April 14th: Titanic!

Titanic hit an iceberg on this date in 1912 and sank in the early hours of the next day. Here are 10 spooky stories associated with the Titanic disaster:

1. Before the ship was even launched, some of the builders reported hearing a tapping noise coming from the hull, leading to speculation that a builder, or his ghost, was trapped inside.
2. As with every disaster, there are always stories of those who should have been caught up in it, but weren't, either because they cancelled their trips or because circumstances prevented them from getting there. Notable examples in this case were British entrepreneur J. Connon Middleton, who had recurring dreams about Titanic sinking prior to his voyage, which left him unsure about whether to travel, even though he had urgent business in New York. Then someone in New York sent him a wire suggesting that he put off the trip. He did. Members of the crew fled the ship in Queenstown, Ireland, the ship's final port of call. One, stoker John Coffey, sneaked off the ship by hiding under mail bags being transported to shore. Others weren't so lucky. Henry Wilde, chief officer, had a bad feeling about the ship, and wrote in a letter to his sister: “I still don’t like this ship... I have a queer feeling about her." Despite this, he let his friends talk him into taking the post on the Titanic, which proved to be his last.
3. The mummy's curse: the mummy of the Priestess of Ammon-Ra was said to have been smuggled aboard by William Thomas Stead, who had just bought it from the British Museum. The mummy, dating from 1050 BC and discovered in the 1890s, had brought extreme bad luck to all its previous owners. Its reputation was such that no museum in the UK wanted it, and Stead had to bribe crew members to bring it on board. The mummy somehow survived the wreck and continued to wreak havoc. The ship which transported it from Egypt, the Empress of Ireland, sank with 840 lives lost, in May 2012. Finally, a collector decided that the only way to deal with the curse was to return the mummy to Egypt. However, the ship he chose to carry it was the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a German submarine. What happened to the mummy after that is not known.
4. William Thomas Stead was also a writer, so the tale he told about the mummy on the night of the disaster was probably purely for the entertainment of his fellow passengers. However, he is among a number of authors whose stories are said to have predicted the events of that fateful night. Stead had written two short stories, How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid-Atlantic, by a Survivor (1886), which tells of a mail steamer's collision with another ship, resulting in high loss of life due to lack of lifeboats; and From the Old World to the New (1892) about a White Star Line vessel rescuing survivors of another ship that had collided with an Iceberg. He wasn't the only one. The May 2012 issue of The Popular Magazine, contained the short story by Mayn Clew Garnett called The White Ghost of Disaster, about the collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, which caused a sensation at the time - the magazine was already on sale when the Titanic sank. Earlier that year, a German newspaper had published a serialisation of a novel called Atlantis by Gerhard Hauptmann in which a ship meets a similar fate. In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a book called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, about an enormous British passenger liner called the Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the Titan hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board.
5. Vessels sailing in the vicinity of the wreck claim that they continue to hear SOS signals from the Titanic, and occasional radio interference and signals, to this day. Some ships have claimed to see orbs in the area - orbs are thought by ghost hunters to be spirit presences.
6. There are also tales of mysterious people being rescued by ships passing the site, including a woman in Edwardian dress whose name was later found on the passenger Titanic passenger list; a ten month old baby in a lifeboat inscribed with the Titanic's name, and even an elderly gentleman in a White Star captain's uniform who introduced himself as Captain Smith.
7. In 1977, Second Officer Leonard Bishop of the SS Winterhaven gave a tour of his ship to one of his passengers, a soft-spoken man with a British accent. Something about the man struck Bishop as odd, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, except that the man seemed unusually attentive to detail. A few years later, when he saw a picture of Captain Edward J. Smith, The Titanic's captain, Bishop recognised him as the man he had shown around his ship.
8. Disasters like this are often referred to as "acts of God", and there are stories suggesting that Titanic was cursed by God Himself. The ship was built in Belfast, a sectarian city, and therefore many of the men hired to build her were Protestants. The White Star Line had a policy of not "christening" their ships; and the Titanic had an extra reason to annoy God (or the Roman Catholic one, at least) - it was given the registration number 39094, which, seen in a mirror, resembles the words "No Pope", a common Protestant slogan of the time.
9. A travelling exhibition of Titanic artefacts is reported to be haunted. Volunteers working at the exhibition have reported hearing disembodied voices and footsteps, and feeling strange presences around the artefacts. A woman in a black dress and her hair in a bun has been seen several times. A photographer taking pictures of the exhibit prior to its opening, reported seeing a woman walking down the Grand Staircase. He thought this odd, since the exhibition wasn't open and the staff never walked on the staircase. When he asked the woman if she wanted her photograph taken, she didn't reply, but slowly disappeared.
10. The funeral home to which the bodies of the victims were taken in Nova Scotia is now a restaurant. Glasses and cutlery flying off shelves is a frequent occurrence, and the restaurant's manager has said that the ghosts will play tricks when people do not acknowledge that they are there.