Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 44: Ghost Ships

Starting point is 00:00:00 Are you talking? I'm not talking. No. Oh, okay. You want me to talk? Yeah. Start going. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:08 I'll start going. Hello and welcome to Well Scares Your Problem, a podcast about spooky engineering disasters with slides which are also spooky. I'm Justin Scarey-Rosniak. I'm trying to think if it goes not yet. Scarey-Rosniak. My pronouns are boo and yikes. I am Scarey Alice-Called-Vo-Kelly and my pronouns are...

Starting point is 00:00:50 And... Fuck, I was gonna... All right. I am Liam Anderson. You wouldn't even go for like... Fuck, now I'm trying to think of one. Liam Murdersen. Liam Murdersen.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Yeah. That's right. That's a hobby. Bloody Liam. If you say your name three times, you appear in the mirror. I do, but I just ask for drinks and snacks. Not like Casper. I'm not a friendly ghost.

Starting point is 00:01:24 Like if you don't get me the requisite drinks and snacks, you will be murdered. But I need them and then you don't get murdered. My pronouns are jinkies and yikes. Rot-Row. Rot-Row. I hope you're all enjoying the seasonal flavor that this podcast is taking because it is spooky season. We are recording this on the spookiest night of the year, Halloween.

Starting point is 00:01:54 It's 12.47pm here and I haven't been murdered by apparitions, so roll tide, baby. Is that what they're calling the Philly police these days? It's an incredibly dark and windy night right here. The rain is washing off of the windows and I'm just like, yeah, no, this is fine. Actually, time to record a podcast about being scary with my scary friends. Yes. Liam, you're a bit quiet still. You're a bit quiet.

Starting point is 00:02:19 That was a little bit better. Just being mad the whole time. It would be fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's my shtick. I just scream at people. All right. So today we're going to talk about a special subject.

Starting point is 00:02:27 We're going to cover three instances. We're going to talk about ghosts. Yes. Spectral sloops. Haunted hulks. Paranormal penises. Spooky schooners. Ghoul-ish gondolas.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghost. Ghost. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts.

Starting point is 00:03:23 Ghosts. Stay Dul Juanado. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghost. Ghosts. Ghosts. ani.

Starting point is 00:07:21 Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghost. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts.

Starting point is 00:19:07 Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghost. Ghost.

Starting point is 00:19:19 Ghost. Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Please tell the company the ship has no anchor, otherwise we're good, right? But he also reported the crew was milling around on a quarter deck where they weren't supposed to be. Says who? Like, who says there's not allowed, you know?

Starting point is 00:20:24 Maybe they're just having a nice time. Don't shame them for that. That's a good point. Yeah, I mean, probably shouldn't probably shouldn't snitch on the crew. Yeah. That's right. No snitching even a hundred years later. Yeah, snitches get spooky stitches. Thank you. So, now on January 31st, the ship was sighted off a Cape Hatteras, right? It's another part of the North Carolina Outer Banks. After it had rammed itself directly into Diamond Shoals and grounded itself, right?

Starting point is 00:21:02 OK. It had some distress signals on. There were two red lights which were high up in the rigging. Those were the distress signals. Also extremely spooky to just be coming at this thing at night. And like the Outer Banks, which is spooky as hell anyway, just naturally. Fuck, man. No, no, thank you. I'm not getting on that ship. I was I was very confused because this is a sailing ship. I don't know where the electricity was coming from.

Starting point is 00:21:33 I mean, that's a good question, actually. Maybe they had like gas lanterns or how long does it take those to burn out? There must have been some kind of generator on board. That's what I think. I tried looking it up. I couldn't figure anything out about, you know, electricity supplied to large ships. We found the real mystery here, which is fucking how the fuck did those lamps keep going? Yeah, exactly. If you can find out how we can crack this thing wide open, because if we know how long those lamps would like keep burning for, we can trace when they were set up.

Starting point is 00:22:10 And holy shit, this is a five like a five episode series podcast where we like get to the bottom of this. Yeah, I'm kidding. I don't care that much. I don't care either. So under rough seas, the ship couldn't be boarded until February 4th. And when when folks got on the ship, it was abandoned, right? The crew's personal possessions were all gone. The two lifeboats were gone. The ship's galley was like halfway through food preparation, but with no people. So, you know, no one knows what happened to the crew, right? They just disappeared.

Starting point is 00:22:50 And that's kind of weird because they're close to shore, right? Like they're close enough to yell at a guy in a light ship, you'd think even if like even in heavy seas, right? If they abandon the ship, they can kind of probably make their way or at least drift somewhere onto a beach. But like, nah, nah. I mean, they did drift onto a beach, right? Right into Cape Hatteras. Every ship is attracted like a magnet to Cape Hatteras. They just smash right onto the shoals, right outside the lighthouse.

Starting point is 00:23:22 The sirens at the beach bars. It's all 50 year old Georgia moms just showing you their boobs. That's why Blackbeard had to get out of town. Too many milfs. So the Coast Guard tried to salvage the ship. They tried to get another ship and pull it off the shoals. It's too big. They couldn't do it. So they blew it up with dynamite the next month.

Starting point is 00:23:49 Okay, cool. Yeah, they blew the shit up. They blew it up with dynamite on March 4th because, you know, it's a navigational hazard, right? That's the highest number of ghosts that have been killed with explosives in a single incident. Yeah, I've never understood. This is something for the horror movie, you know, sort of universe. If you have a haunted house and you just blow it up with dynamite, you have to see the ghosts. Do you think it's like an alien sort of scenario where if you actually do nukes a site from orbit,

Starting point is 00:24:25 it's just fine, like problem solved? Or do you think that it's like more like a Pandora's box time situation where now you have like distributed ghosts? Second one. Second one? Yeah, it could be that. I am of the opinion that you might just blow up the ghost, but you might kill the ghost with explosives.

Starting point is 00:24:47 You would certainly like dissipate the sight of its like haunting and like part of the thing that makes a ghost scary is that like it's haunting somewhere. It has some emotional tie to like where it was murdered or whatever. Like you can't like that ghost can't float down the road and go haunted denies, right? Yeah, exactly. What if you like deconstructed the haunted house and reused its pieces elsewhere? The haunted house of Theseus. This particular set of joists here is haunted.

Starting point is 00:25:22 Like, does that mean that like that sort of transitive property applies? If I take a timber off of the Winchester murder house, a mystery house, that that timber is going to be haunted. I think that timber itself is haunted. If you distribute these tender timbers finely enough throughout a house, it's indistinguishable from not being haunted. Welcome to the Institute for Advanced Ghost Studies. It's like my dad used to say about pollution.

