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Two ships found with no one aboard, both were still afloat, and neither loss has ever been explained. One was found in 1955 and one in 1872, and the older of the two is the reason you think you already know the newer one.

The Joyita, 1955

She left Apia, Samoa, on the third of October, bound for the Tokelau Islands, about two days out. Twenty-five people aboard: sixteen crew, nine passengers, including a district officer, a dispenser, and a copra buyer. The trip was routine. The captain, Thomas Miller, an American known to everyone as Dusty, had made it before.

She never arrived. A search covering something like a hundred thousand square miles of ocean found nothing.

Five weeks later, on the tenth of November, the merchant vessel Tuvalu came across her drifting roughly six hundred miles off course, listing hard to port, decks awash, no one aboard.

Here is what makes the Joyita different from every other lost ship. She could not sink. Her hull was lined with cork, several hundred cubic feet of it, a holdover from her years as a refrigerated fishing boat. Miller knew this. He told people so. Waterlogged and half swamped, she was still floating five weeks after everyone left her, which is exactly the outcome he would have predicted.

So they left a vessel that could not sink, for open water, in a part of the Pacific where the nearest land was days away.

The inventory is the strange part. Missing: three life rafts, the logbook, the sextant, the chronometer, the firearms, and roughly four tons of cargo. Present: a doctor’s bag containing scalpels and, by most accounts, bloodstained bandages. An awning rigged over the deck as if for shelter. The clocks stopped at 10:25. The radio was tuned to 2182 kilocycles, the international distress frequency, but a break in the wiring behind the set had cut its effective range to about two miles. Miller had been calling for help into a dead line.

The flooding traced back to a corroded pipe in the engine cooling system, and the bilge pump was blocked by a mattress. That explains the water. It does not explain the departure, and it does not explain the missing cargo, and it certainly does not explain why an experienced captain abandoned the one thing in the ocean guaranteed to stay on top of it.

The Board of Inquiry called the fate of the passengers and crew “inexplicable.” That word is doing a great deal of work.

The Victorian Connection: Mary Celeste, 1872

Eighty-three years earlier, on the fifth of December, the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia sighted a vessel yawing badly in the Atlantic between the Azores and Portugal. She was the American brigantine Mary Celeste, out of New York, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol in her hold.

Aboard: nobody. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia Matilda, and seven crew were gone.

The ship was sound. She had six months of food and water. The cargo was almost entirely intact. Personal belongings, including the crew’s oilskins and pipes, were still stowed. The single yawl was missing, along with the chronometer, the sextant, and the ship’s papers, though the log slate remained, its last entry dated the twenty-fifth of November.

Nine days between that entry and her discovery. Nine days of a ship sailing herself.

The likeliest explanation is quiet and undramatic. Nine of the 1,701 barrels were found empty, and those nine were red oak rather than white. Red oak is more porous. Alcohol vapor may have leaked into the hold, and in warm weather it may have produced a noise, a smell, or a pressure release alarming enough to convince a captain with his wife and small daughter aboard that the ship was about to go up. So they took to the yawl, likely on a tow line, meaning to wait it out and reboard. And then the line parted, or the weather turned, and a twenty-foot open boat lost sight of a ship that was in no danger whatsoever.

That is the reconstruction most researchers favor. It requires nothing supernatural. It requires only a rational man making a reasonable decision with incomplete information, which is the most Victorian tragedy I can think of.

And Then a Twenty-Four-Year-Old Doctor Ruined It

In January 1884, Cornhill Magazine published an anonymous short story called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” It presented itself as a survivor’s account. It described the abandoned ship, the untouched food, the silence. It also supplied a passenger driven by racial vengeance, a massacre, and a tidy solution.

It was fiction. The author was a struggling physician in Southsea named Arthur Conan Doyle, four years away from Sherlock Holmes and badly in need of the money.

The story was convincing enough that Solly Flood, the Attorney General of Gibraltar who had presided over the actual salvage inquiry, publicly denounced it as a fabrication, which of course only spread it further. Newspapers reprinted it as fact. The invented details migrated into the record: the meal still warm on the table, the cat asleep by the stove, the coffee still steaming. None of that was in any deposition. All of it is in the story.

Doyle also got the name wrong. He called her the Marie Celeste. A hundred and forty years later, so does almost everyone else.

That is the connection I want you to sit with. When the Joyita turned up in 1955, not one headline described her on her own terms. Every single one reached for the Mary Celeste, and the version they reached for was Doyle’s. A Victorian ghost story wrote the frame that a genuine Pacific disappearance was forced to fit inside. The bloodstained bandages and the dead radio and the mattress in the bilge pump are the real strangeness, and they got flattened into a familiar shape because a young doctor needed rent money in 1884.

Later this week, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday. And I want to share in the festivities by giving YOU a gift!

Now through July 4th, use the code usbday to get $2.50 off a copy of one of my books.

And if you want to get my complete collection of five books, enter the code jul4$ to get $17.76 off your order!

