Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, the show where we take your sources,
stitch together the most compelling facts, and really try to
unravel the biggest mysteries that history or in some cases,
legend has to offer.
Speaker 2: And today we are definitely sailing right into a classic
maritime nightmare.
Speaker 1: We really are. This is the story of a ghost
ship whose final terrifying moments were broadcast via Morse code
across the ocean, ending with two chilling, unforgettable words.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the legend of the ss or
rang Medan, the so called death ship, And you just
have to imagine the scene for a second. A rescue
party boards a drifting freighter in these sweltering tropical waters,
only to find its entire crew debts sprawled across the
decks and below, and all of them are wearing identical
expressions of just absolute bone chilling horror.
Speaker 1: That expression that this is the key, isn't it? That
tableau of terror is the central enduring hook of this
entire mystery. And it all begins with this desperate SOS call,
intercepted sometime in that chaotic post World War II era.
Most accounts placed around what June nineteen forty seven, or
maybe February nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the dates are a little fuzzy, but the location
is usually the Strait of Malacca. That's that narrow sea
gap between Indonesia and Malaysia, a very very busy shipping lane.
Speaker 1: Okay, So messages are picked up by several vessels, American ships,
the City of Baltimore, and the Silver Star.
Speaker 2: The silver Star was reportedly the closest. Yeah, and there
were also Dutch and British listening posts that picked it up.
And the mariners receiving these signals, you know, they're professionals,
they're trained for anything, but they quickly realized they were
dealing with something completely outside their training manuals.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack that original distress signal, because this is
really the only piece of like verifiable action that launched
the entire legend. It starts out pretty urgently, it does.
Speaker 2: It starts SOS from oring Madan, We float all officers,
including the captain dead in chart room and on the bridge,
probably whole of crew dead.
Speaker 1: And then it just falls apart, right, The professional communication
just breaks down completely.
Speaker 2: What followed was this frantic, garbled sequence of dots and dashes.
I think one report called it frenzied gibberish. It suggests
the radio operator was in just extreme dress, maybe convulsing
or struggling to even stay conscious.
Speaker 1: And then the ultimate climax, the transmission cuts out. There's
a moment of silence, and then this final horrifying broadcast
that just silence the airwhere I die, I die, and
then nothing, just silence. No further communication was ever received
from that vessel.
Speaker 2: That phrase I die. That's what really crystallizes the whole tale.
It suggests this singular, immediate confrontation with death that's happening
to everyone at once, including the person sending the message.
Speaker 1: It taps into all those deep post World War II fears,
doesn't it, You know, hidden weapons, secret government operations, and
just the terrifying unknowability of the deep ocean. Absolutely so,
our mission today it's a bit of a forensic puzzle.
I have to treat this whole narrative like a crime
scene where all the evidence was immediately and conveniently destroyed.
Speaker 2: So we're going to go through the historical records. What
few there are the scientific theories that people have tried
to apply to the scene, and the investigative journalism that
you might have uncovered the real origin of this whole thing.
Speaker 1: We have to figure out what researchers have actually found,
and this is the big one who might have been
responsible for creating this enduring legend in the first place.
Speaker 2: It really is the maritime mystery that rivals the Mary
Celeste in just how macabre it is. And it all
starts with that terrifying discovery.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start with the canonical version of the disaster,
the story told by the supposed rescuers, because these details,
this is what makes the tale so powerful. The vessel
was the ss oron Madan.
Speaker 2: A Dutch merchant vessel, a freighter. The name translates loosely
to man from Madan, and Madan is a big city
in Sumatra, Indonesia, so.
Speaker 1: It kind of grounds it in the location right in
the Malaca Strait exactly.
Speaker 2: It gives it this air of authenticity. So according to
the reports, the American ship, the Silver Star was the
closest and it races to the coordinates from the distress call.
Speaker 1: And when they get there, it's really good, quiet.
Speaker 2: Eerily quiet. The scene is unsettlingly normal. The Dutch freighter,
it just looks Okay, it's undamaged, just drifting aimlessly. There's
no smoke, no distress signals, nothing to suggest the frantic
event from the SOS call.
