THE STORY:
"The SS Ourang Medan" was a ghost ship which, according to various undocumented sources, became a shipwreck in Dutch East Indies waters after its entire crew had died under suspicious circumstances.
The story of the Ourang Medan has become something of a legend.According to the story, at some point in or around June 1947(apporx).Two American vessels navigating the Strait of Malacca, City of Baltimore and Silver Star, among others, picked up distress messages from Dutch merchant ship Ourang Medan. A radio operator aboard the troubled vessel sent the following Morse code message: "S.O.S. from Ourang Medan we float. All officers including the Captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead ." A few confused dots and dashes later two words came through clearly. They were "I die." Then, nothing more.When Silver Star crew located and boarded the apparently undamaged Ourang Medan in a rescue attempt, the ship was found littered with corpses (including the carcass of a dog) "sprawled on their backs, the frozen faces upturned to the sun with mouths gaping open and eyes staring, the dead bodies resembled horrible caricatures", with no survivors and no visible signs of injuries on the dead bodies.
A fire broke out in the ship's No. 4 cargo hold, forcing the boarding parties to evacuate the Dutch freighter, thus preventing any further investigation. Soon after, Ourang Medan was observed to explode and sink.
THE SHIP THAT NEVER WAS:
The first problem with trying to ascertain what happened to this now infamous Dutch freighter is the fact that there doesn't seem to be any official records that it ever existed in the first
place. We know that the Silver Star was real although, by 1947, it had been reacquired by the Grace Line shipping company who dubbed the vessel “Santa Juana” — but there’s no paper trail leading to the
Ourang Medan.
THEORY:
There are those who speculated that the ship was actually carrying a far more sinister and altogether more dangerous cargo. Biological weapons manufactured by Japanese scientists as the result of insidious experiments that even the Nazi regime would baulk at, could well have been smuggled out of Japan. Known as Unit 731, it was designed to be a secret research and development meant to create the most dangerous chemical and biological weapons to help establish Japanese supremacy. Unit 731 was formed sometime in 1932 by a Japanese bacteriologist called Shirō Ishii who conducted terrible experiments during the Second World War. Is it feasible that Unit 731 was smuggled on a nondescript merchant vessel with a foreign crew to avoid drawing unwanted attention to what was taking place? If so, what went horribly wrong?
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