The wreck of the Seabird

One of the difficulties with accepting tales of the paranormal, or even ones where the paranormal isn't explicitly invoked but which fall into the "unsolved mysteries" category, is that humans just love to tell stories.

And embellish them.

Once a claim has gone through a few generations of handing down, it's often hard to tell what about it -- if anything -- is actually the truth.

Take, for example, the story of the Seabird, a sailing vessel that met a very odd fate, reminiscent of the better-documented case of the Mary Celeste.  Here's a typical version:

On a strip of land near Newport, Rhode Island, there was a little settlement known as Easton's Beach.  Only a few farmers and some fishermen and their families made their homes there.

One day in 1880, a fisherman working on his boat near shore suddenly sighted a full-rigged ship of very good size heading straight for land...  [I]t was coming steadily and directly for shore in the on-shore breeze.  He called to the other fishermen nearby and ran to the settlement above the beach to tell the rest of the people about the approaching vessel.

Soon everyone was on the beach, watching in helpless silence as the strange ship came on as though determined to wreck itself, its canvas straining and flags snapping at the mastheads.

With horror the spectators heard the grating of the hull upon the bottom as it struck.  Yet the ship still bore down, keeping straight on course as it cut a keel groove in the sandy ocean bottom.  When it finally came to rest, it was still on an even keel, with the bowsprit almost over their heads.

Then they recognized the ship.  It was the Seabird, under the able command of Captain John Husham.  It had been to Honduras, and was expected that very day in Newport.  Not a sound came from the decks.

At once the crowd went on board to explain the mystery -- but it only deepened.  Coffee still boiled on the galley stove, food for breakfast was on the table, all the navigation instruments and charts were in order.  Yet there was no trace of the crew, nor any indication of when, why, or where they had gone.  The only living thing aboard the Seabird was a mongrel dog shivering on the deck.

The sea had been calm, the breeze fine, and the Seabird had been almost exactly on course for Newport.  The crew must have left only shortly before the ship had appeared on the horizon.  But why should they have left the ship when they were so close to their home and families?  Only Heaven and a mongrel dog knew what had happened aboard the Seabird that sunny morning.

Creepy stuff, right?  And it seems like it should be easy to verify, given that "everyone" from the town witnessed the ship beach itself, and a whole "crowd" of them saw the empty decks for themselves, as well as the peculiar observation of the breakfast food laid out for the crew that indicated that whatever had caused them to vanish had just happened.  It's one of those stories that when you read it, the natural inclination is to say, "There's enough detail here that it has the ring of truth."  The name of the captain, the ship's origin and destination, all sound like stuff that would be simple to verify.  And, after all, there wasn't any wild explanation given; no explanation at all, really.  A ship shows up sans crew, with a dog as the lone survivor.

And thus, the tendency is to believe it must be true.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ronnie Robertson, Ghost Ship IMG 2744 (28440601905), CC BY-SA 2.0]

But the owner of the curious site EsoterX was not content to leave it there.  He started poking around to see what, if any, of the information in the story of the Seabird could be substantiated.  And he found that the version I related above is far from the only one, and that those details -- the same specifics that made the story sound so convincing -- vary greatly from version to version:

This is a fairly rudimentary set of facts, but as I poked into the various accounts of the Seabird, even the simplest plot points of the narrative were found to be in dispute.  The event is variously dated to 1750, 1760, and 1850...   The missing captain was one John Husham.  Or maybe not.  He might have been John Huxham, or perhaps even John Durham of Middletown, Connecticut.  The ship may have refloated itself overnight and sailed away, never to be seen again.  Or, as fairly detailed accounts have it, was salvaged and used commercially for many years after without incident.  Or, was parked in the Newport harbor, where it was later captured by the British and turned into an armed gunboat.

Even the non-human survivors vary; some versions say it was a dog and a cat, others a dog, a cat, and a parakeet.

By this time, whatever truth there may have been to the wreck of the Seabird is probably unrecoverable, tangled up in the inevitable Game of Telephone that occurs when people tell stories.  As EsoterX put it:

Much of human history is oral history, the tales we tell each other around the campfire or by the hearth, but for the past few thousand years we’ve tended to lionize the printed word, shuffling kings and their wars into history, and mysterious accounts passed from generation to generation by word of mouth into folklore.  We substantiate the reality of history by writing it down, but the further in time we creep from events, the less we understand the minds of the men that wrote them, gleaning the odd fact here and there, chuckling at their superstitions, and manipulating the warp and weave of their remembered histories to fill in those annoying plot holes that interrupt our remembered tales.

