his undying

(40:41):
fealty to God or possibly thedevil, and in this rash action,
doomed and condemned him and hismate in the ship to sail on
forever, unable to find safeharbor, you know, kind of giving
you an idea of, you know, well,don't make such rash decisions.
Or you have the story of theLady Lava Bond or Louvabond.

(41:02):
This is the legendary schooneralleged to have wrecked on the
Goodwin Sands off the KentCoast, southeast of England, on
February 13th, 1748, andsupposedly is said to reappear
there every 50 years as a ghostship.
Although there are no records ofthe ship or its supposed
sinking.
But the story goes that the shipwas at sea on February 13th

(41:24):
because her captain, Simon Reed,possibly Simon Peel, had just
been married and was celebratingwith a cruise.
According to several accounts,they were heading to Portugal.
Despite the longstandingsailor's superstition that it
was bad luck to bring a woman onboard, Reed had brought his
bride Aneta with him on theship.
But according to legend, thefirst mate, John Rivers, an apt

(41:46):
name, a rival for the hand ofthe captain's young wife Anetta,
was pacing on the decks injealous anger.
And while the captain, his wife,and their guests were
celebrating the marriage belowdeck, the first mate seized in a
fit of jealous rage, casuallydrawing a heavy club like
belaying pin from the rail, themate walked softly up behind the

(42:06):
crew member at the wheel andstruck him dead with one
crushing blow.
Rivers then seized the wheel andsteered the ship onto the
treacherous Goodwin Sands,killing everyone aboard.
And supposedly the first time itwas the Phantom version of the
Lavy Lava Bond, Lady Lava Bond,was on February 13th, 1788, and
recorded by two ships, theEdinbridge, and I it doesn't say

(42:30):
what the other ship was, so uhwho knows?
That's a the nice recounting ofthe tale there.
The Goodwin Sands are England'smost fertile grounds for ghost
ships, and are also location ofother legendary island of
Lomiya.
The Lady Lavan shares the areawith two other phantom vessels,
a liner called the SS Montroseand the Shrewsbury, which was a

(42:52):
man of war.
But again, it's a legend thatthen tells sailors maybe this is
not something you should do.
The myth of having a woman onboard would lead to problems and
thus disaster during a maritimescenario.
Same thing as if you werereading the Bible, you know, in
something Leviticus, where it'slike, hey, don't eat pork, you

(43:13):
know, or or don't sow two cropsnear each other.
These were things to help peopleavoid disease or or famine, but
are later codified into apractice and a belief system
that far outlasts and outpacesthe nugget of wisdom that it
meant to house and sustainhundreds of years ago.

SPEAKER_02 (43:35):
You've sort of nailed something on the head
there.
That's absolutely true,especially when you know
society, technology, practiceseven surpass the need for those
legends.
That's when they becomefolklore.
When they're not needed anymore,they're considered myth.
There are legends in certainEuropean cultures where it's

(43:56):
like a swamp hag is gonna grabyou if you lean too close to the
water after dark or whatever.
It's like, well, that's whatparents told their kids so their
kids wouldn't fucking fall intothe fucking river or whatever,
you know, like when they weren'tuh being attended to.
I mean, that's the same thing.
In a modern sense, in a more I'dsay nihilistic sense, the modern
legend of the candy bars withrazor blades or needles in them

(44:18):
or whatever in Halloween.
That's based on some othercultural uh bullshit that didn't
really happen.
But it's the same idea.

SPEAKER_00 (44:25):
Yeah, and you can find out more of that stuff in
our urban legends episode.

SPEAKER_02 (44:30):
Oh, nice try.

SPEAKER_00 (44:31):
Way back when we did do that.

SPEAKER_02 (44:33):
The idea of cautionary tale that is part and
parcel with that entire thing.

SPEAKER_00 (44:38):
In ancient sailing times, probably having a woman,
especially a solitary woman, onboard with a crew at sea of
swarthy men months on end, thatprobably would lead to problems.
Probably not in the form ofdivine retribution, but there's
a difference between it's a goodidea not to do this and we

(45:02):
should develop a mythos behindnot doing it.

SPEAKER_02 (45:05):
Well, right.
Just on its surface, that one'spretty easy.
It's like, what are those dudesgoing to do?
They're not gonna be like, man,I'm gonna reevaluate who I am as
a person, right?
They're gonna be like, Well, weshouldn't have brought that
bitch on board, huh?
Right?
I mean, isn't that I mean that'swhat they're gonna do.