I hope you enjoy the weekend, and if you’re reading a book, let me know what you’re reading!

The group had no reason to die. That is the first and most important thing to understand about the Dyatlov Pass incident, and the reason it has occupied investigators, physicists, mountaineers, and mystery writers for more than sixty years. Igor Dyatlov was twenty-three years old and had led more than a dozen Ural expeditions. His eight companions were experienced ski-hikers — students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute — preparing for the highest difficulty rating in Soviet mountaineering certification. They had the right equipment, the right experience, and the right weather window. On the night of February 1st, 1959, on a slope called Kholat Syakhl — which translates from the indigenous Mansi language as Dead Mountain — something made nine competent people abandon every survival instinct they possessed, and run into the dark to die.

Search teams found the tent three weeks later. It had been slashed open from the inside — not clawed, not burst outward, but carefully cut, as though someone inside needed to exit quickly and the door was not an option. Footprints in the snow led away downhill, toward the tree line, some 1,500 metres distant. The prints showed the group had walked in a relatively orderly file — not a panicked scatter. Whatever they were fleeing, they were still capable of coordinated movement. They were wearing socks, or were barefoot. Not a single pair of boots had been taken from the tent.

The bodies were recovered in stages, each discovery more confusing than the last. The first five were found near the tree line, beneath a large cedar that showed signs of having been climbed — branches broken high up, as though someone had needed to see over the slope. Two of these hikers showed severe frostbite and signs they had tried to make a fire with their bare hands. A third body was found partway back up the slope toward the tent, as though he had turned around and tried to return. He had not made it.

The final four were found two months later, buried under four metres of snow in a ravine, and these were the deaths that transformed a tragedy into a genuine mystery. Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had massive skull fractures. Lyudmila Dubinina and Semyon Zolotarev had fractured ribs on both sides of the chest — the kind of damage consistent with a car crash, or an industrial press. There was no external bruising to explain these injuries. The force, whatever it was, had been applied from within, or from a direction no blunt external object could account for. And Lyudmila Dubinina was missing her tongue, her eyes, and part of her lips. The medical examiner noted that the soft tissue appeared to have decomposed rapidly, but a later examination of the report suggested this explanation did not adequately account for what was found — and what was not.

Several items of clothing tested positive for elevated radiation. One investigator who reviewed the case years later noted that the orange-brown discoloration of the hikers’ skin was consistent with radiation exposure. It is also consistent with severe cold, and the debate continues. The Soviet government classified the file. Russia opened a new formal investigation in 2019, which concluded in 2020 that the most likely explanation was a specific type of avalanche. This explanation was immediately disputed by nearly every researcher who had studied the case. The tent showed no evidence of an avalanche impact. The slope gradient was wrong. And nothing about an avalanche accounts for the missing tongue.

The Dyatlov Pass is now a registered tourist destination. A small museum in Yekaterinburg holds what remains of the group’s equipment and photographs — including a roll of film recovered from the tent, developed after the discovery, showing the last images the hikers took. The final frames are unexposed. Whatever happened on that mountain, the camera was not pointed at it.

When it comes to unsolved mysteries, few capture the imagination quite like the Lost Amber Room. Crafted in the early 18th century, this dazzling chamber made entirely of amber panels, gold leaf, and mirrors disappeared during the chaos of World War II—and has never been found. But what does this enigmatic masterpiece have to do with Victorian England? As a fan of Victorian-era mysteries and steampunk, you’ll love how this story weaves together history, art, and intrigue.

Originally created in Prussia and later installed in Russia’s Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg, the Amber Room was hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Its walls shimmered with thousands of amber panels, crafted into intricate mosaics and framed with gold leaf. The chamber represented the pinnacle of Baroque craftsmanship and was a symbol of immense wealth and power.

Though the Amber Room predates the Victorian era, it became well-known to British aristocrats, collectors, and scholars during the 19th century. Many Victorian-era travelers documented the room in detailed sketches and writings, spreading fascination with its beauty across England.

Victorian England was also a hub for master craftsmen skilled in amber work and woodcarving. The techniques used by these artisans parallel those required to construct and restore the Amber Room, suggesting that Victorian workshops might have held the knowledge to replicate or repair parts of the room.

Despite numerous searches and investigations, the Amber Room’s fate remains unknown. Was it destroyed in the war, hidden away in a secret vault, or smuggled out piece by piece? Its story blends art, war, and lost technology, making it an endless source of inspiration for writers and historians alike.

My calendar is starting to fill up for 2026. On Thursday, May 21 I will be one of five authors taking part in the Author Publishing Panel at Bound Books in York. If you want to get your book published but don’t know where to start, come join us! All five of us have taken different paths to get our work into the world. There will be goodies and freebies, too!

On July 31, I will be one of the authors taking part in Fable Con, also in York.

Last, but not least, you can now find my books at KMD Chaos Reads Indie Bookstore in Warren, OH!

You can get more information on both of these events here.

I look forward to seeing you out and about!