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 ship-christening 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 Amen-Otu 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?

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