The Flying Dutchman, the world’s best-known non-human ghost, is a seventeenth-century merchant ship said to haunt the high seas. According to sea lore, the ship, which often appears as a hazy image or a strange light, is said to be a portent of bad luck and doom.

The story has been adapted many times, but one of the more common versions tells of a Dutch captain, named van der Decken, refusing to take safe harbor during a storm while traversing the Cape of Good Hope despite pleas from the crew and passengers. Instead the impudent captain challenged God to take them down. The ship was promptly cursed and in its ghost form is damned to never find port again. The “ghost ship” has been reported on the ocean from time to time, including appearing off the coast of South Africa in 1923. The Flying Dutchman most recently appeared in movie theaters across the country in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, captained by Davy Jones.

“The tale of the doomed Dutch ghost ship stems from a British literary tradition (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries),” wrote Theo Meder in “The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands (opens in new tab)” (Libraries Unlimited, 2007) and is likely tied up in the trading company competition between Dutch and British businesses in that era.