SPEAKER_01 (45:23):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (45:23):
And so that becomes this legend, and then it becomes
romantic.
Then they're like, we shouldnever have a woman on board,
she's a portent of uh bad thingsto come or whatever.
Or you could have just not beenan asshole collectively, but
you're not gonna re-examinethat.
There's no introspection goingon there.

SPEAKER_00 (45:39):
No, and it's probably a good idea to just
take away any possibility ofsomething bad happening.
True.
Just say that they're bad luck,and then don't have them on
board, so you don't have to, Idon't know, worry about, you
know, uh sexual violence andjealousy and mutiny and things
that might not go well on aship.

SPEAKER_02 (45:59):
The ghost ship of New Haven.
It's where the settlers of NewHaven collectively saw a vision
of a ghost ship in the aftermathof a storm.
A guy named Theophilus Eaton,Stephen Goodyear, and various
merchants commissioned theconstruction of a 150-ton ship
in Rhode Island.
Its maiden voyage was rocky.

(46:21):
In the winter of 1647, it wasunusually cold and the water had
frozen over.
They hacked the ice with axesand saws for three miles to
create a channel so they couldbring the ship up through the
Long Island Sound.
But even after that ship wasfreed from the ice, it still had
to be towed.
And then when they saw how grossthe ship had gotten and how

(46:42):
awful the whole situation was,the Reverend John Davenport, who
apparently was sort of like thepatriarch of that town, is to
have said, quote, Lord, if thypleasure to bury these our
friends in the bottom of thesea, they are thine.
Save them.
So they did it anyway, and theship sailed for England with a
cargo that included wheat, peas,various furs, and, of course,

(47:07):
writings from the aforementionedDavenport and Thomas Hooker.
The following spring, no news ofthe ship had reached the colony.
The settlers began to think ofit as lost.
And in June, a thunderstorm camefrom the northwest.
An hour before sunset, thecolonists saw a vision of a ship
in the sky.
The ship sailed against the windwith full sails for half an

(47:30):
hour.
Spectators had a detailed viewof the ship and watched as it
gradually vanished from mast tohull, leaving a cloud of smoke,
which soon dissipated.
And the settlers concluded thattheir prayers had been answered
and God had given them a visionof their ship's fate.
This is all recounted byReverend James Pierpont in Oh
boy, Cotton Mathers, MagnaliaChristi Americana, and boy

(47:53):
Cotton, we should do a wholeepisode on Cotton Mather.
Uphologists claimed that this isactually a UFO sighting.
This was included in HenryWadsworth Longfellow's 1950 1858
poem, The Phantom Ship.
So this is well documented.
It's another one of those abunch of people saw something
weird.
Like the Arizona Lights or theor what have you, and then they

(48:16):
didn't know what to think of it.
Oh, that ship was missing.
Maybe it was that.
I imagine.
That brings up a lot of otherquestions, like what was it?
Was it that ship?
Nobody knows.
You know, a lot of ghost shipsare literally just ships that
people find that are just sortof abandoned, just floating out
there.
The HMS Uratus, which was a26-gun Royal Navy Corvette,

(48:39):
which was the victim of one ofthe biggest disasters in
Britain's Navy ever in 1878.
And she basically was anill-fated training cruise.
Only two lived.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is fascinating.
Essentially what happened withthis one was it was found

(49:00):
adrift, and it had capsized nearthe Isle of Wight.
This is from a weather report inthe Midland Naturalist.
The violent but briefatmospheric disturbance, which
was the cause of thecatastrophe, appears to have
advanced from the northwest andreached the north of England
about 10 AM, taking asoutheasterly course.
Snow began to fall at Leicesterabout 145 and was followed by a

(49:25):
strong gusty wind, but in anhour all was over.
The situation of the Uridus, buta short distance of the
southeastern high cliffs, behindwhich chalk downs rise to a
height of 800 or 900 feet, willsufficiently explain the way in
which the squall took the vesselby surprise.
The vessel was screened from ituntil it burst into a steep

(49:47):
slope of the land in full fury.
It basically wrecked at the Isleof Wight.
Two of the ships, three hundredand nineteen crew and trainees
survived, most of which were notcarried down with the ship but
died of exposure in freezingwaters.
One of the witnesses to thedisaster was Winston Churchill.
How so?