Starting point is 00:25:55 Delusion is the solution to haunting. So we simply dump like because the ship did sink after it exploded, right? Like the bits of it that got exploded sank. So that, you know, mission accomplished, right? Exactly, right? Ghosts sufficiently diluted. Yeah, exactly. So after an extensive investigation, there's still no solid idea of what happened, right?

Starting point is 00:26:24 There was a real strong storm in the vicinity and at least one other large vessel, which was the sulfur freighter called the Hewitt, had gone down at the same time the ship was found abandoned, right? So there are some theories as to what might have happened, right? You know, one of which is that, you know, due to heavy weather, the crew abandoned the ship, you know, possibly after they had run aground. Another thing some folks thought was, you know, pirates. Pirates had stolen the ship, but then they realized it was just full of Groverhouse parts.

Starting point is 00:26:59 So, you know, they... And also they hadn't stolen the ship. Like the ship was still there. Yeah. But there was another theory, which it was communist pirates. Oh boy. Yeah. So some Soviet-aligned group had their offices raided in New York City around the same time.

Starting point is 00:27:19 And the police found a bunch of papers that indicated a plot to steal ships and sail them to the Soviet Union, right? I mean, I respect them so much for doing like bullet journaling, just like doing some fun ideas, you know? What if we pull this shit, you know? So, you know, at the time, a lot of people thought, yeah, it must have been the communists. The communists did this, right?

Starting point is 00:27:44 Which is, despite the fact that ramming the ship directly into Cape Hatteras is the opposite of going to the Soviet Union. They were taking the feeder crowd. Yeah. Plus, what is Cape Hatteras, if not the Kola Peninsula of North Carolina? Yes. Then there was a theory that it was for, it was rum running, right? Because prohibition was happening.

Starting point is 00:28:12 So, you know, some rum runners stole the ship in the Bahamas to run rum into the United States and then abandoned it, right? What? Say rum runners is 50 times real quick. They stole a scooter to do that. The slowest ship in the world. The biggest, slowest ship possible? Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 00:28:33 That's what rum runners would do. No, that's probably not right. Also, were they moving all of the rum in, like, from Canada anyway? Yeah. Like, how much running do you need to be doing? Not a whole lot. You need to swim, but... And then, you know, another theory, of course, it might be communist rum runners.

Starting point is 00:28:54 Oh, shit. Okay. Fuck. Just a hold full of Havana Club. Yeah, exactly. And another theory was mutiny, right? You know, so maybe since Warmel didn't like his crew and the first mate was mad at him, maybe he fucked up and he got mutinyed, right?

Starting point is 00:29:12 And then the crew screwed up and, you know, just steered the ship directly into, you know, Cape Hatteras. Hey, we finally got rid of this guy. Donk. Awesome. Fantastic work, guys. There's one piece of evidence from this, for this theory, which is the light ship captain we mentioned earlier, reported that the man who yelled at him with the megaphone did not

Starting point is 00:29:40 look very much like Captain Warmel. Oh, do you want to make a, like, positive identification across, like, a nighttime sea from a light ship? That's what the light is for. Did he have, like, a telescope? Five minutes in. All right, guys, we're all ready and mutiny. Any percent speed run.

Starting point is 00:30:10 You just tossed the captain off the ship and he, like, swims back to Barbados. You haven't even really left yet. Another theory, of course, is there was a mutiny, but it was a communist mutiny, right? What I'm learning here is that communists are a kind of cryptid. The most powerful cryptid. Yes. I believe a communist mutiny is called a revolution. Only if it's successful.

Starting point is 00:30:36 Otherwise it's called a commune. I mean, Marx himself did say, you know, a specter, a frightful hobgoblin is doing what? Haunting Europe. Oh, he did say that. That's right. And it's about to mutiny against the ship of state. Yeah, it was a metaphor. Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:05 I like this one. I think it's an attempted revolution. I choose to avoid that. Like, mostly because that's what I want to have happened. But also, I think, like, yeah, sure. Why not? It's 19, it's 1919, 1920. Why would everybody was doing communism back then?

Starting point is 00:31:25 You know, it was the hot new thing was like the Lindy hop. So now another idea was that the paranormal was involved, right? Aside from communism. Yes. So, you know, the ship, of course, had traveled through the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. I guess.

Starting point is 00:31:46 Had a delayed action. Which caused it several days later on the Bermuda Triangle. No, no, no, no. That would get away. Get him. Get him. The Bermuda Triangle with its gaming mouse, like fucking lag. CPI.

Starting point is 00:32:04 All right. Next best thing will disappear the crew and ram it straight into Cape Hatteras. I like the cut of the Bermuda Triangles jib, you know, big fan. And of course, the specters in the Bermuda Triangle got to work OT. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not.

Starting point is 00:32:24 They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're not.

Starting point is 00:32:32 They're not. The Bermuda Communist Triangle, right? Oh, yeah. Hammer and Triangle. Yeah. The Communists did cause paranormal things to happen. So yeah, those are the theories. I mean, I was a big fan of like an attempted revolution, but now that you've mooted Communist

Starting point is 00:32:54 Bermuda Triangle. I mean, what else is the Bermuda Triangle sunk, right? Like mostly like, American yes. How many, how many Soviet ships have gone down? Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. There was that one Soviet submarine that did sink in it, but they could have been revisionists.

Starting point is 00:33:15 You know, who, you know, who sails through the Bermuda Triangle all the time and is fine. Cubans. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. I think we've just discovered Fidel Castro's last super weapon.

Starting point is 00:33:32 Fidel Castro. That's the Bermuda Triangle actually protected him. He had the power of like several dozen like Catalina search and rescue flying boats, like armoring him. When he went to New York and they asked him if he was wearing a bulletproof vest and he was like, I have a moral vest. What he meant was I have the Bermuda Triangle, which is communist. The Triangle protects all your shipping lanes.

Starting point is 00:34:04 No one's going to get shit in or out, baby. So. Hasta la Victoria Siem Frey, you know. Well, so no one knows what happened. Yeah. Today you can see some fragments of the ship at the graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Cape Hatteras. At the what museum?

Starting point is 00:34:28 The graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. That's the most metal name for a museum I've ever heard. The museum's actually like built out of pieces of ships that wrecked on Cape Hatteras. Very sweet. I've been there. That's so cool. So. The next boat.

