This Paranormal Life - #201 The Flying Dutchman

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Ahoy mateys! This week Rory and Kit set sail on the seven seas to investigate the worlds most infamous ghost ship... The Flying Dutchman.Patreonpatreon.com/ThisParanormalLifeYouTubeyoutube.com/thisparanormallifeTwittertwitter.com/ThisParaLifeInstagraminstagram.com/thisparanormallifeSecret Society Facebook Pagewww.facebook.com/groups/thisparanormallife/Edited by Kami Tomantomanedits.comResearch by Amy GrisdaleIntro music: www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is it possible to control the weather with your mind? If jellyfish sting you, why don't stingrays jelly you? All of these questions you can find the answer to on This Paranormal Life! Welcome everyone to This Paranormal Life, the comedy paranormal podcast where every week we investigate a brand new paranormal case and come to a conclusion as to whether or not it is truly paranormal my name is roy powers i've been in the professional paranormal sphere for my god 40 years now i think kit you've been in it mike my co-host here kit you've been in for 50 am i right if we're counting the time loop a couple that you got me into a couple years back uh then 90 well the wizard said if i brought along a sacrifice

then they would be able to take my place turned out he just wanted another body in the time loop yeah so he kind of got us both there so don't blame me for that so we're recording with a victim of the wizard outside of space and time right now this room we're recording in is kind of surrounded by some kind of weird gelatinous goo that we can't quite get through and it seems to be some kind of interdimensional membrane it's pretty weird it doesn't really exist in time and space but uh but goddamn the goo is delicious that's all we'll say so we're happy welcome back to this paranormal life as we said this is a comedy paranormal podcast hopefully you've been here before if it's first time, I hope you enjoy this week's episode. We don't like to dilly-dally at the start of the podcast. We like to dive

straight into it. So Kit, I hope you like semen, because we're taking a voyage on the salty waters. It's the 11th of July, 1881. On board the British warship, the HMS Boucante. Among the crew are Princes George and Albert, age 14 and 15. They're in the middle of a three-year voyage with the Royal Navy, under the supervision of their tutor, John Dalton. I hope they're at the beginning of this three... well, how long did you say?

Three-year voyage. Otherwise, they signed up when they were 11 to the Navy. This is just... this is how long things took back in 1881. Right. You know, if you wanted to even go to the shops for some milk, that's a three-year voyage. You were carrying cans of beans and pickled bread. Didn't Christopher Columbus just go out looking for some f***ing spice?

He's supposed to be this master seaman. spice he got he's supposed to be this master uh seaman and he thought he had discovered india when he discovered uh the caribbean they were very confusing times well it's four o'clock in the morning and the future king of england george v is on deck doing his sailing work alongside his fellow seaman we are going to be saying seaman a lot in this episode we just have to move past it all right we're all adults to move past it. All right, we're all adults here. We're talking about sailors. It's a calm morning, and the ocean is still as the crew patrol the boat. But suddenly, the quiet is broken by the lookout stationed at the bow. Sail ho! Sail ho!

Which is warning that another ship can be seen on the water. George and the crew race to the front deck to see what the fuss is about. There on the horizon, they can make out the silhouette of a ship in the distance. But this ship wasn't just passing by. It was sailing right at them. Is it one of ours, Captain? Hard to say, lad. But if it ain't, we'll know soon enough.

He tightened the grip on his pistol. As the ship sailed closer, a cold dread runs through the sailors. They can't believe what they're seeing. The ship is moving at incredible speed, and the mast, sails, and rigging are illuminated with an unearthly red glow. Man the cannons! Brace for an attack! Chaos erupts on the deck, sailors bracing themselves for impact. But moments later, when the crew looked out over the water, the ship is gone. What? There's no trace of it, no hint of wake in the sea ahead.

Oh, they've been drinking seawater again. They're only three years out and they're already drinking seawater. it's easy to turn away the seawater on year one yeah you know not to do that there's plenty of grog down below deck by year two you can't remember if they said drink the seawater or don't drink it honestly it's starting to taste pretty salty and delicious your memory of whether or not you should drink the seawater is starting to faint because of all the seawater you've been drinking. You wake up in the morning, you black out. Next thing you know, you wake up surrounded by seaweed and barnacles.

