These ghost ships aren’t home to phantom sailors, but they are equally mysterious, with crews that seemingly vanished into thin air
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Mary Celeste
On Nov. 7, 1872, a captain, his wife, their 2-year-old daughter and seven crewmen set out from New York to Italy aboard the Mary Celeste. A month later, they should have arrived, but the British ship Dei Gratia caught sight of the American boat drifting in the Atlantic. The crew boarded the Mary Celeste to offer help but found it completely empty.
Six months’ worth of food and the crew’s belongings were still there, but the lifeboat was gone. The ship’s floor was covered in 3 feet of water, but that was far from flooded or beyond repair. It’s become one of the world’s most famous ghost ships, largely due to the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the boat as inspiration for his short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.”
As for what caused everyone to disappear, theories range from pirates to mutiny to murder. The most likely explanation is that the captain didn’t know the extent of the damage to the ship and ordered the crew to abandon it at the first sight of land. But the world may never know the real explanation for this unsolved mystery of the ocean.
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Carroll A. Deering
The Carroll A. Deering cargo ship and its 10-man crew successfully made it to Rio de Janeiro in 1920, despite the need to change captains when its original one fell ill. But something strange happened on its way back to Virginia that turned this working vessel into one of history’s most mysterious ghost ships. A lighthouse keeper in North Carolina said a crewman, who didn’t seem very officer-like, reported the ship had lost its anchors while the rest of the crew was “milling about” suspiciously.
Another ship spotted the Carroll A. Deering near the Outer Banks the next day, in an area that would have been a strange course for a ship on its way to Norfolk, Virginia. The following day, a shipwreck was spotted, but dangerous weather conditions kept investigators away for four days. When they went aboard, they found food laid out as if the crew were getting ready for a meal, but their personal belongings and the lifeboats were gone.
The federal government followed leads on pirates, mutinies and more, but they all came up fruitless.
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Jian Seng
Some ghost ships are so mysterious that they barely have a backstory. In 2006, the Australian Coastwatch found an abandoned ship floating in the sea. It had a broken tow rope, suggesting it was under tow but broke free.
The name Jian Seng was printed on the side, but that was about all investigators had to go on. There was nothing else to identify the ship, no records of distress signals or SOS calls, no identifying documents or belongings and no reports of a missing boat. They couldn’t even figure out who it belonged to or where it came from.
Experts’ best guess? It probably supplied food and fuel to fishing boats, but that didn’t explain why no one tried to save it when it broke loose.
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High Aim No. 6
Fishing boat High Aim No. 6 left Taiwan on Halloween in 2002, but when the Australian Navy came across it in January 2003, something was amiss. The engine was on full throttle, and the main gas tank was empty, though the auxiliary fuel tanks were still full and untouched. Ten tons of bonito tuna were kept cold, but there wasn’t a crew member in sight on this seemingly haunted vessel.
It was set to be one of the most mysterious ghost ships of all time until a single crew member turned up. The Indonesian fisherman was arrested and confessed that the crew had worked with pirates to kill the ship’s captain and main engineer, but their motive or reason is still a mystery.
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Nina
The Nina yacht’s crew reached out to meteorologists with concerns about dangerous weather conditions in 2013, then stopped responding. Given the 70-mile-per-hour winds and 26-foot-high waves, it seemed obvious that the boat had met its match and never made it through the storm. A fruitless search effort might have been the end if it weren’t for a mysterious message.
Three weeks after anyone had heard from the crew, an undelivered text reached one of the meteorologists. “Thanks storm sails shredded last night, now bare poles,” it read, noting that the boat was still on the move. The family of a 19-year-old girl on the boat took that message as a sign that she was still alive.
Their private search turned up satellite photos that they thought might be of the missing Nina, though most experts say it was just a large wave. To date, the story of the Nina remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries.
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MV Joyita
In 1955, merchant ship MV Joyita set off on a two-day journey in the South Pacific. It would never reach its destination.
After the ship’s mysterious disappearance, a rescue team searched the South Pacific for signs of ship but came up empty. It wasn’t until more than a month later that another captain spotted the partially sunken ship. There was no sign of any of the 25 passengers, and an investigation deemed its doom “inexplicable.”
Over the years, dark theories—from Soviet submariners kidnapping the crew to Japanese fishermen killing everyone onboard—circulated. As recently as 2002, family members were still researching what could have gone wrong. One professor insists the most likely scenario is that a corroded pipe was leaking and flooded the boat, forcing the crew to abandon ship. Whatever the cause, one thing is certain: As of now, the MV Joyita remains one of history’s most fascinating (and perplexing) phantom ships.
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The mummy ghost ship
No, this isn’t an ancient mystery—it’s a case straight out of the 21st century. When Filipino fishermen boarded a seemingly abandoned yacht in 2016, they weren’t prepared for the sight they would find: the mummified body of a German sailor. Manfred Fritz Bajorat had been sailing around the world for about 20 years. He’d last been seen in 2009, although a friend said he’d heard from Bajorat on Facebook in 2015.
