24 replies to this topic

[TraceMalin]

Are you guys saying that wreck of the St. Peter is haunted?

Trace




NOTE: This thread was split from "Where did that wreck go" in the Dive Training section to allow us to have some pre-Halloween fun!!!

[Diverbrian]

Trace,

That is the "local legend". I just know that I have had better days in the water when more things when right .

Things worked out at the end of the day, but much like NC, it was a long drive to NOT see a wreck, LOL. I will get back out there next year and likely be diving it with my regular dive buddy and have better luck!

[TraceMalin]

Brian,

I'd like to hear that local legend. I know of one other wreck that may be haunted & I'd like to collect more information on wrecks that might be haunted.

Trace

[Diverbrian]

Brian,

I'd like to hear that local legend. I know of one other wreck that may be haunted & I'd like to collect more information on wrecks that might be haunted.

Trace

Hnladue knows more about this then myself. The St. Peter is in her proverbial backyard.

The gist of the curse is that the Captain's wife was onboard the St. Peter when it went down. Her name was Martha. Supposedly, Martha brings bad weather and other misfortune onto diving trips out on the St. Peter as she still haunts the wreck.

The Regina in Port Sanilac has that reputation as well. None of the ships that went down in the Storm of 1913 had any survivors. The Regina was of no exception. I am told that if you are to have an equipment issue in that area, it will be on the Regina.

Other wrecks that come to mind with these reputations are the Pewabic in Alpena, MI (125 crew and passengers dead in a collision with her sister ship) and the Arabia (amazing since the orginal crew lived in this case) in Tobermory, Ontario. So, if you are collecting cursed/haunted shipwreck stories, I have given you a great start for Halloween.

But, really my dive buddy knows the story of the St. Peter far better than I. I should let her elaborate.

[hnladue]

Trace,

There have been many an occasion that someone went out to dive the Pete and things just went wierd! Think of us! We saw the thing on the GPS and fishfinder.... so why wasn't it there when we went down? I know we drifted, but really!!??? BTW the lake was dead calm everywhere else but where we were. Check out this site for a little more on her:
http://playfair.home...sh/StPeter.html
Click on "account of what happened"

The captain's wife's name isn't really Martha, but that's what we call her. She was hanging onto the back of the boat with the captain and couldn't hang on any more. He was rescued just 2 minutes later. She was never found.

Heather.

[drdiver]

This is an interesting thread! Does anyone else know any ghost stories connected with diving? Good topic!

[TraceMalin]

This is an interesting thread! Does anyone else know any ghost stories connected with diving? Good topic!

Okay, at the risk of ruining whatever slight respect that I might have around here, I'll tell everyone my own ghost story.

During my first trip to North Carolina years ago, we were heading out with Olympus Dive Center on the dive boat Olympus to dive the wreck of the U-352. The day prior we had excellent diving conditions on the wreck of the Aelous which was intact at the time. The visibility had been 70 or 80 feet and the current mild, so, psychologically, I was in the same frame of mind as if I was diving in the Carribbean or any other stress free spot. I was also very excited to be diving a U-boat because I love the history of submarine warfare. Spirits, not the ghostly kind, were high on the way out because the day was sunny but we had a little chop with which to contend. Some of us gathered up top and were seated on the deck telling jokes to pass the time. One guy, Joe, was Italian and to be an instigator, I decided to tell the joke, "Why aren't there any divers in the Italian navy?" He didn't know. I replied, "Because they leave oil slicks." Yes, there was a point to me telling you all this, it will be important later!

We reached the site and the crew set the hook. As we geared up for the dive, we were informed that the visibility was only about 30 feet and there was a moderate current. That was no big deal. After all, it was a submarine and most of the diving I've done had very poor visibility associated with it. Again, an upbeat attitude was prevalent.

