The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals

Hey Coastal,

On the morning of January 31, 1921, a lookout at Cape Hatteras spotted a five masted schooner run hard aground on the outer edge of Diamond Shoals. Every sail was set. The ship wasn't going anywhere, but somebody had rigged her to sail.

Nobody was on deck. Nobody answered. It took four more days of brutal seas before anyone could get close enough to board her.

What they found when they finally did is the kind of thing that's hard to explain away, and a hundred years later, still hasn't been.

The Carroll A. Deering was a big, capable ship. Five masts, 255 feet long, built in 1919 in Bath, Maine, the last of nearly a hundred vessels turned out by the G.G. Deering Company. She'd only been at sea about a year and a half when her story ended on a North Carolina sandbar.

Her final voyage started ordinary enough. She left Virginia in August 1920 under Captain William Merritt, hauling coal down to Rio de Janeiro. A few days out, Merritt fell seriously ill. The ship put in at Lewes, Delaware, and left him ashore. The company scrambled to replace him, and that's where things start to go sideways.

The new captain was Willis Wormell, a veteran shipmaster brought in on short notice. He was experienced. He was also, by multiple accounts, going blind. His new first mate, Charles McLellan, was a big, capable man who didn't think much of taking orders from an old captain he didn't respect, and who ended up doing most of the actual navigating because Wormell couldn't see well enough to do it himself.

That's not a great combination on a ship at sea for months at a time. It got worse.

By the time the Deering reached Rio and then Barbados to resupply, Wormell had confided in an old friend, another captain, that he didn't trust his crew and was worried about McLellan specifically. In Barbados, McLellan got drunk, got arrested, and complained to a fellow captain that Wormell was undermining him every time he tried to discipline the men. Wormell bailed him out anyway. Witnesses overheard McLellan say something that should have ended his career on the spot: "I'll get the captain before we get to Norfolk, I will."

The Deering sailed anyway, McLellan still aboard, headed home.

On January 29, 1921, the Deering passed the Cape Lookout Lightship off the North Carolina coast. The lightship's keeper, Captain Thomas Jacobson, watched her go by and noticed something odd. The crew was milling around the quarterdeck, a part of the ship they weren't normally allowed on. A man hailed him through a megaphone to report the ship had lost both anchors in a storm and ask that the owners be told.

Jacobson said the man didn't act or talk like an officer. Tall, thin, red haired, speaking in a way Jacobson took for a foreign accent. Not Wormell. Not anyone who sounded like they were in charge.

Jacobson's radio was broken, so he couldn't pass the message along himself. He flagged down a passing steamer and asked it to relay the report, which ships were obligated to do. The steamer didn't stop.

The next day, another vessel spotted the Deering sailing what witnesses called a peculiar course. That was the last anyone saw of her moving under her own power. By the following morning, she was aground on the shoals, sails still set, and there wasn't a soul aboard to explain why.

Storms kept rescuers away for four days. When the wrecker Rescue and the cutter Manning finally reached her on February 4, the ship's wheel was smashed, her compass housing shattered, likely from running aground. But that damage didn't explain the rest of it.

The ship's log was gone. The navigation instruments were gone. Both lifeboats were gone, along with the main anchors and every scrap of the crew's personal belongings. And in the galley, someone had started cooking a meal that never got eaten. Coffee. Soup. Spareribs in a pan, sitting untouched.

The only living things anyone found aboard were a few half starved cats.

Eleven men, by most counts, though a couple of sources put it as high as twelve. Every one of them gone. No bodies were ever recovered. No wreckage from the lifeboats ever washed ashore. To this day, nobody knows what happened to a single one of them.

Here's the part of this story most retellings skip past on their way to the spooky stuff, and it's the part that actually moves me.

Willis Wormell's daughter, Lula, was not willing to let her father's disappearance become a shrug and a closed file. She went, with her pastor and a former captain of the Deering, to Senator Frederick Hale of Maine and asked him to force the federal government to actually investigate. It worked. What started as a regional Coast Guard case became a full federal inquiry involving five different departments, personally overseen by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who would be President within a decade.

That's not a small thing. A grieving woman with no official standing pushed the machinery of the United States government into motion because she refused to accept "we'll never know" as an answer.

Then, in April 1921, the case took a turn straight out of a novel. A Buxton, North Carolina man named Christopher Columbus Gray said he'd found a corked bottle washed up on the beach near the wreck site, with a note inside describing the crew being captured and handcuffed by another vessel. The story exploded. Newspapers ran with pirates. Some speculated Bolshevik agents were stealing American ships. The State Department got involved.

Months later, the truth came out. Gray had written the note himself. Under questioning, he confessed, and investigators believed his motive was as ordinary as it gets: he wanted a job at the local lighthouse station and thought the discovery would help him get it.

So the one piece of hard evidence pointing to piracy turned out to be a lie told by a man looking for work. That left investigators back where they started, with a ship, a missing crew, and nothing solid to explain either one.

Depends who you ask, and that's worth being honest about instead of picking whichever answer sounds better. The National Archives, which holds the actual case files from the federal investigator who ran the inquiry, says he and Hoover settled on mutiny as the most likely explanation but kept the file open in case new evidence ever turned up. The State Archives of North Carolina, in its own account of the case, says the investigation simply closed at the end of 1922 without any conclusive findings at all.

Two credible institutions. Two different endings to the same story. We're not going to pretend one of them is definitely right just because it makes for a cleaner ending.

What we can tell you is this: nobody was ever charged with anything. No bodies were found. No trace of the men who vanished off that ship has ever surfaced, not in 1921 and not in the hundred plus years since.

The wreck itself was eventually stripped and destroyed as a hazard to shipping, but the sea wasn't done with her yet. Storms pushed pieces of the hull back onto the beach at Ocracoke years later, and a hurricane in 1955 dragged what was left of her all the way to Hatteras. Even the wreckage didn't want to stay gone.

Here's a detail that surprises people every time we mention it.

The Carroll A. Deering gets lumped into Bermuda Triangle stories constantly. Ships vanish, crews disappear without a trace, cue the ominous music. Except the Bermuda Triangle, as a named idea anybody believed in, didn't exist yet in 1921. Nobody investigating this case that year had ever heard the phrase. The term wasn't coined and popularized until the 1950s and 60s, decades after Lula Wormell was already fighting to get her father's case taken seriously.

So the Triangle didn't explain the Deering. The Deering, along with a handful of other unexplained disappearances from around the same era, got folded into the Triangle after the fact, borrowed by a newer legend that needed some good stories to build itself on.

It's a small thing, but it changes how you read the whole case. This wasn't a ship swallowed by a mysterious patch of ocean with a catchy name. It was a genuine, document-backed federal mystery that happened first, on its own, and only got dressed up in Triangle mythology decades later once that story needed some real incidents to borrow credibility from.

The real mystery didn't need the costume. It was strange enough on its own.

The Deering is just one wreck in a coastline that's swallowed more than 5,000 ships. This week's blog goes wider, into the Graveyard of the Atlantic itself, and why this particular stretch of North Carolina coast has claimed more vessels than almost anywhere else in the country.

A ship sailed herself onto a sandbar with her sails still set and dinner on the stove, and nobody has ever explained why. That's rare enough on its own. What stays with us is Lula Wormell, refusing to let the government file her father away as an unsolved shrug, and pushing until a future president's own office had to answer for it.

We don't have a tidy ending for you this week. We're not going to invent one.

Until Next Tide,

Hey Coastal