A Haunted Yacht.
Weird sounds and sights.
Dead sailor on board again.
The Glasgow Weekly Mail has a novel ghost story. It is said that a month ago a steam yacht was anchored in Rothesay Bay, when one of the hands was drowned at that cold eerie hour known as “the turn o’ the night.” The skipper and another man joined the yacht next day. The hand who had wrought along with the man had taken another situation.
Just a night or so after they had joined the vessel they were startled in their bunks by hearing seven distinct knocks in the forecastle. They looked out, examined the yacht, and finding nothing to account for the weird sounds were mystified. The knocking continued; then after awhile it stopped, but from the sensational incident, for theyw ere the only two persons on board, they sat up and wondered what the sounds could have been.
A night or two afterwards two gentlemen were on board at the hour when the rapping and rattling amongst the pots commenced, and one of them shouted over to where the skipper and engineer were resting,”Were you knocking, captain?” The yacht was ordered by its owner to sail to the Kyles, where it is used every day by a gentleman and his party.
The two men are left on board at night. The other night at 12.15 the knocking began and to their horror the lid of a pot was flung at them, and struck the ladder between their beds. “In the name of God, what are you?” shrieked the captain. “Speak, I say! speak! If you want anything, make a sign?” That instant the noises ceased. The lid of the pot, it is said, could not have fallen off, as it was on the pot when seen last.
Next morning the sounds commenced at the self-same hour, and lasted the usual time, till after one o’clock. The noises resembled a poker being hit on a grate, and then the sound of bare feet hurrying along the deck overhead. There were no traces of rats on board. The two men, thinking that the “spook” might be concerned about some belongings, searched the yacht through and through, but came upon neither money nor anything else. Fully convinced that there was nothing on board belonging to the drowned man, the skipper, when the noises started the other morning, whispered hotly to his companion, “It’s a shame that two poor innocent men should be thus visited by weird, unearthly sounds at this hour of the morning.”
The captain is said to be a seaman of proved courage, a life abstainer, a regular church-goer when at home, and not superstitious.
Shields Daily Gazette, 15th August 1899.