Speaker 1: Just a dark hall, silent alone in the middle of
the ocean. You just imagine the dread building on the
Silver Star. I mean, you're trained for smoke, for wreckage,
for survivors, waving, not for silence. Exactly. It's the silence,
not a storm, that makes this so scary. So they're
hailing the orangumudan over and over, whistles, radio signal lamps,
just nothing, only the ocean responding.
Speaker 2: So the captain of the Silver Star, he orders a
small boarding party go over. And what they found inside,
as one account puts, it was a scene of just
unparalleled horror. So the decks, the interior, they were and
this is a quote lousy with corpses. Even the ship's
dog was found dead near its master. The sheer number
of bodies and how they were spread out, it ruled
out some sort of you know, localized accident. This was shipwide.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is where we need to focus, because the
state of these bodies is the central anomaly of the
entire mystery. Describe that tableau of terror that the boarding
party found. What were the forensic details that just defy explanation.
Speaker 2: Every single body, and this is without exception, was described
as having this terrifying identical posture. They were sprawled on
their backs, faces turned up to the sun, mouths gaping open,
and eyes staring blankly ahead, frozen in fear, literally frozen
in fear. One rescuer described them as looking like horrible
caricatures of human agony. Even the ship's dog was locked
in this tormented grimace, just like its masters.
Speaker 1: And the posture details are so crucial. Here wasn't just
you know, people who had passed away peacefully. It was active,
instant terror. Many were described as having their arms.
Speaker 2: Outstretched, as if desperately fending off an invisible assailant. That's
the key phrase, right.
Speaker 1: It suggests a really rapid death while they were actively
fighting or recoiling from something they couldn't see, something that
was coming.
Speaker 2: For them precisely. And that brings us to the most
significant forensic detail that just eliminates all the conventional explanations
like piracy or you know, a gunfight, which is there
were no visible signs of injuries on any of the bodies,
no blood, no obvious wounds, no signs of a struggle,
not even signs of poisoning that would leave marks like
foaming at the mouth or discoloration. Death just seemed to
have taken them completely by surprise, right at their posts,
leaving this physical manifestation of pure agony.
Speaker 1: And the communications guy, the one who sent those final
fragmented words, Yeah, he was frozen mid action.
Speaker 2: Yes, the radio operator was found dead at his station,
his fingertips still resting on the Morse code transmitting device.
The captain was dead on the bridge, Officers in the
chart room, engineering crew in the boiler room. The fact
that the deaths were synchronous, happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: All over the ship, from the deck to the deepest interior.
Speaker 2: It just suggests some kind of airborne, rapidly legal agent
that permeated the entire vessel instantly.
Speaker 1: Now, let's talk about the environment on the ship. The
Strait of Malacca is tropical. The inside of a ship,
especially near the engine room, it should be sweltering right,
easily over one hundred degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: Should be Yeah, But the rescuers noted this inexplicable environmental anomaly.
Speaker 1: And this is maybe the strangest detail of all.
Speaker 2: It is this uncanny, unnatural chill. The boarding party reported
an inexplicable chill pervading the ship. They described the lower decks,
including the boiler room, which should have been stiflingly hot,
as eerily cold. Some accounts even estimate the temperature was
as low as forty degrees fahrenheit or four degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: Wait a second, If the decks were eerily cold, doesn't
that fundamentally contradict the other observation, one that said the
bodies were already decomposing at an unnaturally rapid rate.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: How can decomposition speed up in cold temperatures. That's a huge,
huge scientific contradiction.
Speaker 2: It is a profound contradiction. And that's what adds this
perfect layer of the paranormal, you know, it's what makes
the story so successful. It suggests a phenomenon so alien
that it's literally violating the known laws of physics and biology.
Speaker 1: So you have a scene of mass death by sheer
existential dread combined with environmental conditions that are impossible exactly.
Speaker 2: The contradiction itself becomes part of the mystery. It makes
people just immediately discard the possibility of any natural causes.
Speaker 1: That combination the frozen terror no wounds, the mysterious chill,
and the rapid decay it creates a perfect storm of
nautical horror that basically demands a fantastic explanation, not a
mundane one.
Speaker 2: And just as that horror reaches its peak, we get
to the part of the story that makes any historical
investigation immediately frustrating.