You went hard on the seawater the night before. It's like, yeah, they told us a lot of things before we left. Don't drink the seawater. That was the most important one. We've been out here for years. And yeah, I've been eating barnacles and I've been drinking seawater, but I'll never drink the seawater. you just said you're drinking seawater you've got a pitcher full of full of seawater as we speak what they had just seen was the ship known as

the flying dutchman so this is a real ship or at least a ship that people knew about? It's a ghost ship that people knew about. In total, 13 men aboard that day say that they saw the ghostly vessel and two nearby ships even flashed messages to ask if they too had seen the mysterious red light. The crew were shaken. They knew it was bad luck to see the Flying Dutchman, but they had no choice but to continue their work. But later that morning,

the seaman who first spotted the Flying Dutchman fell from the top mast and was killed instantly. Whoa! This is a kind of very unlucky omen kicking in right away. What we're about to learn in this podcast is that if you see this ship, this ghostly ship, the Flying Dutchman, it usually means something bad is about to happen. Now I know stories like this are purely told as fantasy and legend, but the best part about this story in particular is that the events are logged in Prince George's actual diary. For those young lads and future King of England, that was a really scary thing to experience

in your first couple of years on the sea. The other sailors and seamen are kind of like taking you under their wing. Ah, this whole gig gets a bad rap, guys. It's actually pretty nice out here. You know, you get to drink as much rum as you want, eat as many barnacles. Sail hole!

Holy ****! The ghost pirates are back. Everyone get your cyanide pills at the ready we're gonna have to kill ourselves prince george here's the biggest rifle we have pointed to the horizon and fire boy he fires the gun launches him off the ship backwards oh false alarm false alarm guys yeah wait george yeah i wonder if when they sent him out they were like oh you know this will put some hair on his chest like spend a couple years at seed and he'll become a real man do you think he he's come back after all these years and they're like hey you're ready to be be a king george and he's ghost white he's seen the afterlife his ship was raided by pirates from another world and he's just like

i am no longer concerned with the mortal realms oh jesus maybe one year was it was enough king george what is your first royal edict as king everyone better start believing in ghost stories because they're living in one okay not really sure what that means we'll do another tax increase though yeah what's your second? Booty! All right, just put him back on the ship. Just send him out again. Come back in three more years. Maybe he'll be f***ing fixed.

His bed in his bedroom is one of those kids' fake pirate ship beds. George's diary reads, The Flying Dutchman crossed our bow. A strange red light, as of a phantom ship, all aglow. At 10.45am, the seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the four topmast cross-trees onto the top-gallant forecastle. He was then buried in the sea. Which I think is fancy talk for, we dumped the corpse off the side of the ship.

Yeah. Like a dead whale. 10.45am. I mean, there's only so much seawater you can drink by then so maybe I gotta give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they really did see what they saw. But did the Flying Dutchman appear just to kill that young man or was it to warn the crew of the impending doom? This is what we're going to investigate today. So Kit how much do you know about the Flying Dutchman? Have you heard of this ghost ship before?

I've heard next to nothing about the Flying Dutchman. Really? This is quite exciting. I'm coming in a bit like an alien observer, unfamiliar with any of the concepts on Earth. I've definitely heard the name before, but I might have been able to hazard a guess it was some kind of ship. But I know nothing other than that. I think it featured, I mean, it's featured in a lot of movies before. Well, I think most people have probably heard of the Flying Dutchman if they're a fan of literature, opera, or SpongeBob SquarePants.

Simply put, it's a ghost ship. It's cursed to sail the seas until the end of time. sail the seas until the end of time. Simply even seeing it is considered a bad omen that can bring about horrifying accidents like the sailor in our story. I feel like the seas are already quite a superstitious place full of the paranormal. There's quite a lot of sea legends, isn't there?

Certain things you should and shouldn't do. Yeah, well, drink the seawater for one. The Kraken, you you know there's like mystical legends cthulhu mystical legends that live in the water that um sailors tell stories about i think they say it's a bad luck to bring a woman on deck is that true i don't know if that one has survived to today's modern age but then also put a woman on the front of the ship yeah Yeah. So that the ocean is kind to her. There is a reason behind that, but I never remember what it is. But yeah, it's full of these kind of superstitions.

