Happy Halloween!

Ira Wesley Kitmacher

In my recurring columns, I try hard to be clear about what is documented history versus folkloric tales. 

History includes societal, political, scientific, military, and other documented events that occur in our physical world. 

Folklore consists of the stories people tell and pass down over time, often tied to history, but not necessarily documented or proven real.

Examples of history include the maritime disasters of the Dix and Andelana shipwrecks (which I’ll describe below). Folklore around those disasters includes reports of “ghost ships” on Puget Sound. 

 Puget Sound, stretching from Olympia in the south to the Strait of Juan de Fuca separating the U.S. and Canada to the north, has had some 364 shipwrecks. 

Many (but not all) of these disasters involved the Mosquito Fleet, a fleet of hundreds of steamboats, sternwheelers and ferries that was the primary way to travel around our region from the 1880s to the 1920s. 

The story is that an office worker in Seattle looked out her office window, saw the boats buzzing about, and remarked: “They look like a swarm of mosquitoes.” They carried families, mail, livestock, and practically everything else imaginable in the absence of roads or railroads.          

Before radar, GPS, sonar, and other modern technologies, these boats were subject to nature's whims and tried to avoid colliding with one another.  When our notorious fog and stormy weather rolled in, navigation was limited to what they could see and hear. 

Boat captains relied on “acoustic signatures,” including steam whistles and other sounds. Some people say (folklore) that if you stand at Percival Landing or other shore locations and listen intently, you can occasionally hear a faint, metallic clanging drifting across the water, like what was heard when the Mosquito Fleet was still sailing.  A lively imagination or ghost ships, you be the judge! 

On Friday, Jan. 13, 1899 (Friday the 13th!), the large four-masted British sailing ship Andelana waited in Commencement Bay in Tacoma for its shipment of wheat to take back to England. Nine crew had already left the ship because they thought it didn’t perform well in the wind, as its masts were too tall.  The captain got so angry at their unapproved departure that he had most of the remaining crew (and their dogs) sit for a haunting photograph.  It seemed he was trying to tell the remaining crew they had better not leave, because he had proof of who they were.

The ship was top-heavy because it lacked its ballast of wheat to hold it down in the water.  The 17 remaining crew had gone to sleep in their bunks when a freak storm with 40 mile-per-hour winds hit the Bay and the ship.  The top-heavy Andelana rolled over in the wind and sank quickly to the bottom, 200 feet down. 

There have been attempts to reach the ship (it and its crew remain where they went down, which is in part why, during my walking tours, I sometimes refer to Puget Sound as a “water graveyard”), and at least one diver was killed trying to reach the site.  Since then, reports have described the Andelana ghost ship sailing through ectoplasm (ghostly mist) on Puget Sound. 

Other stories describe phantom sailors desperately rowing a boat in search of help. Related stories describe a cursed item: a wooden model of the Andelana carved from the wreckage of the Tacoma 4th of July 1900 streetcar disaster (the worst in U.S. history) and housed at the Foss Waterway Seaport Museum. Maybe I’ll discuss this further in a future column. 

Crew of the doomed Andelana.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

On Nov. 18, 1906, the mosquito steamer SS Dix attempted to sail from Alki Point in Seattle to Bainbridge Island.  The boat’s captain was collecting fares (a common practice) while the unlicensed first officer drove the boat.  The Dix unfortunately collided with the three-masted, much larger schooner Jeanie, capsized, and sank in hundreds of feet of water in less than five minutes.

Newspaper report on the Dix accident.

Courtesy of Library of Congress.

More than 40 of the 77 people on board drowned, mostly women and children.  This horrible event gave rise to stories of the ghost ship Dix, whose lights (some say) still glow where the collision took place. Others have reported a silent phantom vessel that glides beneath the surface of Puget Sound. 

Next time you look out on our peaceful-seeming Puget Sound, maybe on Halloween night, take a moment and think of these disasters and the ghost ship stories they spawned. Happy Halloween!  

Ira Wesley Kitmacher is an Olympia-based historian and author, writing twelve published and upcoming history and folklore books, many on the Pacific Northwest (including Haunted Puget Sound and Pacific Northwest Legends and Lore), one on World War 2, and two on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. His books are available through many booksellers. Ira speaks at many public venues.  He leads Olympia history and haunted walking tours based on his books. Ira has been featured on television, radio, and other media. He is a Commissioner on the Thurston County Historic Commission. Ira is a professor who taught graduate courses at Georgetown University and other colleges. He is a retired senior federal executive and an attorney (California, Inactive).