Speaker 1: The rapid and let's be honest, very convenient destruction of
all the evidence.
Speaker 2: Right the Silver Star's captain, He's faced with this gruesome scene,
no discernible cause of death, and he decides the only
logical thing to do is toe the orangmud Dan to
a nearby port for a proper forensic investigation. I mean,
the ship itself was outwardly intact. Salvage was possible.
Speaker 1: So they rig the toe lines. But before they could
even get Underwegh, disaster strikes.
Speaker 2: Dark ominous smoke starts aggressively billowing from the number four
cargo hold of the Dutch freighter, and the fire spreads fast.
Speaker 1: It forces the rescuers to retreat from the Orangmu Dan.
They barely have time to cut the toe lines before
the ship just.
Speaker 2: Explodes, and not just a small fire. Accounts describe it
exploding with terrifying force. It wasn't a gentle burn. The
blast was so violent it apparently lifted herself from the water.
Speaker 1: Well, what a dramatic image it is.
Speaker 2: It suggests a really powerful internal detonation. And after it
lifted up, it plunged back down and just swiftly sank
beneath the waves.
Speaker 1: The sinking was immediate and total within minutes. The Orangmudan
vanishes forever into the depths, and it takes with it
every single.
Speaker 2: Clue, the bodies, the cargo, any structural evidence, the environmental
anomalies all gone. All that's left are the highly unsettling
testimonies of the rescue crew. As an investigator, this is
the moment you start to smell a rat. The crime
scene was perfectly incinerated.
Speaker 1: And because this mystery needed a few more dramatic threads
to weave into that post war fabric, a new narrative
emerged about a year later. It introduces a supposed soul survivor,
giving the whole affair a backstory.
Speaker 2: This narrative comes primarily from a nineteen forty eight Dutch
newspaper article in De Locomotive, and it sourced its information
from an Italian man named Silvio Shirley, a name you're
gonna want to remember because he is the key to
this whole puzzle.
Speaker 1: So this sole survivor. Sometimes he's called Jerry Rabbit, which
is a highly dubious name to say it elas, or
sometimes he's just an unnamed German seaman. He allegedly survived
the disaster and was found by an Italian missionary on
tiongi Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Speaker 2: And that location, tiongi Atoll, is geographically central to disproving
this entire story, but let's stick with his confession first.
Before dying from his injuries, this German Man reportedly told
his harrowing tale to the missionary, who then related to Shirley.
Speaker 1: And according to this deathbed confession, the Orangmu Dan was
on a clandestine operation. The ship had stopped mid voyage
to take on some suspicious cargo loaded from a coastal.
Speaker 2: River mouth right coming from what seemed to be military
camouflaged huts, very consistent with a black market or covert
military exchange.
Speaker 1: Specifically, he claimed the ship was carrying a badly stowed
cargo of oil of vitriol, which is.
Speaker 2: Just the old timy name for concentrated sulfuric acid. His theory,
as relayed through Shirley, was that seawater had leaked into
the hold, reacted with this improperly stored acid, and released
powerful poisonous fumes that killed everyone.
Speaker 1: And to make the clandestine operation theory even stronger, the
survivor alleged that the ship was sailing from some unnamed
small Chinese port to Costa Rica, deliberately avoiding all official
registers and authorities.
Speaker 2: Which conveniently explained the lack of documentation.
Speaker 1: Exactly has all the elements of a classic highdrama pulp
fiction story. You got the secret cargo, the lone tormented
survivor dying tragically in the arms of a man of God.
It is, however, that meticulous level of detail, especially the
geographical detail, that makes us immediately suspicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is where we shift from chilling legend
to some pretty rigorous forensic analysis. The primary problem with
the Orang of Adan is that its story is so
profoundly compelling, but the ship itself is just absent from
the historical record.
Speaker 1: Completely absent. The story's mense detail contrasts so sharply with
the complete utter lack of verifiable evidence. When we say
lack of evidence, we aren't talking about, you know, patche records.
We're talking about a definitive historical void.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the maritime bible, Lloyd's Shipping Register. This
is the global gold standard for tracking commercial vessels. It's
been around since seventeen sixty four. It records everything about
a ship, construction, ownership, tonnage, its eventual fate.