I mean, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? It's like you're never more vulnerable as a human being than on a giant plank of wood with 50 other people, thousands of miles from civilization and land. So you're going to want to do everything you can, even if it means praying to every god that's ever lived. All the sea gods. To ensure your safety. Poseidon, Aquaman. Who's the f***ing guy from Baywatch?

Oh, David Hasselhoff? David Hasselhoff. Surfing Pikachu, personally. At least in this case of the first story, you'd be kind of psyched that if the bad thing that this ship had showed up to predict was just that one of the crew was going to fall and die oh yeah because it can't get any worse than the flying dutchman showing up yeah so you survived you survived the omen and you know the guy falls from the the mast and you're going to be like oh my god steve i think he's dead i think do you think that was it though do you think that's

why they showed up because i mean it's a tragedy really is I love the guy you know I love the guy but I'm gonna get a quick head count because if it's just Steve then actually we got off pretty pretty light they thank God in heavens because that's like I mean it's a tragedy I know he had like a wife and kids back on shore but um do you think that's what it was there for do you think it because then do you think we're actually all fine and the wife and kids I mean sure they're like miss him but like no miss him i mean he wasn't he wasn't a great guy so because i mean look steve dying yeah that's a tragedy that's up here but i mean the whole boat

going down anything could have happened the whole we could have all been at the bottom of the ocean by now the ship could have sank you know we have down below deck we got like 20 crates of bananas those things are like gold bars i gold bars in the 1800s. I'll be honest. Even if the Flying Dutchman hadn't arrived, I might have killed Steve. He had this look about him. I think he had it coming. That's when sailors have been on the ocean for too long.

They're saying their crewmates have got a dirty look about them. The Flying Dutchman is known to glow in the dark and is usually seen in full sail even on the stormiest of conditions when other ships have their sails tightly furled wow in most legends the ship just appears as if it rises from beneath the waves bursting to the surface that's terrifying it's really terrifying something that size bursting out from underneath the waves. This also really creeped me out. Sailors have also seen it zooming along with full sails without a breath of wind in the air. Jesus. You sometimes forget that boats needed wind.

I mean, that's how they worked. That's how the whole thing worked. So, yeah. I mean, they didn't have motors or propellers or oars. You know, it was kind of just like, hope it's windy today. Yeah, that's how they got everywhere it's crazy it's actually surprisingly in recent years become like a new topic of conversation as everything in the world goes full circle that i don't know the coolest

thing that young people can be is now like a baker uh right right or a farmer um the same way they've worked out that one of the best ways we could cut greenhouse emissions and our co2 footprint is start using the wind again and that all those giant cargo ships uh that burn like a million puppies a day or whatever it takes right to get across the world if they just put sails on them they could sail for free i mean i don't know why that seems like much more alluring uh job if they just gave it like a pirate coating yeah like i have no desire at all to work on a cargo ship to just leave and go country to country delivering shipping containers but if i get to wear an eyepatch and a little peg leg then yeah sure i'll quit my job right now if i have to cut an eyepatch and a little peg leg, then yeah, sure. I'll quit my job right now. If I have to cut off my leg to get the peg leg, that's not really an issue.

You know you're just going to show up day one with the f***ing pirate hat, burst out of the Uber and be like, Yaha, ye salty dogs! And the boss is like, we just added sales. We're not doing any of the other pirate stuff. We're still just normal people. Oh. Oh.

So you're just your regular dogs, eh? At least the rum thing though, right? No, no, no. If you get caught drinking on the job, you're fired. Alcohol is not prohibited on the premises. Yar!

I'll be getting an Uber home then. You get in the Uber so they just hear through the windows couldn't you at least play some sea shanties on the way home? What are you waiting for you land

lovers it's like four middle-aged men a busy dock full of guys in high-vis jackets yeah we're shipping uh 5 000 reams of fiberglass to japan your job is health and safety pirates do not recognize health and safety on board the ship it's been 45 days and they're like this is this is dangerous the the surfaces are slippy we've had three men almost lose their lives oh well they should have known what they're getting onto the little scallywags it's like this is your job you're the one supposed to be protecting these people so it's a mutiny is it pulls out a cutlass oh how did you get that on board kills everyone on deck has no idea how to sail a cargo ship by the way who is this guy all right instead of long John Silver, he's Short John Bronze of the bootleg pirate. So we know what the ship looks like, but where did it come from? Why is it sailing?