In other words, a claim like this is only as accurate as the person who tells it -- and the person who told it to them, and the one who told it to them, and on and on back into the mists of the past.  Sometimes we can learn enough from contemporaneous records to reconstruct what actually happened; but sometimes -- as in the case of the Seabird -- the truth is lost as completely as the ship's unfortunate crew members.

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Diseased cannibal rat ship

In the last few days we have a new story circulating in the media, and this has led to considerable buzz on Facebook and Twitter.  Comments I've seen have included, "Yuk," "This is horrible," "Terrifying!," and "The government better do something about this, soon!"

Not once have I seen anyone post my immediate reaction, which was, "Okay, really?"

The story has appeared on various woo-woo websites, but has also made it onto Fox News and The Independent.  Here are excerpts from the version that appeared on Stranger Dimensions, entitled, "Is a Russian Ship Filled With Diseased Cannibal Rats Heading Toward the UK?"

Experts believe a derelict cruise ship that’s been missing for a year may be en route to the U.K. The problem? It’s filled with disease-ridden cannibal rats.

Built in Yugoslavia in 1976, the Lyubov Orlova was a cruise liner that had for many years transported passengers to destinations around the world. Unfortunately, in 2010, the ship was impounded in Newfoundland, Canada and deserted by her crew. Two years later, while being towed to the Dominican Republic to be scrapped, a heavy storm caused the tow-line to break, sending the Lyubov Orlova out to aimlessly wander the North Atlantic Ocean...

Now, a year later, new concerns are being raised that the ship is heading for the U.K.

It’s completely empty, save for the potentially hundreds of diseased rats aboard the ship that have most likely been forced to eat one another to survive.

Diseased cannibal rats!  By the millions!  Waiting for their chance to get onto land, and rush around swarming over and eating innocent British citizens, like a scene from the movie Willard!

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But then we hear what data these "experts" are currently going on:

Over the following months, the Lyubov Orlova was spotted at various locations in the North Atlantic. In one instance last year, satellites found an object near Scotland that may have been the ship, but subsequent searches in the area found nothing...

Discerning readers may point out that the ship’s emergency position-indicating radio beacon had activated off the Kerry coast on March 1, 2013 after presumably being submerged in water, implying that the ship had, indeed, sunk. However, authorities say some of the life-boat emergency signals have yet to activate, and the ship may still be out there, diseased cannibal rats and all.

The ship’s current position is unknown, but due to recent high winds, experts fear the ghost ship may be on a crash course for the British coastline. If they’re right, the Lyubov Orlova is likely to wind up on the west coast of Ireland, Scotland, or southern England. What happens if/when it gets there? I don’t know, but…diseased rats. Can’t be good.  

That's right; there was a beacon signal detected in March of 2013, and it was "maybe" spotted by a satellite later that year -- and no one has had a glimpse of it since then.  The ship's current position is unknown.

Remember a couple of days ago, our discussion of what the word "unknown" means?

But then what went through my mind was: even considering that the ship may be out there, how do they know about the rats?  Were they detected on the satellite, baring their decay-ridden fangs defiantly at the sky?  Okay, presupposing that any ship is gonna have rats, still... how would anyone know that they're diseased cannibal rats?  When the beacon went off, did the people who picked it up hear, in the background, the sound of hoarse, coughing squeaks, as if a diseased rat were being savagely dismembered and eaten by its pack mates?

I know that the whole thing was written for no other reason than to get people stirred up, but what bugs me is that hardly anyone seems to be questioning how the writer of the article knows all of this stuff.

Oh, but to hell with the facts; the diseased cannibal rat ship may still be out there.  And if it may still be out there, then it might be headed for England.

Even the Wikipedia article on the Lyubov Orlova has been contaminated by this silliness; the last paragraph of the article is, "Certain independent researchers and amateur salvage hunters have also stated that a population of rats are on board the vessel, and that in the absence of edible food, the rat population have turned cannibalistic.  The opportunity to study the cannibalistic rats has been welcomed by researchers."  (Although I will say that at least someone appended "citation needed" after this paragraph.)

Well, I think we can do better than this, can't we?  Let's see... back in 1950, a ship called the Phoenix went missing off the coast of Australia.  It was last seen near Darwin, but no word of it was heard from thereafter.  But it could still be out there.  Carrying a load of... cannibalistic kangaroos and feral wombats.  Experts can't be certain that this is wrong.  And maybe by now, it's drifted across the Pacific, and is on a collision course with San Francisco.  What would happen if it ran aground near the Embarcadero, depositing its cargo of hopping, waddling death into the waterfront cafés and shops filled with unsuspecting tourists?

I don't know, but it can't be good.