Welcome back to the Bermuda Triangle, that mysterious zone where planes, ships, people and who knows what else supposedly vanish into thin air! Of course, most disappearances likely have rational explanations, just ones that are difficult to prove due to circumstances and the distance of time…but why rain on the History Channel’s parade? Here is another well-known Triangle incident for your consideration.

One of the creepiest, and most often-repeated stories about the Triangle involves the Ellen Austin, a sailing vessel who, sometime in 1881, encountered a derelict vessel adrift in the Triangle. The ship was, as is standard in these stories, in perfect condition, down to the inevitable food in the process of being cooked when the ship was abandoned. (This weird detail recurs in almost every derelict story from Bermuda Triangle lore, not to mention the Mary Celeste, because it’s a convenient way to suggest something…unexpected occurred.) The captain of the Ellen Austin sent a small prize crew aboard to sail the vessel back to board, hoping to claim its cargo as a prize. Only, after a few days, the Triangle ship vanished, along with its new crew.

A few days later, the Ellen Austin encountered the ship again. The Captain boarded the vessel, only to find that the prize crew had vanished! Clearly, there was something cursed about this vessel, perhaps constructed by Satan, the Flying Dutchman, Extraterrestrials and the surviving Elders of Atlantis to claim new souls for their collection. This time, according to most accounts, the Ellen Austin left the ship to drift eerily into the fog, taking its dread secrets with it…and perhaps, setting off to ensnare other, less lucky sailors in its grasp. Of course, some variations go further, claiming that the Captain sent a second prize crew aboard…no points for guessing their fate. Which also leaves one wondering how many sailors the Ellen Austin remained onboard for the remaining voyage.

Lawrence Kusche, in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved, rather cursorily dismisses the story as the invention of radio host-early paranormal researcher Rupert T. Gould, who also popularized such well-known lore as the Barbados coffins and the Devil’s Footprints. Gian J. Quasar, the hilariously-named Triangle researcher, was able to prove that the Ellen Austin was a real ship, although it had been renamed the Meta by 1881. Quasar thinks this proves that the ship’s weird ordeal really happened…although the record of its voyage in question indicates that the ship traveled from Liverpool to London, thus nowhere near the Triangle, and more importantly that no casualties or losses were reported. It was a routine trip across the Atlantic, unless the Captain and his crew were so terrified of their ordeal that they opted not to report it, fearing that mention of their fate would unleash the curse upon them for all eternity.

The earliest mention of this tale occurred in a newspaper article (sourced to the Deadwood Pioneer-Times, though I suspect there’s an original source that the small South Dakota paper was reproduced) published in 1906, one of those unsourced Weird Tales articles that we’ve encountered before. Such stories were common in newspapers of the time, and clearly meant to entertain rather than be taken seriously…which doesn’t stop later researchers from treating them as gospel. Of course, some of the details are fudged, most notably that the Ellen Austin‘s spooky encounter occurred in 1891, not ’81…though as we’ve seen, Triangle lore is often curiously imprecise when it comes to the dates of disappearances.

Either way, this gives the story a provenance, but proves nothing about its veracity. Other writers have noted that Rupert Gould, repeating the story for his radio show and book The Stargazer Talks, likely embellished the original sparse tale with details taken from Mary Celeste lore (much of it equally suspect) and a short story by William Hope Hodgson, “The Mystery of the Water-logged Ship,” where pirates used an “abandoned” vessel as a death trap for unwary, greedy crews. Only a cynic would suggest that Gould, and later Triangle writers, used this dubious story as a way to ensnare unwary readers…more comforting, perhaps, to imagine that the mysterious derelict continues its voyage across the Sargasso Sea, claiming victims to this day.