Speaker 1: And the Orangmudan is.
Speaker 2: A non existent vessel. Maritime historians like Roy Bainton and
Professor Theodore Siersdorfer have spent decades combing through global archives.
It is not in Lloyd's Shipping Register. They've checked Dutch registries, Singaporean, Indonesian.
There is simply no record of a vessel by that name.
Speaker 1: No construction details, no crew manifests, no insurance claims, and crucially,
no official wrec records have ever been found.
Speaker 2: The only photo that was ever published of it, which
appeared in that nineteen forty eight Dutch newspaper, was almost
certainly just a generic stock photo, even though the caption
insisted It was the Irang Maudan right before.
Speaker 1: It sank, and the name itself Urang Mudan from m Dan.
It's essentially a regional identifier. It roosted in Sumatra's geography,
giving it that air of local authenticity. But even in
the Netherlands, it's supposed flag country investigators true a total blank.
Speaker 2: The fact that its name is its only proof is
pretty telling.
Speaker 1: So what about these supposed rescuers The Maria Rican silver Star.
That was a real ship.
Speaker 2: It was a real vessel, yes, owned by Gracelines of
New York, but its involvement in this narrative is historically impossible.
Researchers who have analyzed the Silver Star's official logs found
no record whatsoever of this dramatic encounter. A logbook entry
for finding dozens of corpses witnessing a spectacular explosion and
a ship sinking that would be an undeniable, high priority
event that a captain would meticulously record.
Speaker 1: And it's just not there.
Speaker 2: It is simply not there, and even more damning. By
the alleged date of the incident nineteen forty seven or
forty eight, the Silver Star had undergone some changes. Its
history is a bit complex, but the crucial fact is
its operational location. By nineteen forty eight, the vessel, which
had been renamed the SS Santa Cecilia, was reportedly operating
on shipping lanes near Brazil.
Speaker 1: Brazil, thousands of miles away from the Straits of Malacca.
Speaker 2: Exactly. That geographical incompatibility just completely pulls the rug out
from under the entire rescue narrative. If the rescue ship
wasn't where the incident supposedly happened, the whole core event
relies solely on that initial distress.
Speaker 1: Call, the distress call, which itself is highly suspicious.
Speaker 2: Very and that lone survivor narrative we mentioned geographically is
just absurd.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's dissect the impossibility of Jerry Rabbit's journey to
Tungi Atoll.
Speaker 2: Right, So, if the incident happened in the Straits of Malacca,
the journey for a survivor, you know, clinging to some
flotsam to reach tongy Ashole in the Marshall Islands is
roughly five thousand miles in a straight line.
Speaker 1: A near impossible distance to traverse without navigation resources or supplies. Yeah,
especially in that timeframe.
Speaker 2: It strains all credulity and navigational roads would add even
more mileage. But even if you set aside the staggering distance,
the existence of a missionary station on tongy A Toll
is highly improbable.
Speaker 1: Why is that.
Speaker 2: Tongy Atoll is tiny, it's uninhabited, and crucially it lacks
fresh water. It just couldn't sustain a long term missionary station. Historically,
even the seasoned Japanese soldiers set up an outpost there
during the war struggled with resource scarcity and had to
be evacuated.
Speaker 1: So the core element of the survivor's story, the deathbed
confession to a missionary, is geographically impossible, and it just
feels structurally designed to give this religious gravitas to an
unverifiable tale.
Speaker 2: Exactly, But despite this mountain of evidence proving the incident
never happened, the story still managed to infiltrate the highest
levels of government and intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is fascinating. Little footnote a declassified nineteen fifty
nine CIA memo from C. H. Mark Junior, who was
an assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence.
Speaker 2: He specifically mentioned the frenzied SOS call, and Mark asked
if the story dealt with something from the unknown. He
even stated with some confidence that he felt sure the
ss R rang Medan tragedy holds the answer to many
of these airplane accidents and unsolved mysteries of the sea.
Speaker 1: Wow, So why would the CIA be interested in an
unsubstantiated ghost story a decade after it allegedly happened.
