The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Not until 31 January the following year did Great Eastern, prodded by rams and dragged by tugs, reach the water at last. The multiple launches had cost the company more than £200,000 - a sum which distressed the backers, who had been promised early and easy profits. But the spending couldn’t stop now. As the mighty vessel rested in the Thames Estuary the final opulent touches had to be added to her lavish interiors: marble pillars and surfaces for the vast Grand Salon; the world’s biggest hot water system to supply the baths installed in every cabin; ornate wrought-iron ornamentation everywhere. And at Brunel’s insistence, a horde of wooden rocking-chairs. Americans adored them, and Brunel was determined that the US tourist trade would become the backbone of his bold enterprise.

  But fear nagged at him. Already he had begun to hear the first reports of frightening phenomena aboard his ship. He speculated - accurately as it later transpired - about a possible reason for the disturbances, but dared not share his theories with more than a few trusted colleagues. He dreaded the slightest gossip about the ugly matter. If the wider public became aware that there were ghosts - terrible ghosts - aboard Great Eastern it would almost certainly be the end of her.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel did nothing and hoped the problem would go away.

  Horror on the Trial Voyage

  In the pre-dawn darkness of 9 September the Great Eastern set out on her first proving trial around England’s southern coast. Aboard were the full crew and a dozen guest passengers. Brunel had objected to a public presence at this early stage in the testing regime, but the owners overruled him. He had still considered it his professional duty to go on the voyage, but when the day came was too ill and pessimistic to leave his bed.

  As the ship approached Hastings at about 7 am ‘a powerful tremor’ ran through her, jolting some passengers from their sleep. A massive explosion followed, blowing the forward funnel from its moorings and hurling hot chunks of metal across the decks. [A board of inquiry later found that an engineer had forgotten to open the stopcocks when the vessel left port. With nowhere to go the steam had swelled up in the funnel casing until it blasted its way free.]

  Four men in the boiler room were immediately swamped by blistering steam. It scalded their lungs, killing them in seconds. A fifth died less mercifully, scrambling, screaming, up the ladder to the deck from which he jumped overboard, seeking the balm of the cold sea. But he was denied even that relief - falling instead into a gigantic spinning paddlewheel which shredded him alive.

  Within hours of hearing the appalling news the ailing Brunel suffered a stroke. He died six days later.

  However, the ‘curse’ bubbled on without him.

  Following the replacement of the funnel and other vital repairs, the Great Eastern steamed to the Welsh coast for a further trial. The captain, William Harris, decided to go ashore at Holyhead. With him in the ship’s main boat were a coxswain and the purser’s nine-year-old son. During the short journey to land, a powerful squall overturned the boat. The captain, the coxswain and the boy were drowned.

  The Great Eastern on a trial voyage. Already 10 people connected with her had died.

  In the face of all these catastrophes the Great Eastern’s owners had no choice but to remain publicly optimistic. Dismissing dark newspaper interpretations of the run of ill-luck that already had swallowed 10 lives, they spoke only of the pleasures and luxuries their revolutionary vessel offered. In a public relations effort that would be admired even by today’s spin-practitioners, the company managed to sell tickets to more than 1000 people for the vessel’s first voyage to New York. It was not generally known at the time, but many of these tickets were heavily discounted. Meanwhile the firm was obliged to tempt superstitious sailors with abnormally high wages - sometimes double the prevailing rate.

  Under its new captain John Vine Hall the Great Eastern set sail (and steam) for New York. There were few accidents and no deaths - but the voyage was a disaster nonetheless. Because London’s chefs and waiters were proving even less willing than seamen to come aboard, the company had been forced to recruit virtual amateurs - and their unsuitability showed in the form of repulsive meals, sloppily served. An equally unpleasant problem was the soot the funnels had begun to spew onto the decks, smudging the clothes and faces of everyone aboard. The gritty material also worked its way into water and food, prompting some passengers to fast until they disembarked.

