The Baychimo: The Arctic Ghost Ship That Would Not Sink

Somewhere off the top of Alaska, a black-hulled cargo steamer slides out of the fog with no lights, no smoke, and no one at the wheel. Fishermen and trappers along the Beaufort coast reported exactly that sight, on and off, for the better part of forty years. The ship had a name, a registry and a paper trail, which is what makes the SS Baychimo stranger than any invented phantom.

The Baychimo was a real vessel, a steel-hulled cargo steamer built in Sweden in 1914 and later run by the Hudson's Bay Company to carry furs and supplies along the northern Canadian and Alaskan coasts. In the autumn of 1931, loaded with a season's pelts, she became trapped in pack ice near Barrow, Alaska. The crew twice walked to shelter as the ice closed in, planning to wait out the freeze.

The night she vanished

A blizzard in late November did the rest. When it cleared, the Baychimo was simply gone from the floe where she had been stuck. Most of the crew assumed she had been crushed and sunk, and were flown out. But an Inuit hunter told the captain the ship was still afloat, drifting some forty miles away. A salvage party reached her, stripped off the most valuable furs, and left, judging that she could not survive the winter.

She survived the winter. Over the following years the abandoned Baychimo was spotted repeatedly, sometimes frozen fast, sometimes riding open water, always empty. Trappers boarded her. A group of prospectors sheltered aboard for several days in 1933 before a storm carried her off again. In 1939 a party managed to climb aboard once more, then had to abandon her when the ice threatened to trap them too.

A wandering hull

The sightings kept coming, thinning out as the decades passed: a derelict steamer glimpsed in the drift ice, recognisable, unmanned, refusing to go down. The last widely reported sighting was in 1969, when she was seen once more frozen into the pack off the Alaskan coast, thirty-eight years after her crew last stepped off. After that the Baychimo drops out of the record. She was presumably crushed and sank at last, or lies somewhere on the sea floor, though no one has confirmed a wreck. In 2006 the Alaskan government even opened a project to search for her; nothing conclusive turned up.

There is nothing supernatural required here, and that is worth saying plainly. A well-built steel hull, kept buoyant by trapped air and preserved by cold, can outlast its owners for a very long time in a sea that few people cross. Ships abandoned intact do sometimes drift for years. Northern sailors have an older word for the invisible spirit blamed when a vessel behaves as though it has a will, the klabautermann of Baltic and North Sea folklore, but the Baychimo needed no crewman below decks to keep moving.

Still, forty years is a long charmed run. The tidy explanation accounts for a derelict that floats; it is quieter about a derelict that kept turning up, boarded, stripped, abandoned and lost, and then found again by different people who had no reason to invent her. Somewhere in that long drift the Baychimo stopped being a lost ship and became a legend of the ice.

Readers have posted their own accounts of derelicts, drifting wrecks and empty vessels below, and mark each True, Fake or Not sure. Follow the Baychimo north and cast your vote.