Speaker 2: Well, it's us. The narrative, even if it was fake,
aligned perfectly with genuine ongoing post war concerns, concerns about
disappearing vessels, invisible chemical threats, maybe unconventional Soviet or captured
access technology. The story felt plausible in the Cold War climate.
Speaker 1: It just shows the story's incredible stain power. It went
from sensationalist newspaper fodder to a piece of institutional record.
Speaker 2: It really did. It got an air of official legitimacy
when it was reprinted in the US Coast Guard Proceedings
of the Merchant Marine Council in nineteen fifty two. And
that is how folklore gets confused with fact when respected
journals start treating a legend as an actual report.
Speaker 1: Okay, this brings us to the crucial part of our investigation,
the archival detective work that gives us that aha moment.
If the ship didn't exist and the rescue was impossible,
where did this tale actually come from? And who was
the masterful storyteller behind it.
Speaker 2: This investigation is largely credited to researchers like Estelle Hargraves
and Roy Bainton, who used the power of digitized archives,
and what they found found immediately undercut that nineteen forty
seven forty eight timeline.
Speaker 1: The story was published years earlier.
Speaker 2: Years We're talking nineteen forty, a full seven years before
the alleged States of Malacca incident. It first appeared in
Italian and UK newspapers like The Daily Mirror and The
Yorkshire Evening Post in November nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: And in that nineteen forty version the details were very
different right he shows the tale was still in its
sort of embryonic stage.
Speaker 2: Very different. The ship was placed thousands of miles away
near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, and more importantly,
the distress call lacked that dramatic finality. The sos stated
SOS from the steamship or Ragmadan begships with shortwave wireless
get touched doctor urgent.
Speaker 1: A call for a doctor and the follow up message
focused entirely on medical distress and a specific need for
military help, which is really telling for a wartime environment.
Speaker 2: It is it said, probable second officer dead, other members
crew also killed, disregard medical consultation, SOS urgent assistance, warship
and this version ended with the incomplete, much less dramatic phrase.
Speaker 1: Crew has so notice the critical difference there. The specific
mention of a warship in nineteen forty was highly relevant
during the early stages of World War II. It implies
naval action or maybe a threat from an.
Speaker 2: Enemy sub right, and the later nineteen forty eight version
of the story completely drops the warship detail. It replaces
it with the simpler, much more chilling I Die, which
better fit that post war narrative of hidden chemical threats
rather than outright military combat.
Speaker 1: This trail of publication dates in shifting details. It leads
directly to the one common thread that links the pre
war rumor to the highly embellished post war spectacle.
Speaker 2: The man responsible for the story's creation and propagation, Sylvia Shirley,
the same guy, the same guy. The dateline for those
nineteen forty associated press reports originated in Trieste, Italy and
Sylvia Shirley, an individual known to be from Trieste, was
the acknowledged and repeated source for the later, highly embellished
nineteen forty eight Dutch newspaper article. He even published another
article himself about the Orang Madan in nineteen fifty nine,
showing this decade long commitment to his tale.
Speaker 1: So Shirley was clearly enthusiastic almost quit proprietorial about this yarn.
The nineteen forty eight version basically took his initial nineteen
forty concept. He shifted the location to the Malacca Strait,
which makes the man from Bdan name logical. He invented
the sole survivor who conveniently dies after telling the missionary
the secret cargo backstory, and most importantly, he engineered the
SOS message to achieve that succinct, chilling climax.
Speaker 2: Hi Doug and the geographic hopscotching is key to understanding
his method. He moved the story from the remote Solomon
Islands to the bustling, well known trade route of the
Malacca Strait. This localization made the story feel far more
credible to the Dutch Indonesian newspaper readership. They were primed
for tales of covert shipping and smuggling right after the
Dutch East Indies conflict.
Speaker 1: It shows he wasn't just telling a story, he was
adapting it for his market. He understood how to leverage
current events, the fear of black market activity, and unrecorded
chips to give his creation legs.
Speaker 2: And crucially, even the Dutch paper that printed the Embellished
nineteen forty eight series had severe doubts about it. They
felt they had to print a pretty significant disclaimer, which
is often lost in all the retellings.
Speaker 1: What did say?
