Titanic Ghosts, Curses and Premonitions

Titanic had not even been thought about, when Morgan Robertson wrote Futility. Yet the similarities stretch beyond coincidence into a chilling tale.

It was 1898 when Morgan put pen to paper to create his novella about a ship sinking in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. At the time few people were interested. It was not a best-seller nor did it make him rich and famous.

It took another fourteen years for the story to become infamous. The narrative contained scenes which seemed to predict Titanic!

As soon as the news of Titanic's sinking hit the headlines, readers experienced a sense of deja vu. The resulting publicity has kept Futility in print and going strong until the present day.

Some modern readers have also spotted another of Robertson's short stories, entitled Beyond the Spectrum (1914), which reads uncannily like the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

If he had prescience, then it didn't do him much good. He died of a drug overdose only three years after Titanic sank.

This legend appears to have its origin in a story told by William Thomas Stead, while actually on board Titanic. He regaled First Class passengers with it on the night of April 12th.

In the cargo hold of Titanic was an Egyptian mummy. It belonged to WT Stead, but it had been smuggled on inside his car. He hadn't openly declared it, because he thought it would be refused admission. Why? Because it had a deadly reputation.

The mummy was that of Amen-Ra, a princess, who had lived around 1050 BCE during the 21st or 22nd Egyptian dynasty. Four British treasure hunters amateur archaeologists had made their way into her pyramid and removed goods from her tomb.

But they had all met an horrific fate. Death had quickly taken each of them, with one lingering just long enough to face destitution as well.

Whoever owned Amen-Ra's mummy similarly fell victim to the curse, but WT Stead was not a superstitious man. He purchased it from the British Museum, who were keen to get rid of it, after some of their staff had fallen victim to its presence.

It was being taken to America as a curiosity to show in exhibitions. But the mummy now lies in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, along with William Thomas Stead.

The British Museum deny all knowledge of ever having such a mummy in their collection. But still on display there is the gessoed (mummy-board) of a possible priestess of the Goddess Amen-Ra. It too has an unlucky reputation.

Constructed entirely in the fiercely Christian city of Belfast, one curse story about the Titanic ran like wildfire through its Catholic population.

The hull number was 3909 04. Look innocuous to you? Then read it like a gamer would, then turn it around (or simply read it in a mirror).  It appears to spell out the words 'NO POPE'.

The story went that Protestant shipbuilders had assigned it, in order to upset Belfast's Catholics, but God had had the last grim laugh when Titanic sank beneath the waves.

There's only one slight hitch with this tale. 3909 04 wasn't Titanic's hull number. That was 131428.

Even before the survivors of Titanic had reached New York City, another boat was leaving from Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada.

This was usually in service laying coastline cables, but the news of the disaster had been radioed through. It was now laden with coffins and ice. It was going to collect the floating dead.

Nothing prepared the crew for what they were about to encounter. Over 300 corpses bobbed on the ocean waves, kept afloat by their life-jackets. They carpeted the seascape for miles around the spot where the liner had gone down.

There was another problem too. The radio message hadn't quite conveyed the scale of the disaster. The cable boat only had 109 coffins.

Strict social hierarchy had dominated the selection for getting into the lifeboats, now it played a part in determining a place in the coffins. The salvage crew sorted through bodies for signs of social class.

Those with monogrammed jewelry or clothes which suggested they had been First Class were automatically embalmed on the boat. The majority of steerage passengers were stripped of identifying items and their life-jackets, then consigned to the icy depths as a burial at sea.

Finally over-burdened with more bodies than the boat could safely hold, the crew returned to Halifax. Each corpse was numbered and, where possible, given a name. The majority were buried in graves lining the city hill-side, their funerals paid for by the White Star Line, the owners of Titanic. Their headstones merely held the date, the fact of their being on that ship and their number.

That was not the end of the story.

A makeshift mortuary had been made in a port side building, which is now the Five Fisherman Restaurant. Diners and staff alike have reported strange phenomena. Cutlery moves on the tables without anybody touching it. Glasses are flung from shelves. Disembodied voices call for help. Shadowy figures are spotted rushing across the dining room. A misty, grey shape floats down the central staircase. An old man's reflection has been seen in the bar-room mirror.

There have also been shadowy silhouettes seen in the local St Paul's Anglican church, where the funerals took place. (Maybe because many of the dead were Irish Catholics?)

These ghosts never made it to their destination and now they're trapped, far from home, in a strange place not of their choosing. Perhaps that is why the haunting seems so strong in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Meghann Gibbons is a curator at the Georgia Aquarium, in the USA. In 2009, it was the venue for Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition; and it left her firmly believing in ghosts.

