Ghost Ships: True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings, and Disasters

Rating:
Summary: Pirates, jinxes, and ghostly galleons
Review: "Ghost Ships" is filled with stories of horror and mystery on the high seas, and in a couple of instances, on the Mississippi River---"The 'Iron Mountain' rounded the bend and was never seen again," as the author tells the tale.

Eleven months later, "another palatial Mississippi River paddle-wheel vessel, the 'Mississippi Queen', cast off from Memphis on April 17, 1873....She was last seen shortly before midnight, about twelve hours after her departure. Then she, too, vanished without a trace down on the Mississippi River."

It's easy to understand how ships go missing in the Great Lakes or on the Seven Seas. But how do they manage to disappear without a trace on a river, even one the size of the Mississippi? In his chapter "Without a Trace," the author attributes the disappearance of ships to pirates, waterspouts (he was actually on board a ship that sailed through a water spout), UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Incidentally, Richard Winer is also the author of "The Devil's Triangle."

In addition to ships that vanished without a trace, there are also ships that stayed afloat (and in one case delivered the mail) but lost their crews. The 'Mary Celeste' of nineteenth-century fame is mentioned, but Winer spends most of his time with the 'Joyita,' a sixty-five foot yacht that mislaid her crew of twenty-five right in the middle of the twentieth century. She was found deserted and adrift ninety miles north of Fiji, her radio smashed, and part of her cargo missing.

Rather than accept the more mundane explanation of piracy on the high seas, the author elaborates on the theory that the 'Joyita' was jinxed. She was cursed by the widow of a Portuguese shipfitter who died while the yacht was still under construction, and the disappearance of her crew was only one of several incidents that solidified 'Joyita's reputation as a bad-luck ship.

Whether or not you choose to believe, with the author, that the 'Joyita' was trailed all over the South Pacific by a ghostly Portuguese galleon---well, "No Joy aboard the Joyita" is not the strangest chapter in this book.

Oddly enough, there aren't too many ghosts aboard "Ghost Ships." A chapter is devoted to the ghosts on the luxury liner, "Queen Mary" (now a museum). The ghost of Errol Flynn, and the headless ghost of the pirate Bartholemy Portuguese make brief appearances. There are a pair of swimming ghosts that followed their former ship, the "Watertown," long after their burial at sea.

One frightening story involves a Russian ship, the 'Ivan Vassili,' that seemed to be possessed by something other than a ghost. At irregular intervals, 'it' caused the 'Vassili's crew to go berserk:

"For twenty minutes, the men ran amuck, screaming wildly, racing about the ship, totally oblivious to what they were doing. They were beating each other and themselves. During the frenzied melee a seaman named Alex Govinski, broke away from the others, hurled himself over the rail into the blackness of the sea and disappeared. Then, in a matter of seconds, it was all over. Everything, including the possessed seamen, returned to normal. Except for the loss of Govinski, it was as if nothing had happened."

After a few more suicides and incidents of mass hysteria, the crew finally deserted the 'Ivan Vassili' in the port of Vladivostok and burned her to the waterline.

"Ghost Ships" is a fun, scary read if you ignore the occasional misspelling, unfamiliar grammatical construction, and some of the author's more outrè theories on the mysteries of sea.

Rating:
Summary: Neither fish nor fowl
Review: I bought this book because I'm an enthusiast of both maritime literature and ghost stories, and this book purported to appeal to both interests. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to its claims. The author, who, as he reminds us time and again throughout the book, wrote "The Devil's Triangle," which inspired the cheesy 1971 Vincent Price-narrated documentary of the same name. This might account for the over-dramatic tone of some of the accounts, which promise to scare, but don't. A ship enters a fog bank and crashes on rocks that were poorly charted. Putting "was there something more to the fate of this ship?" at the end of the story doesn't make it creepy. There are some truly alarming disappearance stories out there, but they're not to be found here. Particularly disturbing was the author's digressions into personal opinion, as in the chapter about a group of seal-hunting ships that were trapped by an ice floe. Winer claims that it was nature restoring the balance against the brutality of the hunters. If this was the case, why didn't this sort of disaster happen every year during seal season? And why are we supposed to care what he thinks of Errol Flynn's draft-dodging, which enters into the tale on celebrity haunted yachts? The book could also have used a better editor; grammatical errors abound. Want a good maritime-based chiller? Grab a copy of Berlitz's "The Bermuda Triangle" instead.

Rating:
Summary: Not scary enough
Review: I bought this for my ghost-story loving 9 year old grandson.. this is HIS review: "I thought the book was okay, but it didn't have much detail and it wasn't frightening enough. It didn't talk enough about hauntings and peoples encounters, but it was pretty good. That's why I have to give it only three stars." Well, he would know!