Starting point is 00:34:47 This is the famous one. The Mary Celeste. Wait, that's probably a historical. They wouldn't have had a fog on. I don't think they had a fog horn. You just have a guy who yells, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Fog.

Starting point is 00:35:03 Fog. So the Mary Celeste was a brigantine, right? It's got two masts, right? Front mast, square rigged, rear mask, four and aft rigged, right? Sometimes there's top sails on the rear mast, but this one did not have that. It just has a big flag with writing on it, but I can't read what it says. Well, that's because they had even fewer pixels in the 1800s. Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 00:35:37 That says haunted. They're going to put that single flag up if you see a ghost. You guys advertise, I can't. It's like the list of like seven four signals is like diver, quarantine, ghosts, communist ghosts. Does that say a specter of communism is haunted? It's got a mile long boom with flag strung from it. Mary Celeste was built in 1861 in Parsborough, Nova Scotia, first named Amazon, right? 99 feet long, 25 feet six inches wide and 198 gross tons, right?

Starting point is 00:36:23 Mood. Yeah. Me too, buddy. Honor maiden voyage Captain Robert McClellan fell ill after the ship took out a load of timber bound for London. He had a load on his plate, what was having to coordinate the defense of Washington, D.C. also. Yeah. So the ship turned around and after they reached land, the captain died. Oh, OK.

Starting point is 00:36:52 Yeah. Classic move. That's a leadership. Yeah, exactly. Well, we made it to land. Everybody. Yeah. Just steps off the boat.

Starting point is 00:37:03 Yeah. Croaks. Well, go. What if it was worse? What if he was like really happy? Like I made it home. I'm going to go well. I made it off this curse and.

Starting point is 00:37:19 So Captain John Parker took over and the ship turns around, heads back for London and he promptly wrecks into a fishing boat. And your east port main. And then when he reached the English Channel, he crashed into a brig. And. We're pirates, but entirely because our captain is too drunk to navigate. I just like the idea of applying the same standards of driving that you get like a crew cab truck. To a sailing ship. And it's just like, yeah, whoever I want, I'll just give that be worse off than me.

Starting point is 00:38:05 So after this maiden voyage, several otherwise quiet years of service until October, 1867, when she runs the ground on Cape Bretton Island, right? And she was banged up big enough that, you know, the company just abandoned her, right? Until until it was she was salvaged by Richard W. Haynes, right? So Haynes and a group of New York finance financiers salvage the ship. They restore it. They rename her Mary Celeste. He sails it himself for a year. And then his creditors repo it.

Starting point is 00:38:48 You just come down the dock and there's a boot around the main mass. So his creditors sold it. She sailed for several more years in 1872. She was refitted, lengthened to 103 feet. Now it's up to 282 gross tons, right? And captain was a man named Benjamin Schooner Briggs. That's seriously his fucking name. That's his name, yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:15 Schooner was actually his middle name. Awesome. How much do you think this motherfucker dined out on that? Just be like, oh, do I know something about Schooner as well? I'd say they're almost like my middle name. He just waggles his eyebrows at you until you punch him unconscious. Well, his last name is also a type of boat. That's the other thing.

Starting point is 00:39:37 He's got two kinds of boats in his name. Jesus. Nominative determinism comes to Bretton Island. So Briggs was an experienced captain, right? And he had about a third ownership of the ship, right? The maiden voyage after the refit would bring the Mary Celeste to Genoa with a load of denatured alcohol, right? So she left New York City November 5th, 1872

Starting point is 00:40:08 after waiting a few days from scheduled departure for the weather to clear up, right? Now, eight days later, another ship, the De Grata. De Grata, I don't know how to pronounce it. De Gracha, the grace of God. Yeah. That sounds about right. Left from New York following a similar route with a load of petroleum, right?

Starting point is 00:40:33 Once they got past the Azores on December 4th, 1872, a helbsman reported to Captain David Moorhouse that there was a ship about six miles distant traveling erratically and generally going towards them, right? Do you know how much you've been drinking tonight, sir? It's one-third ownership of this boat. I'm on the ocean. What am I going to hit?

Starting point is 00:40:57 I'm on the boat. I'm taking stuff anywhere I need. That's what we do here. If they're trying to pull you over at sea, they've got to get those warning lamps from the Carol Dearing. They've got to hoist up like red and blue ones really fast, ultimately. And ups you down, and up and down, up and down.

Starting point is 00:41:19 Sir, do you know why I pulled you over? Because you have supplies for me. That's how we get supplies on the boat as we ram other boats to take. But we're not pirates. We're just drunk. That's not a crime, is it, Ossifer? But to say maritime law has nothing to say about this.

Starting point is 00:41:39 It's true, famously. That sail has fringes. Just going into an admiral's escort. Like this is an admiral's escort. And they're like, yeah. Yes, it is. Just an actual admiral. Just like, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:55 Glad you understand the situation. Like, yes, you guys know you're being court, but you guys know you're being arrested, right? I do not recognize. Yeah, that doesn't work here. So. I don't know. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:42:16 I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So. They drew close to the ship and saw it was the Mary Celeste. Apparently with no one on board.

Starting point is 00:42:30 Spoopy. Spoopy. So the first and second mates went aboard, right. And they found the ship was mildly disheveled, but otherwise fine, right? Another mood, yeah. Hell of a mood. No one was aboard.

Starting point is 00:42:48 Fine just like, shit. That's why we do a podcast. You just get on board the ship and they're like, man, clearly this guy has not been taking care of himself for like a while. And just like, oh my God. What are you? Fuck you. We're going back into lockdown.

Starting point is 00:43:09 But no one was aboard and the lifeboat was missing. The sails were in bad shape, but they were still serviceable, right? And the last entry in the ship's log was November 25th. Nine days earlier, right? And that listed the ship's coordinates as some 400 nautical miles from where Dave Grashia encountered the Mary Celeste, right? Just drifting. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:35 Fuck. How long does it take a bridge to fucking drift 400 miles? I guess it depends on the wind. Apparently nine days. Yeah. Oh yeah. I forgot that you actually gave me the other half of this. If a train is traveling towards Chessanooka at 50 miles an hour.

Starting point is 00:43:57 So all the evidence pointed to some kind of deliberate evacuation of the ship, right? The mates returned and reported the condition of the ship. And Captain Morehouse decided, all right, let's try and salvage this thing. We're going to bring it all the way to port. So the crew split in half and each ship made the remainder of the trip with half of a crew, right? They made it to Gibraltar on December 12th, where the Mary Celeste was impounded and then salvage hearings began.

