For centuries, the ocean has been the setting for chilling tales, and at no time more so than during Mystic Seaport's Nautical Nightmares.
by Rick Eggleston photographs by Caryn B. Davis
From ghost ships to spooky old sea captains, there's just something about a dark and stormy night on the ocean that awakens the imagination in all of us. If you've ever lived in an older home along the Northeast coast, chances are you've had a run-in--or two--with a ghost. A woman dressed in a flowing gown atop a widow's walk, staring longingly toward the sea. The unexplained creak of a door. A mysterious flicker of light in the attic. For some, Halloween comes more than once a year.
Of course, there's no better time than All Hallows' Eve to conjure up a salty specter. After all, this is when the veil between the living and the dead is said to be the thinnest. So it was then that I visited southeastern Connecticut's Mystic Seaport for the annual Nautical Nightmares, which blends maritime fact with a bit of ghostly fiction on the perpetually circa-1876 museum grounds. During the annual ghost tour/production, actors dressed in period costume played out the mystery regarding the fate of the nineteenth century brigantine Mary Celeste, a 103-foot cargo ship out of New York that was discovered unmanned and under sail roughly 600 miles off Gilbraltar on December 4, 1872.
"The story of the Mary Celeste has been told for well over a century, and there have been several theories put forth on what happened," said Seaport educator and Nautical Nightmares co-director Nancy Hughes. "There have been many story threads tossed about over the years, and we chose the theory that it was the crew of the Celeste that was responsible for her demise."
Ghost ship is the term still used to describe a vessel found abandoned at sea, and the Mary Celeste fits the name perfectly. Her young captain, his wife and child and the entire crew went missing under a shroud of mystery. To this day their disappearance has maritime historians scratching their heads about what happened.
Of course, this was a time when tall ships and whalers roamed the sea, long before radar, weather reports and chart plotters. Tales of sea serpents, powerful gales and ships breaking up on jagged coastlines were commonplace during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These disasters and tales of woe were big news in their day and were often splashed across the front pages of newspapers. The Mary Celeste disaster was reported in the New York Times and the Boston Post. Both papers included detailed accounts of what is known to have happened to the Mary Celeste and her crew, led by Capt. Benjamin S. Briggs of Marion, Massachusetts. But all that is truly known is that Briggs, his wife Sarah Elizabeth, daughter Sophia Matilda, first mate Albert C. Richardson and six crewmen have never been found--or perhaps they were. More than two months after the discovery of the Mary Celeste, several bodies were found in a pair of lifeboats off the coast of Spain. However, the remains could not be positively identified.
Unlike the fabled Flying Dutchman and the Palatine ghost ships before her, the Mary Celeste is known to have actually existed, and her wreck was supposedly found off Haiti in 2001. The Dutchman and Palatine stories are, for the most part, regarded as embellished tales, passed on through genera-tions to scare sailors--not to mention modern museumgoers. The Dutchman is said to have cursed all who came across her glowing and swift-moving hull, while the ghastly legend of the Palatine involves a burning ship that appears off the New England coast. In his book Down Barnegat Bay: A Nor'easter Midnight Reader, Robert Jahn relates fantastic spooky yarns and includes detailed sepia illustrations of mysterious New Jersey-based maritime legends, storms and shipwrecks--everything from sea serpants to beach-walking ghosts.
"These legends still live in peoples' minds," Jahn told the Princeton Packet newspaper in 2000. "There's some sort of primal interest in historic seaside sights and old stories. [People] identify with things like lighthouses and tall ships."
Indeed, the Northeast coast has been ground zero for countless disasters at sea and chilling tales of lighthouse keepers falling to their deaths. And many of these stories come to life at Mystic Seaport, where maritime artifacts and ships from the Age of Sail's heyday have resided for more than seven decades. Take, for example, the seaport's centerpiece, the Charles W. Morgan.
This nineteenth-century whaling ship was subjected to a full-fledged paranormal investigation by ghost hunters in 2006. Armed with digital cameras and recorders, members of the Rhode Island Paranormal Research Group spent a night aboard the 167-year-old, 113-foot ship--the last of its kind in the world still afloat--and searched for paranormal activity pertaining to three separate incidents reported to have occurred onboard. In each instance, visitors to the ship--all from different states and all visiting at different times--reported seeing a man belowdecks dressed in period clothing sitting atop a pile of rope smoking a pipe. When the tourists shared their concern to museum officials that somebody was seen smoking on the National Historic Landmark, they were told that no such museum guides or interpreters were stationed on the ship.
"The mystery of the sea has been part of almost every culture," said Jen Emerson, a member of the Seaport's education department and the Nautical Nightmares lead scriptwriter. "Any time you have a ship on the ocean, and it disappears, and you don't know what happened, it gets people's attention. Sometimes things seem to happen for which there is no explanation."
While I had no luck seeing a ghost when I visited the seaport last fall, I did manage to get aboard the Morgan, which on this night played the role of the salvaged Mary Celeste. Of the numerous theories that have been offered on what happened to Capt. Briggs and his crew on that December night, one suggests that piracy was to blame, as bloodied weapons were found aboard, but none of the ship's cargo or money was missing. Others postulate that her cargo was to blame, as Briggs was carrying 1,700 barrels of alcohol--$30,000 worth--bound for Genoa, Italy, to be used for the fortification of wine. Historians have theorized that leaking barrels in the hold could have led to the buildup of explosive ethanol vapors. Fearful of this, it's thought Briggs might have ordered everyone into the lifeboats, which they tied off to the stern of the ship. Perhaps the line broke, setting Briggs and his crew adrift in the lifeboats, as the Mary Celeste--still under sail--continued on her course. In the end, all hands were thought to have perished in the boats, victims of hunger and exposure.
Another theory states that the crew was determined to break into the hold and drink the alcohol, murdering Briggs and his family in the process, then leaving in a lifeboat. Along the same lines, mutiny was also reasoned as a motive. When the Celeste was found by the crew of the British cargo ship Dei Gratia, she was said to be "thoroughly wet," with the compass broken and the ship's papers (except for the captain's logbook), sextant, marine chronometer and lifeboat missing.
This sprouted yet another theory, that perhaps the crew of the Mary Celeste had been sent scrambling off the ship because they were threatened by a waterspout, a seaquake or a sea monster. However, fingers were also pointed at the crew of the Dei Gratia, particularly Capt. David Reed Morehouse and chief mate Oliver Deveau. Their involvement in the discovery and salvage of the Celeste suggests they may have staged the whole thing, simply overtaking the ship, killing everyone, disposing of the bodies and laying a salvage claim.
Sure enough, the Nautical Night-mares production touched on this theory, too, while weaving in some of the producer's own touches to make the experience--and the story--even scarier and more mysterious. Visitors were led along the entire length of a completely dark and narrow ropewalk building. Later the tour wended into the museum's famed figurehead room, where eerie and mysterious catheads, billet heads and carvings from old ships stared blankly at us, as we watched and listened to the ghostly mother of Capt. Briggs mourn the loss of her son and grandchild.
Will the mystery of the Mary Celeste ever be solved? Probably not, but the intrinsic danger, intrigue and mystery of the ocean will keep us searching for its ghosts. "I love the sea, because around it anything can happen. It is always going to draw people, and there's an aspect of it that has you living on the edge," production co-director Nancy Hughes said. "In those days sailors were a superstitious and quirky lot. In some respects they still are."
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