Short Stuff: The SS Ourang Medang
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That's right. This is another fun tale of a ghost ship. Ghost ships are just a lot of fun to talk about. And this is the tale of a ghost ship that may or may not even exist. It's a big one. But one thing for sure, one thing is for sure is that this story has influenced a lot of a lot of pop culture, I feel like.

Yeah, at the very least it showed up as a video game in 2019, a horror game. I was watching a four-hour YouTube video where this YouTuber just basically narrated, I guess added commentary here or there to this four-hour gameplay.

You didn't just watch the trailer of the game. You watched actual four hours. I did. I mean, I didn't watch the whole four hours. No, I skipped ahead. And it was cute. Oh, okay. It was kind of fun. But, yeah, I know I probably watched five minutes total of the whole thing just skipping around. But it looks very scary. It looks like a really cool game. If I played games, I would definitely go get it. It's called The Man of Medan.

And the reason it's called the Man of Medan is because that's the English translation from the Indonesian for the name of the ship, Orang Medan. Orang in Indonesian means man, which is why orangutans are called that. They're forest men, I think we've said before. So the name of the ship in English was Man of Medan, which is a city on Sumatra. That's right. And it looks like a very scary game about people that get up on this ghost ship and have to contend with ghosts.

So what happened with the SS Orang Medan was that – well, here's the story. It depends on –

There's some hinkiness that goes on with the dates, and we'll explain why in a minute. But either 1947 or 1948, or maybe even 1940 as we'll see, there was a Dutch freighter ship named the Orang Medan that sent an SOS picked up by some nearby ships, including the Silver Star, an American ship, in the Straits of Malacca where all it said was this, we float all officers, including Captain Dead, alive.

Lying in chart room and on bridge, probably whole crew dead. I die. That is a creepy message. The only way it could be creepier is if it said we all float down here.

Or I'm right behind you. You're right. So this was like the SOS, the distress call. And that Silver Star, like you said, was close enough that it arrived to help the Orang Medan. And when it arrived, you could basically just tell looking at it that it was a ghost ship. And Chuck, before we go into detail, I say that we take a break. What do you think? Oh, an early break. Okay. Okay. Let's do it. Suspenseful early break. Mm-hmm.

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And everyone said, not me, not it, not it. And there was one guy that was eating some C rations, looked up and went, what? So he went aboard. And what he found supposedly were people on deck, frozen in place with their fearful looks on their faces, their eyes wide open, their mouths stretched in like they were screaming. Even a dog in mid snarl, all frozen, frozen.

So immediately I thought of another pop culture thing, this reference. Did you see this season's this year's True Detective Night Country? I think so. Right. I tried to and I couldn't make it past the first episode. Oh, God, it was so good, dude. I know you said that and I just I didn't see it.

Well, maybe you should have watched more than the first episode. Well, that's what I'm saying. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see the contours of it being great. I actually was like, I can't watch this. In your mind's eye, you didn't see how it could have been good possibly after that? No. And believe me, I know stuff. I can figure stuff out. Well, did you see enough to see the influence here for Night Country? Was that in episode one? Yeah, I think it was in episode one where they show up and, yeah, it's a similar thing. Sure.

Yeah. It was part of the thing, part orangutan, I think, for sure. Yeah. Well put. Oh, you want me to take over? So I also saw... Mr. TV critic. I also saw that the people, all of the corpses were described as having their arms outstretched as if they were trying to fend off some unseen something. But there was no trace of anything on the ship that would have suggested what had happened to this crew and the dog.

And they hooked up, I guess, a tow line from the Silver Star to the Orang Medan and they started to tow it. But before it could get anywhere, the thing caught fire and actually blew up. And so any trace of the Orang Medan and its mystery sank to the bottom of the Straits of Malacca and became enshrined in sea shanties from that moment on. That's right. But was this even a real ship at all? No. No.

We're not going to take a break and find out. We're going to talk about it right now. Yeah, I guess we should have done it like that, sure. No, it's fine. It seems like this probably was completely fabricated. There's never been a shipping record of that vessel. No living human ever came forward and said, hey, I was that person eating the sea rations that got shoved aboard this thing. Mm-hmm.

There were also, depending on when the article came out, there were varying details that were different, which is always sort of a giveaway that it could be fabricated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the fact that there's like different dates, different locations, that kind of stuff, it's at the very least the thing's been embellished as we understand it today. And there was a researcher named Estelle Hargraves who found the first mention of this story

All the way back in 1940, a good seven or eight years before the story supposedly took place. This was during World War II. And it was a British merchant ship, not an American ship, that came to help out. But the thing that does, you know, bear a resemblance to the following stories was that there was the ship exploded and there was no trace of anything or any evidence that could have explained what happened.

Yeah, this one was kind of fun because I was on Reddit looking at some, like, theories and stuff just for fun. And someone said, hey, I think I've figured this thing out. Like, everybody knows this is probably a hoax, but I think I've actually got the paper trail and figured out who this was. And I was like, oh, interesting. And I started to read it. It was Estelle Hargraves on Reddit. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah, it was that researcher. I was like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense. So what did she say? What's the explanation? Well, it's the same explanation that we have here, which is it's laid at the feet of one single person, not just like a bunch of people that kind of made up this lore. It was actually, at least Estelle has put it out, that it's a reporter named Silvio Shirley, S-H-E-R-L-I,

And wrote this thing in 1940 and then wrote about it again in 1948 as supposedly the first time that it had happened. And, you know, it was the same name, so it had to be the same person. Okay, so I guess he's the culprit, right? Well, it seems like it. Well, okay, so there were some other parts to this story that Shirley added. There was a 1948 Dutch-Indonesian newspaper called Der Lokomotief.

And this was the one where we get the story as we kind of recognize it today. But one of the extra things that gets left off these days is that there was one survivor from the Orang Medan who washed up on the shore of one of the Marshall Islands, was found by a missionary and told the story that the ship was actually carrying illicit cargo. That's why no one can ever find any record of the ship. It's because...

They didn't want to be found. And that the cargo, sulfuric acid or nitroglycerin or something, either, um, like off-gassed and killed the crew or blew the ship up or both. That's right. And this missionary supposedly told this story to that writer, Silvio Sherley. Uh-huh. Uh,

It's interesting that this article says, like, no one can be sure that it was Shirley who made the 1940 report. But I think this is old because online, like, Estelle Hargraves posted, like, screenshots of the actual 1940 articles with his name. Yeah. But everybody knows she's always headed out for Silvio Shirley. So can that be trusted in this day and age of deep fakes and AI and stuff?

Yeah, that's a good point. But it seems like it didn't even exist at all. And it maybe was this like writer writing about it a couple of times and embellishing it even more the second time to see if it gets more steam. I don't know. Yeah.

Full steam ahead. So do you want to hear a little interesting tidbit, a little appendum? By the way, no one knows if this is true, but it's almost certainly not. And if it is, it has taken on some shape, so you can barely recognize the actuality of it or pick it out. But we based this off of a HowStuffWorks article on it, correct? Yeah.

Correct. Among other things. You're right. I went and read an additional article on All Things Interesting, including some others. But in the All Things Interesting article, it referenced the HowStuffWorks article that this was based on. Ergo, the universe will collapse on itself soon. Amazing. Chuck said amazing. I'm not going to press my luck, so I'm just going to end this now. Short Stuff is out.

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