Starting point is 00:44:28 At Piracy Courts. Yes. So the man in charge of this. This is Gibraltar. Stop yelling about your rights. We're trying to give you stuff. So. The man in charge of this, the attorney general of Gibraltar, which is a British

Starting point is 00:44:45 possession. Oh boy. Was named. This is going to be some absolutely like fucked by colonial administrator. Like. Like the kind of person who gets their career in law and then is so bad at it that London wants nothing to do with them and puts them in, I guess, Gibraltar. Yes.

Starting point is 00:45:09 Go do boat laws. So this I know without you even telling me this guy is going to be just the worst kind of dumbass imaginable. Yes. And his name was Frederick Sully flood. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. That wasn't his name.

Starting point is 00:45:28 No, it was his name. Frederick Sully flood. He was the attorney general of Gibraltar, and he was a very stupid man. Do we sink him and how? So, of course, he immediately suspects that this is foul play, right? Oh, Jesus. Clearly the crew of the day, Gracia had engaged in piracy, right? To steal the value, the ship and its valuable cargo.

Starting point is 00:45:56 That's why they came. Yeah, like, yeah, that's why they brought the ship back. A thing that you do when you're when you're doing piracy. The main thing to do is to bring the ship that you pirate back and be like, hey, what's the deal with the ship? You just found this. Yeah, we just found this. Believe this.

Starting point is 00:46:17 This tactic never fails. Please ignore the skeletons. All of the best pirates did this constantly. All right. So, you know, he tried to produce some evidence to support his theory. Right. So like, look, there was blood on the captain's sword. It turned out to be.

Starting point is 00:46:41 Gibraltar. He said, look, there are cuts on the bow of the ship, which turned out to be from manufacturing the ship. He said, look, there's blood on a handrail, which turned out not to be blood. This guy just really turned this whole ship inside out looking for blood and inadvertently provided a lot of great evidence that there was not any blood. Yeah. Also, if they were pirates and they wanted to like bring the thing back,

Starting point is 00:47:15 why wouldn't they clean off the blood? Yeah, exactly. Right. You could just, you could just scrub it off. So, blood concluded that either the crew of Dagrashia had murdered the crew of Mary Celeste, or, and he's also willing to entertain this notion, the crew of the Mary Celeste had gotten drunk off of the denatured alcohol and then killed the captain in a drunken frenzy and then fled.

Starting point is 00:47:45 Oh, okay. You just see this brigantine go past and it's just playing hard bass inexplicably. Yeah. And he's just out there. And then he puts out blood in the lifeboat and then they immediately went blind from the methanol. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:02 I mean, just classic sloth. Shit, you know? Yeah. You just like, you crack open the cargo and you're just like, Suka, blyat! Just as the ship's going up and down. There was, there was no evidence whatsoever for either of these theories, but Frederick Solly Flood had significant...

Starting point is 00:48:32 Again, not a real name. Had muddied the waters enough, but now the jury in the court, you know, sort of suspected the crew of De Gracia, right? And so they awarded them, although they found them not guilty, they awarded them an absolute pittance of a salvage value like 1,700 pounds of like the 80,000 pound cargo. Jesus, fuck that. After, after retrieving the ship through an extremely dangerous

Starting point is 00:49:00 and understaffed voyage. Yeah, filled with ghosts. Yeah. The ghosts are just like actually trying to help you. They're just totally fuck all useless. Just like, hey, Casper, you want to run that rigger? No, I can't. I can't.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Yeah, all I can do is like, float around westerly and like, that's fuck all use on a sailing ship, man. Grab a rope, jackass. Can't even lift the spyglass to be a lookout. So there were several theories as to what actually happened. Of course, Sully flood was big on the foul play idea. You know, one of the one of the big problems with this theory, of course, is that De Gracia was a much slower ship than the Mary Celeste.

Starting point is 00:49:56 So a little difficult for him to catch up and do piracy, right? Not through ghost pirates. Yeah, but I mean, there was also one other theory which is advanced by Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. And a guy who really likes his cocaine. A guy who really likes his cocaine believed in fairies and wrote a story called J. Habakkuk Jeffsons Statement in which a sort of like antifa anti-white fanatic

Starting point is 00:50:29 tries to hijack the ship to sail it to Africa. Oh, hell yeah. A guy named Septimus Goring, who had like developed such a hatred of the white race that he kills all of the ship's company. Save for Jefferson. This is also why people misspelled the name of the ship. They spell it Marie like IE because a Conan Doyle didn't care enough to get it right.

Starting point is 00:50:54 It's Mary, but like people still think it's like the Marie Celeste because of J. Habakkuk Jeffsons Statement. Yeah, so I like that theory because, you know, kill Whitey. So another theory is that the ship encountered a waterspout, right? So they found a waterspouts of tornado on the ocean. He sends a bunch of water up in the air, right? So they found a sounding rod on the deck, right? For measuring the amount of water in the hold, right?

Starting point is 00:51:29 A what? A sounding rod. Oh, that's not the thing that I think it. Okay, fine. I know, Alice. Don't be gross. I'm sorry. Well, I don't know what the other, like it's just like a measuring stick.

Starting point is 00:51:44 Okay. So if the ship encountered a waterspout, the lower atmospheric pressure could it could cause it to appear than more water was in the hold than usual, right? Water would travel up from the bilges through the pumps sort of into into the hold. And when they found the ship, there was a little bit more water in the hold than usual about three and a half feet of it, which is more than should be there, but not enough to, you know, be super alarming. Like it's not going to cause the ship to sink, right?

Starting point is 00:52:14 So maybe the crew evacuated because they thought there was more water in the hold than there was. And then they see it rising and they're like, oh, okay, shit. We're in the Communist Bermuda triangle over here. Yeah. So, you know, and they all got in the boat, they left the ship, the ship, and that didn't sink, but, you know, the ship's boat, of course, did. Oops.

Starting point is 00:52:44 Another popular theory is it encountered a giant squid, which then ate the crew and the ship's boat. You know, that's, yeah, you know, cracking, you know, very, very likely, of course, you know, there's there's so many cracking encounters today. I mean, it's like real common. I mean, I will say that our podcast will always be a friend to all sea monsters. And so like if this happened, we are on the cracking side. It was provoked 21 foot rule.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Yeah. Castle doctrine. Yeah. Castle doctrine. Underwater castle doctrine. Yeah. Exactly. Listen, the cracking are protected species.

