The Carroll A. Deering Ghost Schooner

On the morning of January 31, 1921, surfmen at the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard station on the Outer Banks of North Carolina sighted a five-masted commercial schooner hard aground on the Diamond Shoals, the treacherous sandbars that have earned this stretch of coast the name of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Heavy seas prevented immediate boarding, and it was not until February 4 that crews from the wrecking firm of Merritt-Chapman were able to reach the vessel. What they found on board has remained one of the most genuinely unsolved mysteries in modern American maritime history.

The ship was the Carroll A. Deering, a 255-foot commercial schooner built in 1919 in Bath, Maine, and registered out of Portland. She had been on a return voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Norfolk, Virginia, with a crew of eleven under the command of Captain Willis B. Wormell, a veteran master mariner of nearly forty years’ experience. When the boarding party climbed her rail, they found her sails set as though she were under way, the steering wheel disabled and the binnacle smashed, the navigation equipment and ship’s log missing, food prepared but uneaten in the galley, and not a single member of the crew aboard her. The two lifeboats, the personal effects of the officers, and the captain’s papers were also gone.

The Last Sightings

In the days before her grounding, the Deering had been observed by at least two other vessels along the eastern seaboard. On January 28, the Cape Lookout lightship, anchored some eighty miles to the south, had been hailed by the schooner. A red-haired man, neither the captain nor the first mate, had called across through a megaphone that the ship had lost her anchors and that the lightship should report this to the Deering’s owners. The hail itself was unremarkable, but the keeper of the lightship, Captain Thomas Jacobson, later told investigators that the crew of the schooner appeared to be milling about on the quarterdeck in a manner highly unusual for a disciplined merchant vessel under way.

Jacobson also reported that, shortly after the Deering passed, a second steamer of suspicious appearance had passed the lightship without responding to recognition signals. Whether this second vessel had any role in the events that followed has never been established.

A Federal Investigation

By the spring of 1921, the case of the Carroll A. Deering had drawn the attention of every federal agency with even a tangential interest in maritime affairs. The Department of Commerce, the Treasury, the Navy, and what would shortly become the Federal Bureau of Investigation all conducted parallel inquiries. The Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, took a personal interest in the matter and corresponded directly with the Deering family of Maine, who had financed the construction of the ship and her sister vessels.

Theories circulated freely. Bolshevik piracy was suspected, given the recent revolution in Russia and the unusual cargoes some American schooners were rumoured to carry. Caribbean rum-runners were proposed as suspects, the Volstead Act having taken effect only the previous year. A possible mutiny by the foreign-born members of the crew, several of whom were of Scandinavian and German origin, was investigated at length. A bottle washed up on the beach at Buxton in April 1921 contained a note in handwriting later identified as that of the engineer, Henry Bates, claiming the ship had been seized by an oil-burning steamer and the crew taken prisoner, but the note was eventually shown to be a hoax produced by a local resident.

By 1922 the federal investigation had been quietly closed without conclusion.

Paranormal Interpretations

The Carroll A. Deering case has been adopted, almost from the moment of her discovery, as a key text in the literature of maritime disappearances. The proximity of the grounding to the Sargasso Sea and to the area later popularised as the Bermuda Triangle led writers from Vincent Gaddis in the 1960s onward to include the schooner among the supposed casualties of that anomalous zone. Charles Berlitz, in his 1974 bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, treated the case at length, while later researchers have suggested everything from time slips to oceanic discontinuities of the sort sometimes invoked to explain the Ourang Medan incident.

More restrained investigators have noted that the Deering’s disappearance was almost certainly a human crime of some kind, most plausibly a piracy or mutiny in which the crew were forced overboard or transferred to another vessel. The truly mysterious element of the case is not the supernatural but the institutional, namely that the resources of an entire federal investigation could not establish what had happened to eleven experienced mariners on a single ship in a heavily trafficked stretch of American coastal waters.

What Remains

The wreck of the Carroll A. Deering was deliberately destroyed by dynamite in March 1921, the schooner having been judged a hazard to navigation. Pieces of her hull washed ashore for years afterward and a section of her bow remained displayed at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse complex into the late twentieth century. The disappearance of her crew has never been solved.

Of the eleven men who sailed from Rio de Janeiro under Captain Wormell, no body, no boat, and no positive identification has ever been recovered. They remain among the most thoroughly investigated and most stubbornly absent victims of the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Sources

• Hicks, Bland Simpson. Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Berlitz, Charles. The Bermuda Triangle. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
• United States Department of Commerce. Records of the Bureau of Navigation, RG 41, National Archives.
• Snow, Edward Rowe. Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948.