This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 16:55:43 -0800 (PST)
To: guestbook@ghosts.org
yourname Jack L. Spencer
email grandpa@si-net.com
During the last year of WW II I served in the North Atlantic aboard a U.S. destroyer doing convoy escort duty. During the closing weeks of the war I got off watch one morning and as I was going back to the crew's quarters I saw a strange (ghost?) sailing ship! I don't know what The Flying Dutchman looked like nor where she is supposed to sail, but I thought that the ship I saw was of the Dutchman's type.
We were, I'd guess, about two hundred miles east of Gibralter. The sea was calm. The time was either around 3:30 am or 7:30am; that was more than fifty years ago now and I can't remember! There was a light patchy fog.
Around the deck there were stationed men whose duty was to report anything and everything unusual which they might see. They had binoculars and wore an extra large steel helmet with earphones and a microphone under it. I was assigned to engineering; my job was to, with other engineers, to keep the ship supplied with steam.
As I walked towards the after end of the ship (we were moving east at the time) I saw a a three or four mast sailing ship sailing south through the east bound convoy!
It would not have been possible for this ship to do this without colliding with some of the ships in the convoy unless she was a ghost. And, without a doub't, she would have been shot out of the water by we escorts.
I stopped beside one of the lookouts as I watched this apparition sail past about seventy-five yards from our stern. No crew members could be seen on deck and she flew no colors. She listed to her port side (east) pushed by a light west breeze. The kookout pushed the key down on his microphone to report his sighting to the bridge, held it down for only one or two seconds then released it without reporting it. He looked at me and confirmed that I had seen it too, and said that he sure as hell wasn't going to report it. Before we had time to talk about what we had seen a British aircraft flew in out of the fog and he became busy reporting its type, speed, bearing etc. I moved on and the ship we had seen sailed off into the fog.
He and I never talked about this sighting again. He was in the deck division and I was in engineering. We ate at seperate tabels and slept in different compartmants. I don't enen remember his name---if I ever knew it.
There was no talk about this ship. But it was normal for there to be little or no talk about things we had seen. We worked such long hours that we were always too tired for gossip.
If the Deck Ape who saw that thing with me that morning reads this----I'm still here! I'm not sure that I won't always be here!
Jack Spencer