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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pirates, jinxes, and ghostly galleons,
By E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Ghost Ships: True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings, and Disasters (Paperback)
"Ghost Ships" is filled with stories of horror and mystery on the high seas, and in a couple of instances, on the Mississippi River---"The 'Iron Mountain' rounded the bend and was never seen again," as the author tells the tale.Eleven months later, "another palatial Mississippi River paddle-wheel vessel, the 'Mississippi Queen', cast off from Memphis on April 17, 1873....She was last seen shortly before midnight, about twelve hours after her departure. Then she, too, vanished without a trace down on the Mississippi River." It's easy to understand how ships go missing in the Great Lakes or on the Seven Seas. But how do they manage to disappear without a trace on a river, even one the size of the Mississippi? In his chapter "Without a Trace," the author attributes the disappearance of ships to pirates, waterspouts (he was actually on board a ship that sailed through a water spout), UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle. Incidentally, Richard Winer is also the author of "The Devil's Triangle." In addition to ships that vanished without a trace, there are also ships that stayed afloat (and in one case delivered the mail) but lost their crews. The 'Mary Celeste' of nineteenth-century fame is mentioned, but Winer spends most of his time with the 'Joyita,' a sixty-five foot yacht that mislaid her crew of twenty-five right in the middle of the twentieth century. She was found deserted and adrift ninety miles north of Fiji, her radio smashed, and part of her cargo missing. Rather than accept the more mundane explanation of piracy on the high seas, the author elaborates on the theory that the 'Joyita' was jinxed. She was cursed by the widow of a Portuguese shipfitter who died while the yacht was still under construction, and the disappearance of her crew was only one of several incidents that solidified 'Joyita's reputation as a bad-luck ship. Whether or not you choose to believe, with the author, that the 'Joyita' was trailed all over the South Pacific by a ghostly Portuguese galleon---well, "No Joy aboard the Joyita" is not the strangest chapter in this book. Oddly enough, there aren't too many ghosts aboard "Ghost Ships." A chapter is devoted to the ghosts on the luxury liner, "Queen Mary" (now a museum). The ghost of Errol Flynn, and the headless ghost of the pirate Bartholemy Portuguese make brief appearances. There are a pair of swimming ghosts that followed their former ship, the "Watertown," long after their burial at sea. One frightening story involves a Russian ship, the 'Ivan Vassili,' that seemed to be possessed by something other than a ghost. At irregular intervals, 'it' caused the 'Vassili's crew to go berserk: "For twenty minutes, the men ran amuck, screaming wildly, racing about the ship, totally oblivious to what they were doing. They were beating each other and themselves. During the frenzied melee a seaman named Alex Govinski, broke away from the others, hurled himself over the rail into the blackness of the sea and disappeared. Then, in a matter of seconds, it was all over. Everything, including the possessed seamen, returned to normal. Except for the loss of Govinski, it was as if nothing had happened." After a few more suicides and incidents of mass hysteria, the crew finally deserted the 'Ivan Vassili' in the port of Vladivostok and burned her to the waterline. "Ghost Ships" is a fun, scary read if you ignore the occasional misspelling, unfamiliar grammatical construction, and some of the author's more outrè theories on the mysteries of sea.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wide Ranging with Some Genuine Chills..,
By
This review is from: Ghost Ships: True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings, and Disasters (Paperback)
Winer may be better known to most readers as the author of "The Devil's Triangle", which boosted the brief Bermuda Triangle craze years ago. This collection is much better, as it is not pushing some grand conspiracy theory (alien or human); instead, it is a collection of "Readers' Digest" type, short articles. What certainly comes across well is that the oceans are large places indeed and been home to many unexplainable and mysterious tragedies over the centuries. The nature of the sea lends itself well to the supernatural, and while the cases in the book range from well explained and resolved losses to genuinely frightening and seemingly inexplicable events, Winer's style conveys the great mystery of the deeps very effectively. The book is a very easy read, atmospheric, and a fun jaunt for landlubbers who want a taste of the dark side of going down to the sea in ships...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining in a Scattershot Enough Manner,
By
This review is from: Ghost Ships: True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings, and Disasters (Paperback)
Richard Winer's Ghost Ships is subtitled "True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings, and Disasters" and that is appropriate enough (although "true" may be stretching things somewhat) as the book is full of a variety of stories, only a very few which can properly be called "ghost ships". It is still fun and slightly creepy, though, and the author does avoid the more famous sea tales, such as the Mary Celeste, and sticks to stories the readers is less likely to have heard. Taken with a often large grain of salt, the tales ring true within the context of this book. The author does a good job setting the scene and telling the story, although so often ending the short narratives with a question can, at times, get a little grating.
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