The ghost ship that drifted the Arctic for 38 years
In 1931, the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned the SS Baychimo after it became trapped in Arctic ice, according to Wikipedia. The crew assumed it would sink. It didn’t. For the next 38 years, the steel-hulled cargo steamer kept appearing — unmanned, drifting through the frozen waters off Alaska like something from a sailor’s nightmare.
The Baychimo was a 230-foot cargo ship that traded provisions for pelts along the Canadian Arctic coast. On October 1, 1931, loaded with furs, it got stuck in pack ice near Barrow, Alaska. After a fierce November blizzard, the crew found no trace of their ship and assumed it had broken apart. A few days later, an Inuit seal hunter spotted it 45 miles away.
The 15 remaining crew tracked down their vessel, salvaged the most valuable furs, and left it for dead. But the Baychimo refused to stay gone. Over the following decades, people kept stumbling across it: prospectors, dog sled teams, Inuit hunters. In 1933, a group of Iñupiat boarded the ship and got trapped for 10 days by a storm. In 1939, Captain Hugh Polson tried to salvage it but was driven off by ice floes.
The ship was spotted floating peacefully, locked in pack ice, drifting hundreds of miles from its last known position. She always eluded capture. The final confirmed sighting came in 1969 — 38 years after abandonment — when Inuit found her stuck in the ice of the Beaufort Sea.
In 2006, Alaska began searching for the “Ghost Ship of the Arctic.” They haven’t found it yet.