The ghost ship of Northumberland Strait

What fascinates me about many claims of the paranormal is how persistent they are.

Once the story of some otherworldly sighting gets around, it's remarkably hard to eradicate belief in it -- not only is there the "well, my mother's brother's best friend's boss's gardener saw it with his own eyes" phenomenon, there's also the problem of confirmation bias.  As soon as you're even partially sold on an idea, all it takes is minuscule amounts of evidence thereafter to cement your certainty further.

Take, for example, the curious story of the "ghost ship of Northumberland Strait," which has been reported from the narrow channel of water separating Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for about two hundred years.  It's a fully-rigged schooner, eyewitnesses claim, with "pure white sails and masts of gold..." that is also aflame. 

The sightings have apparently been convincing enough.  In 1900, a group of well-meaning citizens of Charlottetown were so sure of what they were seeing that they piled into a rowboat and rowed out toward the stricken ship, only to have it vanish into thin air before they could reach it.  Interest in the apparition was boosted by Canadian singer-songwriter Lennie Gallant, a PEI native who included a song about the ghost ship on his 1988 album Breakwater:

There's a burst of flame and a flash of light

And there on the tide is a frightening sight

As a tall ship all aflame lights up the sky

Tales of the phantom ship, from truck to keel in flames

She sails the wide Northumberland Strait

No one knows her name.

 It even merited depiction on a Canadian postage stamp in 2014:

The people who've seen it are, apparently, completely convinced.  Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Giguère was interviewed in 2008 about his sighting of a "bright white-and-gold ship" in Tatamagouche Bay, and a local man named Melvin Langille backed him up, saying he'd seen the ship himself only a few months earlier.  "I believe in all that stuff," Langille said, "and I don't know what else it would be."

That statement, though, encompasses the dual problems with claims like this.  "I believe in all that stuff" predisposes you not to question what you might be seeing, and "... I don't know what else it would be" is the Argument From Ignorance that you hear all the time in discussions of UFOs.  "I saw a bright light in the sky, and I don't know what it is -- therefore it must be interstellar visitors from outer space."  But as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "If you don't know what it is, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't then go on to say, "... so it must be" anything."

As far as the ghost ship of Northumberland Strait, it may well have started out from a real incident.  In 2015, the Canadian Hydrographic Service found a sunken ship in Pictou Harbour, sitting on the ocean floor under about twelve meters of water.  It's about sixty meters long, has large wooden propellors -- and signs of fire damage.  As far as most recent sightings, explanations could be a combination of phenomena like St. Elmo's Fire -- luminous electrostatic discharges from ships' masts during stormy weather -- and mistaking fog banks or mirages for distant ships.

Because if you already believe in something, it doesn't take much to act on your imagination and impel you to interpret what you're seeing as something supernatural.

So that's our curious claim for the day.  It's an interesting legend, even though there's probably not much to it in reality.  But if I'm ever visiting the Maritimes and I see a flaming white-and-gold ship out at sea, I'll happily eat my words.

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