The SS Ourang Medan

A story of a ship whose dead were found in cramped postures, told in newspapers from 1940 onward. Skeptoid argues that no real ship could have escaped every shipping register, and the earliest known versions trace to one Trieste journalist, Silvio Scherli.

On 3 February 1948 De Locomotief, a newspaper in Indonesia, ran the story under a headline that promised a mystery of the sea: the puzzling loss of the Ourang Medan, the cramped postures of the dead, and riddles that would never be solved.

Wikipedia finds the earliest version in October 1940, in Trieste's local paper, Il Piccolo, as one of a series of sea dramas by Silvio Scherli, a freelance journalist who also worked as a maritime radio operator. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid credits a researcher named Hargraves with finding that Associated Press stories of 1940 carried a Trieste dateline, which was Scherli's home city. Dunning notes that the 1948 De Locomotief version was an updated telling from Scherli himself, and that Hargraves found a 1959 article on the ship that Scherli wrote for the magazine Trieste Export Trade.

Dunning also sets out why the ship itself is doubtful. He treats its absence from the registers as a serious problem, arguing that no commercial vessel could escape the notice of every shipping register in the world. The Silver Star named in the story was most likely the Silver Star Park, which was launched in 1943, renamed Santa Cecilia in 1945 and moved to Brazil. No ship called Silver Star was sailing the Pacific in 1947.