Image credit: http://daveherr.com/
If you’re like me, you were heartened to see ghost ships finally make their way back into the news recently, albeit for sad reasons: the Ryou-Un Maru, once a mighty, 164-foot Japanese fishing vessel, was sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard earlier this month, having drifted aimlessly ever since the disastrous tsunami back in March 2011.
But don’t weep too hard for the Ryou-Un Maru. Reportedly, its owners haven’t even bothered to salvage the ship, and had plans to put it to rest even before it started wandering the seas over a year ago. More importantly, it has never been the cool kind of ghost ship. Traditionally, ghost ships can be defined as either “haunted” (sweet) or just “derelict” (boring). Ryou-Un Maru falls into the latter category. Even in the age of “satellites,” “forensics,” and Mythbusters, we can do better than that.
Whether they’re said to make beyond-the-grave appearances (The Flying Dutchman or The Eliza Battle) or were simply found abandoned for unclear reasons (The MV Joyita), ghost ships have long been the inspiration for literature, film, and even opera. Who are we to try to tease out disappointing, scientific reasons for their spooky voyages?
Fortunately, aside from the Ryou-Un Maru’s unspectacular ghost career, occurrences of mysterious ghost ships seem to have actually been on the rise in the past decade or so, at least if the running list on Wikipedia is to be believed. I’d like to think that rather than having something to do with the unfortunate rise of violent piracy, this means we’re making our way back to a world where children listened to their elders, politicians were noble and magnanimous, and people had fun, nautical ghosts to believe in without having everything ruined and explained to death. More to the point, it means that The Twilight Zone was right, and we’re working our way up to the next logical phenomenon: ghost planes and, lord willing, ghost spaceships. Like The Flying Dutchman himself has been known to shout from the deck of his lonely ship, “You can’t stop progress.”
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