Well, the legend goes that the Flying Dutchman was once part of the fleet belonging to the Dutch East India Trading Company. In true colonial fashion, it sailed from Amsterdam to the East Indies, where it loaded up on the resources of less developed countries to sell to the wealthy Europeans. Yeah, not everyone knows this. Everyone thinks, oh, the British, they took over India. It was actually a private company. It was the East India Company. Yeah. How's that fair?

They were pirates. A corporation. Turns out if you just call yourself a corporation, you can do whatever you want. Pirates should have called themselves pirate industries and that would have been totally legal. Yeah, these guys sailed around ganking all the important resources from every other country with almost zero consequences. Sure. With almost zero consequences. Sure.

But on one fateful voyage, stubborn old Captain Hendrik van der Decken was keen to get back to Holland ASAP. Stormy sees be damned. He refused to stop at Cape Town on the way home and decided to take the closest possible path around the coast of South Africa. This is some classic, it's 1am, he had a couple beers at the pub and he's like, nah, nah, nah It's alright. I can drive I got I got a piss so we need to get back home ASAP. Yeah His friends are trying to take the keys away, but he's the captain you can't take the keys away to the boat He's gonna leave without you the keys to the boat. What would they even do now? This is a particularly dangerous route Even in the best conditions as they sailed around the rocky headlands, the weather began to worsen,

and the ship was tossed side to side, narrowly avoiding the jagged rocks below. Captain VD struggled to keep control of the vessel. Captain, she's too stormy. We have to go back. Hold your post! That's an order! But Captain! Unless you want a cutlass in your belly, hold your post! That's an order! But Captain! Unless you want a cutlass in your belly, hold your post! I thought you said these were businessmen. Well, things get pretty piratey real fast when you set sail on the open seas, alright?

When the rocks are jaggedy and the waves are tossed you from side to side, you get a lilt to your accent. As soon as that ship leaves dock even steve jobs himself would swig the rum and whip out a flintlock pistol firing it into the sky the captain wanted to keep going but he was outnumbered the crew knew the only way they'd ever get this ship turned around was to take control so they drew their swords and surrounded the captain. So it's a mutiny, is it? Well, come on then! One way or another, we'll all be joining Davy Jones!

He drew his sword and the fight commenced. During the commotion, Captain VD managed to kill the leader of the rebels. He looked around at his crew with venom in his eyes. Listen here, you filthy mutineers. I'm going to sail around the Cape, even if it takes me till the day of judgment. Whoa! I feel like... Someone's been drinking the salt water.

What does this guy need to do? Does he have an overdue DVD that needs to go back to the rental place? Like, why does he need to get back this bad? I think he's just fired up at this point. He's just like, I don't even give a shit if any of you want to go home. We're doing things my way. And if you don't, you're going to end up like Chris over here.

This is sometimes you got to know when to take the L. Exactly. You know what I mean? You're the boss until you're not the boss anymore. As he cried out those words the bloodied body of the lead rebel went overboard and hit the water sealing in the ship's fate forever now there are a few variations of the story in some stories the devil actually appeared on the ship in others there's a clause where every seven years, Captain VD is allowed to go back on land for one night.

And if he finds the love of a good woman, the curse of the Flying Dutchman will be broken and the crew will be freed. That just sounds like, to me, a really good way of chatting someone up at the local tavern. Right. Being like, look, baby, I don't just say this to any girl but i'm actually the pirate captain of a ghost ship and if we don't hook up i need the love of a good woman baby or else the team i'm sorry well most days 364 days i'm a ghost but today i'm all man baby one variation says that in order to make sure he arrived in the indies in just 90 days the captain made a deal with the devil condemning the returning journey to last forever either way

