It was a synchronicity that led us to the island of Chiloe, Chile, and the legend of 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 is 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.
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. One night in 1968, a pastor in Ancud was startled to see a large sailing vessel enter the shallow, unnavigable waters of the Rio Pudeto, where we were standing. “I saw several brilliant lights, then a mast, then two more masts and finally, a ship illuminated in brilliant colors.” Father Garcia watched the ship for half an hour before it disappeared in the same slow manner that it had materialized.
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 seem to deal with individuals who bear an uncanny resemblance to MIBs. The crew has been blamed for abductions of islanders. When these abductees returned to their villages, they didn’t have any memory of where they’d been. One man who was supposedly abducted at the age of 18 and returned to his village 50 years later, claimed he had been on a boat and implored his brother not to ask anything more about it.
We’ll continue this be story in a subsequent post. We still have the article that we wrote for FATE in May 1984, but have to figure out a way to scan it into PDF format so we can make it available.
