5 Real Ghost Voyages That Ended in Doom

5 The Ghost Train We Sealed Away, Workers Included

The darkest episode of television ever came in 1984 and starred Thomas the Tank Engine. The third-ever episode of the 500-plus-episode series has an engine named Henry being walled up in a tunnel, unable to move. His fire goes out, the narrator says he deserves it and the show cuts to credits. He does get freed in the following episode, but children watching this episode’s end couldn’t have realized that. 

Slightly darker than that was what happened in 1925, when a tunnel in Virginia collapsed on a real train filled with real people. Most of the people on train — workers, all of them — were thankfully able to get out following the collapse. One person who got out later died in the hospital from burns. Wreckage pinned one other person, and rescuers later found his dead body.

But two other people remained unaccounted for. They were Richard Lewis and H. Smith, both Black laborers, and they had to still be in there when the Chesapeake and Ohio railway decided the safest thing to do for everyone was to close the tunnel permanently. The railway sealed it up with a concrete plug. The two men remained inside, presumably dead but possibly alive (but certainly dead before much longer).

Wrote the newspaper following this move, “The train might not be seen for another geological period when men of a new civilization discover a relic of the Twentieth Century in what once was the blue marl of Church Hill.”

4 The ‘Mary Celeste’ Ended in an Insurance Fraud Scheme

The Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in 1872 with all of its crew having completely vanished. It’s a famous story, and if you've forgotten just what happened, we can point you to previous stuff we’ve written on it to figure out what went down there. 

But that wasn’t the end of the ship’s story. In 1884, it had a new owner, Gilman C. Parker, who filled the ship with cargo and insured it for $1 million in today’s money. The ship ran aground, taking on irreparable damage, and Parker was set to collect. Then he got extra greedy. He also sold salvage rights, and the people who dug through the wreck discovered it didn’t contain any of the expensive good Parker claimed it did. 

The supposedly expensive herring was rotted stuff, good only as fertilizer. The supposedly expensive liquor was trash, and many of the bottles weren’t even full. One crate, that supposedly contained $1,000 of silverware, actually contained $50 of dog collars (men get up to some crazy antics when at sea). Parker and his crew were now put on trial for insurance fraud, as well as for the crime of barratry. Barratry means purposely scuttling a ship, and this was considered such a crime at the time that the penalty was death. 

The jury was reasonably reluctant to have the men executed for this, and in the end, the defendants slipped away from the charges. That didn’t mean they lived happily ever after, though. One of the defendants killed himself. Another, Abraham Wendell, went insane. Parker himself died within three months of the trial ending. 

Laws are irrelevant; in the end, the sea will get you. 

3 The North Korean Ghost Ships. The MANY North Korean Ghost Ships

In 2018, a ship landed in Japan with seven corpses aboard. The men were North Korean, they’d died while at sea and the ship washed up on Japan’s western shore. Along with the bodies, the ship contained a box of letters and badges with Kim Jong Il’s face on them. 

We’d love to break down in detail exactly what happened to that ship, but we’re not going to. Because it turns out the only thing notable about it was that it was the first of the year to arrive. Every year, dozens of North Korean ghost ships reach Japan. The year 2017 was especially bad, with over 100 ships washing ashore, with 35 or more corpses each. 

The issue appears to be that North Korea has illegally leased large sections of its fishing waters to China, which sends in trawlers of enormous size. North Korean fishermen get pushed into more dangerous areas. Off-course, and never having been properly equipped in the first place, the men starve to death or succumb to dehydration. 

The hundreds of ghost ships are just the ones that happen to reach Japan, by the way. We have no idea how many more boats of dead men drift back to North Korea or never return to land at all. 

2 The Mediterranean Ghost Boat That Maybe Didn’t Sink

If you’d rather focus on one single boat, we could talk of an unnamed vessel that vanished in 2014. It carried 243 Eritrean refugees, who left Libya and planned to reach Europe. It never reached Europe, prompting a search effort that was dubbed the ghost boat investigation. 

Did the boat fall apart in the Mediterranean? Probably. But that obvious theory baffles the many people who searched for it, because when quite a few other refugee boats disintegrated there over the last decade, their wreckage and bodies were found fairly easily. 

Perhaps the passengers didn’t die. Perhaps they turned around, landed back in Libya and were sold into slavery, as sometimes happens there. So, cheer up.

1 The Plane Where Everyone Passed Out

Preflight inspections normally reduce the chance that a plane will crash. That didn’t happen with Helios Airways Flight 522 in 2005. In the process of checking a bunch of systems, an engineer changed the settings so that instead of pressurizing automatically when it took off, the plane had to be pressurized manually. When the plane did take off from Cyprus, on its way to Athens, it failed to pressurize. A proper warning system would have alerted the pilots to act, but as it was, everyone lost consciousness. 

Autopilot on the plane kicked in, and the plane reached Athens airspace all right. Then the autopilot set the vessel to circle the airport, waiting for the human pilots to take control. Airport officials got no response when they radioed the plane, and this was a severe enough situation that the military intervened and flew their jets alongside it to take a peek. They saw the pilot unconscious in the cockpit, and they saw oxygen masks hanging uselessly in the passenger compartment, no one having put theirs on.

Then the jet pilots saw someone enter the Helios cockpit. It was Andreas Prodromou, a 24-year-old flight attendant, breathing oxygen out of a bottle. Whether he had recently woken up or had been conscious all along was unclear, but his entry to the cockpit had evidently been delayed by the pilots locking the door during takeoff — for security reasons.

At this point, it was too late for him to take control of the plane. The engines died, having run out of fuel. A trained pilot may still have been able to land the plane, and an amateur may have been able to land a functioning plane if someone walked them through instructions while an encouraging musical score played. But a flight attendant couldn’t land a plane without functioning engines. 

All he could do was steer a little. So, he steered, ensuring that the plane didn’t crash in Athens, killing a bunch of people on the ground. Instead, it crashed into some hills 25 miles away, merely killing all 121 aboard. That was a blessing. The other blessing is that almost none of those 121 people had the faintest idea what was happening. 

Next time you close your eyes on a plane, maybe you, too, will be so lucky. 

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