THE PLANET NERD SOCIETY

A dozen ships picked up the SOS, which read, Captain and all officers dead. Entire crew dying.” And later, now I am also near death. Then the air waives went dead. It was a perfect day in February 1948 and, of all the vessels that heard the strange message, only one was able to identify the ship in trouble and pinpoint her position. The ship was named as the Dutch freighter Ourang Medan, bound for Djakarta, Indonesia, through the Malaca Strait.

Within three hours, the first rescue vessel was along side the Ourang Medan.

A crew man said later, sharks were surging around the hull, and it looked like every shark in the Bay of Bengal had homed in on her knowing there was death aboard.”

When there was no response to flag or radio signals, a boat was launched and the rescue party climbed aboard. They found all the ship’s officers massed in the chartroom as if their skipper had called them to a council of war against some unknown disaster. all had died there.

They seemed to have died within a seconds of each other; their eyes stared in horror and their bodies were already locked in rigor mortis, some with their arms pointed to the heavens.

The dead seamen littering the decks had died in same way. A doctor who boarded with the party later reported no signs of poisoning, asphyxiation or disease but all seemed to have known that death was coming- even the ship’s dog. They found it below decks with paws in the air, fangs bared in a silent snarl. In the radio shack, the telegrapher had fallen over his silent key.

The rescue ship tried to take the Dutch ship in tow to the nearest port, but when tackle had been readied and towline rigged, there was a gush of oily smoke from one of the holds. Knowing they could not contain the blaze without flushing pumps and stream for the fire, the salvage crew fled to their own ship. They had only enough time to cut the towline before the stricken freighter exploded.

The blast scattered wreckage for a quarter of a mile and even killed some of the hungry sharks. What was left in Ourang Medan sank.

In short inquiry that followed, the doctor reported that something unknown had killed the seamen. Although the official verdict was “death by misadventure”, the mystery of the ghost ship Ourang Medan has never been solved.