MYSTERIES OF THE

TITANIC
by Tom Slemen
At twenty minutes to midnight on
April 14th, 1912, the White Star
luxury liner Titanic gently brushed
past an iceberg in the calm dark
waters of the North Atlantic. Of the
2,224 people on board the
Liverpool-registered liner, only a
handful felt the vessel jolt as it
encountered the iceberg, but from
that moment on, the 66,000-tonne
ship was doomed; and within a few
hours, over 1500 people on board
would be dead...
The Romany people say that great
tragedies cast a warning shadow

ahead of their arrival, and this

certainly seems to have been the
case with the Titanic sea disaster,
for there were many eerie
premonitions that apparently
predicted the White Star liner's
fate...
In the year 1898, a magnificent
floating palace set sail from
Southampton on her maiden
voyage to New York. She was the
70,000-tonne luxury liner Titan,
and she carried almost 2,500
people, including several
millionaires. However, the Titan
had only 24 lifeboats, which was
less than half the number needed
to save everyone on board. No one
thought it mattered anyway; after
all, the Titan had been proclaimed
"unsinkable". However, through
some freak chance, the Titan

struck an iceberg 300 miles off the

coast of Newfoundland, then sank
two-and-a-half miles to the seabed,
leaving over 1500 people to drown.
The Titan sea disaster only
happened on paper. It only took
place in a novel called Futility,
written by a struggling novelist
called Morgan Robertson - 14 years
before the Titanic was built. Like
the fictional Titan, the Titanic was
also making her maiden voyage
from Southampton to New York,
and, like her fictional counterpart,
she had also been called
"unsinkable", and had only carried
the inadequate amount of 20
lifeboats. Even the number of
people on board the Titanic was
almost the same as the number of
passengers on the ship in
Robertsons's book. And most

chillingly of all, the Titanic, like the

Titan, slid below the waters of the
Atlantic 373 miles off the coast of
Newfoundland after hitting an
iceberg...and on board, one
passenger on the doomed liner had
been reading the prophetic book by
Morgan Robertson which had
foretold the Titanic's doom...
There were other premonitions
regarding the Titanic, even further
back in time...
In 1850, there lived an eccentric
old Englishman named Joseph
Mercer in the Anfield district of
Liverpool. Mercer was regarded as
a psychic, and had amazing
eyesight. He was said to be able to
see ships entering Liverpool Bay,
long before lookouts with
telescopes could spot them. It is

recorded that Mercer once told his

grandson that one day in the
distant future, a gigantic iron ship
with four funnels would anchor in
the Mersey. Mercer said the makers
of this immense vessel would
blaspheme against the Almighty,
and that God would sink their
creation in the middle of the ocean
with a terrible loss of life. Had
Mercer been referring to the
Titanic? For decades, scores of
people swore that the Titanic
visited Liverpool, England on her
way to Southampton from the
Belfast shipyard. It was said that
the Titanic's Captain, Edward
Smith, who lived in the Waterloo
district of Liverpool, had come to
the port to pick up the president
and chairman from the Cunard
White Star Line offices, which were
situated near the Pier Head. It was

alleged that a masonic shipchristening ceremony took place

onboard the vessel in the Mersey.
This is a real possibility, because
curiously, the Titanic was not
launched in the traditional way by
having a bottle of champagne
cracked against her hull.
Perhaps the blasphemy Joseph
Mercer referred to in his prophecy
was the claim made by the
Titanic's makers that "God himself
could not sink the liner".
But some think that other
supernatural forces were
responsible for the loss of the
super-liner...
In the 1880s, archaeologists
removed the sarcophagus of an
ancient Egyptian princess from her

death chamber near Cairo. The

inscription on the walls of the
death chamber warned that
anyone who disturbed the resting
place of Princess Amen-Otu would
be cursed to death. The two men
who later discovered the
sarcophagus died suddenly from
Malaria-like symptoms. It was
subsequently established that the
mummified girl in the mummy case
was indeed Amen-Otu, a
clairvoyant high priestess who had
lived in Thebes around 1000 BC.
Every owner of the Egyptian coffin
and its mummy either died in
mysterious circumstances or lost a
loved one. By 1890, the coffin case
was bought by the British Museum,
but even the guards at the
museum, who did not know about
the supernatural reputation of the

sarcophagus, were soon having

paranormal experiences. Late one
evening, one guard at the museum
came face to face with a hideous
phantom which seem to come out
of the mummy case containing the
remains of the Egyptian princess.
The guard resigned on the
following day, and his colleagues
also reported seeing the terrifying
apparition near the sarcophagus.
In 1912, the British Museum was
approached by a wealthy American
collector who wanted to buy an
Egyptian mummy. The museum
decided to sell the mummy of
Princess Amen-Otu to the collector,
so the corpse was packaged in a
wooden crate and transported to
Southampton, where it was stored
in the hold of the Titanic. One of
the stevedores who packed the