There was no evidence of foul play, so a year would seem like enough time for the warm, salty air to mummify the body … until an autopsy revealed he’d probably been dead for only about a week.
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Kaz II
In April 2007, two brothers and a skipper set off on a two-month yacht journey around Australia. Just three days later, the Kaz II was found off the Great Barrier Reef with a half-empty coffee cup, an open newspaper and knives strewn on the floor—but no one aboard.
A coroner suggested that one of the inexperienced sailors had fallen off, and the other two drowned in their rescue attempts. But that’s just one theory with no evidence backing it up. For now, their fate is lost in history.
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Sam Rataulangi
The tale of the Sam Rataulangi is a pretty recent story, and unlike other legends of abandoned ghost ships, this one has a plausible explanation. A PB 1600 freighter, the Sam Rataulangi appeared in August 2018 off the coast of Myanmar, where fishermen found it empty of people and cargo.
Shortly afterward, though, Myanmar’s navy discovered that a tugboat had been towing the freighter to a ship-breaking plant to be dismantled when bad weather hit. The cable connecting it to the tugboat snapped, and the “Myanmar ghost ship” was abandoned by its crew.
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Jenny
Stories of ghost ships range from the curious to the disquieting, but this one may be the most disturbing of all! The (unsubstantiated) story comes from anonymous accounts of a whaling ship called Hope. As the legend goes, in 1840, the Hope came across the schooner Jenny, completely frozen in ice, in the Antarctic Drake Passage. The crew was still on board but frozen to death. The captain was frozen at his desk, where an open log’s last entry read: “May 4, 1823. No food for 71 days. I am the only one left alive.”
Sure, this is likely one of those sensationalized legends of ghost ships, but it could have a basis in truth.
FAQs
What is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the most famous ghost ship?
We can’t create a list of mysterious ghost ships without mentioning the Flying Dutchman, though unlike the others on our list, this one is based more on fiction than fact. The Flying Dutchman was a 17th-century spectral ship captained by a Dutchman—or so the legend goes.
According to maritime myth, the vessel was in the service of the “East India Company,” and fellow seafarers claimed to spot it several times off the Cape of Good Hope. But what really set this phantom ship apart was its captain. The Dutchman was able to defy weather conditions and sail abnormally fast across the ocean. Some believed that he was in cahoots with the devil or that he bartered his soul for safe passage. In the tales, he may eventually be cursed by God or doomed to sail forevermore.
Where’d the legend of the Flying Dutchman come from? Researchers say English sailors in the early 1800s invented the tale. At the time, the Dutch were not spoken well of, as a Cambridge University article suggests, which may have birthed this story. However, it does have a real-life inspiration in Dutch Capt. Baren Fockesz, who made frequent trips from the Netherlands to Indonesia at a much faster speed than other sailors.
Of course, it’s possible the ship was a mirage known as Fata Morgana, a type of optical illusion in which atmospheric conditions cause the image of a ship to appear on the horizon.
What is the most recent ghost ship?
One of the most recent sightings of a ghost ship is the Karolee, which made headlines in August 2025. The fishing boat was traveling from Washington to California with 70-year-old Joel Kawahara at the helm. But when the Coast Guard boarded the boat in Northern California, they found no one on board. Despite a frantic search, the Coast Guard could not find a single trace of Kawahara.
Have any ghost ships been found with evidence suggesting supernatural involvement?
Even though they’re called “ghost ships,” there is no supernatural involvement in these cases. Ships are usually abandoned because of distress at sea, pirate involvement or other unexplained (but of-this-world!) circumstances.
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Sources:
- Smithsonian Magazine: “Abandoned Ship: The Mary Celeste”
- United States Coast Guard: “Ghostship Carroll A. Deering”
- National Park Service: “The Ghost Ship of the Outer Banks”
- Sydney Morning Herald: “Mystery shrouds ghost ship found off Queensland coast”
- The New York Times: “A Fishing Boat Falls Prey to Mutiny? Pirates?”
- Stuff: “The mystery of the missing Nina”
- The New Zealand Herald: “Author says he’s solved MV Joyita mystery, 47 years later”
- The Telegraph: “Adventurer died of heart attack just a week before his ‘mummified’ body was found in yacht”
- The Guardian: “Australian coroner ends mystery of ‘ghost ship'”
- BBC: “‘Ghost ship’ in Myanmar: Navy finds answers”
- Cambridge University: “The Drift of the Jenny, 1823–40”
- Cambridge University: “In search of the origin of an Antarctic ghost ship: The legend of the Jenny re-evaluated”
- History.com: “Flying Dutchman: Phantom Ship, Legend and Sightings”
- Los Angeles Times: “Mysterious ‘ghost ship’ lurks off California coast. What happened to missing captain?”