My buddy Jack and I splashed and descended to find ourselves in a thick school of barracuda. How cool! They closed over us as we descended down the anchor line helping to block out some of the ambient light. The anchor was hooked in at the stern close to the access to the engine room. Jack wanted to enter the engine room, but I first wanted to go check out the conning tower. We split up at this point. Being used to diving alone, used to wrecks, and used to poor visibility, I was still in an awesome frame of mind as I headed toward the conning tower. I reached it and shined my light down the hatch seeing the wires and cables twisting into the hatchway. I was wearing a single AL80 with a pony bottle inverted on the right side of the main cylinder. I was studying the hatchway into the conning tower and working out a strategy to remove my pony from the Pony Tamer bracket system and take off my tank and slip through into the darkness. Since, that was going to be a pain, I decided to swim toward the bow & see if there was any access up that way to swim through the sub and meet Jack in the engine room.

When I arrived at the bow, I suddenly felt like I was being watched. In shark attack accounts that I've read, some experienced divers have sensed that something wasn't quite right just before a shark attack. With this in mind, I began scanning the water column looking in all directions and studying every shape looking for any sign of a white underbelly of a great white to the striping of a tiger shark. Nothing. I checked again all over very carefully. Weird. Something wasn't right. I looked over the hull of the submarine and only saw the exhaust bubbles of Joe's three man team rising from the starboard side of the U-boat. I asked myself, "Am I narced?" Well, I was diving nitrox 32 with an EAD of about 95 feet so that might explain it, but...

Then, I began swimming along the wreck deciding to forgo penetration and meet up with Jack in the engine room when it hit me. I had a feeling of a very angry presence or an angry aura surrounding the sub. It was almost like someone was seething with hatred and insisting that I leave -- NOW! This could be easily written off as narcosis or just imagination except for having a past history of being able to detect such phenomena.

As a kid, I never liked sleeping in my bedroom. Our house was a new and incredibly spacious ranch style home and about as sunny and inviting as a house can be. There was nothing creepy about it, but my room gave me the creeps. As the oldest sibling, I had the second largest room in the house across from my parents' master bedroom. But, I'd find myself sleeping in the hallway, in the living room, on my parents' bedroom floor, in my brother's bunk bed -- often anywhere except my room when I was in elementary and middle school. Years later, during a family party, my strange behavior was brought up and I explained that I always used to feel like I wasn't alone in my room. I used to have the feeling that an old lady was bothering me. I told everyone how I felt like my room was haunted which was ridiculous because our house was new and no one had died in it. People were laughing, but my mom became very serious and said, "That's not true." She then explained that the previous owners had only moved in for a few months, that they had a sick mother to care for who ended up dying in the house, and then they decided to sell and move. Chances are then since my room was the second largest with 2 windows and closest to the bathroom that she died in my room. Another instance came after I inherited my grandparents' home after both my grandparents' passed away, first my grandmother, then my grandfather two years later, I moved into the house. While sleeping one night on the couch in the living room after having dozed off while watching TV, Mookie, my sister's cat that she gave our grandfather for company after our grandmother died, woke me up by crashing into things as she ran down the steps. I heard her hiss and cry loudly then run down the steps and smack into the wall at the bottom of the steps, hit one of the sliding doors to the living room, and then the table before jumping up on me with her fur and tail standing straight up. She was hissing and staring toward the steps. I was trying to figure out what she might be afraid of, like maybe an animal such as a squirrel or raccoon or a bat may have entered the attic or the upstairs rooms since the house is in the country, when I became really freaked out myself. I heard footsteps that sounded like my grandfather's since he used a cane come down the steps, go down the hallway, then I hear the creak of the basement door and heard the footfalls and the sound of a cane go down into the basement. Okay, Mookie, we are out of here! I've had an experience with a farm field in college where I felt a strong sense that it had been a civil war battlefield, but a friend's grandmother told me that it had been use for planes that were on their way to England for WW II so maybe it was just the last piece of US soil some guys were spiritually connected to among others at just sensing the past or that people died in places such as on a few wrecks that I didn't know had lost crew. I don't really believe too much in the occult as it is portrayed in movies or in many documentaries. I do believe that the things we are trying to make sense out of in our primitive brains have very scientific and rational explanations and the universe may hold live & Memorex images, acoustic sounds, etc., that we somehow pick up or incorrectly interpret at times.

