A Tale of Ghost Ships Three!

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

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Forrest Burgess (0:16)

In late August of 1933, 25 miles south of Point Barrow, Alaska, a wooden schooner called the Trader was stuck in the ice, and had been for two weeks. Three men ran her, Pete Polson, the captain, his brother Cowrie, the engineer and cook, and Ira Rank, the owner. There was one passenger aboard as well, a Scottish woman in her forties named Isabel Wiley Hutchison. She was a botanist, and she'd come north collecting plants for Kew Gardens in London. Fortunately for us, she wrote the whole trip up the following summer for Blackwoods Magazine, so we have what she saw, in her words. On one of those days stuck in the ice, Hutchison was on deck, and out past the edge of the pack she saw a steamer. A steel ship, a whopping 230 feet long, riding high on an ice floe like a boat on a trailer. Not a soul visible aboard. She was moving up the coast towards Point Barrow on the current, at something like five miles an hour, by Hutchison's estimate. No engine, no crew, no one at the wheel, and making better time than a schooner with a working engine stuck in the ice. She'd reach Barrow days before the trader did, even on a moving ice floe, and on top of that, the steamer would pass them upside down. Hull to the sky, masts hanging toward the sea, like it was on a mirror, in a mirage, past the same shoals and the same ice that had the trader essentially pinned.

Captain Pete stood on deck and watched her go.

You would think, he said, that someone must be steering her. I believe she is haunted.

This wasn't their first encounter with the Bayshimo. Two weeks before that, they'd actually been aboard themselves, climbed a broken wooden ladder and a rope up that hull and found the hold open to the sky and a breakfast menu and a doorway with six courses on it. It turns out her crew had been flown off two years earlier. Her captain had gone home, believing the ice had crushed her and buried her under a ridge 75 feet high. However, she'd been turning up along that coast ever since and people kept climbing aboard, but the Bayshimo had no desire to be rescued.

She wasn't the first ship the ice had back with nobody on board. In 1775, the story goes, a whaler working off Greenland found a ship frozen fast, her crew dead in their bunks below, and her captain sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand, halfway through a log entry dated 1762, 13 years before anyone found her. And in the years after the Second World War, ships in the Strait of Malacca picked up a distress call from a Dutch freighter. The captain and all the officers were dead, the rest were probably dead too. The ship that eventually reached her found every man aboard sprawled on his back, faces turned up to the sun, mouths open, eyes staring.

Even the poor old ship's dog was dead. Then a fire broke out in her number four hold, and a few minutes after the would-be rescuers fled, she blew up and sank. Tonight, we'll bring you the haunted histories of the Octavius, the Ourang Medan and the Baychimo, the only one of the three anybody ever photographed. Where the first two ended up depends on which legend you've heard. Where the Baychimo ended up, nobody knows.

Scott Philbrook (4:20)

Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess.

Forrest Burgess (4:25)

SOS. From Ourang Medan. We float, all officers, including the captain, dead in chart room and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead.

I die. A Morse code message from We Sail Together, Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council, US. Coast Guard, May 1952, page 107

Scott Philbrook (4:50)

Join us tonight as we return to the sea to look for ghost ships that don't want to be found. Folks, it's been a crazy past couple of weeks. We went to the absolutely amazing, wet hot, bad magic summer camp up in Pennsylvania at the invitation of our friends Dan and Lindsay Cummins from the Time Suck and Scared to Death podcast. Both excellent podcasts. If you haven't heard them, find and subscribe to them. And I'll tell you what, it was a blast.

Forrest Burgess (5:17)

It really was. And we had such a great time and even did a live show that, well, let's say you would all have loved, I'm sure. And we're going to keep working on it and it will get performed and fine tune at some point. So we'll save that for the campers who saw it a few weeks ago.