GHOST SHIPS
Mary Celeste Found Adrift, All Hands Gone; Podcast Reopens Old Case
A Weird Darkness episode revisits the brigantine discovered empty in 1872, alongside a ghost said to have solved a murder and a beast said to have stalked France.
THE AZORES, ATLANTIC OCEAN — The brigantine Mary Celeste was found drifting between the Azores and Portugal on December 5th, 1872, by the crew of the Dei Gratia, according to a Weird Darkness podcast episode. Her cargo and the crew's belongings were reportedly still aboard, but there was no trace of Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their two-year-old daughter or the seven crew.
The episode, first aired in June 2024, relays the theory of documentarian Anne MacGregor, who holds that all ten people took to the lifeboat bound for Santa Maria Island after the pumps clogged. The notes say experts remain unsure what became of them.
The program does not linger long on the sea. It turns next to Redding, California, where Sherri Papini vanished while jogging in November 2016. She pleaded guilty in 2022 to lying to federal agents and mail fraud, after male DNA on her clothing led investigators to an ex-boyfriend.
A third segment concerns Frederick Fisher, an English convict who vanished from his New South Wales farm in 1826. According to the account, a local man said Fisher's ghost pointed toward the place where the body lay. The episode notes, however, that trial records credit blood on a fence and two Aboriginal trackers with finding the grave.
The remaining stories include an Alabama jailbreak, Ron Wyatt's claim to have found the Ark of the Covenant, which scientists, scholars and his own church have dismissed, a 1960 Tennessee disappearance, and the Beast of Gévaudan. The episode includes a death by suicide, and the producers direct listeners in need to a directory of mental health resources.