There’s something oddly fascinating about stories of haunted ships aimlessly wandering the open sea. In a way, they’re essentially floating haunted houses, carrying their spectral crew wherever the currents lead. Such tales are probably inspired by real sightings of deserted ships meandering past shipping lanes. Since humans first began to sail open waters, there have doubtlessly been times when an entire ship’s crew perished due to disease, malnutrition, or exceptionally harsh storms. Certainly, it would be a frightening and inauspicious sight to encounter one of these vessels for sailors of any era. Imagine catching sight of another ship in the distance, attempting to signal its crew in vain, only to see the rotting corpses as the ship creaks by your own.
It should be little wonder then that there are so many modern legends and folktales about haunted or ghostly ships. Such a ghastly sight would only become further imbued with the folklore of the supernatural as the rumors spread and evolved. Interestingly, we have a feint echo of similar rumors during a particularly chaotic period of Late Antiquity. The Syriac Christian writer John of Ephesus (c. 507 – c. 588), in describing the Justinianic Plague, gives the following eerie details about what some reportedly saw at sea:
Ships in the midst of the sea whose sailors were suddenly attacked by God’s wrath and the ships became tombs for their captains and they continued adrift on the waves carrying the corpses of their owners . . . Many people saw shapes of bronze boats and figures sitting in them resembling people with their heads cut off . . . Black people without heads sitting in a glistening boat and travelling swiftly on the sea, so that this sight almost caused the souls of the people who saw it to expire.
Tr. Witaskowski (1996), pp. 75, 77.
It’s an open question whether these were believed to be demons that caused such calamities or the ghosts of the dead sailors. As I’ve briefly discussed in a previous post, the categories of supernatural beings in Late Antiquity were far from clear and often overlapped. The headless aspect of these beings was likely derived from the folklore of demons, whom are frequently whom are sometimes described as being without a head. One feature of the archetypal nature of headless demons has recently been traced in an article by David Frankfurter (linked below). Procopius of Caesarea, another sixth century writer who lived through the plague, similarly chose to describe the demonic Justinian as occasionally appearing headless in his slanderous Secret History.
More generally, it should be remembered that malevolent spirits were broadly associated with disease. The plethora of textual and archaeological evidence in the form of amulets can attest for this. Procopius of Caesarea also includes sightings of demons by plague victims in Constantinople in his own narrative of the Justinianic plague. Given the tremendous fear and anxiety caused by such a devastating pandemic, it is not surprising that such dreadful tales were circulating.
Furthermore, I cannot help but wonder how often such ships, whose crew were all killed by the plague, continued to wander the open sea. The prevailing theory among modern scholars is that the Justinianic plague became so ubiquitous because it was spread through the grain ships of Egypt. For several centuries, Egypt had exported its abundant grain supply to the rest of the empire. It was through these trade channels that rats, invested with plague carrying fleas, may have hitched a ride to other parts of the Mediterranean and thus spread the deadly disease. Of course, most of these arrived at their destination, but there is some probability that some crews succumbed to the plague en route. We cannot be sure of how frequently this happened, but the tales reported by John of Ephesus seem to be a dim indication of the possibility. Moreover, another interesting, but ultimately unanswerable question would be: How long would such ships wander the Mediterranean before capsizing or running aground?
A much later (14th century) depiction of a Byzantine ship
There seems to be no other extant tales of haunted/ghostly ships from antiquity, at least not to my present knowledge. However, there’s certainly no shortage of ancient tales of terrors one might encounter at sea, from the Sirens to the Ketos. Perhaps it’s only due to the nature of our sources that we never hear similar tales. After all, most of our written sources are from literate “elite.” We rarely hear the thoughts of “ordinary” men like sailors and when we do it is frequently through the filter of what writers like John of Ephesus deem to be worthy of reporting.
There would be a rich history of haunted ship stories following the Medieval period. After the start of the Age of Exploration and what is sometimes termed the “Age of Sail” (1571-1862), there was an explosive increase in the amount of lore and tales about this topic, for obvious reasons. For example, there are vague stories about legendary haunted ships like the Flying Dutchman, which has been weaved into a variety of literary depictions and helped preserve a place for this motif in the modern cultural consciousness.
Further Reading:
On the motif of headless demons, see Frankfurter, D. (2018), “The Threat of Headless Beings: Constructing the Demonic in Christian Egypt,” in Ostling, M. (ed), Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, 57-78. (https://www.academia.edu/35424632/The_Threat_of_Headless_Beings_Constructing_the_Demonic_in_Christian_Egypt)
For a thorough narrative of the Justinianic Plague and a summary of the latest scholarly work on it see, Harper, K. (2017), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, Princeton, 199-245; Appendix B.
Witaskowski, W. tr. (1996), Psuedo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle: Known Also as the Chronicle of Zuqnin. Part III, Liverpool, Quoted in Harper, K. (2017), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, Princeton, 224-5.
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