#1. The Mary Celeste - Perhaps the most famous of all sea mysteries, is the tale of the Mary Celeste. On December 5, 1872, 600 miles west of Gibraltar, she was sighted by the brigantine Dei Gratia. The Mary Celeste appeared to be sailing without the aid of a crew! Captain Morehouse sent three men to board her and investigate. Not a soul was found. Stranger yet, everything was in place just as if the crew was on board! Food and water were plentiful aboard the Mary Celeste, and the cabins were complete with oilskins, money, pipes and tobacco, but no sailors were to be found. Captain Briggs had been the captain of the strange ship. Could he have put his wife and daughter into the missing lifeboat, along with the seven crewmembers, and abandoned ship for some reason? According to old salts, the ship's owners made a grave mistake with that vessel, when they changed her name. That is always taboo. The Mary Celeste was refurbished, and once again plied the seven seas, but soon gained a reputation of being a jinxed vessel. Trouble seemed to follow her, and Captain Gilman Parker was said to have wrecked her on a rocky reef near Haiti.Ref 1 Some legends claim that the Mary Celeste was seen several more times in the years that followed, with futile attempts at her capture being made each time. Is she still out there sailing on the night seas? Do the howling winds still flow through her rigging? Back
#2. The Rosalie - The Rosalie was a French merchant ship bound for Havana Cuba in 1840. The ship never disappeared, but the crew did, leaving behind all their possessions. The only living thing aboard was a canary. Back
#3. The Grand Zenith - On December 30, 1976, the gigantic tanker, Grand Zenith, reported bad weather in the Atlantic. She lost radio contact almost immediately after that message, and was never seen again. One vessel reported seeing an oil slick from the Zenith. She was carrying almost two million gallons of oil when she vanished, so the oil slick report was very believable. However, when a ship arrived to take samples of the oil, the whole slick was nowhere to be seen! The Coast Guard searched in vain until January 19, 1977. Back