Ghosts of Salem

I love stories like this one.  Of course, they’re undocumented. Today, we’d call them urban legends.

Stories like these are classics, in jeopardy of being as lost as the subject of this tale.

This one was from a December 19o1 newspaper:

The Dead Ship of Salem is well known off the Massachusetts shore. Just 2oo years ago, the ship was ready to sail to England when two mysterious people — whom none in the village had ever seen before — came hurriedly aboard and secured passage.

They were a young man and woman of strange but forbidding beauty.

The ship was detained so long by adverse winds that the townspeople began to suspect witchcraft and prophesied disaster. But the skipper jeered at their fears and, when the wind changed, put out to sea on Friday morning.*

No word or sign of that ship or its living freight was ever seen or heard of again. But, later that same year, incoming vessels reported having met a craft with shining hull and luminous spars and sills spinning along, with every cloth drawing in the teeth of one of the wildest gales.

A crew of skeletons manned the ship while on the quarterdeck stood, arm in arm a handsome pair — a young man and a woman.

*A note reminded readers that it’s bad luck to set sail on a Friday.

I’ve found a brief verse that describes this same ghostly ship.

The spectre ship of Salem,
With the dead men in her shrouds,
Sailing sheer above the water in
The loom of morning clouds.

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If you have additional information about this ship, let me know.  It’s a rich tale worth including in my book, if I can find anything else to support it.

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