Description of Place: The rusted and weather-ravaged Italian liner was once the epitome of fine traveling. With a gross tonnage of 29,1000 tons (36% of the Queen Mary) and 697 feet, it has three decks and a passenger complement of 218 first class, 320 cabin class and 703 tourist class. The ship was powered by a Parson Geared turbine engine and could reach 23 knots. The interior included a grand-sized ballroom with crystal chandeliers, swimming pool, grand dining room and wall-sized murals by Gio Patito.

Ghostly Manifestations: Chet Ferriman is a helicopter pilot in Anchorage, Alaska. He makes his living by airlifting supplies to isolated camps and mining, fishing and oil camps up and down the Alaska shoreline. It’s a job he cares a lot about and a lot of people count on him for their monthly orders and he’s never late. His helicopter sometimes travels and covers up towards a hundred miles a day with the only things to keep him company are ships below and the whales at sea. The coast guard even depends on him to report on illegal whaling ships that he might see and he’s even been shot at by suspicious characters. In October of 2002, Ferriman caught sight of an unusual sight he’d never seen before. It was a huge ocean liner quite ruined by storm caught in the current in the Bering Strait. He had made several passes over it looking for people, but never saw a sole living thing on board. He then mentioned it to his friends in the Arctic Warrior salvage team and they made a deal with him to claim the ship and tow it in for the lifeguard.

“Right from the start it seems,” Captain Hank Murphy of the Arctic Warrior reported later. “There was something not quite right with the old girl. We pretty much rammed into it by accident because we had a hard time keeping track of it on radar. Now……… equipment can act up, ships can vanish in the horizon and I never believed in ghosts before, but that fricking boat is haunted.”

Walking the decks of the ship then as well as now has been described as exploring a flooded metal tomb. Ruined beyond repair, rusted parts of the deck can cave in like quicksand and drop an unwitting party down three to five decks where the deck is still rusting through. Eugene Dodge knows that. He’s been a member of the Arctic Explorer since the beginning and he’s been really lucky. When he crashed through a rusted spot on the Antonio Graza, he was lucky he was not alone. Maureen Epps and Hector Munder were right behind him as they crossed a hallway above one of the tall lobbies on the ship. If they hadn’t caught him, he’d have plunged twenty feet. As Epps was pulling him up, she caught a brief glimpse of a figure in the below lobby. It was just for a scant notice, but in that second, she thought she saw a young girl in late adolescent in flawless dress at the bottom of the staircase.

“You’d think….” Epps replies. “That if there were survivors on board that they’d be as dirty and unmanaged as the ship was, but no, she was very well groomed. It was like, just for a second, and then she was gone, but I know what I saw.”

Murphy saw his own spirit too as he looked for the captain’s log. Making his way through dark shadowy corridors and around collapsed bulkheads, he found the nearly preserved remains of the captain’s abandoned quarters. There was not a single body on board as he made his way and as his crew set up a working base in the main salon of the ship, he was conducting his own investigation into the disappearance of the ship’s crew and passengers. He also located a sealed bottle of Italian liquor on the ship and as he tried to sample it from the cup off his thermos, he lifted his eyes to the stained and ruined mirror on the wall. In addition to his reflection was the image of a figure in white behind him. The costume was that of a ship’s captain. Murphy was so spooked by the presence that he raced to the salon before he started to read the ship’s log.

Epps also recalls seeing the girl again while she was in one of the spas on ship. She recalls entering to room with the swimming pool when she just happened to catch the image of her racing around the pillar as if she was trying to hide. It was just a brief glimpse of swaying skirts and movement and then she was gone.

“I don’t know if I’m psychic or anything.” Epps adds. “But as she vanished, I reached out for her and said the name Katie. I don’t know where that name came from or why I said it, but I somehow thought her name was Katie. I later searched the passenger list and later found the proof I needed. There was a girl on board with that name. Her name was Katherine Worsham and she was traveling alone to catch up with her parents in New York City.”

The strange phenomenon wasn’t enough to scare away the salvage team. They were used to harried situations such as being underwater for minutes on end and working around decks that were on the verge of collapsing. They were going to be on the ship for almost thirty hours as they repaired a hole in the hull and unjam the rudder to control its drift. They would not start comparing sights and sounds until eight hours after they arrived. Some of the sounds they reported to each other considered footsteps from empty halls, but then those could have come from echoes being carried across the ship. The sense of being watched and the sound of distant voices preyed on the imaginations of a few of them, but then maybe it was the odd situation of the discovery of the ship. Epps once heard several doors slamming shut around her at once, but then too, the movement of the ship with its vibration could force things to move.

“Whoa, what a ship…” Eldon Greer has been salvaging since he was eighteen. “You know, I love a good ghost story, but I do not, repeat, do not, want to live through another one and the Antonia Graza was one of the largest wrecks we ever had. You’ve got that big ship, you’ve got the mystery of all those missing people, plus their missing bodies, and the whole atmosphere is playing on your mind. Please don’t ever send me on another deserted ship at see without fifty of my best friends!

“One of the first things I like to do on any ship,” He continues. “Is exploring it. I like to look at and get a sense of the construction and style of these old passenger ships. They don’t make them like that anymore, but I was in the ballroom on the fifth deck I think it was, and, I swear, I swear, I heard distant singing from somewhere and that old sort of ballroom music coming from far away. Now, I know Munder likes to play his jam box on jobs like this, but there is no mistaking his rap music with the distant sounds I was hearing, and if that wasn’t bad enough, I found an extra cigarette butt with lipstick on it in a deserted ashtray on the old piano on stage in the moonlight. And yes, someone keeps telling me, well, maybe Epps was in there a little while before you were. Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell them. One, Epps does not smoke, and two, she does not wear lipstick.”