Speaker 2: They stated, this is the last part of our story
about the mystery of the Orangmadan. We must repeat that
we don't have any other data on this mystery of
the sea, nor can we answer the many unanswered questions.
It may seem obvious that the entire story is a fantasy,
A thrilling romance of the sea.
Speaker 1: Wow, a thrilling romance of the sea. That disclaimer is
the ultimate proof that the paper knew it was likely fiction,
but the story was just too good to pass up.
Speaker 2: They published it anyway, and even with that massive caveat,
the paper still had to include Shirley's assurance. On the
other hand, the author Silvio Shirley assures us of the
authenticity of the story.
Speaker 1: So the conclusion reached by most skeptics, including Roy Bainton,
who spent a lot of time on this, is that
the entire narrative is just a masterfully created yarn.
Speaker 2: Or a sophisticated and highly effective hoax orchestrated by Shirley.
He was possibly a former seaman himself who knew just
enough nautical jargon to make all the details sound plausible.
He just leveraged the postwar chaos where record keeping was
patchy and the public was primed to believe in hidden
military tech.
Speaker 1: So the most terrifying thing about the Orang Madan might
just be the sheer power of an invented tale to
rewrite history and infiltrate official records.
Speaker 2: Now we've established to our satisfaction that the historical record
points pretty definitively to a hoax by Sylvia Shirley. However,
the story is so compelling that researchers continue to apply
scientific and speculative theories to explain that death scene if
the event were real, And.
Speaker 1: This is the important distinction. We are now moving beyond
the historical investigation and into pure scientific speculation operating under
the highly theoretical premise that the Silver Star cruise testimony,
the frozen faces, the cold decks, the explosion was all accurate.
So what unseen killer could have done this?
Speaker 2: Let's start with the strongest, most scientifically grounded hypothesis. This
is the one that tries to rationalize the unexplained death,
the lack of trauma, and the explosive.
Speaker 1: Sinking the hazardous chemical cargo theory exactly.
Speaker 2: This theory posits that the Orangmudan was engaged in a
highly illicit smuggling operation carrying dangerous chemical agents, maybe from
post WWII stockpiles that were on the black market. Its
lack of registration was its.
Speaker 1: Protection, and the specific agents that get mentioned are things
like potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin.
Speaker 2: Right, early researchers like Automilkea mentioned potassium cyanide or xeoncali
and highly volatile nitroglycerin, and of course the sulfuric acid
from the survivor story.
Speaker 1: So let's focus on the mechanism of death. If cyanide
was involved, the hypothesis needs seawater to get into the hold, right,
maybe through rough seas or just poor maintenance.
Speaker 2: Right, and seawater reacts with potassium cyanide to release hydrogen
cyanide gas, or HCN. It's a profoundly potent and invisible
chemical asphyxiatet. HCN works by binding to an enzyme in
our cells mitochondria. Essentially, it starves the cells of oxygen,
preventing cellular respiration even though your body has plenty of
oxygen in its bloodstream, so.
Speaker 1: It leads to extremely rapid cellular death. The crew would
have suffered instant collapse, then convulsions, and then death within minutes,
often without any visible wounds.
Speaker 2: And that mechanism explains the mass demize, the death at
their posts, and why the bodies were outwardly intact. The
extreme agony and convulsions associated with this kind of acute
asphyxiation the body just desperate for air could certainly account
for those contorted, horrified facial expressions.
Speaker 1: The agonizing physical manifestations of the crew fighting for a
breath that would.
Speaker 2: Not come exactly.
Speaker 1: And what about the explosion that just wiped the ship away.
Speaker 2: The nitroglycerine hypothesis handles that perfectly. If the ship was
also carrying unstable explosives like nitroglycerin, maybe in liquid form.
Contamination by seawater, especially warm tropical seawater, could easily destabilize it.
That would cause a massive, rapid explosion that aligns perfectly
with the accounts of the ship lifting out of the
water before sinking.
Speaker 1: This theory, while it's still speculative, it really connects all
the dots, the lack of trauma, the rapid death, and
the destructive ending. We should probably note that carbon monoxide poisoning,
which is often suggested, doesn't really fit, does it.
