I was watching an episode of Haunted History today on television and the information about the hauntings of this boat grabbed me so good I had to write a post about it. Because I am weird and enjoy these things.
The Great Eastern was a colossal steam ship built by Isambard Brunel in the 1830s. The 680 foot vessel was at it’s time six times larger than any ship ever built and boasted engineering innovations like a double iron hull attached to a girder frame & seperated by the large paddle wheels seen in the picture above and for having the first transatlantic telegraoh cable aboard. This gigantic boat employed the work of over 1,000 laborers, seperated into 200 “rivet gangs” to hand drive the rivets into the ships walls. Young men, known as “Bash Boys” were also hired to squeeze into the narrow space between the ship’s two hulls 12 hours a day the would work by candle light enduring the pounding hammers of the rivet gangs. Many accidents occured during the construction of the ship. Many fell to their deaths and several of the bash boys never came out.
The ship was launched in 1858 and it became apparent immediately the ship had been cursed from the beginning. The multiplying wench jarred, one worked died from massive internal injuries and four other men were injured as a result of the incident, which only propelled the ship a total of 3 feet. The ship then wedged it’s self to the seas floor and took another 3 months before it would attempt to sail again. FInally the boat was afloat, but the joy surrounding the occassion was short lived. An explosion in the engine room killed one man and scarred four others so badly they later died of their injuries.The builder Brunel died of a stroke shortly after recieving news of this latest incident. It then suffered damage during a storm at sea which killed 16 people and later had the hull torn open by a large rock which would have sunk it had it not been for the double hull! A sightseeing boast became entangled in it’s propeller and 2 more people were killed. Attempts were made to sell the steamer, but no one was buying.
Workers aboard the boat began to complain of ghostly hammering noises coming from below the decks. It would wake them from their sleep and was loud enough to be heard over storms. The eeriness frightened them & they believed it was the sould of one of the bash boys lost between the two hulls. When their fears were increased by a medium travelling aboard the ship it’s captain & crew organized a thorough inspection, where they heard the ghostly hammering for themselves. The hauntings continued through the ship being used as a cable laying vessel for many years. She was again tried many years later to be turned into a commercial ship again but it was ultimately a failure. She was scrapped and taken apart in 1889. During the scraping of the hull it is a pretty widely accepted fact that a young man’s skeleton was found in the space between the two hulls. The hauntings had been real.
Re-blogging an older post of mine now that there are new followers. This one never really got the love it deserved, such a creepy story.