Greer later took Munder back to the see the so-called cigarette left behind when he started teasing him about it. While his proof was gone along with the old glass ashtray, they were both a bit more spooked a bit later as they turned to leave. From the shadows of the darkened room, they thought they saw a figure watching them from the darkness. They called out to it several times with the names of Epps, Dodge, Ferriman and even Carlos DeVasquez, who almost never leaves the Warrior, but whoever it was never responded and every time they got close to seeing who it was, he vanished in the dark and reappeared somewhere else in the dark. After a few minutes of trying to catch this practical joker, they got spooked enough to just let things be.

“There were strange shapes all over the ship.” Epps mentions. “Ferriman and I were discussing theories on the disappearances on the passengers when we casually looked up and there was a human figure standing in the bulkhead to the engine room. Could have been Munder, but then it could have been a ghost.”

“You know,” Munder recalls his experiences on the ship. “When we found the Graza, she had a hole in her side and was slowly taking on water. She was drifting so slow that anymore faster and she would never have been found. We had that hole patched in about, oh, what was it, five hours, and the engine room drained of seven feet of water in another two hours. Afterwards, our investigation of the engine showed it was one big rusted hulk. Some of the electronics above it were in fair shape, but the mechanics were rusted in the place they were when they ran out of fuel. Yet, on a few occasions, while I was on board and we were towing it, I swear I must have heard rumblings from the hold as if the engines were trying to start back up, but then you realize, when a ship that big is being towed, and the current is pulling on the propellers, and the shaft is turning slightly, it’s going to make noises.”

“The one thing it’s not going to…” He continues. “Is make you see things. I was on the deck as we started getting it moving and out the corner of my eye, just for a second, I saw a figure in white standing in the window of the bridge. It could have been a reflection of light, but for all the world, I truly think I saw the ghost of the ship’s captain looking down on me as if to say thanks for getting his ship fixed.”

The crew of the Arctic Warrior eventually did the Antonia Graza back to a port and split the salvage money with Ferriman. The idea of the ship actually turning up so far off course attracted a lot of media attention and suspicion on the crew of the Arctic Warrior that was later dropped. Bermuda Triangle stories started to abound as news teams solicited the Coast Guard for chances to broadcast from the deck of the ship. American news correspondent Julie Largo would get to take a camera crew on board the derelict ship, but she would focus more on the discovery of the ship than its ghosts. (A year later, Largo would also cover the discovery of the Corona Queen.)  The ghosts, however, still worked their way into the news segment.

In a piece of film from the engine room, Largo interviewed Epps about how the crew of the Arctic Warrior patched up the ship. As they talked, they passed three steel barrels lined up on a catwalk, but as the camera angle changed less than a minute later, and with the barrels now in the background of the footage, one of the barrels had ended up stacked on the other two!

“Those things are almost two hundred pounds.” Eldon Greer said in a non-televised interview. “You can’t stack one on top of the other and not make a lot of noise.”

History: The Antonio Graza was built in 1957 and provided elegant traveling for five years until it was reported missing on May 25, 1962 off Labrador. At the time of its disappearance, it was only carrying about 632 passengers. No message from the ship was ever recorded.

In October of 2002, helicopter pilot Chet Ferriman noticed the ship caught in the currents in the Bering Strait. No one knows how it got there, but theories are that it somehow floated unmanned across the Northwest routes unseen possibly getting frozen and unfrozen inside icebergs. Ferriman told the crew of the Arctic Warrior salvage team about it and they successfully dragged it into port. A digital watch found on board started a theory that someone had been on board it since it had vanished.

The story of the discovery eventually became a backdrop of a movie called "Ghost Ship" supposedly telling the story of what supposedly happened to the crew and passengers. As yet, no scenario has been proven that completely explains the disappearances of the people on board although the one case that has been brought up suspects that either compass or engine trouble sent the ship unprepared through the Northwest Passage and the crew and passengers froze and died from the severe cold. Unfortunately, if that was the case, there should have been a radio report and traces of bodies on board. Another theory concerns modern pirates who drugged the crew and robbed the guests as they threw everyone overboard, but then the ship was carrying nothing of considerable value and no trace of anything belonging to the passengers has ever turned up. Although the film merges ingredients of all the stories, the case remains unsolved.

"I liked the movie to an extent." Ferriman confesses. "I know Hollywood has to artistic license to over sensationalize, but I wish the ending had gone somewhere else."

To date, the Graza remains the most expensive marine salvage ever recovered. Although it is worth more than a million just in scrap value, businessman David Shaw has been working to acquire it. His company, Crescent Cruiselines, owns the remaining stocks of the former Oceanic Seven cruise line company, now defunct, who owned the Graza when it was lost in 1962.

Identity Of Ghosts: The ship vanished with 632 passengers and a crew of 112. Theories on their vanishing range from the logical (mutiny) to the absurd (abduction by aliens). The movie depicts and tries to lend credence to the theory that one of the crewmembers led a mutiny in order to seize the gold bars being shipped to New York. Another theory is that food on board was discovered tainted and that everyone on board died. Of many of these theories, not one scenario has been adequately able to fit in with all the forensic evidence found on board.

Witnesses: Carlos DeVasquez, Eugene Dodge, Maureen Epps, Chet Ferriman, Eldon Greer, Hector Munder, Hank Murphy,

Comments: Ghost Ship (2002) Structure based on the Andrea Doria; Hauntings based on the Queen Mary, Long Beach, California.

David Shaw and Crescent Cruiselines from Lost Voyage (2001)