Speaker 2: No, not really. Carbon monoxide is a silent killer. It
causes confusion and weakness, but it doesn't typically induce those sharp,
terror filled expressions or convulsions. And plus CO would have
been quickly ventilated from crew members who are found on
the open deck. The frozen grimaces lean much more toward
the acute, agony inducing convulsions caused by something like cyanide
or nerve gas.
Speaker 1: And that leads us to the darker sub theory, the
nerve gas cover up, which places the Irong Madan right
in the center of postwar military secrecy.
Speaker 2: This theory suggests the ship was secretly transporting a consignment
of deadly Japanese chemical weapons maybe nerve agents like taboon
or sarin, seized by the US military after the war.
These were agents developed by notorious facilities like Japan's Units
seven thirty one, And.
Speaker 1: The crucial political element here is that the US military
secretly granted immunity the head of Unit seven thirty one,
shiro Ishi, in exchange for exclusive access to all his
horrific biological and chemical weapons findings.
Speaker 2: Right, so, transporting these agents would violate international treaties like
the Geneva Convention. That would necessitate a complete cover up
and erasure of all records, which is a perfect explanation
for a non existent ship.
Speaker 1: A nerve gas release would flood the ship. These agents
attack the central nervous system, causing uncontrollable muscular spasms, paralysis,
respiratory failure, all within moments that.
Speaker 2: Would absolutely result in the described contorted muscular postures, the
arms outstretched, the mouth scaping, and the extremely rapid death
without physical trauma. And the complete lack of records then
becomes not an indication of a hoax, but proof of
a high level government operation gone catastrophically wrong.
Speaker 1: Okay, so beyond man made chemical mishaps, there are some
non cargo explanations rooted in natural phenomena, tapping into that
deep a knowability of the ocean.
Speaker 2: One very intriguing theory involves methane hydrates. These are massive
ice like cages of frozen methane gas that are trapped
beneath the seabed, often in areas of deep water, like
near the Malaca Strait. A sudden seismic event or a
shift in temperature could destabilize them.
Speaker 1: So if the seabed released a massive volume of methane gas,
it can just engulf the ship in an invisible, suffocating cloud,
displacing all the breathable.
Speaker 2: Oxygen, which would cause instant suffocation, leaving no marks on
the bodies. And critically, methane is highly flammable, so once
that gas cloud dispersed a little and mixed with air,
the slightest spark a short circuit friction could ignite it,
resulting in a rapid, powerful explosion.
Speaker 1: Perfectly mirroring the dramatic sinking. It's a mechanism that explains
the rapid, nonviolent death and the explosion it does.
Speaker 2: And then there's the truly strange natural theory.
Speaker 1: Infrasound infrasound waves. These are low frequency sound waves below
what we can hear exactly.
Speaker 2: We can't consciously hear them, but powerful sources in nature,
like massive waves or strong winds funneled through canyons, can
generate infrasound that's capable of causing serious physiological and psychological effects.
Speaker 1: In humans, things like disorientation, severe anxiety, nausea, and in
really high intensity situations, panic attacks, and even physical resonance
with internal organs. It could potentially lead to fear induced
cardiac arrest.
Speaker 2: A prolonged exposure to strong infrasound coming from the sea
could theoretically cause a mass psychological breakdown, resulting in those
terrified expressions and synchronous cardiac events. But of course direct
evidence of that happening at that specific time in place
is non existent.
Speaker 1: So it's a powerful explanation for the terror, but a
weak one for the explosion. And finally, we have to
pay tribute to the highly specific, deeply entertaining, and utterly
fringe zombie theory.
Speaker 2: You have to This theory draws directly from the suspicious
nature of that cargo loaded at the river mouth. You
see it in fringe online journals. It suggests that the
mysterious cargo with the apparent military background was related to
secret military life after death projects or bioweaponry.
Speaker 1: The anxiety around military bioweapons during the Cold War made
this narrative just structurally perfect. The theory posits that the
military was developing serums for soldiers, not necessarily to bring
back the dead, but maybe to manufacture a massive adrenaline
release or modify the brain to create hyper aggressive, pain
immune soldiers, and the.
Speaker 2: Side effects naturally manifested as uncontrollable aggression and an appetite
for human flesh, in other words, true zombie behavior. The
military would need a hidden staging area like a coastal
river mouth, away from official ports to keep this tech hidden.
