Part of what makes the mystery of flight MH370—the Malaysian airplane that disappeared—so haunting is the horror we all feel, wondering if there were people alive and conscious aboard the plane, and if so, if they were aware that the plane was doomed, flying on autopilot for hours, with the crew dead or incapacitated. Or perhaps everyone aboard was mercifully dead or unconscious when it kept flying—a so-called “ghost plane.”

The idea of a “ghost ship” has haunted people for centuries.

Painting of the Flying Dutchman by Charles Temple Dix (1838-1873)

I read a lot about ghost ships as I researched yellow fever, the mosquito-vectored disease that was such a source of horror in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes hopped aboard ships that came from Africa, bound for North America or the West Indies, where they laid their eggs in the water caskets. Of course, no one knew how the disease was transmitted, but everyone knew it was highly contagious. Once it broke out aboard a ship, the crew and passengers could be incapacitated or wiped out entirely by the disease, leading to “ghost ships” left adrift and unmanned. It may even have been yellow fever that sparked the legend of the ghost ship the Flying Dutchman, first described in 1795. It was a Dutch man-of-war that was lost while sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.

The Mary Celeste

One of the most famous ghost ships was the Mary Celeste, found abandoned in 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean with no one aboard, but with all its cargo, valuables, and food stocks intact. Its only lifeboat was missing. All sorts of theories were proposed, ranging from sea monsters to pirates to mutiny to a single homicidal crewman. According to this article in Smithsonian, a new theory may have been simply that the ship’s pumps became inoperative and the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship close to land. But as with the Malaysian flight’s passengers, we may never know what became of them.