The tragic sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 is almost singular in its hold on the popular imagination for 113 years now and counting. At the time, it was the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history, leading to significant safety reforms that are still in effect today.
But maritime reforms don’t explain why the RMS Titanic holds such a grip on our imaginations. All of the elements of classic, tragic drama lined up for that fateful voyage: the glory of the largest ship of its day embarking on its maiden voyage; the hubris of steaming at nearly full throttle even as the the ship received multiple warnings of icebergs; the dearth of lifeboats that consigned more than 1600 people to their deaths in icy waters; the eeriness of the ship’s band continuing to play even as the doomed ship was sliding into the ocean.
Death was an equal opportunity reaper: it took wealthy elites like John Jacob Astor IV as well as those who boarded third class (not to mention that 3 out of 4 crew members perished)
If there ever was a chance that the unsinkable ship that sank with so much loss of life would fade into memory, the amazing discovery of the ship’s final resting place in 1985 and subsequent videos of the wreck and its interior so many fathoms beneath the surface, assured its place in collective memory for many years to come.
Of course, such a devastating object lesson in human fallibility and misplaced faith in technological progress was bound to generate more than its share of myths and legends and spooky stories that seem to suggest that Jung was on to something with his theories of the collective unconscious.
An article at The Encyclopedia Titanica, “Ghostly Tales from the Titanic,” gives a chilling overview of the spookiness surrounding the tragic event. For one, there was the sighting of the Titanic captain’s ghost by his wife a thousand miles away from the scene of the disaster. Smith’s wife, “Sarah Eleanor Smith, was in her drawing room when the door opened. She watched her husband walk across the carpet towards the window….When he reached the window, he simply disappeared. It was too early for news of the Titanic to reach her, but she knew. From the moment she saw his ghost, she knew.”
One Step Beyond, hosted and narrated by actor-director-producer John Newland, was an anthology of true tales of the supernatural that ran for 3 seasons, from 1959 - 1961. Like its more famous contemporary series The Twilight Zone, the half-hour program featured plenty of familiar faces from TV and movies of the day, including actors like Charles Bronson, Christopher Lee, Elizabeth Montgomery, Donald Pleasance and many more. The fact that the night’s drama was, as Newland pointed out in each introduction, “a matter of human record -- you may believe it, or not…” added a touch of uncanniness to the episodes.
Just the second episode to be aired in the series, "Night of April 14th" delves into not just one but several uncanny paranormal stories connected with the sinking of the great ship. The main storyline concerns a well-to-do young bride to be, Grace Montgomery (Barbara Lord), who, as her wedding date nears, is not sleeping too well. The scene opens on Grace as she starts out of bed, with a feeling that she is drowning in icy cold waters.
She relates her vivid nightmare to her dowager mother (Isobel Elsom), who assures her that it's only pre-wedding jitters, and that, since she will be honeymooning in Switzerland, there's very little chance of drowning.
The all-too-real nightmares continue, and her sense of impending doom is only given more fuel when her cheery bridegroom-to-be, Eric Farley (Patrick Macnee), announces that he's changed the honeymoon plans, and has booked them first class passage to New York on the newest and biggest ocean liner, the RMS Titanic.
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| The honeymooners try to steel their nerves as the unsinkable ship starts to go down. |
Grace tries to suppress her misgivings as her mother confidently states that all the experts consider the ship to be "unsinkable." But the nightmares persist, and at one point Grace protests that she can't possibly go on the voyage, as she clearly saw "Titanic" stenciled on a lifeboat in one of her dreams.
But actually tying the knot seems to calm her down, and the next scene shows the honeymooners enjoying the cruise from comfortable deck chairs. However, two other male passengers strolling the deck add to the palpable dread, as one, out of earshot of Grace and Eric, tells his companion about dreaming of "a terrible grinding sound" and shuddering all around the ship.
Soon enough, the terrible grinding and shaking throws the couple to the floor of their stateroom. At the lifeboat station, Eric insists that Grace get on the boat. Tears streaming down her face, Grace declares that she has loved their marriage, "all 6 days, 5 hours and 20 minutes of it!" Trying to keep his wife's spirits up, Eric responds that "if you ever have another bad dream, I'll listen to you ... every word!"
The episode cleverly punctuates the poignant story of the honeymooning couple with vignettes of other eerie forebodings that suggest that certain traumatic events can affect sensitive people through the fabric of space and time: As the Titanic is sinking, a Canadian minister, preparing for his sermon, suddenly is seized with the idea that his congregation should sing the hymn to those in peril on the sea; and in New York, a magazine illustrator, as if in a trance, draws an eerie and affecting picture of an ocean liner sinking.