Speaker 1: So the theory suggests two of these dangerous zombie boxes
were loaded onto the Irang Madan. At some point, maybe
due to rough seas. The boxes break open and the
crew is then confronted by this unimaginable, shabbily dressed enemy,
and the terror.
Speaker 2: That froze their faces is rationalized by the sheer shock
of seeing an animated dead corpse shambling towards them. The
instantaneous death theory is slightly modified here. Maybe they died
from shock, or maybe they were just unconscious, their bite
wounds hidden or small.
Speaker 1: And the final convenient.
Speaker 2: Destruction that's attributed to a wandering, undead creature. A zombie
stumbling aimlessly in the ship's lower decks crashes into an
electric light, shattering it. The cracked light eventually sets the
zombies' ripped clothing on fire, and the mindlessly burning creature
spreads the flames to the fuel compartment boom.
Speaker 1: The ship explodes and sinks, eliminating the evidence and the
zombie threat all at once.
Speaker 2: It's a testament to the evocative power of the original
narrative that it can support theories ranging from sophisticated chemical
warfare covers er ups all the way to military grade zombies.
The story's gaps are so large they can be filled
by any collective fear do you want to throw at it?
Speaker 1: So, as we wrap up this very chilling thread on
the Orang Madan, we're left with this fundamental tension. We
have a haunting, detailed story of mass death by sheer terror,
the frozen faces that final desperate message, I die. But
we also have meticulously documented archival inconsistencies.
Speaker 2: In a single source Silvio Shirley, who is responsible for
its entire propagation over decades.
Speaker 1: The forensic reality defined by the total absence of Alloyd's registration,
the impossible geography, the Tongian Tol survivor tale, and those
pre war nineteen forty publication dates. It all points definitively
toward a sophisticated and highly effective hoax. The physical wreck,
if it ever existed at all, is gone.
Speaker 2: Yet the irang medon indoors, and that's the true deep
dive here. It survives not because we can prove it
was real, but because Shirley created the perfect vessel for
all of our collective post war anxiety. It contains fears
of invisible chemical killers, the specter of sees Japanese weapons
from Unit seven thirty one, Cold War government secrets, and.
Speaker 1: Just the terrifying unknowability of the deep ocean that swallows
all secrets.
Speaker 2: And we can't forget how the story went from just
sensationalist newspaper fodder into institutional record. Its inclusion in the
US Coast Guard's proceedings in nineteen fifty two gave it
the ultimate air of official legitimacy, and that then became
a source cited by later researchers who just assumed the
Coastguard had verified all the details, the fact.
Speaker 1: That the story was potent enough to move from a
thrilling romance of the sea, as the Dutch paper called it,
all the way into a nineteen fifty nine CIA memo
where a director's assistant wondered if it holds the answer
to many of these airplane accidents. That just shows the
narrative's incredible staying power, the psychological impact of those frozen faces.
It's just immense.
Speaker 2: Ultimately, the researchers who proved the hoax, like Estelle Hargraves.
They remind us that the most terrifying aspect of the
Orangmudan is not the possibility of a ghost ship, but
the ease which a single man in Triesque, Italy could
use the sensational details of terror and a perfectly timed
explosion to convince the world and even official bodies that
it was real.
Speaker 1: He leveraged the chaos and paranoia of a post war
world with just surgical precision. The blending of these potent
dark themes is why this legend sails on in the
shadowy waters of folklore. Long after genuine maritime disasters have
faded from public memory.
Speaker 2: And that leads us to our final thought.
Speaker 1: For you to ponder, if the Irrangmudan was a deliberate
fabrication written and embellished by Sylvia Shirley, why do you
think this specific story, with its frozen faces, mysterious chill,
and that perfect vanishing act from the explosion, was so
much more successful at infiltrating official records and enduring in
global culture that any other thrilling romance of the sea
published during that paranoid post war era. Was it the
specific trauma of the terrifying expression, the psychological shock of
the unknown killer, or just the neat convenience of the
explosion that eliminated all skepticism?
Speaker 2: What stands out to you is the most powerful element
of this masterful hopes. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this very chilling thread.