(50:08):
Uh he was a toddler who wasliving in Ventnor with his
family at the time, andbasically looking over the
cliff, and they saw the thingwreck.

SPEAKER_00 (50:16):
Wild.

SPEAKER_02 (50:17):
Yeah.
This one is interesting.
This one is listed in thisbecause it had multiple
disasters.
Like it wrecked more than onceand killed almost all of its
crew, including 281 lives thesecond time it voyaged out.
So that's that's real fun.
You can get into maritimedisasters.
This is a varied and diversetopic.

(50:39):
But we're just talking about theWest.
Briefly, let's get into theEast.
Every year, dozens of emptyvessels from North Korea wash up
on Japanese shores.
I did come across as this wasweird.
It deserves its own thingalmost.
The Japanese government has noidea why.
Some of their uh reasoning isthat they they're fishermen who

(51:00):
died of exposure or starvationbecause they have no material
support, or they just venturedout too far into international
waters.
They just wasn't enough for themto get fish enough to survive
because it's really overfishedthere.
North Korea specifically oftengoes out for king crabs, squid,
and sandfish, which I didn'tknow was a thing.

(51:21):
And a lot of them arenationalized, or there's
soldiers or sort of armyadjacent.
They export a lot of their stuffbecause of all the sanctions and
the way they're closed off.
Essentially what happens is theyhave no GPS, they have no
material support inland, andthey're kind of desperate, and
so they keep venturing furtherand further out into the waters.

(51:43):
Inevitably, they fail and theydie.
The crazy thing is that theyjust disappear.
The crew are just gone.
There are theories that theydefect, which is possible.
You've heard that with Cuba andHaiti and things like that, but
if they do defect, it's probablyto Japan.
Then there's the Ryu Unmaru, notthe Kobiashumaru, but the Ryu

(52:05):
Unmaru, which is a Japanesefishing boat that was washed
away from its mooring at EmorariPrefecture in March 2011 because
of an earthquake in tsunami.
It was spotted a year later bythe Royal Canadian Air Force,
about 150 nautical miles off thecoast of British Columbia.

(52:26):
It entered US waters.
After salvage attempts failed,they just sunk it.
The Coast Guard sunk it on April5th to prevent it from becoming
a quote hazard to navigation.
I mean, there are thousands ofthings we can go into with ghost
ships.
Basically anything that wedidn't even get into a lot of
the Soviet or Russian ones.

(52:48):
There was a U-boat during WorldWar I, the SMUB-65, who went on
six war patrols, sank sixmerchant ships, and sank the
British sloop HMS Arbutus.
It was lost off of PadstowCornwall on or after the 14th of
July, Bastille Day, 1918, whereall crew was on board.

(53:11):
But there were reports that hadbeen seen in other places.
There was questioned whether ornot that was the real ship.
The ocean is so mysterious andso deep and so dark.
How many fucking Twilight Zoneepisodes are about this?

SPEAKER_00 (53:24):
And how many military things do we not even
know about?
Where they just don't sayanything.
I mean, I'm pr I'm sure a lot ofthese submarines go missing and
we just never know or hearabout, because they're meant to
be clandestine.
That's their entire role.

SPEAKER_02 (53:38):
Yeah, I mean, my dad still claims to this day that he
was on vacation with his family,they were in like I don't know,
somewhere in the southwest, youknow, they went to a famous
lake, and that they were thereto sort of like taking it all in
and a and a submarine out ofnowhere just came up out of the
water in a place where itshouldn't have been, you know
what I mean?
Sort of an Area 51 type likescenario.

SPEAKER_00 (54:01):
Is this one of those there's a passage in this lake,
the underground?

SPEAKER_02 (54:05):
I think what he was getting at Because how else is
it gonna get there?
I think it was just like beingtested in the middle of the
desert, because that's what theUS did.
Gotcha.
And they fucking put it in therebecause they thought no one was
there and it was really deep.
And they were like, oh, we'regonna test this nuclear
submarine or whatever.
And of course, that kind ofthing sparks legend and myth.
When you see things like that,especially when you're a kid, of

(54:27):
course that's gonna spark thatkind of thing.
Oh, let's not forget the uh YongYu Singh number 18, which is a
Taiwanese fishing vessel, wasfound adrift and unoccupied near
the Midway Atoll after losingcontact.
The Taiwanese government claimedthat it was due to a weather
event.
It was a tuna fishing vesselbuilt in 2001.