coffin into the cargo hold later died

from heart failure, yet he was only
21.
Did the cursed mummy of AmenOtu jinx the Titanic?
In the summer of 1910, a young
woman named Mary Murray visited
the caravan of a Blackpool fortune
teller. Miss Murray asked the old
gypsy woman what lay in store in
the future, and the fortune teller
examined Miss Murray's palm with
a very concerned expression which
soon turned into a look of terror.
Understandably, the girl became
nervous and asked the gypsy what
she could see.
The old woman let go of the girl's
hand, and seemed almost ready to
faint. She gave Mary Murray her

money back and said, "Stay away

from boats dear. Do not travel
abroad. You will have three narrow
escapes; three brushes with death
at sea. Such loss of life, oh, babies
in the water."
Two years later, Mary Murray had
to board the ill-fated Titanic liner to
visit a relative in America. She
survived the sinking by being
allowed into one of the lifeboats.
Just as the gypsy had forecast 2
years previously, there was an
appalling loss of life, and many
babies drowned along with their
mothers.
Then, in 1915, Mary Murray was on
board another Liverpool registered
liner visiting a relative. The liner
was the Lusitania, which was
torpedoed by a German submarine

off the coast of Ireland. Once again,

the death toll was staggeringly
high. 1,198 men women and
children perished when the
Lusitania sank. However, Mary
Murray was one of the lucky
survivors.
For the next fifteen years, Mary
Murray avoided travelling on ships,
but in 1927, she had to board a
ship called the Celtic. She told a
few of the passengers on the Celtic
to expect trouble because of her
past record, but they all laughed
and said it had been pure
coincidence. A few hours later, the
ship she was travelling on was
accidentally rammed by a ship
called the Anaconda. Many
passengers on the Celtic drowned,
but Mary Murray was once again
spared, and ended up in a lifeboat.

Our penultimate mystery

concerning the Titanic is very
strange. In 1978, the radio officer
of the QE2 received a mysterious
Morse code message. The
message had been broadcast on a
radio wavelength that was no
longer in use, and was coded in an
archaic fashion which belonged to
the Edwardian age. The antiquated
message in Morse said: "CQD CQD
- We are sinking fast.
Passengers are being put into
boats." The radio officer re-tuned
his transmitter to the Morse
frequency and in Morse he tapped
out: "Identify yourself."
There was a slight pause. Only
howls of atmospheric radio
interference could be heard, then a
reply came back which sent a

shiver up the radio officer's spine.

The reply said: "Titanic."
The Captain of the QE2 was
informed and decided some hoaxer
was at work, but someone pointed
out that the liner was passing the
very spot in the North Atlantic were
the Titanic went down in 1912.
Under the orders of the curious
captain, the radio officer of the
QE2 tried to contact the sender of
the Morse code distress message
again, but a reply never came. A
cold silence descended on the
bridge of the QE2; it was as if
through some freak of nature, two
liners from different eras had come
into brief radio contact across time
itself.

One final mystery concerning the

Titanic: many of the survivors
huddled in lifeboats swore that
they saw a strange light shining
from a nearby ship which refused
to come to their aid. The light from
this unidentified vessel was
described as a directional beam
similar to a searchlight. I might be
wide off the mark, but is it possible
that the source of the mysterious
illumination could have been the
searchlight of a German
submarine? In 1912 the German
Navy had perfected the U-boat,
and by 1915, one of these
submersibles had torpedoed the
Lusitania. It is an historical fact that
U-boats were patrolling the waters
of the North Atlantic at the time on
reconnaissance missions. Perhaps a
U-boat torpedoed the Titanic as
part of some covert military

agenda - or perhaps the Germans

wanted to teach Britain that their
new state-of-the art liner was not
"unsinkable" at all - and what
better way to carry out the torpedo
attack than under the cover of
night, masked by a large iceberg?
The U-boat theory would perhaps
throw some light on the muffled
explosions heard below decks as
the ship was going down. Perhaps
they were more torpedoes
ramming into the hull to finish the
liner off. After the attack, one can
imagine the Captain of the German
sub surfacing for a while to take a
look at the survivors. Was this the
"ship" the survivors cried out for
help to before it seemed to vanish?
We may know more one day.
For offbeat stories from Liverpool writer Tom Slemen, go to
these sites:

http://www.ghostcity19.freeserve.co.uk/
The Liverpool Valentine Ghost
The Devil in the Cavern Club
The Song that can Kill You
The Last Dance
The Welsh Werewolf
The Wail of the Banshee
The Phantom Matchmakers
The Thing in Berkeley Square
The Zodiac Murders Mystery
Cheshire Timewarps
Merseyside Timeslips
The Penny Lane Poltergeist
The Kennedy and Lincoln Coincidences
The UFO that Crashed in Wales
The Mysterious Spring-Heeled Jack
George Washington's Vision of the Future
Mystery of the Liverpool Mass Graves
Feel free to e-mail Tom personally with any comments or
queries:Tom Slemen