Starting point is 00:53:27 And that's right. You know, I think it's worth it to have this hazard to maritime shipping to preserve these beautiful creatures. That's right. Another theory is involves alcohol vapor, right? So the captain and crew may have evacuated the ship after smelling some kind of like major leak of alcohol throughout the ship, right? And they evacuated because they thought, oh, shit, this thing might blow up, right?

Starting point is 00:53:53 So a recreation was done in 2006 for Channel five in the UK, right? Oh boy. You know, for what would happen if like there was a big like alcohol vapor explosion on the ship? Like not even trying to leave. What if there was an explosion? I'm trying to explain how trashy Channel five is. Like I don't know what the what the equivalent would be in the US.

Starting point is 00:54:21 Is it like spike TV? Yeah, kind of. But it's on terrestrial TV. Like it was the last one. It was the last channels to like come onto to direct onto terrestrial TV before people all got like free view and shit. And it like, oh God, it's really like low rent stuff. So definitely the CW.

Starting point is 00:54:45 Yeah. No, it'll do it. So so the CW did this like recreation. Well, surprisingly, it sort of indicated that if there was an alcohol vapor explosion, it was a very large and very violent fire that would burn out extremely rapidly, which might not actually significantly damage the ship in any way, just because of how quickly it burns. Right.

Starting point is 00:55:10 You know, you ever cause like a alcohol fire by mistake. Yeah, you ever deglaze a pan with vodka? Yeah, I did do that. And a lot of a lot of fire very suddenly in my kitchen, but it also disappeared very quickly. He burnt the microwave buttons. Yeah, I did melt part of the microwave. Yeah. That was that this is this is an experience, you know, that I learned more about cooking

Starting point is 00:55:38 through it. Well, there's your problem test kitchen. I'll spin off. The vodka sauce turned out really good though. Yes, it was delicious. And it did deglaze the pan very effectively. Oh, I bet. You have a very deglazed chip here.

Starting point is 00:55:59 Yeah. Yeah. So they deglazed the whole they evacuated after ship started deglazing itself. So the Mary Celeste continued shipping cargo for another decade. But, you know, it's kind of had a bad reputation at this point. They weren't they wouldn't want to fucking work on it. Yeah. In February of 1879, her new captain fell ill while aboard.

Starting point is 00:56:25 And after making an emergency stop in St. Helena, that captain died as well. You know, okay, not killed three captains. Yeah, it's the ghosts in the timbers. Yeah. In November of 1884, carrying a bunch of worthless cargo, right, but ensured as though it was carrying very valuable cargo, her new captain deliberately wrecked her on a reef near Haiti, right? Then the captain tried to do insurance fraud and was immediately discovered.

Starting point is 00:56:58 Just instantly because he sold he sold the worthless cargo that he could salvage to the American console. Look, there's only like four or five people to sell it to. And so sometimes sometimes you got to ask the cops if they want to buy some stolen goods. Hey, I'm going to commit insurance fraud with this later. Don't tell anyone. You're not a cop, right? Legally, he has to tell you if he's an American diplomat.

Starting point is 00:57:34 Does that apply under maritime law, though? So God, I mean, one thing I will say though is clearly the ghosts involved here are communist ghosts because this has a proletarian character because the people that they kill disproportionately are the officers. So this is this is like ghost revolution. Yes. So Captain Parker was tried for baritry, right? That's like the deliberate wrecking of a ship.

Starting point is 00:58:06 And at the time that was a capital offense. Oh, shit. I think he made some kind of plea deal. He got off and walked free. He gave up his boss, the ghost. Like, oh, shit, we can't. We can't. The the courts just confused like how do we execute this?

Starting point is 00:58:28 He's already dead. How do we execute? What the hell kind of plea deal could he have possibly made? Well, despite this, his career was ruined and he died a popper about three months later. Oh, wow. That's it. So it took another captain to kill that one. Yeah, kill that one too.

Starting point is 00:58:56 Fuck me. Okay, the merciless rules. Yeah. Good boat. Good boat. All right. And in the next one. Oh, that's my favorite one.

Starting point is 00:59:12 This one's genuinely spooky to me. As far as I'm concerned, this is this is now spooky season. I'll wait for Justin to get back before I get into it. So Liam, how's how's your day going? So my buddy lives in beautiful Mountville, Pennsylvania, where currently there's a hostage situation unfolding. Oh boy. Wow. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:59:39 They felt that they had to take hostages. Not my buddy. My buddy is not the one taking hostages. The guy apparently barricaded himself outside. He's been sending me pictures and updates. There's a SWAT team. There's a sniper team. He called for a medical emergency and then took one of the medics hostage, which do not do that fucking hell.

Starting point is 01:00:03 And he's, it's not funny, but it's sort of. It's, you know what it reminds me of is something that reminds me of is the guy who tried to kidnap Princess Anne in the UK and in the 70s. And I posted a screenshot of a thing from a book. I was reading about this, but like in Britain in the 70s, if you had a gun, you could just do anything like anything you wanted because like, essentially what happened was a succession. I think it was like six or seven people, all of them unarmed came up to him like, oh, I might drop the shooter and they just shoots them. Like, I don't think he even killed any of them. But like one of them, a guy just stops his car behind and is like, Hey, stop shooting people when he gets shot. Like, what did you think was going to happen?

Starting point is 01:00:53 Well, yeah, negotiation tactics. Yeah. You could just kind of keep going from there because like nobody could stop you until eventually you run out of bullets and get rugby tackled. So maybe that's what's going to happen with this guy. Yeah, I mean, I, it's a bit terrifying. He's in the middle of moving and there's just a hostage situation down the block and there's an armored truck just parked in his neighbor's driveway. Hmm. Well, at least they're not like, Hey, can we use your like front room to set up a sniper nest or whatever?

Starting point is 01:01:24 Yeah, third amendment, folks. That's right. I'm back. What did I miss? Oh, we were talking about hostage situations. Eric's neighbor took a hostage. Oh, fun. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:39 Yeah. Liam was telling me that he was like, he called an ambulance also for like for the hostages. And then he took one of the EMTs hostage as well. Oh my God. I was like, come on. You can't, you can't just like work your way up like that until you've taken the whole fucking state hostage. And you're like, give me a plane or the entire state of Pennsylvania gets. I'm sending in more trains.

Starting point is 01:02:24 He just needs to like, he just needs to take more and more EMTs hostage until eventually the numbers are off enough that they can tackle him. It's spoopy season. Very spoopy. All right. Liam, this is your job. Yeah, but it's also my favorite one. So I can, I can like go blanks. This is MV Hoyita, which is Spanish for little jewel.