  Far worse were the reported ghosts. Passengers disembarking in London and New York swore to eagerly awaiting newspapermen that they would never set foot on the troubled ship again. Usually the story was the same: of being startled awake in the night by bloodcurdling bangings and frantic screams for help. As one American paper put it, ‘The cries were of a most terrible nature, seeming to emerge from Satan’s deepest realms.’ The shipping line’s managers denied these tales, once calling them ‘the fruits of fantasy and spite’. But on both sides of the Atlantic Brunel’s dream-liner was now principally known for its soot, phantoms and foul food.

  Although few spoke well of the Great Eastern any more, she defiantly persisted with her transatlantic voyages, losing increasing amounts of money on every trip. But the trend became terminal in 1862 when she scraped across an uncharted rock outside New York. The accident tore a gash 25 metres long and three metres wide into the hull, necessitating $300,000 in repairs. Port authorities gave the hazard a name: ‘The Great Eastern Rock.’

  The proprietors had had enough. Abandoning all hope of creating a successful passenger and mail line they sold their jinxed giantess for a fraction of what she had cost to build. The new owners immediately put the Great Eastern to work on a project guaranteed to turn a profit - laying part of the new transatlantic telegraph cable.

  The Curse’s Cause ‘Revealed’

  The work of cabling the ocean floor between Ireland and Newfoundland began in July 1865. After nine hours of sailing and laying, the galvanometer revealed that a fault had occurred somewhere back along the line. The ship reversed and drew the cable back on board while technicians minutely inspected it.

  After retrieving more than 17 kilometres of the metallic snake, the inspectors identified the problem: a saboteur had driven a spike of wire into the cable, earthing the current. Despite encountering, and repairing, an identical flaw further along the line, the Great Eastern’s crew managed to lay 1900 kilometres of cable - roughly half the total distance.

  But then the ocean grew violent. The cable aboard the rolling ship snapped, its end slithering over the stern and sinking five kilometres to the sea floor. For days, the master tried with a grapnel to retrieve the immensely costly line from the bottom - but was forced in the end to leave the cable - all 1900 kilometres of it - deep in the ocean.

  The following year the Great Eastern laid a fresh length of cable - successfully. But she was now so enmired in debt that her owners decided to junk her anyway. In 1889, she was broken up and her iron plates and four million rivets sold for $1.5 million - a better profit than she had ever made at sea.

  Toward the end of the demolition, workers were confronted by a chilling sight. Between the casings, bearing the bloody smears of their desperate scrapings and bangings, lay the contorted skeletons of two labourers. The original builders insisted that the men’s absence had not been noticed at the time, but it was plain that they had somehow become trapped in their narrow tomb during construction of the Great Eastern. The skeletons had sailed on every voyage the gigantic ship had made.

  Largely forgotten today is the unhappy history of the liner Hinemoa, launched in 1861, three years after the Great Eastern. From the beginning, superstitious sailors deplored the fact that the dirt constituting the ship’s ballast had been bought on the cheap from a London graveyard. The vessel was dogged by a long series of accidents and mishaps, culminating, on her sixth voyage, in a storm which drowned all aboard. A court of inquiry heard that the Hinemoa had had six captains, one for each journey. The first died after days of drinking; the second was imprisoned for theft; the third
was committed to a mental asylum; the fourth and fifth were found dead in their cabins (the latter a suicide) - and the sixth went down with his men when the ship sank.

  Rocked by III-Luck

  In 1983, frightened tourists rushed to rid themselves of reputedly cursed rocks they had souvenired from Hawaii’s Mauna Lau volcano. At the time, Jan Erickson, a naturalist at the Volcanoes National Park, told me, ‘Sometimes we’re receiving 30 to 40 parcels in a single day’s mail. In most cases nothing has happened to these people. Rationally or not, they just fear what might hit them.’

  The great rock rebound began when newspapers reported a chain of deaths and mishaps linked to the stones. One victim was Ralph Loffert, an airline executive who holidayed near the volcano with his wife and four children in 1981. Ignoring warnings from local guides that the mountain’s goddess Pele punished people who stole her rocks, Loffert took a bagful home to Buffalo, USA.

