Laura Wright 
Titanic Tales
The sea has always been a good place for ghosts.
For centuries, sailors and people living along the world’s coastlines have reported vessels that seem to have no business being there. Some appear in perfectly calm weather with sails full of an impossible wind. Others glow with strange lights, sail directly against the wind, or disappear while witnesses are still watching.
Sometimes the ship is recognizable.
It is a vessel that sank years before.
Sometimes it is something considerably older.
And sometimes nobody knows what they saw.
Long before the term ghost ship became associated with abandoned vessels drifting without crews, the spectre ship belonged to folklore. It was an apparition of the sea, and seeing one was rarely considered a good sign.
The Demon Ship of Old French Folklore
Old French folklore tells of a considerably more sinister spectre ship. This was not merely the apparition of a vessel lost at sea. According to the legend, the ship sailed from the depths of the underworld, crewed by demons and carrying a particularly dreadful cargo.
Its decks were crowded with vicious black dogs.
These were no ordinary animals. According to the tradition, the dogs had once been human. In life, they were among the worst criminals and evildoers mankind had produced. After death, they were transformed into monstrous black hounds and condemned to roam the decks of the infernal vessel.
The image combines several very old supernatural traditions. Black dogs have long appeared in European folklore as omens, spectral creatures and companions of the dead. The phantom ship likewise belongs to a world in which the sea was not merely dangerous, but sometimes seemed to provide a passage between the living and the dead.
In this French tradition, however, the ship does not carry sailors who tragically perished at sea.
It carries the damned.
More Than the Flying Dutchman
The most famous phantom vessel is undoubtedly the Flying Dutchman, the legendary ship condemned to sail forever.
By 1790, a traveler named John MacDonald recorded sailors saying they had seen the Flying Dutchman during stormy weather. The story he heard concerned a Dutch vessel lost after being unable to enter harbor during a storm. Sailors believed its apparition continued to appear during dangerous weather.
But the Dutchman was hardly alone.
Old collections of maritime folklore contain an entire fleet of supernatural vessels.
German sailors told of phantom ships whose appearance foretold disaster. Swedish and Danish folklore possessed spectral vessels of their own. A nineteenth-century account from Cornwall described a schooner-like apparition that witnesses actually attempted to approach by boat.
The seas, apparently, were crowded with ships that had forgotten to sink.
The Spectre Ship of New Haven
One of America’s oldest and most remarkable phantom-ship traditions comes from colonial New England.
In 1646, a ship left New Haven Colony bound for England. Among those aboard were prominent colonists, including George Lamberton.
The ship never arrived.
Months passed without reliable news of the missing passengers. Their families were left with the terrible uncertainty that accompanied maritime travel in the seventeenth century. There was no radio distress call, no Coast Guard search, and often no wreckage to confirm what had happened.
Then something extraordinary was reportedly seen over New Haven.
According to the story preserved in early New England accounts, an apparition resembling the missing ship appeared in the sky.
Witnesses watched as the phantom vessel seemed to encounter disaster. Its masts and rigging disappeared, the ship careened, and finally the entire apparition vanished into a mist-like cloud. Those watching reportedly recognized it as the lost vessel and interpreted the vision as a revelation of the ship’s fate.
The real vessel and its passengers were never recovered.
The apparition became known as the Phantom Ship of New Haven.
A Ghost Ship in the Sky
The New Haven story is particularly strange because the vessel wasn’t simply reported sailing offshore.
It appeared above the harbor.
The apparition supposedly arrived after a thunderstorm during the summer following the ship’s disappearance. To the grieving colonists, the meaning seemed unmistakable.
Their missing friends and relatives were dead.
The vision had shown them how.
Whether the witnesses actually saw an unusual atmospheric phenomenon, interpreted clouds as a familiar vessel, experienced some other optical effect, or witnessed something we cannot explain is impossible to determine centuries later.
But the story itself is old.
And the missing ship was real.
The Spectre Ship of Salem
Salem eventually acquired a famous spectre ship of its own, although its history is considerably murkier.
Later writers claimed that Cotton Mather had recorded the Spectre Ship of Salem, sometimes identified as the Noah’s Dove. The vessel supposedly disappeared at sea and later returned as a supernatural apparition.
There is a problem.
The familiar Salem version seems to have developed substantially during the nineteenth century. Research into the literary history of the legend finds its recognizable form appearing in an 1830 story, followed by John Greenleaf Whittier’s treatment of the tale. Mather did write about a phantom ship, but the documented episode concerned New Haven, not Salem.
