MYSTERY AT SEA
S.S. OURANG MEDAN, THE GHOST SHIP
SARASIJ MAJUMDER
“All
Officers, including the Captain, are dead. Lying in chart room and bridge.
Possibly whole crew dead. … I die.”
Above was the radio message received by some ships in
Straits of Malacca, in 1947–48. Some Morse codes were also there which
couldn’t be deciphered.
This has reference to
S.S. OURANG MEDAN, the ghost ship. Photo pasted above:--
The coordinates of the ship were calculated by the message,
and was sent to the nearest ship, the SILVER STAR.
Captain of the SILVER STAR wasted no time, and within few
hours they found the
OURANG MEDAN.
They tried to contact the crew members of the ship, but
there was no response, so they decided to board the OURANG MEDAN.
As soon as they boarded the ship, they saw the most horrific
thing.
The deck of the ship was filled with dead bodies .
The Captain’s body was there on the bridge. Bridge Officers
bodies were there in the chart room. The Radio Operator, who sent the message,
was found at his station
Even the dogs on the ship were dead.
There was something unusual.
Every face had the same expression.
Eyes wide-opened with fear, and twisted face because of
terror.
The rescue members noticed something strange.
The temperature was more than 100°F, but it was cold inside
the ship.
There were no signs of injuries on the bodies.
The bodies were decaying faster than they should be.
So, they decided to tow the ship to the port.
But as they attached the tow line to the OURANG MEDAN, smoke
started coming out of the ship.
So, they cut the tow line, and quickly boarded the SILVER
STAR.
As soon as they boarded, the OURANG MEDAN exploded and soon
disappeared beneath the water of the sea.
A Survivor Tells His Chilling Story
As reported by The Shipyard Blog, one account of the SS Ourang
Medan spoke of a man named Jerry Rabbit.
Rabbit reportedly washed up on the shore of the Marshall
Islands in a lifeboat with six dead crew members ten days after the Ourang
Medan exploded. He made contact with a missionary and told him a
peculiar tale of survival.
Rabbit said that he had joined the crew of the Ourang
Medan in Shanghai. He claimed that 15,000 crates of unknown cargo were
loaded onto the vessel before it set off for Costa Rica. It was only then that
Rabbit realized he had joined a smuggling operation.
When Rabbit heard his fellow crewmen complaining of stomach
cramps, he grew suspicious. And when a crew member died, he knew he had to find
out what the ship was carrying. He peeked at the vessel’s logbook and
discovered that the crates from China held sulfuric acid, potassium cyanide,
and nitro-glycerine. Rabbit suspected that the sulfuric acid was leaking,
creating a gas that was slowly suffocating the crew.
As more men started dropping dead, Rabbit and six others
sneaked away in a lifeboat. None of his crewmates had survived the journey, and
Rabbit himself died soon after repeating his strange tale.
Aside from one story printed in a 1940s newspaper, there is
no record of Jerry Rabbit’s existence. In fact, there is no record of a ship by
the name of SS Ourang Medan at all.
Did The SS Ourang Medan Ever Exist?
According to Lloyd’s Register of Ships, which has kept a
record of every merchant ship since 1764, no ship by the name of SS Ourang
Medan was ever documented. And there are no official incident reports
about the ship’s sinking.
What’s more, no evidence of the wreck was ever found in the
Strait of Malacca or elsewhere.
A German researcher named Professor Theodor Siersdorfer once
found a 1953 publication titled The Death Ship in the South Seas that
offered evidence about the incident.
The book suggested that the Ourang Medan was
indeed carrying potassium cyanide and nitro-glycerine, which caused it to
explode. If the ship sank either during or directly after World War II, the
secrecy surrounding the vessel would make sense. Those materials were sensitive
items to be transporting at the time.
The first newspaper account reportedly appeared in 1940 in
Britain. But it didn’t make its way to the U.S. until around 1948, when news of
the Ourang Medan was printed in reputable publications such
as The San Francisco Examiner. Why did the stories emerge eight
years apart? And what caused many of the details in them to differ so
drastically?
Today, there are still many questions that remain unanswered
about the mystery of the SS Ourang Medan — so many, in fact,
that the ship’s tale has been relegated almost completely to the realm of
legend.
MYSTERY REMAINS!!
IMAGE SOURCES:--
1st image source:- S.S. Ourang Medan.
2nd image source:- The sudden loss.
References:-
1.0 S.S. Ourang Medan | Historic Mysteries
2.0 Death Ship: The Ourang Medan Mystery
3.0 https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-mysterious-historical-tale-of-the-dutch-ghost-ship-573118081136
4.0 https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/ourang-medan.htm
5.0 https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/ghost-ship-legends-the-mysterious-fate-of-the-ss-ourang-medan/
If that amount of poison dumped in sea, there could had been a catastrophic situation to marine life…. Was there any news in local newspapers… may put some light
ReplyDeleteI AGREE. THE RESULTANT EXPLOSION SHOULD HAVE DISTURBED MARINE LIFE.
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