the devil's involved i think the idea is that the the devil steps in at some point and whatever the turmoil or the tragedy that happened on board the ship it is cursed to forever roam this part of the ocean endlessly until doomsday wow yeah it's pretty grim especially because i feel like the the crew really got dragged in that whole situation yeah there was probably one guy who was just like mopping the deck while the rebels were attacking the captain you know and then he comes out like hey i was thinking of tuna tonight for dinner do you guys when the captain just stabs him in the belly another mutiny here is it tuna is it yeah you make a great point i don't know how many cases of curses we've had on this paranormal life where uh 90 of the people involved

had absolutely no choice over it bystanders i guess they did the majority of them did turn against the captain so that's kind of i guess an act of defiance but i guess they did the majority of them did turn against the captain so that's kind of i guess that's an act of defiance but i mean they were in the right so i don't know now these stories all are quite similar but there are different stories surrounding the ship that aren't all the same in fact one crew's testimony was published in the blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine in 1821. Wow. The story said, while sailing around the infamous Cape of Good Hope, the wind died down and the sailors were stuck on the spot.

With a thunderstorm brewing in the horizon, the crew were eager to get moving again. That's when a young sailor named Tom Willis spotted a rowboat gently drifting towards the ship. The boat shortly arrived, and four men were helped aboard. But something was wrong. The men looked old and weather-beaten, like they'd been drifting at sea for years. One of them spoke. We have some letters to send. Would you kindly post them for us? We've been at sea for such a

long time. We miss our families terribly. The captain took a look at the letters, but they were so old that they were addressed to places that didn't exist anymore. The captain said, I'm sorry to tell you, but these streets aren't around anymore. I can't deliver these letters.

Please, this one is for my beloved wife. I'm sorry. It's most likely that her head now lies under a tombstone wow harsh just take the letters yeah no worries bud i'll post them as soon as i get back first class baby i'll do it in no time i know what do they have to lose oh that dead old bint she's probably sucking on worms six foot under you've been gone for so long she could have remarried six times the men began to cry and said if they would not take the letters that they would just leave them on the ship they tried to offer the

parcel to the rest of the crew but each crew drew back as it was offered, so they simply left them on the deck of the ship. The crew watched as the rowboat gently floated away, heading towards a dark, glowing boat out by the storm front. What? Yeah, this seems like it's the crew of the Flying Dutchman leaving the ship and being like, dude, can you send these? I guess we can't do it on our boat because we're in the ghost dimension, but please send these letters to our loved ones. And this crew were like, I'm not even going to touch these letters. Interesting. A lot going on there. A lot to unpack that these crewmen were, I guess, human enough that the human crew of this ship didn't notice any difference.

Yeah, I would say that, you know, when we think of a ghost ship, we think of it's see-through. It's flying in the clouds, maybe just all green. I think, you know, this ship, even though it's called a ghost ship, its main kind of properties are that it can appear out of nowhere. Yeah. It seems like the crew, even though they're just old and weather-beaten, they're not made of skeletons. They kind of just resemble. Because I'm very much picturing Pirates of the Caribbean. Of course, yeah.

When the moonlight shines on them, they are skeletons. You best start believing in ghost stories, of course. Because you're in one. I mean, it's a different story if four skeletons arrived on your ship and tried to get you to send a letter. They're getting blasted. You're pointing a cannon at that robot you're not letting them aboard after the ship had disappeared the crew couldn't believe what they had witnessed if it wasn't for the letters still placed on the deck they would have thought it was all a dream below the deck the crew debated for hours what to do with the letters some said they they should be delivered. Tom Willis said that they should harpoon them

and toss them off the ship. Eventually, the ship's carpenter said, let no one touch them. The way to do with the letters from the Flying Dutchman is to case them upon the deck by nailing boards over them so that if he sends back for them, they're still here to give them.

Where are these places that don't exist anymore is this like narnia teletubby land basically the um the story i mean you can read the story that was actually published in this magazine in 1881 or no what did i say 1821 1821 200 years ago i mean that should tell you something that it's borderline it's unreadable the english is so old that uh it's really hard to kind of make your way through that article but i believe in the story one of the addresses is to a place in amsterdam and the captain knows the street and he's like it doesn't exist anymore there used to be a church there it's all torn down it's all been uh redone hmm wow yeah spooky stuff i'm not trying to poke holes in this but uh it'd be

interesting to know i mean this story is a ship all right and if you poke too many holes it goes down so actually be careful so actually actually don't turn this into a mutiny because you're gonna get a cutlass in your belly i did bring a cutlass to the podcast and i am inclined to use it so maybe watch yourself i'm just wondering that it probably did actually genuinely happen to sailors that were away for many years and then things would change a lot in the time that they were gone oh yeah yeah yeah i mean if you're at sea for three years god things were changing so rapidly back then you could go out come back and it's a whole different place The local council would just assume you were dead, sell all your shit, and demolish your house.

