"Ghost Ship: The Voyage of the Mary Celeste" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Spirits, Seers & Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic & The Supernatural"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 7
Ghost Ship: The Voyage of the Mary Celeste
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On the
morning of November 7, 1872, after two days waiting out foul weather off Staten
Island, a newly refitted brigantine called the Mary Celeste slipped out of New York
Harbor and into the Atlantic, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of alcohol in
her hold. Aboard were Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their
two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven hand-picked crewmen. None of them was
ever seen again.
Four weeks
later the ship was found drifting, empty, in the open ocean. What happened next
is a story about how a mystery becomes a legend, and about the young doctor who
would one day create Sherlock Holmes…
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Briggs was no reckless adventurer; a devout Massachusetts sea captain from a seafaring family, he read his Bible faithfully and had chosen his officers and crew with care, writing to his mother that he was thoroughly satisfied with both ship and men. While the Mary Celeste sat at anchor waiting for the weather to turn, Sarah dashed off a last letter home, asking that their young son Arthur, left behind with his grandmother, write to her often, and promising to remember every interesting thing that happened on the voyage so she could tell him about it. It’s one of the most quietly devastating documents in maritime history, precisely because it is so ordinary.
On December
4th, the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia,
which had left New York eight days after the Mary Celeste on roughly the
same course, sighted a vessel yawing strangely in the swell midway between the
Azores and Portugal. A boarding party found her deserted. And here it’s worth
being precise, because almost everything most people “know” about this moment
is wrong. There was no half-eaten breakfast on the table, no tea still warm on
the stove, no smoking pipe left mid-puff. What the boarders actually found was
a seaworthy but bedraggled ship under partial sail, some canvas torn away,
about three and a half feet of water in the hold, two hatches open, a makeshift
sounding rod abandoned on deck, and the ship’s single lifeboat gone. The last
log entry, dated November 25th, placed her off Santa Maria in the Azores,
hundreds of miles back along her course. The captain’s navigational instruments
and most of the ship’s papers were missing. Everything pointed not to violence
but to a hurried, orderly abandonment.
The salvage
hearing in Gibraltar didn’t see it that way at first. The colony’s attorney
general, Frederick Solly-Flood,
became convinced that the crew had broken into the alcohol, butchered the
Briggs family in a drunken frenzy, and fled. Supposed bloodstains on the
captain’s sword and a ship’s rail seemed to support him, until chemical
analysis showed they weren’t blood at all, and an American naval officer judged
the suspicious “cuts” on the bow to be ordinary weathering. The court
eventually released the ship, but the suspicion lingered, the salvors received
a grudgingly small award, and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had
already printed lurid tales of murder at sea. The story was primed for legend.
All it needed was a storyteller.
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In January 1884, the prestigious Cornhill Magazine published an anonymous tale called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” presented as the testimony of a survivor. Its author was a struggling twenty-five-year-old doctor in Southsea named Arthur Conan Doyle, who had served as a ship’s surgeon and knew how to make the sea feel real. Doyle cheerfully changed nearly everything: the ship became the Marie Celeste, the captain became J. W. Tibbs, the year became 1873, and the route became Boston to Lisbon. In his version, a fanatical passenger named Septimius Goring turns part of the crew to murder and steers the ship to West Africa, sparing only the narrator because he carries a strange black stone, a sacred charm venerated by Goring and his followers. Doyle never expected anyone to take it as fact, yet Horatio Sprague, the very same American consul who had handled the real case in Gibraltar, was intrigued enough to inquire whether any of it might be true. Doyle’s invented spelling stuck so firmly that “Marie Celeste” is still more widely used today than the ship’s real name.
Doyle wasn’t
the only fabulist; a Los Angeles Times retelling in 1883 had already
invented the untasted dinner and the galley fire still burning. In 1913, The
Strand Magazine, home of Sherlock Holmes himself, published the supposed
papers of a surviving steward named Abel Fosdyk, who claimed the whole company
had drowned or been eaten by sharks after a makeshift platform collapsed during
a swimming contest; it misspelled Briggs’s name and gave his daughter the wrong
age. A cleverer hoax in the 1920s fooled the New York Herald Tribune.
