The Carroll A. Deering
A five-masted schooner found aground on Diamond Shoals, off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in January 1921 with her sails set and no one aboard. Five U.S. government departments investigated and reached no official explanation.
The Library of Congress recounts that everyone aboard the Carroll A. Deering, a schooner, vanished off the North Carolina coast in late January 1921. She was sighted from Cape Hatteras on 31 January, still sound, before the Diamond Shoals tore her apart. When the Coast Guard boarded her after she grounded, the sails were set, a meal had been cooked but left uneaten, and nothing else looked out of place.
The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Hatteras says the ship was launched at Bath, Maine, on 4 April 1919, only 21 months before she was found. The museum says she became known as Diamond Shoals' ghost ship, and that the case has kept her in the history books.
Five government departments investigated: the Navy, the Treasury, and the departments of State, Commerce and Justice. Wikipedia says Herbert Hoover, Commerce Secretary at the time, was struck by reports of other ships lost in the same waters, the sulfur freighter Hewitt above all. Most of those ships turned out to have been sailing near severe hurricanes, but the Hewitt and the Deering had been heading away from the storms.
The Library of Congress says a note had set off the investigations, and the note was a hoax. Christopher Columbus Gray had faked it, it was reported, hoping to discredit the Cape Hatteras lighthouse keepers and win a post there himself. Once the note was discounted, the investigations wound down without an official explanation.
"Five departments of the government — Commerce, Treasury, Justice, Navy, and State — looked into the case. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, was intrigued by the fact that several other vessels of various nationalities — most notably the sulfur freighter Hewitt — had also disappeared in roughly the same area. Although most of these vessels were later revealed to have been sailing in the vicinity of a series of particularly powerful hurricanes, the Hewitt and Carroll A. Deering were proven to have been sailing away from the area of the storm at the time."
- The Mysterious Disappearance of Ghost Ship Carroll A. Deering's Crew (Headlines & Heroes), Library of Congress, Headlines & Heroes blog (2023), via Wayback Machine
- History and Mystery (Carroll A. Deering), Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, Hatteras (archived 2016, Wayback Machine)