My name is Camille Dawson and what I’m about to share with you is something that I’m not sure if I truly believe. My mother is very superstitious and believes in the paranormal, but I have a very skeptical mind. Anyway, let me get to the point.
A while at home at my parents’ beach house, I took a stroll along the shoreline to clear my head. I like to dip my feet in the water and while I was in the process of doing this I found a bottle had washed ashore. While I’m out I usually like to pick up the trash I find and keep the beach clean. So I bent down and picked up the bottle, to my surprise, there was a message within it. I took it back home and uncorked the bottle and wiggled out the message.
What I read was truly eerie and unsettling.
To whoever finds this,
What I’m about to tell you is truly hard to believe, but it is without a doubt real. I’m 22 years old and I took a job on a Tuna Fishing boat. I was just a newbie at the time, and we went out for my first trip. Then we hit a storm. The odd part was that the storm was not on the radar. It came out of nowhere. The storm was so bad, I can hardly believe our ship didn’t capsize. The waves were taller than our little fishing boat itself.
I was trying my best to hold on when a wave caught me and pulled me overboard. I thought for sure I was going to die. Maybe I did die. It’s hard to tell anymore. Even with a lifejacket, it was hard to keep my head above water. I kept getting pulled under. It was a vicious cycle of fighting for air and being swept under the current. The storm made it impossible to see anything. I had to keep my eyes closed the entire time.
It felt like an eternity of torment, being pulled under the surface, fighting my way back up. A constant struggle. Eventually, it came to an end and things settled down. I found myself in the middle of the ocean with only a life jacket and nothing else in sight but water. I had no idea if our fishing ship was intact or what the status of everyone else was. As the sun rose I drifted in the water, cold and shivering. Most likely dealing with hypothermia and I was starving.
That’s when I saw them. Sharks were swarming around me like flies. My heart raced in my chest. I knew I was going to die. There was nothing I could do but float there in the water waiting for them to strike as my skin shriveled up into raisins. I waited with deathly anxiety. Waited for them to bite, but they never did. Hours went by as the sun traveled through the sky. However, none attacked. Finally, the sun fell below the sky. I was starving as darkness took over and night conquered the day.
I hadn’t drunk any fresh clean water in over a day. I was coming in and out of consciousness. My thoughts became filled with desperation and delusions. The lack of any moon wrapped the water in complete darkness. Never have I ever been so afraid in my life. Sharks swam in the distance. I could barely make out that dreadful fin rise up out of the water. At this point, I welcomed death compared to the state of life I barely clung to. The fear and panic came to a point where I thought it’d be best to die and get it over with.
An eerie misty fog crept over the water to add to my disparity. But hope came at last! I spotted a ship in the distance. A cruise ship. It had the words Wilhelm Gustloff written on it. The ship seemed rather old, but I was also very delirious at that point. I waved my hands and shouted at the top of my lungs for help.
It was luck or a miracle. They took me aboard. I was saved. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I was greeted by several people, all worried, but welcomed me aboard. They hardly spoke English and were wary of me. They looked upon me with great suspicion and often asked me where I came from and what side I was on. I was very confused by this. I found it peculiar that most aboard spoke little English. I guessed that there were German Cruise ships. Fortunately, I took plenty of german classes so I was able to speak with them with a certain ease. After I was treated, washed, clothed, and fed, I was given a room to sleep in.
I awoke the next day to be greeted by the same faces. That’s when I noticed their clothes were rather… Outdated to say the least. I told them all about what had happened with our small fishing boat. I urged them to head back and find if there were any other survivors.
None of them seemed to listen. They said I was welcomed to the food and the rest of the amenities aboard. I did find more than a few military officers on board. That’s when I saw a Nazi symbol upon their uniforms and nearly had a heart attack. I tried to keep a calm composure. I had no idea I had gotten myself into. Nazis here? WWII ended long before I was even born. How could this be?
One of the officers spotted me and asked me for my documents. I tried to explain I was on a fishing boat when we got hit by a storm and your ship saved me. They hardly listened. I was grabbed and taken down below. They questioned me and interrogated me, but after a long time, I was put back into a room.
As day turned to night, I knew I had to get off this ship. I discovered they did not lock my door. I managed to slip out and make my way to the lifeboats. I found them to be frozen to the ship. I snuck off and found a knife before climbing aboard a lifeboat and cutting the rope, sending the boat plunging down to the waters. With a loud splash, it stayed afloat. I was free of the ship.
I watched as it sailed away in a misty haze. Now I just needed to find either another ship or land or something. As I drifted out on the sea, I fell asleep.
When I woke back up, I was in a bed on a rather large ship. They must have found me while I was sleeping. I don’t know how I slept through getting pulled onboard. I walked out and to my horror, I discovered I was back on the Wilhelm Gustloff. As I walked out onto the deck, the light of the moon shined down and what I saw horrified me. The men and women aboard were not alive, but walking rotting corpses. Then I saw my own reflection and screamed. I too looked dead. It took me a long time to realize it, but I finally came to the conclusion I did not survive the storm and now I’m trapped on a Nazie Cruise ship.
I’m writing this message to warn you to tread the waters cautiously. If you see the Wilhelm Gustloff, turn around immediately.
Yours truly,
Josiah Shepard
A chill crept down my spine as I finished reading the letter. Surely someone was playing quite a good prank. This couldn’t be true. Obviously, ghosts don’t exist. Right?
I quickly looked up everything. I discovered that the MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German cruise ship that sank in 1945 and over 8,000 people died. I then researched Josiah Shepard and found some of his social media accounts and what I found made me truly sick. I saw a handsome man with brown hair and blue eyes and then I found that he had taken a job on a fishing boat. What I found next truly unsettled me. He was swept overboard on an outing and was lost at sea. What the fuck? Everything seemed to line up in the letter. But still, anyone could’ve researched this and wrote that stuff down in the letter. A very elaborate prank. I gotta give it to them.
Anyway, a few years had passed since I found that letter. I came back to visit my parents during a week in the summer and we ended up taking their boat out. It was a beautiful day and I had my boyfriend with me at the time. We had left the shoreline behind and water was all that we saw for miles.
That’s when an unsettling fog crept over the water and left us all in chills. Off in the distance, I saw the outline of a giant cruise liner. I had a very bad feeling about it all. I told my dad to get us out of there. However, the ship continued to drift closer. I had a nauseating feeling in my stomach as it came into view.
That’s when I saw the words written on the bow. It read Wilhelm Gustloff. Then I saw a man standing on the side looking down at us. I recognized his brown hair and blue eyes and knew who he was immediately. It was the man who had written the letter. I had never felt more terrified in my entire life at that moment. From this point on, I knew the truth. Ghosts do exist.
The End.
Remember, you’re never safe in the dark…
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