Writers added a giant squid, the Bermuda Triangle (in a completely different
stretch of the Atlantic), and flying saucers, while one astrological journal
managed to connect the ship to the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, and British
Israelism. Each retelling borrowed from the last, and the fiction slowly
crowded out the record.
The ship’s own
later history only fed the legend of a curse: her first captain, back when she
was a Nova Scotian vessel called Amazon, had fallen ill and died during
her maiden voyage in 1861. Another captain died aboard at St. Helena in 1879.
And in January 1885 her final master deliberately ran her onto a reef off Haiti
in an insurance fraud; when the scheme unraveled, he died in poverty within
months, one co-conspirator reportedly went mad, and another took his own life.
A sober historian will note that nineteenth-century seafaring was dangerous and
that fraudsters often come to bad ends, but it isn’t hard to see why sailors
whispered.
The richest
irony belongs to Doyle himself …
The man who
built a ghost ship out of whole cloth, and who would go on to create
literature’s great apostle of cold reason, became the most famous champion of Spiritualism in the world. By 1916 he had
publicly declared his belief in communication with the dead, and he spent his
final years lecturing on séances, writing a two-volume History of
Spiritualism, and defending the Cottingley Fairies photographs as genuine.
It’s tempting to read the sacred black stone in “Jephson’s Statement” as an
early flicker of the hunger for unseen powers that would later consume him,
though that’s the column’s own speculation, not Doyle’s.
As for what really happened, the most persuasive explanation is also the least supernatural. Nine of the alcohol barrels were found empty when the cargo reached Genoa, and seeping vapor in a closed hold could have produced alarming rumbles, or even a sudden flash of ignition. In 2006 the chemist Andrea Sella showed that such a pressure-wave explosion could leave no scorch marks at all, and in 2026 chemists at the University of Manchester refined the experiment with wood and ethanol, reaching the same conclusion. Frightened for his wife and daughter, Briggs may have ordered everyone into the boat, perhaps intending to trail behind until the danger passed, and then lost the ship to a rising wind. The true story of the Mary Celeste isn’t a tale of monsters or curses. It’s a tale of a careful man making one fearful decision, and of how quickly the rest of us rush to fill an empty deck with ghosts.
Spirits,
Seers & Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic & The Supernatural
By Steele Alexandra Douris |
Llewellyn Publications
Steele
Alexandra Douris’s Spirits, Seers & Séances, published by Llewellyn
in 2023, is pitched as an exploration of Spiritualism in the age of Sherlock
Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe, and it makes good on that promise. Douris is a
Victorianist with an MA in English from Stanford and a BA in anthropology from
the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Victorian crime, Gothic
fiction, and Spiritualism, and the book moves briskly through four broad
territories: the core practices of the movement, from séances and mesmerism to
automatic writing and planchettes; the Victorian “invisible world” of ghostlore
and fairy belief; magic in Victorian literature and Pre-Raphaelite art; and the
seasonal supernatural, including Hallowe’en customs and the great tradition of
Christmas ghost stories. Each chapter closes with hands-on exercises inviting
readers to try the techniques for themselves.
What makes it
the right companion for today’s post is how neatly it maps Doyle’s own journey.
His chapters, so to speak, are all here: the Gothic fiction that taught him how
to make readers believe the impossible, the séance culture that later claimed
him, and the fairy belief that led him to champion the Cottingley photographs.
Reading Douris makes it far easier to understand why so many brilliant,
rational Victorians, Doyle among them, found the séance room not a refuge from
science but its natural next frontier. Her chapter on the Victorian Gothic is
especially useful here, showing how thin the line between fiction and testimony
could be in an era when magazines happily printed ghost stories alongside
earnest reports of the séance room.
This is an accessible, practice-friendly introduction rather than an exhaustive scholarly history, and readers wanting a deep, critical biography of Doyle’s Spiritualist career will need to look beyond it. Skeptical readers should also know that the exercises are offered in earnest, as experiences to try rather than history to observe. But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what drew the creator of Sherlock Holmes into the world of spirits and séances, Douris offers a warm, well-researched, and genuinely enjoyable way in.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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