The Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is built from the timber of a ghost ship. HMS Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1854, and a year later she was found drifting intact about 1,200 miles away near Baffin Island. In maritime terms a ghost ship is a real derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, and the legends came first: the Flying Dutchman, circulating from around 1795, the SS Bannockburn, a Canadian freighter lost on Lake Superior in 1902, and invented tales like the Octavius, found off Greenland in 1775 with its captain frozen at his desk, and the Ourang Medan of 1947, whose convenient explosion destroyed all the evidence. The benchmark real case is the Mary Celeste, found in December 1872 between Portugal and the Azores with sails set, cargo intact, and navigation tools gone. Arthur Conan Doyle later fictionalized her as the Marie Celeste and added the warm tea that never existed.

Leading theories point to her cargo of 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol, nine found empty: fearing an explosion, the crew may have taken to a tethered lifeboat and watched the rope snap. The Carroll A. Deering ran aground on Diamond Shoals in 1921 with her crew of 11 gone, prompting a six-department federal investigation that even weighed Bolshevik pirates. The SS Baychimo, abandoned in the ice near Barrow, Alaska in 1931, was sighted drifting for nearly 40 years, until 1969. Modern cases turn forensic and then geopolitical, as ships switch off their AIS transponders to vanish from the global tracking grid.

• The MV Alta, abandoned after engine failure in 2018, drifted for a year and a half before wrecking on the Irish coast in early 2020.
• The catamaran Kaz II was found off the Great Barrier Reef in 2007 with its engine running, a laptop on, and a meal on the table.
• In 2016 the yacht Sayo was found in the Philippine Sea with sailor Manfred Fritz Bajorat mummified at his desk near the radio.
• A vessel that left Mauritania with 25 aboard drifted to Brazil’s Amazon region in April 2024 carrying nine dead.
• In March 2026 the sanctioned Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz, abandoned after a drone strike, drifted toward Libya until salvage teams secured it.