Sailors are quite a superstitious people. In their opinion, ships, like people, have their own characters: calm or flighty, creative or destructive. And these characters in no way depend on their "parents" - engineers and builders.
Sailors believe that ships can also be "born in a shirt", but from the moment they are laid in the shipyard, they can prove daily that they are marked with the seal of bad luck or even evil doom.
When, in 1869, a worker slipped on the ladder of the schooner Charles Heskell, which had just left the stocks, and broke his cervical vertebrae, many began to believe that a curse lay on the ship. Nevertheless, Captain Curtis took command of the ship and even managed to recruit a crew.
A year later, Charles Heskell was fishing with other fishing boats off the Great Newfoundland Bank when a violent hurricane struck.
In the stormy sea, out of control "Charles Heskell" rammed the schooner "Andrew Johnson", destroying it and drowning the entire crew, while he himself, despite heavy damage, managed to return to port.
After a complete refurbishment, the Heskell again headed for Newfoundland. For five days the fishermen calmly engaged in fishing, and on the sixth the incredible happened.
It was at night. At exactly midnight, two watchmen witnessed a terrible sight: twenty-six ghosts with empty eye sockets, in half-rotted clothes and rubber boots climbed aboard the schooner. The ghosts threw the net into the sea and twenty minutes later began to pull it back!
Having done this strange work, they, silently and not paying attention to the sailors, left the ship. The frightened watchmen immediately reported the incident to the captain. At first he did not believe it, however, when he saw wet nets on the deck, in which several fish fluttered, he was so horrified that he gave the command to immediately turn back.
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But when the Charles Heskell was already approaching the coast, the silent ghosts reappeared on the ship, again threw the net and took it out of the sea, and then walked together on the water to Salem port.
This was enough for the fishermen, Captain Curtis and the owners of the schooner, and the Charles Heskell never set sail again.
Subsequently, the competent commission found out that during the construction of the ship they used parts taken from the schooner "Saint Anna", whose crew had died at sea under mysterious circumstances. It is likely that the ghosts who visited Charles Heskell twice mistook him for Saint Anne.
