S.S. TOTENSCHIFF
Location: Known alternately as the "Death Ship," the SS Totenschiff is a wrecked German steamship freighter found wrecked on the southwest beach of Morley Isle, one of the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland in the North Sea. Forty miles off the shore of Scotland and roughly a day's travel from the port of Inverness, the area is a beached alcove inaccessible from the small communities on the island and reached by small craft due to the low shoals and underwater reefs.
Description Of Place: Four hundred and forty-two feet in length and seventy-five feet in width, the Totenschiff is a 1930s German transport freighter. It was powered by a triple-expansion single-screw steam engine and could attain speeds of 10-12 knots, allowing it a range of 20,000 miles. It has four lower decks and three upper decks including forward and lower holds, thirty crew quarters, below deck quarters and an on-board kitchen amenity, many of which were altered and renovated for military use. Considerable neglect has compromised the integrity of the wreck.
Ghostly Manifestations: The sea has inspired several of the most fabled myths and legends of the world. The Greeks themselves had more sea-gods and sea serpents than any other culture on Earth, and even today, there are sea stories ranging from the Flying Dutchman to Davy Jones Locker. No other legend is so entrenched in the minds of mortal man than the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, that region of the Mid-Atlantic where numerous ships and planes supposedly vanish or are swallowed up by the sea. The sea is the only part of the world that has not been properly explored, so it is more than fascinating to picture possible survivors of the Mesozoic Age existing in its depths and popping up to the surface to become the basis of our modern sea monsters. Even today when stories of the Antonio Graza or the Queen Of Scots appear floating of the sea, it becomes not that incredulous to disbelieve that a lost World War Two craft can be reported as having been discovered rejected from the floating tides of the ocean.
What can be known about the Totenschiff comes from the reflections of Captain Trevor Marshall, a retired Caribbean Cruise captain, who once served on the SS Aeolus from Florida to Bermuda. In October 1980, he was Junior Captain and Second Officer under Captain Hector Ashland. Marshall was primed to replace Ashland in his retirement, and the older captain was begrudgingly going into it. The main offices of the cruise line felt Ashland was becoming distant to his passengers, and despite a twenty-year experience record in the US Navy, he was becoming too strict and demanding to his crew. Going into retirement was being forced to pasture in his eyes, and Marshall felt the awkward anger of the position. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, somewhere fifty-five miles of the Bahamas en route to Greece, the Aeolus was lost without a single message. It would seem the Bermuda Triangle had claimed another victim.
"I'm still completely not aware of what happened that night, but it felt as if something had hit us from out of that pitch black night." Marshall announced in a televised TV interview after being plucked from the sea seven days after the loss. "The ship was fatally tilted to it's side with a large gash from engine level to the top deck and was taking water fast. The fact that we had any survivors at all is a miracle."
Only nine life boats out of twenty were able to rescue 375 passengers and random crew from among 1075 passengers and a crew complement of 250. (Two other boats in the Oceanic line of Crescent Cruise Lines suffered similar fates. The SS Poseidon was flipped by a tsunami en route to Athens. The SS Neptune sold to a passenger line in California also floated on its side for three days after getting flipped by a tsunami. The Corona Queen had been part of the Crescent line of Crescent Cruises.)
Although surviving the loss of the Aeolus, Captain Marshall reveals in his private memoirs that he was not floating in the sea the entire time he was accounted as missing: "Following the inexplicable loss of the ship, there was a mass of confusion and disorder as passengers raced for the life boats. My first duty was to their safety and protection, my second to searching for survivors in the sinking ship and getting them to the life boats. The Aeolus was going down fast, we had lost the engine room, and I had no idea she was going to stay afloat. After eight boats were set packed with passengers and crew, I was getting my wife and children in the last boat as the deck reached the surface of the water. I had just pushed in Third Officer Nick Daillion behind his girlfriend, and he turned around and grabbed me right as the Aeolus vanished under my feet into the ocean. There were only eight survivors in that boat adrift from the others with Captain Ashland pulled from the sea at daybreak. It took twenty-seven minutes for the ship to sink.
"By the following morning, we had been floating adrift for a few hours when I woke and became conscious of this large dark ship's shadow eclipsing the sun from over us. It was anchored in open sea, and it had no discerning identification, but it was the only sign of hope at the time. We waved and called but received no signal, and as we floated down its starboard side, I became conscious of the ship's gangplank hanging off the side. Naturally, we assumed we were being rescued, but in hindsight, it seems odd that those stairs would be left hanging to the water level in open ocean. I had Nick check their condition first and receive my kids then the passengers, but as he returned to help me carry Captain Ashland on board, the steps suddenly snapped loose of the deck under us and dropped the three of us into the waters below. Passenger Lori Wasserman found a rope ladder she quickly threw over the side, and we ascended on that."
