A Prophetic Tale Published Days Before Titanic Sank
Just one week before the Titanic sank, “The White Ghost of Disaster,” a fictional story by Captain Mayn Clew Garnett, appeared in Popular magazine. The tale featured a massive, supposedly unsinkable ocean liner, a fatal collision with an iceberg, and the subsequent loss of many lives—paralleling the real tragedy almost exactly.
Disturbing Similarities
In Garnett’s story, the doomed ship “Admiral” was captained by a man who, like Titanic’s Captain Smith, ignored iceberg warnings and met an uncertain fate. The story’s depiction of the collision closely mirrored survivor accounts from the Titanic.
An Enigmatic Author’s Dark Past
Captain Mayn Clew Garnett was actually a pseudonym for Thornton Jenkins Hains, a controversial figure who’d been involved in multiple sensational murder trials. Hains had written popular sea tales before taking on the Garnett identity, hoping to escape public disdain.
A Curious Coincidence or Inspiration?
Despite suspicions of plagiarism from earlier works like Morgan Robertson’s “Futility,” Hains never publicly addressed his story’s parallels with the Titanic. His mysterious tale and his even stranger life remain an unusual footnote in the legacy of the Titanic disaster.
In April 1912, just a week before the Titanic sank, “The White Ghost of Disaster” by Captain Mayn Clew Garnett appeared in Popular magazine. The story depicted a giant, "unsinkable" ship crashing into an iceberg with catastrophic loss of life, strikingly similar to Titanic’s… pic.twitter.com/csVqgxDzj5
— Detective Tiger's Stories (@TigerDetective) November 12, 2024