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Lost At Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries
A mother pleads with her son not to sail on a certain steamer because she has dreamt - three times in a row - that the vessel will never reach its destination. Modern-day observers watch in awe as a ghost ship - blazing from bow to stern - dutifully reenacts a two-hundred-year-old tragedy that the observers' fathers and grandfathers also watched reenacted with the same sense of awe. A crewman walks past a solitary figure seated in the ship's restaurant only to turn a moment later and find the restaurant empty. A red glow appears in the darkness ahead of a modern warship, and the faint outline of an old galleon, her sails in tatters, is seen approaching against the wind - only to vanish a moment later before the startled eyes of observers.
Such strange events have been seen for centuries and continue to be reported even today by witnesses who are, for the most part, sober and responsible human beings. In Lost at Sea folklore specialist Michael Goss and George Behe, an expert on maritime disasters, explore what lies behind these amazing narratives and enduring legends.
- GenresNonfiction
359 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 10, 2019
This book is SO WEIRD.
It starts out as a discussion of folklore--the Flying Dutchman and so forth--and there's a fascinating couple of chapters about submarines, and then it takes a sudden HARD left into paranormal and psychic phenomena surrounding shipwrecks. Granted that much of the folklore is about ghosts, I still feel like I only barely kept on the road through the turn. It continued to be fascinating, but in a quite different way. They went from stories about shipwrecks to what I guess you might call testimony about shipwrecks. And they ended with the Queen Mary, which is notoriously haunted (I've seen that terrible episode of Unsolved Mysteries) but not a shipwreck at all.
It's a very well written and engaging book; I don't entirely mind that it changed projects in the middle, because I continued to be engaged by it, but either they had a couple of different books that they just sort of smooshed together into one, or their original intentions got hijacked by the Titanic (Behe is the VP of the Titanic Historical Society, so there's a degree to which that's not surprising, either).
Full confession: I loved this book all the way through, because it's weird and morbid and full of ghost stories, but I recognize my own biases here. Nevertheless, five stars.
It starts out as a discussion of folklore--the Flying Dutchman and so forth--and there's a fascinating couple of chapters about submarines, and then it takes a sudden HARD left into paranormal and psychic phenomena surrounding shipwrecks. Granted that much of the folklore is about ghosts, I still feel like I only barely kept on the road through the turn. It continued to be fascinating, but in a quite different way. They went from stories about shipwrecks to what I guess you might call testimony about shipwrecks. And they ended with the Queen Mary, which is notoriously haunted (I've seen that terrible episode of Unsolved Mysteries) but not a shipwreck at all.
It's a very well written and engaging book; I don't entirely mind that it changed projects in the middle, because I continued to be engaged by it, but either they had a couple of different books that they just sort of smooshed together into one, or their original intentions got hijacked by the Titanic (Behe is the VP of the Titanic Historical Society, so there's a degree to which that's not surprising, either).
Full confession: I loved this book all the way through, because it's weird and morbid and full of ghost stories, but I recognize my own biases here. Nevertheless, five stars.
June 8, 2024
This book was so different than I thought it would be. It was tedious. What could be said in a few paragraphs seemed to be debated in a whole chapter. Was it a real ghost. Was it just a coincidence. Interesting, but I did not like how it was written/presented.
February 8, 2014
Written mostly from a perspective of the study of folklore, this covers a range of mysterious events associated with maritime disasters. It starts out well, with interesting coverage of ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman, the haunting of the UB-65, and similar stories. Here, the authors delve into not just the stories, but the reality behind them, and most were of cases that I'd not heard of before, making them especially interesting.
Since the approach is mostly a folklorist's one, it's quite right that they don't always offer explanations for things like encounters with ghost ships. If you don't know the answer, it's better to admit that than to make things up. The writing is perhaps a little dull in places, but, on the whole, this section isn't bad.
The latter part of the book, however, dealing mainly with premonitions of disaster, is a bit of a flop. The authors seem entirely too willing to take things at face value, and to over-estimate how strange some mundane explanations might be. For example, the fact that, during WWI, (at least) one person out of a population of 40 million might happen to have a vague dream about a ship sinking on a night on which, as it happened, something somewhere was being torpedoed isn't even what I'd call a coincidence, still less a plausible account of a paranormal event.
Other pieces of evidence just aren't explained. For instance, the authors say that there's a "strong case" for the a ship called The President having sunk on the same night that an acquaintance of one of the passengers had an undeniably spooky experience - but they never explain what this case is (and, frankly, it's hard to imagine what it even could be).
To be sure, the authors never insist that any given event is paranormal in nature, although this does rather feel like copping out. But I could have done without the prevarication and the weak or non-existent evidence. The first part of the book is better, so why it all falls apart in the last three chapters or so, I have no idea.
Rather disappointing, then, but by no means a loss when taken as a whole. If nothing else, there are some interesting ghost stories and some food for thought about what sort of evidence would suffice for the events described.
Since the approach is mostly a folklorist's one, it's quite right that they don't always offer explanations for things like encounters with ghost ships. If you don't know the answer, it's better to admit that than to make things up. The writing is perhaps a little dull in places, but, on the whole, this section isn't bad.
The latter part of the book, however, dealing mainly with premonitions of disaster, is a bit of a flop. The authors seem entirely too willing to take things at face value, and to over-estimate how strange some mundane explanations might be. For example, the fact that, during WWI, (at least) one person out of a population of 40 million might happen to have a vague dream about a ship sinking on a night on which, as it happened, something somewhere was being torpedoed isn't even what I'd call a coincidence, still less a plausible account of a paranormal event.
Other pieces of evidence just aren't explained. For instance, the authors say that there's a "strong case" for the a ship called The President having sunk on the same night that an acquaintance of one of the passengers had an undeniably spooky experience - but they never explain what this case is (and, frankly, it's hard to imagine what it even could be).
To be sure, the authors never insist that any given event is paranormal in nature, although this does rather feel like copping out. But I could have done without the prevarication and the weak or non-existent evidence. The first part of the book is better, so why it all falls apart in the last three chapters or so, I have no idea.
Rather disappointing, then, but by no means a loss when taken as a whole. If nothing else, there are some interesting ghost stories and some food for thought about what sort of evidence would suffice for the events described.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews