Abandoned Ship

An abandoned ship named The Octavius was one of the most famous of all legendary ghost ship stories.

The tale of this abandoned ship dates back to 1775, when a whaling ship stumbled across The Octavius floating aimlessly off the coast of Greenland.

Crewmembers boarded the Octavius, where they discovered the dead bodies of the crew and passengers all frozen solid by the arctic cold. Eerily, they were all perfectly preserved at the moment of their death.

They also found the ship’s captain. His frozen body was still sitting at his desk, pen in hand. It seems that he had been halfway through finishing a log entry when he was mysteriously frozen solid. In his cabin there was also a dead woman, a dead boy who was covered with a blanket and a dead sailor still holding a tinderbox.

The log entry the captain had been writing was dated 1762, which meant the Octavius and it’s frozen crew had been adrift for 13 years.

It was eventually determined that the captain of the Octavius had prbably taken a dangerous and risky gamble. He wanted to make a quick return to England from the Orient so he tried to save time by using the treacherous Northwest Passage. The ship must have become trapped in the ice as it was travelling past North Alaska.

After the crew froze to death, the Octavius somehow broke free of the ice and completed its passage to the Atlantic. The ghost ship, its crew and captain long dead from exposure to the elements, continued to drift aimlessly across the sea, blown by the winds.

The Octavius was never seen again after this encounter, since it was carried away in the night by the waves and the wind.