Anyway, back to the U-boat... so... knowing that I have had experiences at sensing things, I started thinking maybe I'm not narced and maybe this is one of those times. I just felt such a sense of anger, hostility, an unwelcoming presence, that I really felt like I was invading someone's space. When I met Jack back on the stern our gas was getting low so we decided to ascend. Normally, once I'm away from a place where I feel anything psychic or whatever, the feeling subsides. In this case, it didn't. I felt it all the way up the anchor line during our safety stops (we made stops until the computers cleared). Even back on the boat while I was tanning, I felt it. Then, someone made the comment. "Look! There's still oil coming up from the sub after all these years!" I got up and went to look and seeing the slick on the surface, I remarked, "Are you sure it's from the sub? I mean Joe was just in the water and he is Italian!" Everyone had a good chuckle over that, but as I lie down to soak up rays I began thinking that if indeed the U-boat was leaking oilo that would be a physical connection to the submarine even at the surface. Twilight zone time. During the second dive, I found myself talking to the entity or the presence or the feeling -- whatever it was. I thought all the crew had been rescued, but later, I also found out that wasn't true. I was basically treating the wreck like a church on the second dive and being very respectful.

That experience made me start thinking about the fact that haunted houses & shipwrecks have a lot in common, but I never heard stories of haunted shipwrecks. I'd like to put a book together on haunted shipwrecks because I don't think it's been done yet. A few years ago, I posted to various boards & newsgroups asking if anyone had heard any ghost stories of haunted shipwrecks or had their own experiences. I also never posted my own experience or told anyone before that time. I only received one email in reply. A guy started off his email asking me to never tell anyone his identity, but that he had been diving the U-352 off NC & felt he encountered an angry presence...

That sold me! Two divers having the same experience on the same wreck at different times... the thing might be haunted after all?

I'd like to write a book if I could get enough stories from enough wrecks.

Yeah, and there goes all my credibility here! See how much I like you SDers!

Trace

[Cold_H2O]

Trace ~ WOW what an experience. I have learned over the years to listen carefully to those funny feelings. Respect is always required.

[annasea]

I do believe that the things we are trying to make sense out of in our primitive brains have very scientific and rational explanations and the universe may hold live & Memorex images, acoustic sounds, etc., that we somehow pick up or incorrectly interpret at times.

This is extremely interesting. Care to expand on it? Trace, or anyone else?

[VADiver]

More importantly...did you or your buddy finally make it into the engine room!?

[TraceMalin]

More importantly...did you or your buddy finally make it into the engine room!?

On subsequent dives, yes. Too bad you & I got blown out. I think we should try to hit every diveable U-boat on the east coast next season.

Trace

[TraceMalin]

I do believe that the things we are trying to make sense out of in our primitive brains have very scientific and rational explanations and the universe may hold live & Memorex images, acoustic sounds, etc., that we somehow pick up or incorrectly interpret at times.

This is extremely interesting. Care to expand on it? Trace, or anyone else?

