Scores of books have been written about ghost ships, haunted vessels, strange lights sighted in the middle of empty oceans and other weird tales of the sea – everything from The Flying Dutchman to the Mary Celeste, tales about strange sightings off the Goodwin Sands and phantom wrecks lured onto rocks along the Cornish coast. Readers who believe in such stories are usually those who want to believe in them.
To this author’s knowledge, few phantom sea stories feature submarines, but while researching this book, such material was unearthed written by a highly credible author and journalist. William E. Bennett wrote under the pen name of Warren Armstrong and produced a number of books on maritime subjects, several with the full cooperation of the Admiralty and others with foreword sections contributed by high ranking naval officers.
Bennett’s Sea Phantoms (1961) is an entertaining read about spooky happenings on the high seas, yet written in a credible and authoritative style. The flyleaf promises: ‘Phantom ships scudding unmanned before the wind; wraiths of murdered captains walking the quarter deck; mysterious lights sighted in the midst of an empty ocean; burning wrecks whose fire on certain days lights the sky year after year; haunted vessels, with crew unnerved by ghostly fears . . .’
The last story in the book, Shadow and Substance, is about Affray, or rather about an unusual occurrence which happened just thirty minutes after the submarine had sent her final signal on 16 April 1951 at 2056 hours stating: ‘Diving at 2115 in position 5010N, 0145W for Exercise Training Spring.’ Bennett writes that on the night the submarine sailed from Gosport and at approximately thirty minutes after she signalled that she was diving, the wife of a British rear admiral was about to retire for the night at her home in Guernsey, Channel Islands. She told Bennett this fantastic story, which he ‘accepted without any qualification’:
Quite suddenly, I realised I was not alone in my room and in the half light I recognised my visitor. He had been serving as an Engineer Officer in my husband’s ship, a cruiser, at a time when my husband was Engineer-Commander, and we had often entertained him in our Channel Islands home.
He approached me and then stood still and silent; I was astonished to see him dressed in normal submariner’s uniform, although I did not recognise this fact until later when I described his clothing to my husband. Then he spoke quite clearly and said: ‘Tell your husband we are at the north end of Hurd Deep, nearly 70 miles from the lighthouse at St Catherine’s Point. It happened very suddenly and none of us expected it.’ After that the speaker vanished.
I immediately spoke to my husband by telephone, for he was then in a shore appointment in England, and to my dismay he told me, first, that he was not aware that this young officer was even in the Affray, nor that he had volunteered for the submarine service. It was all very puzzling. We spoke again by telephone to each other a few days later, when my husband told me that the search was being carried out in quite a different part of the Channel from where my visitor had indicated to me – and, as you know, wrongly, as it turned out later. This being so, my husband said, there did not seem to be anything he could do about it.’
Bennett later spoke about the Affray tragedy with a group of naval officers and one of them said:
If you had been the husband of that woman, what would you have done? Remember, she was visited by what we can only call the wraith of this young officer thirty minutes only after the ship dived and before any alarm was raised. So, what would you have done? Contacted the Admiralty and risk being laughed at? No: in my opinion, though it makes one wonder what might have been the result if the telephone call had been brought to the attention of the Admiralty, I imagine that the accident, whatever it was, must have been almost immediately fatal, or else that vision would never have occurred.
A second officer told Bennett:
I’ve had this same type of vision in my own family, and when checked it was proved to be correct. Death or serious injury leading to loss of life was the cause; but the strange thing was that these visions were not made to the person most closely concerned with the victim but to some near and dear and trusted friend.
Bennett says that ‘it was a harrowing experience for this woman, alone in her home and powerless to help’. She told the author:
I think it would be terribly painful to the boy’s family, and to the families of every man aboard the submarine, to read your book. I do not want to tell you the name of the officer concerned and it would be better were you not to mention either my own name or that of my husband, nor the name of his ship, if you can avoid it.
Bennett respected her wish and wrote: ‘Incidents such as this . . . are beyond my understanding. Much of what I have written may seem complete nonsense to the average shore dweller. But to the average seafaring man, all things are possible.’