You go out sailing for like two weeks, you come back and they're like, we got iPhones now. Things are moving fast. You guys got to catch up. So the crew all agreed. But as they gathered the materials needed to nail the letters to the deck,

the wind finally returned to their sails, blowing the letters down into the ocean. That makes sense. Yeah. I think there's something quite nice about that where it's like when the wind returns to your sails and everything goes back to normal, the ghost letters are also like cast aside. Like you can't have both. That's a nice metaphor. Yeah, I think it's kind of sweet.

Also a nice way to be like, whoa, dude, sorry, man. We wanted to deliver the letters, but the winds just took them down. It's not our fault, Mr. Flying Dutchman. I do like their kind of, it's like the way in America people get served documents. I love this kind of attitude of like, whoa, I ain't touching it. You can't say I accepted it. And the Flying Dutchman crew are like, I'm so close to getting rid of this curse. Take the document.

the flying dutchman crew are like i'm so close to getting rid of this curse take the document yeah it's it's kind of sad where um you have to be that suspicious when encountering a ghost crew because you don't know the context of the curse i wouldn't have even let them on board the ship maybe that's what it is now maybe you're the flying dutchman and they're just four dudes on board you're on board your ghost ship you to be very very careful that's why you never take anything from a ghost yeah you know if there's one just being like oh it's so great that you can see me i've been alone for so many years this is great um do you want this amulet do you want this amulet i just found it that's weird for someone i just met why you'd be so generous as to give me what looks like a pretty expensive amulet? No, well, that's just the token of how much it means for me to have a friend. You're a ghost.

Why do you even have a physical item? I don't think I'd even suit the amulet. And people start asking questions as to where I got such a nice ancient amulet. I was Egypt. It originated from Egypt in a tomb. If you could wear it, though, make sure you put it on and say Ramnas for us on tomb. Okay. If you could just say those words.

We'll just make you happy if I just take it, okay? I'm just going to put it in my pocket. No, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. I'm actually going to need that back then if you're not going to wear it. No, I mean, it was a gift. You said it was like a lovely gift because you appreciate me so much.

This was a waste of time. He doesn't even disappear he just walks over and grabs it he reaches through your pocket hey that's my personal space bud you see him just two streets down hey do you want an amulet put on the amulet wow it's so amazing that you can see me yeah now say the ros no sporadic free at last Now I know what you're thinking. What good is a bunch of old legends from some drunken barnacle-encrusted seaman? Well, the ship is destined to sail until Judgment Day, so there have been a number of sightings, even over the last hundred years.

In 1911, a whaling ship almost collided with the Flying Dutchman before she vanished in front of them. It's kind of nuts to think that it's still a long time ago, but almost a hundred years after all the stories we've just heard. Oh yeah. It's still going on. And there's more. 1923, members of the British Navy saw the Flying Dutchman and gave documentation to the Society for Physical Research, SPR. Fourth Officer Stone wrote an account of the 15-minute sighting on January 26th. Second Officer Bennett also witnessed the ship. Stone drew a picture of the Phantom and Bennett corroborated his account. Wow.

In the Second World War, Karl Donitz, the senior commander of Nazi Germany's fleet of U-boats, noted a sighting in his log. 1941, people at Glen Karn Beach sighted the Phantom ship

that vanished before she crashed into the rocks. There's so many! There's been a lot of sightings. Granted, I think 1942 was the last one that I could find, but that's still pretty recent. Yeah, that is interesting. Boating has probably died down a bit since then.