Accompanying Ashland, Marshall and Daillion were the ship's entertainer Jack Weinstein, Nick's girlfriend Lori Wasserman, a widow named Laverne Morgan, and Marshall's wife, Margaret, and their two children, Benjamin and Robin. Before them, they found a very abandoned and awkwardly foreboding freighter. The hatches of open windows swayed open and closed on the tide, the front ship's hold was completely flooded and the corridors below ship were musty with cobwebs and echoing darkness. Lights below deck were still on, but flickering off and on or going completely out on occasion. The tow lines were hanging loose or tangled on the deck. The ship's wheel and steering system was outdated and rusted in place. The radio system was quite inoperable. It was quite obvious the freighter had been abandoned for some time.
"One of our first urgencies was water, but the ship's fresh water was rusty which we cleaned by boiling it. Our next need was to contact help, and it was about that time that we started to notice something a bit off about the ship. It was empty, but there was a sense of something else there. It felt like a presence left behind by the men who used to work on board. We deduced that it must have been a German freighter by the German signs and messages on board, but even without that, we started hearing distant voices from somewhere within that abandoned wreck. Nick and I tried to track them down, but we could never figure out what was causing them. Eventually, we figured it was the vibrations of air and our own voices coming back to us, but we were never quite sure. Mrs. Morgan even commented that 'the old ship seemed to have a life of its own.' Even while we were getting our bearings, the on-board phone surprised us by ringing. After a second's worth of confusion, I answered it thinking it was Nick, but there was no one on the line. When I asked him later if it was him trying to contact us, he said no... he had spent the time dazed and unconscious after a lose pulley had knocked him off his feet and into a lower hold.
"After three hours on board, we were all getting hungry, and we were all skeptical about the state of the canned food and rations on board. It was about this time that Nick discovered Lori in a scared panicked state racing from the corridors of the crew quarters. Something had scared her pretty bad from down the hall and in a quivering voice and hurried breath, she confessed that she had heard music from an empty state room. It was coming from what she described sounded like an old Victrola phonograph record player. Admitting that she was quite spooked by it, she had entered the room and lifted the needle up, sliding it to the side as it wound down, but less than a minute after she left the room, she heard it playing again. Briefly looking back, she quickly ran to catch up with the rest of us and learned to avoid that hallway.
"As night advanced, we had started camping out in the crew's galley and adjacent quarters. Captain Ashland was drifting in and out of consciousness, and we weren't certain if he was going to survive the experience. We had lost Jackie early that day; his foot got caught in the loose rigging and the sway of the boom suddenly pulled him off deck, drowning him. We eventually lost Mrs. Morgan too. She developed an extreme allergic reaction to something and choked to death near the galley, but as the ship grew darker, the ordeals were trying us and on top of that, whatever presence that was on that ship was continuing to make itself known. On one occasion, I heard several doors below deck slamming shut in succession. Now, first thought I had was that the sway of this drifting craft was swinging all the loose doors and hatches, but as I thought about it, it just never made sense. They should only have swayed and latched one time, and we weren't going around reopening all these doors. Plus, a majority of them were rusted solid. It didn't make sense that some of them stayed solid while others remained loose.
As Captain Marshall continues, "I don't know why, but I felt watched several times from the bridge of the ship. I had been up there with Nick, and the windows were caked with dust from the inside, and the door so wedged tight we could barely get inside it later. In one of the most unexplained occurrences we experienced on that ship, Nick and I had visited the engine room and despite being bone dry of oil and fuel, we noticed we could still feel the vibration as if it was running. It was locked in place, not a drop of fuel in the tanks and yet, we heard the hum of the engines running and the vibrations of the propeller turning from the back of the stern. It was at that point that we realized we had to get off that thing. I never believed in ghosts at that time, and still don't know if I do or not, but when you add one incident after another to a long series of strange events... strange voices, loud poundings, slamming doors, strange accidents, a deserted phonograph and even a forgotten film projector coming on by themselves... Even Lori was driven nearly catatonic when a shower seemed to start spurting blood on her, but then rusted water was all through those old pipes. You'd much rather be drifting at sea alive then scared to death every minute from endless shadows."
For twenty years, Captain Marshall never again thought of the Totenschiff until limited reports of a wrecked German freighter from the Forties was discovered wrecked on an island off Northern Scotland in 2001.
"By time I arrived to investigate the wreck, it was already starting to become a local fisherman's club." Professor Lemuel Poisson is a French Oceanographer based out of the Marine Research Institute in Coeursville, Massachusetts. He was vacationing in France when he heard about the wreck and wanted to visit the site for himself, getting permission to join a second marine expedition team returning to the site to research the site.