(54:49):
It carried a crew of 15, and itwell documented.
On January 2nd, 2021, the entirecrew was gone.
This is an official report bythe US Coast Guard.
A lifeboat was missing, as wereall at that point, 10 crew.
It seemed to be damaged by whatlooked like a collision.
Nine of the crew members wereIndonesian and the captain was

(55:10):
Taiwanese.
There was no signs of physicalaltercations, blood, or
explosions, they said.
Structural damages found on thehull, indicating the boat was
underwent strong wind waves andmultiple directions.
Here's where it gets weird.
In July 2025, two workers on aday trip to the Aran Islands,
Ireland, reported the discoveryof a message in a bottle written

(55:31):
in Indonesian, requesting helpon behalf of three stranded crew
members of the Yu Young SinghNo.
18.
The message stated that the crewhad been lost since December
2020 and cited the name of theship's captain.
The message was then turned intopolice and subsequently
publicized mostly on Reddit,sparking debate about whether or

(55:51):
not it was real.
So this is how we get this kindof myth.
I mean, that's how you get theterror, a fucking great show,
which is, you know, afictionalized version of real
lost ship.
Not just one ship, two ships.
You have these moments that arereal, that are tangible, that
then have mysterious thingshappen to them, but also, in

(56:13):
conjunction to that, sort ofreinforce this mythology we have
about the sea itself.
You combine those things, andthen we get things like the
Bringer Triangle, the MaryCeleste, the Flying Dutchman.
The Titanic really never fitinto that.
Isn't that weird?
Because like that's like thebiggest maritime disaster of all
time.

(56:35):
There are actual survivors,yeah, that's true.
The coolest of which, by theway, was the chef.
The chef?
Oh yeah.
So the chef was a notoriousdrunk, an epic alcoholic.
The reason he survived wasbecause his blood alcohol level
was so fucking high that hedidn't freeze in the waters of
the Atlantic.
Crazily, in a one in a bajillionscenario, survived another

(56:59):
maritime disaster because hisblood alcohol was so high.

SPEAKER_00 (57:03):
That is nuts.

SPEAKER_02 (57:05):
But very true.
Charles John Joklin, he was thechief baker aboard the Titanic.
He survived the ship's sinkingand became notable for having
survived the frigid water forhaving an exceptionally long
time before being pulled intothe collapsible B lifeboat with
virtually no ill effects.
He survived the Titanic disasterand was one of the few crew
members reported to testify atthe British Wreck Commissioner's

(57:27):
inquiry into the sinking.
He's portrayed in at least twomovies, in A Night to Remember
and in Titanic.
He was portrayed by ChrisPornell in the fourth season
premiere of Drunk History in2016.
Alright.
There's also a concept of themetaphysical ghost ship in
writing, in poetry, and inliterature, where the ghost ship
represents the vessel that wewish we had but didn't exist, or

(57:50):
the thing that left us behind onthe shore.
There's a lot to that on top ofalready the sort of romanticized
maritime language that wealready use.
And mythology we already use.
And we haven't even gotten intothe movies, like Ghost Ship.
I'm not gonna say good, but atleast watchable movies, which
does have the most brutalopening sequence of any horror

(58:11):
movie I think anybody's everseen.

SPEAKER_00 (58:13):
Pretty awesome, honestly.
It is awesome.
It's a Final Destination meetsSaw kind of uh opening.

SPEAKER_02 (58:20):
Yeah, the biggest body count, I think, of any
opening horror movie ever.

SPEAKER_00 (58:24):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (58:25):
Brutal, and they show everything.
Quite frankly, there aren't alot of good movies about this
topic.
There's Carpenter's the Fog,which is great.
It's not as much about the shipas it is the town.
You have things like Triangle,but that's more about time
travel.
Mm-hmm.
There's a great X-Files episodeabout this, where they sort of
travel back in time onto a ship.

(58:45):
I don't think it's a Titanicspecifically, but it's that kind
of ship.

