Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The SS Ourang Medang

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

We love our ghost ships here at SYSK and this is one of the better ones. But did it really even exist? Not likely. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the homestretch, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun,

thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, Chuck and Josh. Giddy up on short stuff. That's right. This is another fun tale of a ghost ship.

Ghost ships are just a lot of fun to talk about. And this is the tale of a ghost ship that may or may not even exist. That's a big one. But one thing for sure, one thing is for sure is that this story has influenced a lot of pop culture, I feel like. Yeah, at the very least it showed up as a video game in 2019, a horror game. I was watching a four hour YouTube video where this YouTuber just basically narrated,

I guess added commentary here or there to this four hour gameplay. Really something. So you didn't just watch the trailer of the game, you watched actual four hours. I did, I did. I mean, I didn't watch the whole four hours, no, I skipped ahead and it was cute. Oh, okay.

It was kind of fun, but yeah, I know I probably watched. Five minutes total of the whole thing, just skipping around, but it looks very scary. It looks like a really cool game. If I played games, I would definitely go get it. It's called The Man of Medan. And the reason it's called The Man of Medan is because that's the English translation from the Indonesian for the name of the ship, Urang Medan. And the reason it's called the Man of Medan is because that's the English translation

from the Indonesian for the name of the ship, Urang Medan. Urang in Indonesian means man, which is why orangutans are called that. They're forest men, I think we've said before. So the name of the ship in English was Man of Medan, which is a city on Sumatra. That's right. And it looks like a very scary game about people that get up on this ghost ship and have to contend with ghosts. So what happened with the SS Orang Medan was that, well, here's the story.

It depends on, there's some hinkiness that goes on with the dates and we'll explain why in a minute. But either 1947 or 1948, or maybe even 1940 as we'll see, there was a Dutch freighter ship named the Orang Medan that's in an SOS picked up by some nearby ships, including the Silver Star, an American ship, in the Straits of Malacca where all it said was this, we float, all officers including Captain dead, lying in chart room and on bridge,

probably whole crew dead, I die. That is a creepy message. The only way it could be creepier is if it said, we all float down here. Or, I'm right behind you. You're right. So, this was like the SOS, the distress call, is if it said, we all float down here. Or I'm right behind you. Right. So this was like the SOS, the distress call and that silver star, like you said, was, was close enough that it arrived to help the orang-medan.

And when it arrived, it was, it, you could basically just tell looking at it, that it was a ghost ship and Chuck, Chuck, before we go into detail, I say that we take a break. What do you think? Oh, an early break, okay. Okay. Let's do it, suspenseful early break. Mm-hmm. ["Suspenseful Early Break"]

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Estet Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God.

We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Lorie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. As the US elections approach, it can feel like we're angrier and more divided than

ever. But in a new, hopeful season of my podcast, I'll share what the science really shows that we're surprisingly more united than most people think. We all know something is wrong in our culture, in our politics, and that we need to do better and that we can do better. With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, It's really tragic. If cynicism were a pill, it'd be a poison. We'll see that our fellow humans,

even those we disagree with, are more generous than we assume. My assumption, my feeling, my hunch, is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way to disagree and still be in relationships with each other. All that on the Happiness Lab. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you said, when they floated up to this thing, they could tell that something was awry. There was clearly no activity on the boat. There was no steam coming from the engines, no smoke.

They said, hmm, does someone wanna go check and see what's going on with that thing? And everyone said, not me, not it, not it. And there was one guy that was eating some sea rations, looked up and went, what? So he went aboard and what he found supposedly were people on deck, frozen in place, with their fearful looks on their faces, their eyes wide open, their mouths stretched in

like they were screaming, even a dog in mid-snarl, all frozen. Immediately, I thought of another pop culture thing, this reference. Did you see this season's, this year's True Detective Night Country? I think so, right? I tried to, and I couldn't make it past the first episode. Oh, God, it was so good, dude. I know, you said that, and I just, I didn't see it. Maybe you should have watched more than the first episode. Well, that's what I'm saying. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see the contours of it

being great. I actually was like, I can't watch this. In your mind's eye, you didn't see how it could have been good possibly after that? No. Believe me, I know stuff. I can figure stuff out. Well, did you see enough to see the influence here for Night Country? Was that in episode one? Yeah, I think it was in episode one where they show up and yeah, it's a similar thing, sure. Yeah.