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| The illustrator wonders how he's going to sell a bleak picture of a sinking ship. |
There is even a bit of gallows humor as a portly passenger in a tuxedo bellows sarcastically to a fellow passenger about the great service -- "they ran out of ice, but now that we've hit an iceberg, the stuff is all over the decks!"
Barbara Lord as Grace and Patrick Macnee as Eric provide the coup-de-grace as the unlucky couple. Especially affecting and very believable is a scene in their stateroom as the post-collision commotion is sounding outside the door. With a luxurious fur coat wrapped around her, Grace is absent-mindedly putting on her jewels as if getting ready for a fancy ball, while Eric makes wry observations to steel his and his wife's courage.
Lord guest-starred on only a relative handful of TV shows between 1959 and 1961. While she made a brief comeback on US TV in the '80s, it's a shame that such a capable actress didn't get (or want) more work. Patrick Macnee would soon go on to appear on the hit UK TV thriller The Avengers in his signature role as the dapper John Steed.
Per the show's format, host John Newland gets the last word, and it's a doozy. In his epilogue, he relates yet another extraordinary coincidence (or was it?) concerning the Titanic. If it doesn't send at least a little chill down your spine, you need to check yourself for a pulse.
If you dare, click play to see his eerie epilogue:
In contrast to One Step Beyond, which purported to be true stories, Night Gallery's "Lone Survivor" episode is all fiction. Written by the man himself, Rod Serling, the episode begins with an ocean liner steaming through fog-shrouded seas (are there any other kind in stories like this?). On the bridge, one of the ship's officers spies a lonely lifeboat through the mist.
There is a single figure in the boat, which appears to be a woman. But there's another detail that the officer spots through his binoculars that has him and the Captain shaking their heads in disbelief -- the name on the bow of the lifeboat is "Titanic."
When a rescue party gets to the lifeboat, there is only the figure, which turns out to be a man dressed in women's clothing, and a single blanket. When the lifeboat is hauled aboard the liner, the rescuers notice that the hull is barnacled as if the boat had been floating in the ocean for years.
The rescued man (John Colicos) is taken to the infirmary, where he is interrogated by the Captain (Torin Thatcher) and the ship's doctor (Hedley Mattingly). He insists that the year is 1912, and that he, a stoker on the Titanic, is a survivor. When informed that the year is 1915, he still insists that he must have survived alone on the seas for all those years.
"Have you ever been so frightened you'd do anything to survive?" the rescued man pleads with his interrogators. The ship's officers of course are disbelieving, with the Captain wondering out loud if the lifeboat and its contents are a German trick to slow his ship down (it is 1915 after all, and there's a war going on).
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| The survivor is in agony at the thought of being caught wearing last year's women's fashions. |
SPOILERS AHEAD ON THE STARBOARD BOW!
In a fit of anguish, the survivor reveals his dark secret: "I'm a Flying Dutchman, doctor, made of flesh and blood and bones. Damned and doomed. An eternity of lifeboats, rescues... and then forever being picked up by doomed ships."
The scene cuts to a closeup of the cap of a crewman who has just sighted a torpedo headed straight for the ship. The name on his cap is Luisitania. The episode ends with the survivor once more cast adrift on the seas, and yet another ship's crewman spying the lifeboat and calling out the alert. Can you guess the ship? Click on the image below for the answer.
John Colicos turns in a great performance as the survivor, his face an authentic mask of anguish as he spills out his shame and dread to the Captain and ship's doctor. Colicos will be very familiar to fans of '60s and '70s TV, where he seemed to be everywhere you turned your dial. Star Trek fans know him as the Klingon commander Kor from the classic original Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy."
Another familiar face is the Captain, Torin Thatcher, who started out playing villains in costume dramas before inevitably settling into TV show guest spots. He also appeared in Star Trek and One Step Beyond, among other popular series.
"Lone Survivor" is a haunting episode with a sort of double-twist ending (although you have to know your maritime disasters to fully appreciate it). Serling adds an eerie overlay to his Titanic survivor/Flying Dutchman myth by suggesting that the ships that keep rescuing the man are themselves phantom ships, and their crews are ghosts that are there to carry out the curse and then vanish.
This post is part of The Titanic in Pop Culture Blogathon hosted by the unsinkable Rebecca at Taking Up Room. Visit her blogathon page for more great posts on the impact of the Titanic disaster on movies, TV and beyond.
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