Yeah, I guess that's a really good point. You could, it'd be interesting to see a graph of the amount of sightings versus the amount of actual sailboats out there. A graph to see if there's any correlation between the amount of seawater drunk to the amount of sightings of the ship uh also uh worryingly i'd like to see the graph of um the adoption of personal cameras versus sightings of the flying dutchman watch it well one of these was world war ii right so that was around the time of cameras yeah not like pocket cameras though

now that's very true i don't think if you were a commander of nazi germany's fleet of u-boats you were taking a lot of selfies because that's some pretty incriminating shit now disappointingly there is a possible boring scientific explanation behind the ship sight sightings, which as professionals, we're obliged to talk about, of course. Legally after the fake news trials of 2020. It's called Fata Morgana and it's all about the physics of light. Just like how heat lines rise from a desert road, this phenomenon makes blurry shapes appear on the horizon. Now, different temperatures in the air

rising from the ocean cause light to reflect and blah blah blah fancy words that basically form what looks like a ghost ship that's cool you can tell my heart wasn't in this my heart wasn't in the scientific explanation it's uh it seems quite hard just right off the bat to imagine this could give rise to a multi-sail ghost ship leaping from underneath the ocean with pirates aboard and crewmen sailing to other ships on little dinghies and handing over letters. Yeah, usually an optical illusion means you see like a figure on the horizon not a half man half skeleton handing you a letter to his dead wife that's where it's like you know things are getting a little too real wow the light is so weird at the moment you've got a cutlass to your throat yeah there's a a pirate's ghostly flintlock barrel in your mouth and you're like,

it's actually called Fata Morgana. These are simply a loop. Do not worry, my friends. Boom. Skull explodes. This also might make sense as to why a ghost ship appears and disappears without a trace. When Fata Morgana occurs, the object is actually much further away than it appears to the observer. So by the time you reach the spot you thought it was, it's already gone. Kind of like a rainbow, you know? You can never really reach the object.

There's also some speculation that instead of ghost ships, people were spotting abandoned ships floating aimlessly, especially in the olden days. Apparently this was such a common thing in the olden days, especially around South Africa, that they were nicknamed Cape Flyaways. Wow. Yeah, which is really cool to think that at one point in time they were just abandoned ships kind of floating in the ocean. I guess for every time you've heard the phrase abandoned ship, there has to be an abandoned ship somewhere. That's a really good point. Usually at that point, the story follows the soldiers and the sailors.

It doesn't stay with the ship. Yeah, a certain percentage of times, the sailors were wrong and the ship wasn't going down at all. Because that's one of those terms, you know, like fire, fire. If you hear it, you don't even have to see the fire yeah you have to leave the building same with abandoned ship it could be like 2 a.m and someone as a goof is just like abandoned ship and you're like well all right here we go i like you're rubbing your eyes as you're jumping off the deck you know you just know there were some sleepy nights where uh you know some sailors were below deck and be like oh i'm starving do we have any

any snacks going someone's like we have a uh a bag of chips abandoned ship abandoned ship oh no no fire comes out of nowhere what in terms of the flying dutchman being a bad omen as we mentioned before being a sailor in the 1800s probably wasn't the safest line of work anyway. Whether or not a ghost ship was arriving, people were probably dropping left, right and center. Rory, I appreciate you trying to inject a little bit of realism into these pretty fanciful claims of a widespread and widely seen ghost ship but uh it does still feel like we've got a kind of incongruous pairing of experiences versus explanations rarely uh are they is there such a massive gulf between the two normally you know it's like oh someone saw the figure of a white ghost walking down this lane but on the other hand sometimes these uh deer walk down that street

and in at night you might it might look like a little ghost right right whereas here it's like a trick of the light could explain a phantom ghost ship yeah i guess well i mean there's different levels to these sightings and these experiences and And as we said, some of them can be explained by these optical illusions, these mirages. But at other times, when your ship is being raided by the crew of the Flying Dutchman, I mean, that's not a mirage.

