The ship, the Carroll A. Deering, had no crew on board when it was found “battered” near Cape Hatteras on Jan. 31, 1921. (Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum/Facebook)
(Tribune News Service) — A “Ghost Ship” was abandoned off the Outer Banks coast, sparking a century-long mystery in North Carolina.
The ship had no crew on board when it was found “battered” near Cape Hatteras on Jan. 31, 1921. Adding to the mystery, food was still on the stove, and the captain’s cabin was left in disarray, the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources wrote on the 102-year anniversary of the shipwreck’s discovery.
“The crew had vanished like ghosts,” the state agency wrote in 2018. “Gone with them were personal belongings, key navigational equipment, some papers, and the ship’s anchors. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the FBI, no trace of the crew or the ship’s logs has ever been uncovered.”
Officials also don’t know why the ship — called the Carroll A. Deering — crashed in the first place.
“Various explanations for the wreck surfaced, including pirates, mutiny, and the effects of the ship having travelled through the Bermuda Triangle,” a region in the Atlantic Ocean that has been associated with past disappearances, according to state officials and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But one curious item did remain on the ship — a six-toed cat that still had descendants living along the North Carolina coast decades later, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum wrote on Facebook in 2017.
The ship’s mystery unfolded as it returned to Virginia from a trip abroad. The Maine-based G. G. Deering Company constructed the five-masted ship, “among the last wooden schooners built before their eclipse by iron shipbuilding,” historians said.
On Jan. 29, 1921, someone aboard the Cape Lookout Lightship reported seeing the Deering with crew members “milling about” and hearing that the vessel lost its anchors. The Deering also was spotted the next day, seemingly “steering a peculiar course,” according to the National Park Service.
Often called the “Ghost Ship of the Outer Banks,” the Carroll A. Deering remains an unsolved mystery. (The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources/Twitter)
Then on Jan. 31, 1921, the Coast Guard reportedly spotted the ship with its sails set and lifeboats gone.
“When the seas calmed four days later and the Coast Guard was able to reach the ship, it was clear the vessel had been abandoned,” experts said.
A document that state officials shared with McClatchy News reports that people boarded the ship and discovered “the table set for dinner with hot coffee in the pot and everything aboard the ship in the same condition it would have been had the crew left only a few minutes before. On a sewing machine was a waist which the captain’s wife had been making, while toys used by the captain’s sons were on the floor.”
The Deering was later blown up to help keep others safe on the water. The ship was moved, and “pieces and parts of that and possibly other unlucky vessels” sometimes appear on Ocracoke Island after storms, Nathan Henry, assistant state archaeologist, told McClatchy News in an email.
Over 1,000 shipwrecks lie in the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” an area off the Outer Banks barrier islands where geographic features called shoals create deadly risks for boaters. The Deering was found at Diamond Shoals, “a cluster of shifting, underwater sandbars that ... extend for miles in varying directions,” McClatchy News reported in 2021.
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