THE OURANG MEDAN floated out of nowhere on a day in 1940. On the calm Pacific Ocean, just off the Solomon Islands.

They first received a distress signal.

“Send doctor — urgent.”

The request was immediately canceled. Instead, a chilling message appeared, “Send a warship.”

A British Merchant Marine responded first, and upon arrival, discovered an eerie scene — the Dutch Steamer was floating in the water with no signs of living things. There were bodies on the board, over the bridge, and in the kitchen, all frozen at their time of death. No visible wounds or injuries could be found on any of them.

The boarding party headed to the captain’s chatroom when a sequence of explosions was heard from a distance. The captain and his men then exited the Ourang Medan. And before their eyes, the mysterious “Man of Medan” vanished into the deep sea in soaring flames and black smoke, taking its secrets with her.

The Associated Press first reported this strange event. The story was quickly picked up by a few newspapers.

Little did they know that eight years later, the Ourang Medan “reappeared” halfway across the world.

In early February of 1948, the Dutch steamer was spotted while passing through the Malacca straits. An Italian Officer received a distress message, followed by an image of the dead second officer on the bridge. “S.O.S from Ourang Medan…we float. All officers, including the captain, died in the chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole crew dead…” A series of confusing dots and dashes followed, then a spine-tingling line appeared, “I die.”

Time seemed to pause with the dead man’s finger lingering on the machine.

The rescue team found the Ourang Medan floating 50 miles from its reported position. Everyone, including the captain’s dog, was dead for no apparent reason. And before the investigation could take place, it exploded in fire and smoke and sank into the deep water just like the last time.

A Dutch editor claimed to have brought the photo from the Italian officer, but it too had mysteriously disappeared.

Investigations had been made in Holland, Africa, London, and Indonesia, but only London seemed invested in finding out the truth.

“Some quarters in Holland and in Far Eastern waters consider it best to let the whole matter drop and would like it to be considered an exaggerated or even untrue story,” wrote London, who also claimed to have found a lone survivor on a small Pacific island, who told them that the crew died from inhaling poison gas when two chemicals were mixed together. 

“I understood immediately, a smuggler's ship, 7,000 small boxes were brought on board the night it left Shanghai, and in a godforsaken little port unknown to all of us, another 8,000 boxes were added,” the lone survivor, who claimed to be one “Jerry Rabbit,” told a German newspaper in 1955. 

They set sail in June 1947, heading to Costa Rica. The ship was loaded with “15,000 crates” of cargo that no one knew what was in it. Rabbit suggested the captain put half of the boxes in the room, but it was rejected because they only weighed “1100 tons.” While the ship continued to Panama, a fire broke out on the bridge, and they were going to ask for help.

He disobeyed orders and abandoned the ship, thus survived. When the distress message from the Ourang Medan was received, Captain Haywood from the Silver Star came to their rescue. The rest was history.

Some thirty years later, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph reported an entirely different story about what happened to the Orang Medan.

According to them, the ship appeared in the high summer of June 1948 in the Bay of Bengal, heading for Djakarta (instead of February, to Costa Rica). It radioed a routine message, followed by a distress call 36 hours later. “Captain and all officers dead. I myself am…Entire crew have been…” it gave its position and canceled. The Andressa came to the rescue with Captain Nicolaos Dimas helming the ship.

The first officer Constantine Davakis wrote in his report that they found all the men dead. “They seemed to have died within seconds of each other, their eyes rolling in horror and their bodies were locked in rigor mortis. One man had tried to leave his seat but had apparently been struck down before he was able to do so.”

There were 10 dead men in the crew’s quarters with “no sign of violence and no presence of poisonous fumes or fire which could have been responsible for the deaths.”

The operator was dead on his transmitter while the switch was still on, and the captain was in his cabin, “sitting at a desk with the ship’s log open in front of him and a pen in his hand.”

This time, the Ourang Medan didn’t end up in the bottom of the ocean. The boarding crew called a Belgian physician, Dr. Paul Moureaux, to examine the bodies, who concluded that those men died from natural causes. There was no finding of poison, asphyxiation, or disease.

The vessel was towed to a port in Djakarta three days later and quarantined for examination. Eventually, the ship was sold to a Panamanian company and spent five more years trading in the Middle East and ended her days under the hammer of a shipbreaker.

Did the ship ever exist? Some said yes, but others suspected the whole story to be a hoax. There are no official records of the rescue ships, captains, or doctors mentioned in any of those versions (except for Silver Star, which appears to be a real ship). The one incident was repetitively told in the news, but no confirmation of Ourang Medan’s existence.