Ireland’s Ghost Ship

In the autumn of 1934, a good stretch of the County Down coast saw a ship that, by every ordinary measure, was not there to be seen. The papers had it within the week; and once the papers had it, the whole coast had it, and the letters pages filled the way they only ever fill for a hard winter or a wonder.

Three papers, three names for the one vessel. The Belfast News-Letter gave it “An Ulster ‘Ghost Ship’”; the Northern Whig preferred “Down Coast’s Phantom Vessel”; the Derry Journal, more cautiously, settled for “Northern Coast Mystery.” A ship that could not be found could at least be headlined, and was.

A Phantom off the County Down Coast

The first of the watchers were at Ballyhornan, and there were a good many of them. Mrs John McVeigh counted four masts on her. She watched the ship move slowly toward Gun’s Island — a half-mile off the mainland — and then, with no fuss and no wreckage and no sound, watched it not be there. Its sails, she said, were “faintly luminous.”

Another put it this way: “I saw what looked like a sailing-ship without sails set, half-way across Dundrum Bay, and although the sea was calm, the vessel appeared to be tossing up and down.” A calm sea, and a ship that pitched in it regardless. You begin to see the trouble the coast was having.

Down at Kilkeel they saw much the same four-master — with the one difference that the Kilkeel ship sat still, anchored to nothing, while the Ballyhornan ship had been under way. The record does not trouble to square the two, and neither will I. A ghost ship is under no obligation to keep its story straight.

More Witnesses Along the Shore

From Greenore, on the south side of Carlingford Lough, the ship stood in plain view some seven minutes on the Wednesday evening, the 17th of October. Mr Hubert Magee took a strong pair of binoculars to it and reported that it looked “like a picture drawn on a dark background, with some phosphorescent material.” Word came in all along the south Down shore — from Kilkeel, Greenore, Annalong and Ballymartin. She was seen on several evenings; once at dusk in a thunderstorm, with the sea lying under haze.

One evening a party of locals had enough of looking and put out in a motor-boat to settle the thing. They had got perhaps a hundred yards off shore when the ship vanished out from in front of them. Which brings us to the part the coast could never get past.

The Ship Some Could See, and Others Could Not

Here is the knot of it. The vessel was plain to the people standing on the shore. Yet the fishermen whose boats came in at night, and who by every account passed close enough to hail her, saw nothing at all. Visible from the land; invisible from the water; the same ship, the same evening. Make of that what you will. The coast never could.

She came in slow. She showed herself a while. Then she went — down under the water, more than one witness swore, plunging bodily as though scuttled by a hand no one could see. At Annalong a woman fainted clean away at the sight of her. I’ll not mock the woman. I’ve known grown men go quieter than that over a good deal less.

A Warning of Things to Come

Not everyone read it as a marvel. An old man of Ballymartin had seen the like in his boyhood, and he gave the sighting its older and darker meaning: the phantom came, he said, before a disaster at sea. It never showed itself for nothing.

He had his reckoning ready. A hundred years before, such a ship had been seen along that coast just ahead of the loss of the Newry vessel Lord Blayney, gone down in December 1833 on her way to America. She had been full of emigrants. Every soul aboard was lost.

And he remembered nearer grief than that. Eighteen years before — on a November night in 1916 — the Connemara and the Retriever had struck one another in the dark at the mouth of Carlingford Lough, and better than a hundred people went down with them. The phantom, the old man said, had been seen on that coast before that night too. “It always comes before something,” he told them, “and I wouldn’t be surprised at anything happening.”

The younger readers wrote in to call it an optical illusion — a trick of haze and low light on a tired eye — and they may well have had the right of it. But the old folk along the shore held to the harder belief: that when she came, something followed.

Ulster’s Flying Dutchman

Five years on, in the May of 1939 — with another and larger darkness gathering that the whole of Ulster could feel coming — the Belfast Telegraph man who wrote as ‘John of the North’ looked back at the 1934 business. So many ships had been lost off that coast down the years, he reasoned, that it was small wonder the shore folk kept a phantom on the books, “a sort of Ulster Flying Dutchman.” He set her beside the old sailors’ Dutchman and her spectral captain, Hendrick Van der Decken, whose showing in the offing told every hand aboard that disaster was on its way.

Then he turned plain, and the plainness has stayed with me. The spectre ship, he wrote, was still “sometimes seen by those who see such things.” There had been no word of her lately — and, the year being what it was, he was glad of it: “God knows, if it heralds disaster, we don’t want any reports of it, for we have plenty these times to keep us on the jump without ghost-ships.”

He was nearer the mark than he can have wished. Within four months the war he was bracing against had begun.

“The Ghost Ship” — a Ballad from the Telegraph

Not all of County Down went pale over it. Back in the December of 1934, while the sightings were still fresh, the Belfast Telegraph printed a long comic ballad on the haunting, sent in by a reader who signed himself — with what I can only call an admirably straight face — “A. Cockle.” It is daft, and tender in its own way, and the daftness is rather the point. I give it to you whole, as it ran.

On one dark night off Copeland light
Came gales of driving snow;
Tho cress that sailed the Carymore
Saw ghosts, and went below.
The captain was a seasoned “salt”
His speech was full of damn’s
But words forsook him when he heard
The crew start singing psalms.

The wind rose to a hurricane,
With howl and shriek and roar,
But could not drown the raging dirge
That marked the rockbound shore.
The captain pleaded with the crew
And called them up on deck –
‘Leave singing psalms till Sunday, men!
Or we’ll become a wreck.

But not a move that crew would make
That roused the captain more,
In raging mood he grimly turned
The key that locked their door.
The seas swept o’er that helpless ship
Fast drifting to the shore.
And e’er the light of day came forth
The rocks would claim one more.

The cook was known as “Bare-fut Kate,”
Was born in Cushendal,
And reared upon a peat moss barge
On Portadown canal,
—O captain sir. what can I do?
I’ll cook you herrin’ or ham,
But I was raised upon a barge
And know not hynin from psalm.

The captain loved that brave old cook
And clasped her to his breast:
A mighty wave swept o’er the deck —
The herrings know the rest.
The Carymore still sails the seas
Her crew still singing psalms.
“That’s why there are no herrings!”
Say the cockles to the clams.

By A. Cockle. Belfast Telegraph — Friday, 28th December 1934.

The ship has kept her habits since. She surfaces every few decades, shows herself to those who see such things, and slips off again before any boat can come alongside. Whether she is haze and tired eyes, or something that coast has never quite managed to lay to rest, I’ll leave to you and to the next soul who sees her. If you’re ever along the Down shore of an October evening, and a four-master stands in toward Gun’s Island with a luminous sail, you might keep it to yourself a while. The papers do love to hear.

Sources: Northern Whig, Belfast News-Letter, Belfast Telegraph.