And if you were reading this story, a story which, as I said, was published in official articles in the 1820s i mean that carries with it a bit of believability i think it's uh it's definitely an interesting story because you know we've covered we've covered haunted vehicles before ghost cars ghosts on a plane um and we've even covered some haunted ships before in the past. But I feel like ghost ships are kind of like its own genre, you know, in the pirate world. And they're so fun to talk about because they usually have these amazing stories behind them and this lore, which definitely helps the fact that these stories were being passed along by men who were out at sea for huge amounts of time. You know, and would probably dock, go to

these taverns and tell these tales of the encounters that they had. And I think there's something really cool and interesting about that. You know, maybe you were out at sea for three or four years and you have just been dying to get a big pint of beer and go chat with all the locals. And when you sit down, you're like, we got to tell you about this crazy experience we had. We saw this ship that came out of nowhere. It sailed away faster than we could even reach it. Those are great stories. And you know that other pirates on the other table at the same bar from a different ship are trying to one-up the story? Yeah.

It's like, oh, you saw him from a distance? Well, they actually boarded ours. They actually boarded ours and we hung out. He had a cutlass stuck up my ass. That's kind of weird that's they recruited me to their ghost ship i had to scrub the ghost toilets which are pretty pretty real by the way but if i could just get the love of a good woman i swear everyone's left oh shit look we're kind of dancing around the subject here let's we need to come down on a conclusion today our story the flying dutchman i mean what are you thinking kit

well done my friend thank you it's been quite an investigation a real rip roaring ride we never get to go places um quite as exciting as this, as a journey across the world. That's why I went full out with the acting, with the sound effects. I wanted these people to feel like they were on board the ship themselves. Absolutely.

And we did. I feel I can taste the salt water. We are left with a predicament, of course. It really becomes a he-said-she-said between a nerd scientist and the salty sea dogs who've been at sea for far too long.

So, you know, I don't know which type of people I hate more. I don't know who I should believe. As chief investigator, what do you think? I think it's a tough story. As you said, it's a choice between the nerds of the world and the well-traveled jacked salty seaman the chads versus the virgins if you will precisely i will just let you know once again that i did bring my flintlock pistol with me to the podcast so just be careful with what how you decide to conclude

this because i don't know i have a personal i have a personal what the does that mean though i have a personal connection with this case you really how do you have a personal connection with the case you bought a gun that's your connection look look i have family in tybee that means nothing georgia pirate capital of america okay so actually maybe tread lightly okay or i will use the flintlock pistol. To be fair, as, you know, Northern Irish people, particularly it feels like any Northern Irish person with kind of fair or red hair or anything. We definitely come from some amount of Vikings, which is pretty fun because they are pretty much ancient pirates. Yeah, that's very true. So there's a lot of people out there in the uk and beyond that have uh pirate roots that's why i also brought my two-handed okay so if the flintlock

doesn't do the job i'll finish off with the axe so i don't know how i can win here to be honest i think with this case uh i absolutely love it all right and i do hand off the pistol yeah continue and i trust a lot of the people who have made claim to seeing the flying dutchman awesome i'll take the bullet out as well this process takes like five minutes so just take your time however what i do think these people have been at sea for a long time. Put the bullet back in. The oral tradition. I don't know how to load this thing. Oh my God. Jesus Christ.

The safety's on. How do you get the safety on? My family and friends that I love them. Tell my wife I love her. Jesus. All right. I missed. That was your one bullet, I'm guessing.

Give me 45 minutes. I'll have this thing. Oh, it's a cannonball. There is a american football sized hole in my wall i'm too weak to lift the axe as well the kick from the pistol almost broke your arm shattered my elbow at the same time as you explain rory these people lived and breathed an oral tradition that is similar to the kind of myths and legends of the ancient past, but they lived it just 100 or 200 years ago.

Very true. And so I think I might have to assume that this is a bit more the world of myth and legend than reality. I think that's fair. And you know what? I don't think there's anything wrong with covering those types of stories on the podcast. You know, sometimes it's fun to dive into the world of myth and legends, especially one this interesting and really refreshing. This was a really fun case to even present today because it's such a different backdrop than the cases that we're usually used to. So, hey, I had a blast. Even if we're coming down on a double note, we had a really fun time.

It's always fun to talk like a pirate. I hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode too. Rory's got the axe inches from my neck, by the way. Thank you for listening to this week's episode, folks. I hope you had a great time and enjoyed it. Thank you, of course, to our editor, Cammie Thoman, and researcher, Amy Grisdale. We will be back next week with a brand new paranormal tale.

Ow!