Starting point is 01:02:59 Again, not very many pixels. Roland West, who was a Hollywood director is built 1931 70 foot long ship built from it's a yacht built from Cedar and Oak. It's sold in 1936 and becomes sort of, as far as I could tell, basically pressed into service to the US Navy, which is so funny, right? Like the US Navy, like we don't think of them as being desperate enough to be like, Hey, let's, can I get some Hollywood producers like pedophile yacht, please? Oh yeah, they use it as a yard patrol boat at Pearl Harbor. Oh, fantastic job there, guys. Yeah. Well, this is after the attack damage in 1943 and then released in 1946.

Starting point is 01:03:45 It's sold a few times. And then in 1952 to a Dr. Catherine Lumala, who's at the University of Hawaii. She leases it or she it's under the command of her friend, a dusty Miller. Yeah, British guy. Yeah, just like a British guy who like went to live in Samoa and to become a charter boat captain. Very normal. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

Starting point is 01:04:12 Yeah. So on October 3rd, 1955, she leaves up here in what I've typed as Samau. There's a total islands to collect copper, which is a dried coconut kernels. So it's a 270 mile journey and she begins late because a clutch had failed. So she's leaving on one engine. There's a nine passengers, including a doctor who was to do an amputation. Oh, that's some fucked South Pacific shit is like, Hey, we got to cut your leg off. The doctor will be along on the next boat in like four months.

Starting point is 01:04:48 Try not to get too much gangrene to get too much gangrene. Exactly. So she should have arrived in Tokyo on the fifth and didn't. The I guess Harbor Warden sort of said, Hey, this boat was supposed to be here. And it wasn't. Meanwhile, this guy is just like entire legs rotting off. Don't worry about him. So they launch a search and rescue over 100,000 square miles again.

Starting point is 01:05:14 Fuck that. Yeah. And people like get scared of the Atlantic. Now it's the Pacific for me. Like the South Pacific, the same with with MH 370. Right. You're not finding shit, dude. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:27 No, exactly. Amelia Earhart, like all of the spookiest, all of the spookiest ocean stuff is South Pacific. And it's because there is so fucking much of it. And it's just like, no, no, thank you. No, no featureless blue expanse for me. No, thank you. Nations never quite got control of their communist Bermuda triangle equivalent.

Starting point is 01:05:50 According to the Jakarta method. More of a danger for marine shipping everywhere, honestly. Shout out to Vincent Blevins for the Jakarta methods. So on November 10th, Gerald Douglas, who was captain of this merchant ship to Vellu. Spike spots Joe, you know, 600 miles west of her scheduled route, just sort of drifting along. Yeah, but she's partially submerged. She's listing heavily.

Starting point is 01:06:23 She's missing four tons of cargo and everyone aboard. You can see the Anglitz out there. That's like a 30 degree list. Yeah. So the radio is turned to 21 82 kilohertz, which is the international marine distress signal. No, no, creepy, creepy. At the time.

Starting point is 01:06:42 And they probably wouldn't have known this. The radio was limited to two miles in range because there was a break in the cable between the radio and aerial. So that had limited them to two miles in range. Again, that's like the people who like claim to have heard like distress signals from Amelia Earhart, you know, just no fuck that radio horror. Absolutely not. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:08 So when they get there, like I said, the cable had been painted over so the crew had missed it. The dinghy and three life raster gone. The barnacle barnacle growth showed she had been listening for quite some time. There had been damage to the superstructure, not enough to sink it though, obviously. An auxiliary pump had been rigged, but not connected. And the clocks wired into the ship's generator had stopped at 10. 25 was switches for lights on.

Starting point is 01:07:39 Oh, and there's another fun detail, which is that because it was meant to carry refrigerated cargo, the holds were all lined with cork. Yeah, that's in the notes, Alice. Oh, is it? Where is that? Where is that in the notes? Inquiry. She had made sense to abandon the vessel since her cargo hold was cork lining.

Starting point is 01:07:58 Therefore, she was basically unsinkable and she had empty fuel. Excuse me. I'm so sorry. I don't mean to skip ahead. Please continue. So a pipe had failed due to corrosion, allowing water into the bilges. So that's the leak. And the first time the crew would have spotted it would have been when the water was past

Starting point is 01:08:17 the engine room floorboards. So they wouldn't, so they wouldn't have known where it was coming from. And they found a bunch of, wait, is this in the notes? The mattresses? Are the mattresses in the notes? The mattress is boarded up. The mattress is just piled on the other engine. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:34 Again. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Why did you pile up mattresses on top of the engine to stop ghosts getting out? Sounds about right. Yeah. Anyway, so far this is genuinely unsettling, right?

Starting point is 01:08:49 Yes. So they, they basically tow it and an inquiry starts. And they find what Alice had just said that basically it would have been more or less unsinkable since the cargo hold was cork lined and she had empty fuel drums for buoyancy. There's the life rafts are gone. And there was nothing the inquiry really found. I, the logbook sextant chronometer were missing. The firearms owned by the captain were missing and Alice's favorite detail, bloody bandages

Starting point is 01:09:32 and a scalpel, which had been used for length of bloody bandages. I was like, what? What was the guy trying to practice his amputation and like slipped? Well, that's, there's this theater. So that's sort of what we have to go on. I, the inquiry actually doesn't really mention the, the, the bloody bandages or scalpel. Well, that's weird considering that that kind of like notable details. So there are some theories.

Starting point is 01:10:07 Basically the inquiry also finds Captain Miller sort of most responsible. The license he had had to carry passengers had lapsed. There wasn't a working radio. There was only one engine working. And there's a couple theories, one of which is that Miller was injured or had died, but that doesn't account for the missing cargo. Why are they missing four tons of cargo? Which like also wasn't particularly valuable, right?

Starting point is 01:10:34 Like it was coconut shells of all things. Exactly. There's a theory that Miller and his Chuck and his first mate Chuck Simpson, they both had been taken and hated each other and had fallen sort of off the boat. Again, we're not, we're not talking about the four tons of missing cargo. And one of the friends of Captain Miller said he would have never abandoned it himself. You know, so it's totally possible, I suppose, that he had been injured rather gravely and that's the bloody bandages.

Starting point is 01:11:06 But why wouldn't you just take more bandages? Why are they just there and bloody? There's a fucking like deeply personal psychodrama going on that we don't, like we're never going to know about that led to whatever happened. There's theories, piracy, the Japanese had did it. That the theory was that they had gone through Japanese sort of fishing boats, possibly whaling muscles, and the Japanese, they had seen something the Japanese didn't want them to see.