SPEAKER_00 (58:49):
Yeah, we're not even getting to something like the
Philadelphia experiment.

SPEAKER_02 (58:52):
Oh man.
We can do a whole episode juston that.
Or the final countdown.

SPEAKER_00 (58:57):
Yeah, Europe does need its whole episode.
That is a good movie.
It's been a long time.
Some of this is that they'rejust ships.
It's no longer a prevalent wayto travel or something that for
most people they interact with.
You know, it's it's just forkind of fishermen.
You have the few rich people whotravel or the people that live

(59:20):
in places that um boats theyhave easy access to, but it's
just not a prevalent thinganymore the way that I think it
used to be.
Especially when it was like yourmodus operandi to get any long
distance.

SPEAKER_02 (59:32):
Yeah, which is sad because I'm like it's actually a
better and cleaner way oftraveling than flying, but it
does take longer.

SPEAKER_00 (59:39):
People don't like that too much.
Yeah.
Convenience.
The whole concept of ghost shipis it's this the spooky mystery
of the ocean and the open wateritself.
You transfix that to a physicalmode of transportation or
recreation or workplace and Andit does take on that creepy

(01:00:01):
feel.
And especially when you havethese real life incidences that
can't be explained that we onlyhave to question and wonder
about, it leads to that eeriesense of the unknown and the
inexplicable.

SPEAKER_02 (01:00:14):
Like fog itself.
You can't see through it.
You don't know what's in there,but you know things are there.
I think it's part of the mythos.
It's such a romantic mythos.
It's such a romantic idea.
And it's because, I think,because the oceans are so vast
and so overwhelming and sopowerful that man, who thinks

(01:00:37):
that they've mastered thenatural world, and somehow does
manage to navigate the oceans,is still also at the same time
overwhelmed and often defeatedby such an overwhelming force
that it creates this mythology,which is in and of itself its
own complicated issue.
I think that's kind of the heartof the whole thing, the heart of

(01:00:59):
the ocean.
What's that stupid thing inTitanic home?

SPEAKER_00 (01:01:03):
I've never seen Titanic, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 (01:01:05):
What?
Are you kidding me?
I kid you not.
I don't even like that movie,and I've seen it like a thousand
times.
Because my dad loves that shit,so I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 (01:01:12):
Well, it's one of those things where it's like
I've seen so many bits of it.
I never wanted to see it, and soI kind of avoided it, and now
it's a badge of honor kind ofthing.
If I can say I've never seenTitanic.

SPEAKER_02 (01:01:24):
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm with you on some ofthat.
And until not too long ago, Ihad never seen Top Gun for the
same reason.

SPEAKER_00 (01:01:29):
I mean, from what I've seen of Titanic, and I've
seen Top Gun many times, I'dmuch rather see Top Gun again.
I know.
That's some sweaty, homo eroticaction.

SPEAKER_02 (01:01:39):
Sage Wisdom.
Sage Wisdom.
If you wouldn't mind liking andsubscribing, preferably on Apple
Podcasts, because that's thebest way for us to be seen and
heard.
It is the way the algorithmswork, not the eurythmics, but
the algorithms.
The eurythmics work in acompletely different fashion,
I've seen uh broken downmechanically.
We would really appreciate it.
So please make sure you do that.

(01:01:59):
And thank you for joining us, asalways, because usually it was
just Jake and I screaming at thewall or each other.
So having an audience means alot.
Why don't you broadcast it?
Well, you look like a tourist.
Skip, put that away.
So we're flipping and reversingit?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, we do really appreciatethat.
And we do appreciate you tuningin.
Every person that listens is nowour best friend.

(01:02:21):
And we're probably gonna stalkyou online or call you
constantly asking you in themiddle of the night why you
don't love us anymore.
Which is probably gonna happen.
So, Jake, what what should theydo in the interim between those
events?

SPEAKER_00 (01:02:34):
If they could kindly clean up after themselves to
some reasonable degree, tiptheir bar staff, their waiters,
the wait staff, their DJs, KJs,uh AJs, BJs.
If they also need to tip theircaptain, gotta get you home
safely, otherwise you might endup part of a ghost ship
yourself.
But until that creepy day comes,we would all like to say, God

(01:02:58):
speed! Fair whistle.
I got nothing.
I'm Jake.

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:06):
Well, fuck me then.

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:08):
Please go away.