  A black chain of coincidences followed. Son Todd suffered an appendicitis attack - then shortly after release from hospital, injured his knee so badly it needed an operation. On the day he left hospital the second time he broke his wrist. Meanwhile brother Mark sprained an ankle and broke an arm, and a third son, Dan, acquired a mysteriously lingering eye infection. This was not the pattern of daily life to which the family was accustomed.

  When the Lofferts’ daughter Rebecca lost two front teeth in a fall they decided it was time to get rid of the sinister stones - returning them to Hawaii by priority mail. ‘But the bad things kept right on happening,’ Ralph Loffert recalled. ‘Rebecca broke three more of her teeth, Dan broke a bone in his hand and Todd dislocated his elbow and broke his other wrist. We’d never known a pattern of such bad luck.

  ‘It was only then I found Mark had held back three of the rocks. We mailed them back right away and the trouble stopped.’

  Allegedly the jinxed stones destroyed the life of Alison Raymond of Washington, a nursing sister:

  A week after I took home a collection of the rocks from Mauna Lau my mother died of cancer, and soon after, my husband was killed in a head-on collision. While we were making the funeral arrangements my son broke his leg, then became gravely ill with a pancreas condition.

  I’d been warned about the rocks, but I didn’t believe it - and I don’t entirely know if I believe it now. But for safety’s sake I sent them back, with the bleak feeling that what I’d done was too late anyway. I’ve spent a long time regretting that I didn’t leave the rocks on the slope of that mountain.

  Whatever might be causing it, the sinister stones syndrome is not confined to Hawaii.

  Visitors who souvenired stones from the ancient Australian monolith Uluru have contritely returned them to its Aboriginal guardians, sometimes describing similar patterns of ill-luck.

  But the heaviest paranormal punishments - in Australia at least - have been suffered by tourists who appropriated samples of the sacred (and celebrated) bouncing stones from a beach near Cape Tribulation, Queensland. When thrown, these small black rocks rebound like tennis balls - and despite warning signs and guides’ requests, visitors were pocketing them so often that the beach had to be closed.

  However, if their letters can be believed, some thieves paid heavily for the desecration. ‘We’ve received many parcels of pebbles with apologetic letters inside,’ Hazel Douglas, the Guyalanji tribe’s custodian of the bouncing stones, told me.

  The tribespeople allowed me to read some of the letters. The writers revealed that since taking stones from the beach their families had been plagued by bad luck, illness - and even death.

  ‘We’re receiving a steady stream of our bouncing stones from all over the world,’ Marcia Tudor of the Far North Queensland Promotion Bureau said. ‘People are incredibly anxious to return them to us - hoping that by doing so they’ll end their run of bad fortune. Some say they’d never realised the stones were sacred. A lot seem to be looking for forgiveness from the tribe.’

  Hitler’s Hexed Battleship

  ‘Killed 2000 Men’

  III-luck, injury and death plagued the German battleship Scharnhorst during her seven years at sea.

  The jinx was reportedly at work long before the vessel set out on its maiden voyage.

  During construction the Scharnhorst’s shell rolled over, crushing 60 workers. Ignoring the crew’s fears Nazi leaders gathered in September 1936 to see the ship launched. But it fell off its cradle and slid into the ocean. Mere days after the ship set out onto the still-peaceful seas her sailors began to die.

  Nine men perished when a gun exploded.

  Twelve suffocated when the air-supply to their gun-turret failed.

  While steaming up the River Elbe the destroyer collided with the passenger liner Bremen, damaging it beyond repair. And finally…

  By sheer luck four British cruisers fatally crippled the Scharnhorst in December 1943, firing at random from the ‘impossible’ distance of 14,680 metres. The battleship sank into the North Atlantic ocean, drowning all but 32 of the 1968 sailors aboard.

