Historically, the term has been used to refer to reported sightings of apparitions over water that have appeared in the form of maritime sailing ships, often after having previously been known to have sunk, or to derelict vessels found floating with no crew. In fiction, ghost ships have often been vessels crewed by some manner of spectral or non-living beings.
The Flying Dutchman: according to folklore, this is a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes glowing with ghostly light. If she is hailed by another ship, her crew will often try to send messages to land, to people long since dead. The sight of this phantom ship is reckoned by seafarers to be a portent of doom.
Jian Seng: this ghost ship, an 80 m tanker of unknown origin, was spotted drifting 180 km south-west of Weipa, Queensland, in the Gulf of Carpentaria by an Australian Coastwatch plane in 2006. The Australian Customs Service dispatched its vessel Storm Bay immediately. There was no sign of recent human activity found aboard, nor any sign that it had been engaged in illegal fishing or people smuggling. A spokesman for Australian Customs stated that they had been unable to obtain documentary evidence of its registration or origin port at this stage. The boarding party asserted that it had been adrift for an exceptionally long time before being found, and that the engines were inoperable and incapable of being restarted.
Bel Amica: this ghost ship was discovered off the coast of island of Sardinia near Punta Volpe on August 24, 2006. The Italian Coast Guard discovered the ship without having any apparent crew on board. Once inside, they discovered a half-eaten meal of Egyptian food, French maps of North African seas, a pile of clothes, and the flag of Luxembourg. The only identification aboard the ship was a wooden tablet or ?plaque? as described in some papers that read ?Bel Amica?, a likely misspelling of ?Good Friend? (the phrase needs an additional ?L? to read properly in modern Italian).
High Aim 6: this was a ghost ship found drifting in Australian waters, an obscure and rarely covered mystery from 2003. The ship is known to have left the port of Liuchiu in Taiwan on October 31, 2002. The owner of the ship, Tsai Huang Shueh-er, spoke last with the captain in December 2002. The ship was found without its crew on January 8, 2003. What happened after the last communication remains unknown. It was registered in Taiwan and flew an Indonesian flag. There was no evident reason for the abandonment: no sign of distress was found, and the crew?s personal effects remained on board..
Life At Sea
mylifeatsea.blogspot.com