Starting point is 01:11:39 They didn't kill a guy for like an entire ship for like whaling, because everybody knew that the Japanese were still whaling until like basically now. Even the mutiny theory doesn't make sense, because why are you still losing four tons of cargo? Ghosts. Ghosts. You know, a hundred percent. But it was not a very safe ship. Chuck Simpson, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:59 Knox Miller out and takes command and they abandoned ship, but like that doesn't account for the missing cargo. OK, what about what about like Ergot poisoning? Like they all got some fucked up bread. They start seeing shit. They like take four tons of cargo, put it in the lifeboats for some reason, because they're all fucking doped out of their mind on fungus. And then the lifeboat sinks.

Starting point is 01:12:23 I suppose that's a theory. Master theory of the coconuts. Swap gas. Communist Bermuda Triangle on Vacation. I don't know. This is so fucking weird, man. I figured the Communist Bermuda Triangle would go to a colder climate for, you know, a change of pace. It's like a busman's holiday.

Starting point is 01:12:43 You go on vacation from work and you end up doing the same thing anyway. Yeah. Yes. I hate working vacations. It's like it's like novels where like a detective goes on vacation and then there's a murder, you know, is like I just wanted to take the time off. I'm off the clock.

Starting point is 01:13:08 Oh, does murder not my problem. Not my problem. I'm off the clock. Alice, do you have anything you want to add? I think like could have been the Soviets again, could have been trying to sail it to fucking Vladivostok. And then deliver a critical load of coconuts. I mean, genuinely, though, this is, there's so many strange details here that I have no idea. Like the thing that makes the most sense to me, right, is like there's some kind of fight or accident

Starting point is 01:13:52 and the captain gets injured. Like he's the one who knows that the thing won't sink and like he's out of it. But then I and then the rest of them get into the life with him and leave. But I don't know why you would take four tons of cargo. Exactly. Which you presumably we wouldn't be able to even sail with. To avoid the coconuts falling into Soviet hands. Thereby allowing the Soviets to set up domestic coconut production,

Starting point is 01:14:26 which is a crucial part of the five year plan. Warm and balmy. You laugh now, but Soviet like Soviet ecological policy means that like by 1986, East Germany is choked with invasive coconut plants. Balmy East Germany. There's palm trees. There's coconuts. There's there's girls in grass skirts.

Starting point is 01:14:51 But like Bavarian grass skirts is the thing. You're going to get some people mad at you for saying Bavarian is an East Germany. That's a good point. Yeah. You have like a October fest becomes a luau. You got a Hawaiian later hosin. Oh, God. But like genuinely on this one, like the other two, I can kind of like piece something together.

Starting point is 01:15:19 But like this one, I got no clue. Yeah, it's fucking spooky season. Maybe it was Operation Gladio. Maybe. Yeah, it could be all the conspiracy theories at once in this one specific part of the South Pacific. In this one boat. Just every single one of the passengers has a dark secret, but like it's a different one. Well, that's all I got for that one.

Starting point is 01:15:46 All right. So those were the ghost ships, the boo barges, the yikes yachts. The gas. Yes. All right. So we have a section on this podcast called Safety Third. This is a fun one. This one came from an actual PE professional engineer.

Starting point is 01:16:14 Oh, wow. Okay. This is going to be good. I'm bracing myself. Move it all out. That's right. So this is my Safety Third story. No one ever got hurt because of this, but it stayed stuck in my mind because it was the first time I encountered the whole human lives are worth so many Xbox's mentality in real life.

Starting point is 01:16:35 We love to see a bit come back. Way back in 2014 when I was still a new and naive engineer fresh out of college, I was working as a construction estimator on a large heavy construction firm in New York City, right? My job was to look over the plans of various proposed projects, figure out how much concrete, steel, rebar and other materials the job would require, figure out how long it would take a crew to put it all together and get the price from there, right? A big part of this job was going on site visits to actually see the location where we were supposed to work on and get a better sense of what we were up against, right? So one of the potential jobs I got tasked to look at was a project to do repairs on the Queen's Midtown Tunnel. So it was two years after Hurricane Sandy during which the tunnel had completely flooded with seawater and now it was in need of a whole slew of repairs to fix the damage from all that salt water, right? So a lot of the concrete had cracked, the steel holding the ceiling in place had rusted. Most concerning of all was that the lights and electrical wiring had seriously corroded from the salt water.

Starting point is 01:17:46 So the time to go walk the job before we put a bid in comes and I make my way to this little temporary office, the MTA had set up near the Queen's side of the tunnel along with people from other contractors who also planned to bid the job. They also take us through the main part of the tunnel to look over everything and they actually closed down one of the sides of the tunnel so we could walk around and get up close to the lights, emergency catwalk, all that good stuff, right? So this is walking into the tunnel here. Mm, fun to do like behind the scenes view. After this, it was time to look at the ventilation ducts. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Queen's Midtown Tunnel, what you'll see when you drive through are two square passages side by side, each with two lanes of roadway and separated by a fireproof wall and walkway with some doors spread throughout. So if there's a fire in one part of the tunnel, people can evacuate to the other side, right? What you can't see is that above and below you are massive ventilation passages that constantly blow in fresh air and suck out the exhaust so you don't die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Starting point is 01:18:54 Are these the ones we talked about? Yeah. Are these the ones you mentioned that will just kill you if you're in them and they will like activate the thing? I believe it was, yes. Cool. Don't want to be in there. However, importantly, the firewall that divides the roadway section in half for safety does not extend into the ventilation passages. That's up here, right?

Starting point is 01:19:16 Mm-hmm. So we go and look at these ventilation passages and the work that needs to be done there, right? As we were walking around in the vents, the guy from the MTA leading us around mentions that currently the fan system is set to low idle, which is why there is only a slight breeze blowing through. However, if there was sort of any sort of accident on the roadway that tripped the fire sensors, the fans would switch onto emergency high in order to prevent the roadway section from filling with smoke. Now, the tunnel is ventilated by 46 fans, each 11 feet in diameter, and at full power they will push 3 million cubic feet of air through the tunnel at about 120 miles per hour. I love to be in the fucking wind tunnel. I love to find out how aerodynamic I am. That's a fan right here, one of the fans.