  Odyssey of the ‘Unlucky’ Axe-Head

  Les Kohring of Molendinar on Queensland’s Gold Coast has seen several examples of little-understood forces at work, both between individuals and via inanimate objects. He is even convinced that one artefact - an ancient axe-head - malignly threatened his own wellbeing. Les told me his story in October 2006:

  I’ve had many friendships and contacts with Aboriginal people over the years, beginning with the time I was a 16-year-old boxer in the Western District of Victoria. Murri lads often took part in local fight nights and I was in quite a few of them, both as an amateur and a pro.

  Later in life, working as a concrete contractor on the Gold Coast, I came into close contact with what I knew deep inside me to be raw Aboriginal power. I was preparing a small job at a place called Gaven when I picked up an old Aboriginal axe-head shaped out of stone. I immediately recognised what it was because we used to find them while we were cutting sugarcane. We learned back then that they were quite a few hundred years old - and this one certainly looked it.

  I foolishly decided to keep the thing as a souvenir, so I took it home and cleaned it up and put it on a bookshelf as an ornament - something I was going to regret. From that time on I had a run of really evil luck. First I injured my arm and ended with an elbow so swollen I could barely work. Then the part-Aboriginal bloke who worked for me got a bad heart. I kept going, but with illnesses, mechanical breakdowns and every kind of misfortune you could name, I began to wonder whether someone had it in for me.

  The final crunch came when the concrete cracked in a couple of house slabs I’d laid. That just shouldn’t have happened. I knew a fair bit of Aboriginal lore and I didn’t need to be told that that axe-head probably had something - a lot - to do with it. So I kept an eye on the local classifieds - and when I saw an ad from someone with an Aboriginal name wanting to buy old artefacts, I packed the axe-head up and sent it to him free. I didn’t want a price, I just wanted someone who could handle the problem. After I’d posted it off, things soon returned to normal.

  Aboriginal magic can be very powerful at times. Once, at Cooktown Hospital, I talked to a woman who was in bed very ill, but from no cause the doctors could find. She said she’d been walking in the bush when she stumbled by accident into a sacred spot where women were forbidden to go. She hadn’t gone in deliberately - it was just a slip-up. But she was being punished all the same - and she didn’t expect to live. I was pleased to hear that after a long illness she did survive, but I’ve seen others not so lucky.

  In North Queensland hospitals, like Cairns, you can find people, very sick, who’ve unwittingly broken some old taboo and are dying because of that. Strangely enough, they don’t even have to know about their transgression to experience its deadly effects. In some cases they seem to lose the will to live, and just fade away and die.

  These curses seem to work in a frighteningly efficient way. Christian clergy are usually quite ineffectual in tryin
g to remove them.

  In 1956 the world’s newspapers described how an Australian witchdoctor’s apparently powerful hex almost killed a young Aboriginal mechanic. Daniel C. collapsed at a general store and was taken by ambulance to Darwin General Hospital. Pupils dilated and breathing raggedly, he told emergency department doctors that the ‘snake spirit’ was stinging him to death. He gaspingly explained that he had been walking alone through the bush when he quite accidentally caught sight of an elderly witchdoctor from another tribe squatting in the earth preparing a spell.

  Furious at this taboo-breaking breach of privacy the old man immediately pointed a ceremonial bone and chanted a song designed to admit a snake into the interloper’s body, where it would slowly crush him to death. Over the following week Daniel’s muscles tensed to such a degree that he was unable to eat and could scarcely breathe. Convinced that the snake was indeed crushing his lungs he resigned himself to inevitable death.

  But the hospital’s medical staff refused to give in. Assuring the young man that his problems were not physical but psychological, they placed him in an oxygen tent and fed him through a drip. Meanwhile the counselling continued. There was no magical snake. The death curse was an empty threat. What was real was Daniel and his wish to live. The 20th century healers prevailed. Several days later their patient, convinced that his medical team had defeated the bone-pointer, left the hospital cured.

  Other victims of the snake curse have been less fortunate.

  Horror of the Plasticine Doll

  Sir Alec Guinness learned in a frightening way that it can be dangerous to trifle - even playfully - with the occult. Guinness describes his unnerving experience in the autobiography A Positively Final Appearance (Penguin), published the year before his death in 2000.