It was part of the thing, part orang-madam, I think for sure. Yeah. Well put. Oh, you want me to take over? So I also saw. Mr. TV critic. I also saw that the people, all of the corpses

were described as having their arms outstretched as if they were trying to fend off some unseen something, but there was no trace of anything on the ship that would have suggested what had happened to this crew and the dog. And, um, they hooked up, I guess, a tow line from the Silver Star to the Arang Medan and they started to tow it. But before it could get, um, anywhere, the thing

caught fire and actually blew up. And so any trace of the Orang Medan and its mystery sank to the bottom of the Straits of Malacca and became enshrined in sea shanties from that moment on. That's right, but was this even a real ship at all? No. We're not gonna take a break and find out. We're gonna talk about it right now.

Yeah, I guess we should have done it like that, Shay. No, it's fine. It seems like this probably was completely fabricated. There's never been a shipping record of that vessel. No, like, living human ever came forward and said, hey, this, like, I was that person eating the sea rations that got shoved aboard this thing. There were also, depending on when the article came out, there were varying details that were different, which is always sort of a giveaway that it could be fabricated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the fact that there's like different dates, different locations,

that kind of stuff, it's, at the very least, the thing's been embellished as we understand it today. And there was a researcher named Estelle Hargraves who found the first mention of this story all the way back in 1940, a good seven or eight years before the story supposedly took place. This was during World War II and it was a British merchant ship, not an American ship, that came to help out. But the thing that does bear resemblance to the following stories was that the ship exploded and there was no trace of anything or any evidence that could have explained what happened. Yeah, this one was kind of fun because I was on Reddit looking at some like theories and stuff just for fun and someone said hey I think I've figured this thing out. Like everybody knows this is probably a hoax

but I think I've actually got the paper trail and figured out who this was. And I was like oh interesting and I started to read it. It was Estelle Hargraves on Reddit. Oh really? Yeah it was that researcher. I was like oh oh, okay, well, that makes sense. So what'd she say? What was, what's the explanation? Well, it's the same explanation that we have here, which is it's laid at the feet of one single person, not just like a bunch of people that like kind of made up this lore.

It was actually, at least Estelle has put it out, that it's a reporter named Silvio Shirley, S-H-E-R-L-I, and wrote this thing in 1940 and then wrote about it again in 1948 as supposedly the first time that it had happened, which, and you know, it was the same name, so it had to be the same person. Okay, so I guess he's the culprit, right? Well, it seems like it. Well, okay, so there were some other parts to this story that Shirley added.

There was a 1948 Dutch-Indonesian newspaper called Der Lokomotief, and this was the one where we get the story as we kind of recognize it today. But one of the extra things that gets left off these days is that there was one survivor from the Orang Medan who washed up on the shore of one of the Marshall Islands, was found by a missionary and told the story that the ship was actually carrying illicit cargo. That's why no one can ever find any record of the ship was actually carrying illicit cargo. That's why no one can ever find any record of the ship. It's because they didn't want to be found.

And that the cargo, sulfuric acid or nitroglycerin or something, either like off gassed and killed the crew or blew the ship up or both. That's right. And this missionary supposedly told this story to that writer, Silvio Sherley. It's interesting that this article says like no one can be sure that it was Sherley who made the 1940 report, but I think this is old because online like this Estelle Hargraves posted like screenshots of the actual 1940 articles with his name. Yeah, but everybody knows she's always headed out for Sylvia O'Shaerley, so can that be

trusted in this day and age of deep fakes and AI and stuff? Yeah, that's a good point. But it seems like it didn't even exist at all and it maybe was this like writer writing about it a couple of times and embellishing it even more the second time to see if it gets more steam? I don't know. Yeah. Full steam ahead. So do you want to hear a little interesting tidbit? A little appendem? By the way, no one knows if this is true, but it's almost certainly not. And if it is, it has taken on some shapes where you can barely recognize the actuality of her pick it out, but

We based this off of a how stuff works article on it, correct? Correct. I went among other things. You're right I went and read an additional article on all things interesting including some others But in the all things interesting article it referenced the house of works article that this was based on Ergo the universe will collapse on itself soon. Amazing. Chuck said amazing. I'm not going to press my luck, so I'm just going to end this now.

Short Stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.