Rating:
Summary: Where have you been, Mr. Winer?
Review: Okay . . . I really liked this book. Enough said.

However, I have numerous problems with it. For one, Winer (who thirty-odd years ago wrote a book on the Bermuda Triangle) is either stuck in the past or hasn't done much reading; he lists numerous debunked or blatantly false occurances in this book. For example: the famous "message in a bottle" from the "Carrol A. Deering", which suggested that the crew was kidnapped and put in chains by a mysterious steamer, was proven to be a hoax perpetuated by the founder of it way back in the 1920s, when the "Deering" was front-page news - even though Winer lists it as being proven authentic. Also, as Lawrence Kusche writers in "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved", the disappearance of the USS "Cyclops" is not so mysterious after all, given that there was a rather severe storm in the immediate vicinity of Baltimore at the time that the "Cyclops" was supposed to arrive. The Japanese freighter "Raifuku Maru" or what ever it was called ("Danger like a dagger now!") went down during a severe storm off the coast of France; those famous words were never actually sent. Numerous other "Bermuda Triangle"-type incidences are listed in an equally erroneous manner (especially the "Revonnoc").

Nonetheless, the majority of the book is interesting - especially the chapters on items that I knew little or nothing about (the chapter about the "Ivan Vassili" is arguably the best in the book). I have long been haunted the pictures of the ghosts of the SS "Watertown"; it's interesting to get an insight into the actual events preceding it.

Overall, a good book - if you don't mind the occasional dated/erroneous entry.

Rating:
Summary: Where have you been, Mr. Winer?
Review: Okay . . . I really liked this book. Enough said.

However, I have numerous problems with it. For one, Winer (who thirty-odd years ago wrote a book on the Bermuda Triangle) is either stuck in the past or hasn't done much reading; he lists numerous debunked or blatantly false occurances in this book. For example: the famous "message in a bottle" from the "Carrol A. Deering", which suggested that the crew was kidnapped and put in chains by a mysterious steamer, was proven to be a hoax perpetuated by the founder of it way back in the 1920s, when the "Deering" was front-page news - even though Winer lists it as being proven authentic. Also, as Lawrence Kusche writers in "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved", the disappearance of the USS "Cyclops" is not so mysterious after all, given that there was a rather severe storm in the immediate vicinity of Baltimore at the time that the "Cyclops" was supposed to arrive. The Japanese freighter "Raifuku Maru" or what ever it was called ("Danger like a dagger now!") went down during a severe storm off the coast of France; those famous words were never actually sent. Numerous other "Bermuda Triangle"-type incidences are listed in an equally erroneous manner (especially the "Revonnoc").

Nonetheless, the majority of the book is interesting - especially the chapters on items that I knew little or nothing about (the chapter about the "Ivan Vassili" is arguably the best in the book). I have long been haunted the pictures of the ghosts of the SS "Watertown"; it's interesting to get an insight into the actual events preceding it.

Overall, a good book - if you don't mind the occasional dated/erroneous entry.

Rating:
Summary: Rehash from the 70's....
Review: Richard Winer is best known as the author of the Devil's Triangle books in the Devil's/Bermuda Triangle craze in the 1970's. You may be wondering how this relates to this "new" book. Basically this is the story of a publisher who has 3 old Devil's Triangle books sitting in their vaults gathering dust....So how about combining stories from the three books, throwing a new title on it and seeing how much money they can rake in. And that's pretty much what you have here. The stories vary in quality ( just as the original books did ). If you like ocean mysteries it may be worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: A hit and miss affair
Review: Well I'm sitting on the fence on this one. The subject matter is appealing to me but the manner in which it was written coupled with the research (or lack thereof), enabled me to knock a couple of stars off.

Critics would say that Winer has pulled out some old manuscripts from his office drawer, dusted them off and re-submitted them as a new book. At times, that seems pretty close to the truth. Nevertheless, some of the stories Winer writes about are interesting.

This book blows hot and cold. Buy it and enjoy the hot spots.

Rating:
Summary: Do I Dare Go Out to Sea on a Ship
Review: Winer may be better known to most readers as the author of "The Devil's Triangle", which boosted the brief Bermuda Triangle craze years ago. This collection is much better, as it is not pushing some grand conspiracy theory (alien or human); instead, it is a collection of "Readers' Digest" type, short articles. What certainly comes across well is that the oceans are large places indeed and been home to many unexplainable and mysterious tragedies over the centuries. The nature of the sea lends itself well to the supernatural, and while the cases in the book range from well explained and resolved losses to genuinely frightening and seemingly inexplicable events, Winer's style conveys the great mystery of the deeps very effectively. The book is a very easy read, atmospheric, and a fun jaunt for landlubbers who want a taste of the dark side of going down to the sea in ships...