I had a UFO sighting once that will explain what I mean. Now, I do not believe in aliens from other worlds or anything like that at all. So, one day I was running around this park called Lake Scranton. It's a 3.5 mile paved trail around a reservoir and probably one of the best places to run that I've found because it is beautiful and scenic. On one side of the lake is a pavillion that acts as a scenic overlook. While passing it, I noticed a large black rectangle in the sky that looked like the side view of a giant domino far in the distance. I thought, "What the heck is that?" I stopped running and just stood there for the longest time trying to make out what it could be. The thing was miles away and too high in the sky to be suspended from the ground. I didn't see anything like a helicopter over it and it appeared way too large to be transported by a helicopter anyway. It was just hovering. I tried to recall everything I've ever heard about aviation and aircraft. As a kid I was really into aircraft. This did not fit any reasonable a/c description. I was stumped, yet, I knew it wasn't an alien spaceship or anything like that. Back in the 1950's, my father was a lifeguard at a city pool. He and over 2000 other people in the city had seen a flying object that made the newspapers. I went to tell him my story, knowing that we'd disagree over the existence of aliens. Before going inside, I stopped at the mailbox to grab the local paper for him. As I walked in and began to tell him what I had seen, I was describing it and we were starting to get into life in other worlds debate (I think we are all alone in the universe) when I casually opened the paper. On the cover was a photo of the Forbes' hot air balloon which was designed to look like the Manhattan skyline. It was going to be in town for an upcoming air show. The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Int'l Airport was in the direction of the "UFO" so my unidentified flying object was identified! From my distance, it appeared as a perfect rectangular shape, but up close it would have shown the skycrapers of New York City.

So, I think that whatever strange phenomena we experience in the world has some sort of validity even if we do not know what it is or we do not have the technology yet to detect or understand it. There are living ghosts that people have seen people who aren't dead yet in places and in times that they once existed. For example, there is a retirement home in FL that was once a school in which residents have seen one graduating class validictorian give a speech and can point him out from yearbook photos & that same student was alive and well and living in another Florida city at the time of the documentary. If that can hapen, are ghosts as we know them actually aware of this time and place and can they interact with us like poltergeists, or are "ghosts" simply a psychic footprint in space and time and when conditions in the universe are right, we either see or hear things that once were. Does a recording of all that has already happened exist somewhere in time? Like we record images and sound to tapes and disks, does the universe store images and sounds in time either purposely or by accident in temperature, gases, or some kind of particles that we have yet to identify but exist around us without are awareness? Or, if you believe in God which I do, are we somehow reading God's memory of events and somehow tapping into the spiritual world through a known or unknown interaction with a higher power? These are only several of an endless sea of theories that seek to explain what we cannot as of yet explain through our limited understanding. As modern humans, we know why it rains when clouds come, but early man may have only undferstood that water falls from the clouds when they came. Right now, we can debate the existence of spirits and things that people see and feel that might seem real to them, but are they? If so, what makes them real? What is the true source of things people see and hear? We are mystified at times, but maybe in the 30th century what we are seeking to understand, prove or disprove today might be common knowledge to them as why moisture forms into vapor and then returns as rain to us. Our understanding is so vastly greater than primitive man's yet, we've only made drastic changes to our world since the industrial revolution. Perhaps the technology will exist someday that will leave no questions about the universe to those living in it? That, in some ways, would be kind of sad though, wouldn't it?

Trace

[jholley309]

I noticed a large black rectangle in the sky that looked like the side view of a giant domino far in the distance.

You sure it wasn't just The Monolith?

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." -HAL

Cheers!

Jim

[jholley309]

I'd like to write a book if I could get enough stories from enough wrecks.

Yeah, and there goes all my credibility here! See how much I like you SDers!

Trace

If/when you write it, sign me up for a copy. It sounds like it would be a fascinating read.

Credibility? You mean we're supposed to be credible here?





Cheers!

Jim

[TraceMalin]

I noticed a large black rectangle in the sky that looked like the side view of a giant domino far in the distance.

You sure it wasn't just The Monolith?

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." -HAL

Cheers!

Jim

Positive! We human beings have a looooong way to go before we reach any point of advancement. Once we stop teaching our children to compete against one another in school, but rather cooperate and work together to learn and build as a global society, start teaching them to live responsibly in an interdependent world, teach them that people are worth more than material and not to hurt or kill one another... yeah... I think then a monolith might show up. And, if I recall correctly, the last time I heard a rant about the worthlessness of mankind, the guy landed in Lake Mead and was chased down by damn dirty apes.

Trace