So many people reported feeling watched, or experiencing an over-whelming sadness, that she started to take notice. In one particularly spooky incident, a four year old boy kept demanding of his grandmother, "Who is that lady?" and "What is she doing?"

There was no-one there, whom they could see. Just personal possessions brought up from the wreck of Titanic's First Class cabins.

Wherever the exhibition goes, there are more reports just piling up. Some visitors have seen 'actors' walking about in period dress, when none were actually employed; or have commented that they enjoyed the 'ride', as the floor gently rocked to simulate a ship's deck (no such mechanism existed).

A night watchman in New York City also got a bit irritated by the fact that something set off the motion detector, every night without fail, at around 3am. There was never anything to see.

The Titanic exhibition moves around, so check out its site to see if it will be coming anywhere close to you.

Benjamin Guggenheim was one of the better known men who died on the ship.

A millionaire businessman, he traveled in First Class alongside celebrities, nobility and the other wealthy passengers. The way that he died has also become legendary.

After escorting his mistress and her maid onto a lifeboat, he and his valet dressed in full formal evening attire.

The gentlemen were seen relaxing in the smoking lounge, while all over the Titanic everything else was in panic and chaos. Benjamin was sipping brandy from a fine glass, while his valet stood to attention. He blithely informed Second Captain Lightoller, "We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen."

Later on the pair did return to the deck, but only to pull out a couple of deck-chairs. They sat drinking brandy and smoking cigars, neither even attempting to get into a lifeboat.

Benjamin did send a message via a survivor though. He said, "Tell my wife, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down, tell her I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward."

They both died and their bodies were never recovered from the Atlantic Ocean. But does that necessarily mean that Benjamin Guggenheim never came home?

Monmouth University, in New Jersey, USA, has several buildings on its campus, which once formed part of the Guggenheim family's summer house. The clue is in their names - the Guggenheim Library and the Guggenheim Theater.

Both have been witness to a shadowy figure walking around them. Moreover, lights that have been switched off suddenly turn back on again, after staff have just locked up and are walking away from the door. Local lore has it that Benjamin came back after all.

Some Titanic victims didn't have to go down with the ship, in order for their lives to be over. Survivor's guilt and the condemnation of society killed them, once they were seemingly safe on dry land.

So great was the power of the testimonies of chivalry, that any man who returned in a lifeboat found himself to be a social pariah. It is a little known fact that five percent of the male survivors subsequently committed suicide. They couldn't live with the fact that they had made it home, while women and children drowned; and everyone knew it.

One such man was Dr Henry Washington Dodge. Faced with a wall of disapproval from everyone he met, Dr Dodge initially embarked on a lecture tour. He shared his memories of Titanic, but also used the platform to defend male survivors.

He tried to explain how many women would not get into the lifeboats. None of them believed that the ship would really sink and they were too afraid to get into an open boat. He only saved himself when no other takers were forthcoming for Lifeboat 13.

No-one was really buying this and the trauma wore him down. His depression became so acute that, on June 21st 1919, Dr Dodge shot himself in the head and, seven years after Titanic sank, became one of its final victims.

Yet even then there was no respite. His ghost has regularly been seen, quite clearly and by several witnesses, still wandering lost around his former home.

No such stigma attached itself to another survivor, the 'unsinkable' Molly Brown. She lived out a full life after Titanic, before dying in unexceptional circumstances in 1932. However some people think that she still walks her Denver home.

In 2008, a strange story surfaced on the internet. From sources, which seemed restricted solely to Indonesia, came the news that Captain Edward Smith had been found alive and well.

Over a decade previously, a liner passing through that infamous stretch of the North Atlantic had encountered an iceberg. Unlike its unhappy predecessor, this ship did not crash into it, but it did stop.

There was a man clutching the iceberg, holding on for dear life in the freezing conditions. If that wasn't bizarre enough, his name and aspect, upon rescue, really caused some goosebumps. He identified himself as Captain Edward Smith and he certainly looked the part.

As far as he was concerned, it was April 15th 1912 and he had been going down with Titanic. But then he wasn't. He was as startled as anybody to find himself nearly a hundred years later with none of his charges to be seen.

According to the tale, fingerprint evidence, stored in the archives of the White Star company, confirmed his identity.

But there was more! In 1991, a young woman had been found in practically identical circumstances. Wenny Kathe claimed to have been a passenger on Titanic and she too couldn't explain how she ended up adrift on a 20th century iceberg.

As unbelievable as it may seem, both of these tales appear to be a hoax. An Indonesian blogger did extensive research and concluded that the whole sensational episode was fictitious.