Starting point is 01:20:12 So unsurprisingly, the first question asked after that was, what about the guys working in here? To which the MTA guy simply said, they'd probably die. Yeah. Our operational risk assessment allows for some worker casualties in case of a fire. The priority is always going to be getting smoke away from the roadway, right? I mean, I can see the logic in that, just from a trolley problem perspective, if you're actually using the roads. But still, though, you don't want to be that guy, even making New York Union rates. Mind you, the entire reason for this project was that the wiring in the tunnel was so corroded that the tunnel was one good short circuit away from being the next Mont Blanc tunnel fire, right?

Starting point is 01:21:09 So a fire in the tunnel wasn't exactly some one in a million freak instance. The obvious solution to mitigate this risk would have been to temporarily close the tunnel to traffic while workers were in events. But the MTA was determined to do this project with as little disruption of service as possible, because heaven forbid someone had to use one of the other six East River vehicle crossings or one of the numerous subway lines. Of course. But considering that it took one of the world's largest clusters of COVID-19 breaking out as a result of the subway system for the MTA to decide to suspend 24-hour service. I don't think that's accurate, by the way. And to suspend service and have some time devoted solely to cleaning and maintenance, I feel like I was probably expecting too much.

Starting point is 01:22:02 Still, the fact that the MTA had apparently bothered, actually bothered to do the math and decided it was cheaper to risk barbecuing a couple laborers versus shutting the tunnel down for a few hours every night was pretty surprising. Again, I can kind of see that in the sense of if you happen to be in there while there's a fire and there's like, I don't know, a couple of hundred people in the tunnel, kind of better to, you know, just have you get atomized. But like, you can close the tunnel. You can put some cones down. If you got to send a bunch of people in there to start fixing stuff in the ventilation shaft, you'd figure, all right, we're going to close the tunnel so these guys don't get turned into, you know, a pasta sauce when the fans turn on. But no, I guess cars are more important than human lives. Right.

Starting point is 01:23:01 Yeah. Awesome. That's so cool. Mind you, construction overall is already a pretty dangerous trade and the underground tunnel workers are truly a cut above in terms of risk tolerance, right? A famous saying among the Sandhawks, that's Liuna local 147. Those are the urban miners in New York City is, you know, a man a mile because on average for every mile of tunnel constructed in New York City, a man was killed in the process, you know. The statement that still largely holds true is, you know, one worker was killed in 2011 on the East Side Access project and recently completed second Avenue subway had numerous incidents and injuries that could have for all intents and purposes killed someone, not for pure luck. Here's a here's a here's some blasting that was not done correctly on the second Avenue subway.

Starting point is 01:23:57 It's not supposed to do that. That was in 2012. Just thinking about like a jihad guy joining the ILW, like, because like, hey, I can blow up a pass of New York, but like, nobody can even yell at me for it. Although yell at you, you just get fired over. Oh, that's true. Yeah. For the Queen's Midtown Project, at least my company ended up not being awarded the contract to perform the work. And the contractor who did manage to complete the work without any major incidents and no recreation of the movie Daylight.

Starting point is 01:24:40 That's that's safety third. They should just shut the tunnel down. How much does like a line of cones cost? Well, since the since, you know, there's no firewall on the upper part, you got to shut down both tubes. Okay, so that's four lines of cones. If you're being safe about this. Oh, yeah. I mean, you got to get a redirect traffic to elsewhere.

Starting point is 01:25:13 Yeah. But I mean, yeah, just shut the tunnel down. Why not just shut the tunnel? Shut the tunnel. Shut the tunnel. I said people don't get turned into a fine mist. I mean, like, I'm sympathetic to a certain extent because like, there's always going to be some of this with any kind of transport stuff. Like, you know, railway workers end up having to like hop out of the way of trains because even with speed restrictions and stuff, like, you won't shut down a line just because you're having to do like trackside maintenance and stuff.

Starting point is 01:25:46 So I mean, I get it. It still sucks though. Apparently now they got like protected work areas that, you know, just travel around on railway, railway wheels now. I just saw some of these a couple of days ago. I was like, oh, that's a pretty good idea. I don't wonder why they don't use that in the United States. I don't know if we have them here. Like, I'm only familiar with like trackside maintenance and stuff in the UK as there's one guy on the work crew who's like the manager of safety and like gets to define where the place of safety is.

Starting point is 01:26:23 And then if you hear a train coming, you run towards that guy and hope that like he doesn't get turned into chunky marinara. So engineering is it's a it's a good it's a good series of jobs that anyone should do. Great idea. Very safe, very safety conscious all the time. Just think of it. Just think of it this way. If you do die, the possibility as an engineer that you will die in a way that like no one really anticipated happening and isn't going to happen to anyone else is actually quite high. Like plenty of people die of heart disease.

Starting point is 01:27:11 How many people die getting torn apart by ventilation fans come back as a ghost in hi vis. So I mean, that's that's my call to action for the professional engineer. That's why you should be an engineer. If you if you feel minded to be is that like, yes, you may die, but the chances that you'll die in an extremely metal and unforeseen way. Chances are pretty good. Yep. Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good.

Starting point is 01:27:44 Can't wait to take a nap. Next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Just give you all three of the spooky drops there for that one. The Spooky Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Yes. Anyone have any commercials before we go? Do not believe local news when they're like people are handing out drugs as candy on Halloween to drug your children. They are not.

Starting point is 01:28:20 They are not. No, no one. No one is handing out their their medicated schedules to your children. Too valuable. That's that's my PSA. Nobody. Nobody is drugging your children. Nobody is like putting razor blades and apples or shit because like the parents try to kill their own kids.

Starting point is 01:28:38 Yes. That's literally the only the only cases of that happening are parents who have heard those PSAs and gone, huh, I'm going to kill my kid. That's like a pretty good idea. Yeah. And then they get caught instantly. Likewise, don't do insurance fraud by running your ship of ground. Yeah, because you'll get tried for baritry, which is a capital offense. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:06 It's also what they what they charge because you cut a time was you couldn't charge an officer with mutiny. So if a junior officer's mutiny, they would have to be charged with baritry instead. I'm not sure if that's still true, but certainly used to be. Hmm. I have to ask the sovereign citizens what they think since they know everything about Admiralty war. That's right. Hopefully Franklin 12 is that soon. Everything's recorded.

Starting point is 01:29:36 I got most of the footage though. It's actually going to happen. Holy shit. Soonish. Yeah. Congratulations on Franklin. The next bonus episode is going to be about the Philadelphia 76ers. Yes.

Starting point is 01:29:48 I have I have a drop for that, which I used on the episode. And so I guess to play us out. Yep. If I can get it. Is this the tiger? All right. Bye everybody. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:12 Spooky. Goodbye to everyone. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween everybody. Boo.

Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 44: Ghost Ships

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