Ghost Ship(s)

Could the icicle Godzilla monster be the cause of the Titanic wreck?

I have always been fascinated by shipwrecks, and various other secrets of the deep. In middle school, I was so obsessed with Titanic that I actually memorized the entire timeline of the wreck, and the number of people killed (fyi: 1,571). So fascinated am I, that I've even seen Ghost Ship, quite possibly the worst scary movie ever made, starring the lovely Julianna Margulies of ER fame. (Warning: clip below contains graphic content).

The movie, of course, is a spin-off on a much classier myth of "The Flying Dutchman," basically a bad-ass pirate who's doomed (in death) to roam the seas until he can find some poor lady to love him. Check out Wagner's opera version, it's pretty awesome. There's another little movie that's pretty much stolen the Dutchman's thunder, too. You may have seen it.


So I was pretty jazzed when I opened my issue of New York to discover an article called "Secrets of the Deep," about all the goodies lying in New York harbor.

• Apparently there are over 300 wrecks in the lower Hudson, most of which remain a secret as they are archeological sites.
• There's a freight train near Peekskill! It fell off the drawbridge in 1865!
• Suicides. "When homicides and suicides end up in the river during winter, they often stay underwater until April, when decomposition speeds up, bloating them with gases . . . The worst I ever saw," says an NYPD scuba diver, "was half in the mud, half out. The skin was peeling back, the critters were eating it."
• Lots and lots of cars.
• A piano and a giraffe. "Another time, they found the corpse of a giraffe that had fled a circus." :(
• 404 ice cream trucks. (Good Humor dumped them to build an artificial reef).
  
• Dreamland: One of coney island's first theme parks. It burned down in 1911.

SO COOL.

There's also a rumor that Lake Lanier, the man-make lake in Georgia houses an entire town under the water, including a race-track and movie theater. I once heard tell that a scuba-diver was even able to swim into the movie theater and sit in one of the seats. The Army denies that there's anything under the lake, but last year, when Georgia suffered a severe drought, a steeple from a church popped up and the speedway was exposed.

I love the idea that there's an entire world underneath the ocean. Like, what?!