"By this point, of course," He continues. "German, French and British examiners, as well as a few American historians, had already identified the wreck as the Totenschiff and were scouring the German archives for her records. They had also recovered and pulled out I believe thirty-five bodies from the ship and had confirmed about another hundred or more from the steerage area decaying in bunks and the implements of Nazi torture. However, in between the research and documentation going on, there were the reports of... shall I say, occurrences that didn't quite get reported by the historians and forensic examiners present. Things you would describe as disembodied voices from empty corridors and phantoms of dark shadows peering down from upper decks and the like..."
Several of these stories eventually became tabloid fodder sensationalized and retold by the fishermen and curious boaters who came to explore the wreck and carry off historic artifacts. Such unauthorized visits decreased during the examination of the wreck, but they started up again and still continue to occur. The Totenschiff has become an unofficial port on a stretch of inhospitable shore. It is not unusual for fishing trawlers to anchor nearby in its shadow while the curious re-board it out of curiosity or actually spend a night or two in its rooms. Poisson adds that the wreck has even become a temporary residence for a few out-of-season fishermen.
"I heard about one fellow..." Poisson continues. "...who was sleeping on board one night and started screaming that he was being choked. Of course, no one was there, but after jumping to his feet, it was noticed his neck was red, and it had the imprint of two large hands on it.
"Others have secretly confided to me to have heard voices in German talking below decks and of hearing footsteps in areas of the engine room where the stairs or gang planks have collapsed and no longer exist. One researcher confided in me that he still feels watched when he goes near the ship's freezer, and after talking to Captain Marshall who said he spent a day on this ship, I learned that was where several of the American and RAF soldier's bodies was found."
History: There is not much known about the SS Totenschiff as much of its records and history were lost during World War Two, and what little there is known about it is speculatory and incomplete. It was possibly built at the ship-building works at Desching or Deutsche-Werke in the 1930s, getting transferred from a commercial ship to the Kreigsmarine around 1940. Unlike the other prison ships employed by Nazi Germany, it escaped destruction during the May 3, 1945 bombing by the Royal Air Force in the Bay of Lübeck. While it is unrevealed how it escaped destruction by the Allied Armies, it is believed the craft was used as a floating concentration camp carrying undesirables out of the country as well as holding captured American and British soldiers. Evidence on board shows many of these prisoners were tortured on board, but there is no record as to the fate of the crew. Speculation is that they deserted the craft, but there is nothing to confirm this.
According to Captain Trevor Marshall, the ship was left adrift where it got caught in the oceanic current, drifting in large circles down from the North Atlantic, into the Gulf Stream and then back up north again where he discovered it somewhere 350 miles east of Bermuda. Just before abandoning it, he and Daillion had discovered the lower barracks area filled with the rotting emaciated figures of numerous prisoners of the Third Reich and several more decomposing bodies in the flooded front hold. The bodies of several airmen were found hanging on hooks in the ship's freezer. It was from that compartment that Marshall found the US Navy raft he used to get his family, Nick and Lori off the ship. Captain Ashland remained adamantly behind; his paranoia by that time over-riding his reasoning and self-preservation.
Marshall's account of being on the Totenschiff was obviously not made part of the public record of his rescue from sea, but the US Coast Guard took it seriously enough to spend two days looking for it to rescue Captain Marshall. Of the old German freighter, nothing more was made of the craft. Marshall and Daillion found positions in other ships, and they learned to forget about their paranormal encounters for twenty years until it was discovered following storms off Northwest Scotland had taken a floating wreck of an unidentified ship and beached it against the rugged shore within the Shetland Islands. It was sighted first by a fishing trawler and then confirmed by the SS Westing, a exploration vessel before getting documented and catalogued for artifacts by researchers and marine historians. Eventually, however, Poisson believes the ship's days night still be numbered.
"There was another ship known as the American Star which was lost and eventually wrecked on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands where it was abandoned." He adds. "Over the years, the sea and elements took a powerful toll on its condition. The stern broke off and sank in 1996, leaving only the bow section on the sandbar, which started to list to one side and eventually a funnel detached and sunk. The bow remained intact until November 2005 when it collapsed and caused the gradual break-up of the remaining hull. Today, it is only visible at low tide, but subsequently even the Totenschiff will succumb. It could take a bit longer given its thick hull and being much higher proximity, but eventually, the ocean will reclaim it, either by waves striking it or by another storm carrying it out and sinking it off shore."
Although the wreck falls unofficially under the Scottish Historical Bureau, it is also considered a German landmark, but that doesn't stop squatters, urban explorers and visitors from patronizing the location.
Identity Of Ghosts: There is no means to identify the spirits of the Totenschiff. Her crew manifests are lost, and no records exist of her past World War Two. It is believed her crew abandoned her, but this theory is not confirmed. None of the identities of the captured crewmen found condemned on board have been made public.
Source/Comments: Death Ship (1980) - Description loosely based on the SS Deustchland. History loosely based on the SS America in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Activity based on the film and the USS Cabot in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Star of India in San Francisco, California, the Belle of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky and the USS North Carolina in Wilmington, North Carolina.