The Mysterious Case of the SS Ourang Medan: Fact or Fiction?

The story of the SS Ourang Medan varies depending on where you hear it, but according to Ripley's, one of the most popular versions says that the ship was passing through the Strait of Malacca in the 1940s.

A strange message came from the Ourang Medan and was picked up by a nearby ship: “We float. All officers, including the captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead… I die.”

The Silver Star, an American ship, set out to find out what was going on. When the ship found the Ourang Medan, a group of men went on board and saw a horrible sight.

"Teeth bared, faces turned to the sun, staring as if in fear," the whole crew was dead. Even the dog on the ship had died while barking. Strangely, though, none of the bodies showed any signs of physical damage.

The Silver Star crew was about to pull the SS Ourang Medan into port when they saw smoke coming from the ship. Just before the ship blew up, the people who were trying to help got to safety. Then, the Ourang Medan went to the bottom of the sea and was never seen again.

There were many versions of the story's ending. But one report said that there was a single survivor who knew more about what happened to the ship.

The Lone Survivor

As reported by The Shipyard Blog, one account of the SS Ourang Medan spoke of a man named Jerry Rabbit.

Ten days after the Ourang Medan blew up, Rabbit was found on the shore of the Marshall Islands in a lifeboat with six dead crew members. He found a missionary and told him a strange story about how he had survived.

Rabbit said he had joined the Ourang Medan's crew in Shanghai. He said that 15,000 boxes with unknown goods were put on the ship before it left for Costa Rica. Rabbit didn't know he was part of a smuggling plan until that moment.

When Rabbit heard that some of the other crew members were having stomach pains, he became suspicious. And when one of the crew members died, he knew he had to find out what the ship was carrying. He looked at the ship's logbook and saw that the Chinese crates had sulfuric acid, potassium cyanide, and nitroglycerin in them. Rabbit thought that the sulfuric acid might be leaking, which would make a gas that was slowly killing the crew.

As more men began to die, Rabbit and six other people snuck away in a lifeboat.

A newspaper from the 1940s told one story about Jerry Rabbit, but that's all we know about him. There is no record at all of a ship called the SS Ourang Medan.

Was there ever an SS Ourang Medan?

Lloyd's Register of Ships, which has kept a record of every commercial ship since 1764, says that there has never been a ship with the name "SS Ourang Medan." And there are no official reports about what happened when the ship went down.

Also, there was never any sign of the shipwreck in the Strait of Malacca or anywhere else.

Ripley's says that a German researcher named Professor Theodor Siersdorfer once found a book called The Death Ship in the South Seas, which was published in 1953 and had information about the event.

The book made it sound like the Ourang Medan did have potassium cyanide and nitroglycerine on board, which is what caused it to explode. If the ship went down during or right after World War II, the lack of information about it would make sense. At the time, those were sensitive things to be moving around.

But just because someone said they saw the ship once doesn't mean it was real.

Michael East, an author who writes about history and true crimes, told How Stuff Works, "There is no record of a ship with that name. No one ever came forward to say they knew the ship or had worked on it. Both the different dates and the different places stand out all the time.

In fact, the fact that there are so many different versions of the story of the SS Ourang Medan shows that the story is more made up than real.

References:

"The Myth of the Ourang Medan Ghost Ship, 1940"

"MYSTERY S O S FROM DEATH SHIP"