The Ghost Ship Caleuche

Several days ago, I received this poem from Sharlie West, a poet who lives in Maryland. I was struck by the eerie similarities between the poem and the ghost ship Caleuche, which supposedly appears in a harbor on the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. The Caleuche’s crew is manned by men in black – brujos – sorcerers who are shape shifters and abduct islanders.

Her poem prompted me to revisit the legend of the Caleuche.

Ghost Ship

He lives in the borderland

between sky and ocean’s blue

The tall sea

is in his ebony eyes,

the hint of a cold dark place

He comes for me this slivered night

a specter from a ghost ship,

tall and thin, with black eyes and

black shoes.

In his voice, the same undertow

that entered a few weeks ago

like water that freezes in the rock

and spits it open.

Tonight I’ll cup his secrets in my hands,

a white palm breeze

anoints us with liquid salt.

Seaman’s moon, hairbreadth thin.

then a mast, two more masts and

the ship approaches.

I turn my face seaward,

embrace the dark light.

It was a synchronicity that led us to the island of Chiloe, Chile, and the legend of the ghost ship Caleuche. We first heard about the ghost ship on a flight from Miami to Santiago, in July 1983. We were on our honeymoon and Chile was our first destination. We struck up a conversation with the woman who sat next to us and asked her where the mythology, the mystery, of Chile could be found. “Chiloe,” she said without hesitation.

We’d never heard of it.

“It’s an island off Puerto Montt, where land transportation ends in my country.  From Puerto Montt, you take a ferry to Chiloe. The name means land of sea gulls. There, they believe in a ghost ship, the Caleuche, that’s manned by sorcerers or brujos, who are immortal and possess the power to alter their shapes at will. They can transform themselves into wolves, fish, rocks and birds, and when they take human form, they are tall, foreign, blond.” She went on to say that some islanders believed that the ship itself could transform its shape.

We were hooked. Our synchronistic choice of seats pretty much defined our journey through Chile. Once we got to Chiloe and found a place to stay, we started our exploration.  At a local restaurant, we quickly discovered that the ghost ship wasn’t just a myth to the locals. It was based on real events that involved encounters with the brujos, who supposedly crewed  the ship. The villagers also spoke of stories of the pincoyas – the mermaids – that inhabited the waters near the island. Everything in the restaurant – from the ashtrays to the art on the walls – depicted the ship, the mermaids, the brujos.

We asked our waiter if there was anyone in town we could talk to who had seen the Caleuche. He directed us to a neighborhood down the road, where many of the homes are built on stilts that keep them above the water. “Ask anyone you see about the Caleuche.”

But first, we stopped at the pier where a fisherman offered us a local delicacy – a sea urchin cut in half, spines removed and the jelly-like innards splashed with lime juice. Rob tried one, and while he was devouring it, I asked the fishermen about mermaids. He sort of chuckled. “The legend says that when the fish are running, the mermaids face shore. When the fish are gone, the mermaids face the ocean, so their backs are to us.”

My next question – had he ever seen one – brought a response that turned out to be fairly common. “My father did.” Or, my cousin, grandmother, friend etc. But there were also people who claimed to be actual witnesses.

We walked on toward the outskirts of town and paused on a bridge, gazing out over the harbor where the Caleuche supposedly had been sighted. Chilean author Antonio Cardenas Tabies believes he sighted the ship in one of its altered forms – as a small launch that approached him and his four companions in the fog. Even though the boat passed within several feet of their boat, they didn’t see anyone on board and didn’t hear any noise from the motor.

Then Cardenas and his buddies seemed to have some sort of space/time slippage. They kept rowing for hours and at dawn, found themselves in the same spot. “We hadn’t advanced a meter in any direction,” Tabies wrote in Aboard the Caleuche, published in Santiago in 1980. But that experience led him to interview dozens of islanders who had witnessed an appearance of the ship or encountered its crew members.

Many of the experiences Tabies recounts deal with individuals who bear an uncanny resemblance to MIBs. The crew has been blamed for abductions of islanders.

One morning in 1935, when Juan Antonio Fernandez was 16, he left his home at dawn to go fishing. He recalls that he arrived at a small hill that overlooked the beach and heard a strange noise, like motors. Two days later, his family found him wandering aimlessly on the beach.

“I had a terrible scar on my chest, shaped like a gigantic hand with long, narrow fingers,” Fernandez said. “It didn’t hurt and the strange part was that it looked as if it were old.”

Author Cardenas Tabies spoke with Fernandez’s family, who said he was never quite the same after his disappearance. He was difficult, assaulted people without provocation and spoke and worked only when he was in the mood. Cardenas coaxed Fernandez  into showing him his scar. “I have never seen anything like it,” Cardenas said. “The hand covered almost his entire chest, like a scar from a severe burn. When I questioned him about it, he said that if he revealed the secret he would die.”

Armando Pacheco, a journalist and writer in Valparaiso on the Chilean mainland, theorizes that the legend of the Caleuche is so deeply ingrained that the islanders are predisposed to sightings. He contends that the Caleuche is an archetype of the collective mind of the islanders, “given reality through their intense and prolonged belief in it.”

As Sharlie asked me, are men in black an archetype?

Save