Ghost Ships & You: A helpful primer

A Text by Scholar Medeliu Hammar

An Altmer sailor recently approached me and told me that he had, on his last voyage, witnessed an enormous spectral galleon during a particularly bad storm. While most of his ramblings were irrelevant to my interests he did bring up an interesting question: how could a ship, which lacks a soul, manifest as a ghost?

Now the ghosts of contraptions and structures are not uncommon. The Telvanni wizard Shalathis lived in the ghost of his previous tower until its dissipation and his death (from falling of course) in 3E 127. The ghost of the Merethic Era Limited, a wailway engine, haunted the northern reaches of Cyrodiil before it was slain by Cap Topsham, the Redguard hero. But these examples are both with entities that had, in some essence, a soul. They were alive.

Ships, at least most ships, are not alive and certainly not sapient. There is no soul, nor any animutic compound that should allow it to take form. Yet time and time again there are reports and encounters with such entities. Hangman's Pride, the Raptor, Chuneveer, all famous ghost ships. Why?

The answer of course, is the crew. Ghosts manifest weaponry and attire because of the deceased's affirmed belief and perception of what they were doing when they died. Their appearance is tied to their sense of identity, and manifests as spectral objects. The same thing occurs with ships. A sailor who dies in a shipwreck associates themselves heavily with that ship. With enough sailors all believing in the same, identical concept (the ship), it manifests.

This phenomenon is called collective spectral construction, and while most common with ships, I theorize that it could occur with anything, so long as you have a sufficient number of ghosts.