This doesn’t make the Salem Spectre Ship worthless as folklore.
It makes it a fascinating example of how folklore develops.
A genuine colonial phantom-ship account seems to have acquired another port, new characters, and increasingly elaborate details until Salem possessed a ghost ship of its own.
The Phantom Ship of Cornwall
Another extraordinary report came from Cornwall.
A schooner-rigged vessel was supposedly seen off St. Ives Head. Unlike witnesses who merely watched the apparition from shore, people reportedly launched boats and rowed toward it.
The vessel remained plainly visible as they approached.
The leading boat came close enough that a man attempted to catch the phantom vessel’s side with his boat hook.
The hook passed through it.
The man nearly fell into the water.
Then the entire ship, including its lights and crew, disappeared.
According to the account, the following morning another vessel, the Neptune of London, was wrecked nearby with the loss of everyone aboard. The phantom ship was consequently remembered as a supernatural warning of the disaster.
It is an extraordinary story.
Whether every detail occurred precisely as later writers recorded it is another question.
The Phantom Ship of Gaspé
Canadian folklore provides an even more elaborate spectre ship.
One legend from the Gaspé region tells of a ship carrying religious treasures. The crew supposedly stole the valuables and abandoned a priest, who cursed them.
A storm arose and destroyed the vessel.
According to the legend, the ship did not disappear completely.
Its supernatural counterpart continued sailing the Gulf of St. Lawrence, complete with a spectral crew and the tolling of its stolen bell. Seeing the apparition was believed to foretell a storm, and following its mysterious light could lead another vessel toward the same deadly reef.
Here the spectre ship becomes more than an apparition.
It becomes a death omen.
Ships That Sail Against the Wind
One characteristic appears repeatedly in phantom-ship stories.
The vessel doesn’t obey the rules.
Washington Irving wrote of maritime legends in which phantom ships sailed directly into the wind or moved rapidly across perfectly calm water, leaving foam at their bows despite the absence of any breeze.
This makes sense from a folkloric perspective.
A distant ship alone isn’t frightening.
A ship doing something a ship cannot do is another matter.
Sailors understood wind and water better than almost anyone. A vessel traveling in a direction its sails shouldn’t permit would immediately attract attention.
The impossible behavior identifies the apparition.
Were Spectre Ships Mirages?
There is at least one natural phenomenon capable of producing remarkably ghostly ships.
A Fata Morgana is a complex superior mirage caused when atmospheric conditions bend light through layers of air at different temperatures. Distant objects can appear elevated, distorted, stretched, duplicated or seemingly suspended above the horizon.
A distant ship can consequently appear to float in the sky.
That makes atmospheric refraction an appealing explanation for at least some historical phantom-ship sightings.
But it isn’t a universal answer.
Folklore has accumulated many different phenomena under the category of the spectre ship: distant lights, mirages, unidentified vessels, actual shipwrecks, literary inventions, omens and experiences for which the original evidence is simply too old or incomplete to evaluate.
Explaining one apparition doesn’t explain them all.
The Sea Keeps Its Dead
Perhaps ghost ships became such a powerful tradition because death at sea was different from death on land.
A family might never receive a body.
Sometimes they received no news whatsoever.
A ship sailed over the horizon carrying a husband, son, daughter or friend and simply never came back.
There was no grave.
No final moment.
Only absence.
Under those circumstances, seeing the lost ship again would have carried enormous emotional power.
That is particularly apparent in the New Haven story. The colonists weren’t merely frightened by the apparition. According to the tradition, they understood it as an answer.
The missing people weren’t coming home.
Something on the Horizon
Today we have satellites, radar, radio, GPS and enormous databases tracking vessels across the world’s oceans.
The sea is less unknowable than it once was.
But it remains enormous.
And phantom ships have never entirely disappeared from our imagination.
Perhaps some historical sightings were mirages. Others were undoubtedly stories embellished in the telling. Some famous ghost ships may owe more to nineteenth-century writers than to frightened sailors.
Yet behind the legends are genuine disappearances, genuine wrecks and occasionally genuine historical reports from people who insisted that they saw something extraordinary upon the water.
A ship appears where no ship should be.
Its sails catch a wind nobody else can feel.
It moves across a motionless sea.
Perhaps it approaches.
Perhaps it disappears.
And perhaps, as sailors believed for centuries, the wisest thing to do when a dead ship passes yours is simply to let it sail on.
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