Why are there so many ghost ship stories from Newfoundland and Labrador?
I think there are a couple links between shipwreck stories and ghost ship stories. I think at one level, ghost ship stories arise from the tragedy of the wrecks, and incomprehensibility of tragedy in general. Disasters on a large scale, such as that associated with a shipwreck, where multiple lives are lost at once, are harder to understand than an individual death. It is difficult to understand why such an event would happen. Associating the event with a ghost story places makes the event larger than life, more momentous, and places the story outside of the regular occurrences of daily life. I don’t know if it makes the tragedy any easier to deal with, but it marks it as somehow “unreal”. I also think that ghost ship stories, like a lot of ghost stories, are a means of ensuring that oral history is passed from one generation to the next. Even something as momentous an occasion as a wreck will loose emotional or sentimental value as the story passes from generation to generation, and a
