On a Sunday afternoon in the year 2011, a thousand-tonne vessel bearing the Panama flag was found on the shores of Mumbai’s Juhu beach. The vessel reportedly spent hours in Indian waters before being detected, exposing India’s lack of coastal defences post-26/11.
The Indian media called this vessel a “Ghost Ship,” as it had been abandoned by its crew and reported sunk. Yet, somehow, it made its way to the shores of Mumbai.
This is not an eerie, isolated incident. In 2014, the British media reported the presence of a rat-infested Ghost Ship. The ship in question was the infamous MV Lyubov Orlova, a cruise liner built in 1976, Yugoslavia.
Named after a film star, the liner was once built to ferry rich Russians on Arctic cruises. However, in 2010, it was seized in Newfoundland for failure to pay two years’ worth of port bills. A few years later, it was sold at an auction and towed out of St Johns.
On its way to the Dominican Republic to be scrapped, the towline snapped. Considering it to be a threat to the offshore oil rigs of Newfoundland, Canadian authorities towed it into international waters, where they released the four thousand tonne vessel. Since then, the Orlova has never been sighted again.
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