The ship Dei Gratia set off from New York in the same direction as the Mary Celeste a few days later. On December 5, 1872, the crew of the Dei Gratiaspotted the Mary Celeste ahead of them in the east Atlantic. From the erratic way she moved, they could tell something was wrong. They hailed the ship, but when they got no reply, a couple of the crew members rowed over to see what was up.

According to Ghost Ship, what they found was a perfectly serviceable vessel … with no one onboard. The lifeboat, chronometer, and sextant were missing, but everyone’s personal belongings had been left behind, including their foul weather gear and some things of value. The hold was still full of the cargo of denatured alcohol. Although the logbook indicated that the Mary Celeste had hit the same bad weather all other ships in the Atlantic were also running into at that time, when the last entry was written on November 25, everything was fine.

The Dei Gratia crew members were perplexed. The hatches were removed, and the skylight was open. There was about 3.5 feet of water in the hold, but nothing that couldn’t be pumped out easily. The slight damage to the rigging and sails almost certainly happened after the ship was abandoned. They determined the Mary Celeste was “apparently in good condition” and “nearly new.” They couldn’t figure out why, but it seemed like the occupants had left “in a great hurry.”

In most tellings, the tale stops there. Empty ship, creepy situation, theories about what happened, the end. But that was far from the end for the Mary Celeste. Despite the fact that everyone onboard had seemingly vanished into thin air, the ship was still a useful, valuable piece of property.

According to Naked History, she eventually finished the voyage to Italy and then returned to New York the next year. By now, the vessel was infamous in the sailing community, and it took another year before anyone bought her. After that, the Mary Celeste had years of boring normality, sailing between Boston, the West Indies, and Africa, per Slate. But some bad luck still seemed attached to her: Captain Edgar Tuthill died during one voyage, and the ship continually lost money on her cargoes. The Mary Celeste appears to have been such a bad investment that people couldn’t get rid of her fast enough: She had 17 owners in the next 13 years.

The Mary Celeste certainly hadn’t been lucky for the captain of the Dei Gratia, David Morehouse, either. He was only awarded about one-fifth what the ship and cargo were worth, much less than would be expected in such a case normally. And the court made it clear they thought something fishy was going on, which put Morehouse under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of his career. It just didn’t make sense that ten people would vanish from a perfectly good ship in the middle of the ocean.

So … what the hell happened? Where did those ten people go and why? As one documentary on the Mary Celeste says (via Smithsonian) there are plenty of things we can rule out, from the seemingly reasonable to, you know, aliens.

Because people hear there was literally a boatload of alcohol, many assume the crew must have gotten drunk and mutinied. But had they imbibed the denatured alcohol, mutinying would have been impossible, what with the being dead and all. Plus, there was no sign of struggle, and stains that inspectors initially thought might be blood were proved to be something else, according to the New England Historical Society. If pirates were responsible, they were inept ones, since the cargo was undisturbed, and other valuables were found onboard. And while the crew of the Dei Gratia was under suspicion, they had no motive.

As for the more out-there theories: Obviously, it must somehow be the Bermuda Triangle’s fault, even though the Mary Celeste was thousands of miles away from it. As for a giant squid attack, while they have been known to grab onto boats very rarely, it would take an extremely special animal to pick off almost a dozen people and drag them into the deep. And some have claimed the Mary Celeste‘s occupants robbed another ship of treasure and then started new lives in Spain … which would mean that the captain and his wife just abandoned their young son, whom they’d left in America.

Another possible theory does involve the alcohol the ship was transporting, but not in a drunk mutiny way. The author of Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crewtold AccuWeather about his hypothesis in 2020.

The denatured alcohol in the hold was essentially an industrial chemical. When the ship was discovered, nine of the barrels in the hold were empty. All of them were made of red oak, which was more porous and likely to leak than all the other barrels, which were white oak. 450 gallons of methanol pouring into the hold would cause a serious fume problem. Since the weather had been bad, the hold had been closed up for weeks. So when the weather improved, Briggs could have ordered “every hatch, door and window” opened (which is how they were found), attached the lifeboat to the ship with a rope, and ordered everyone in while the dangerous fumes dissipated. This would also explain why important documents and valuables were left behind, since those in the lifeboat thought they were coming right back. Then the weather must have changed, a strong wind caused the towline connecting the ship and lifeboat to break, and all those in it were doomed.

A variation on this theory is that the fumes ignited, causing a huge bang. An experiment in 2006 found this was possible without leaving any scorch marks. Thinking the ship was about to explode, Briggs gave the order to abandon ship.

Abandoned ships were uncommon but not unheard-of in the 1800s. That is, after all, why there was a legal procedure when Captain Morehouse salvaged the Mary Celeste: because the situation was a relatively normal occurrence. Most of the details of these empty ships have been lost to history, and the story of the Mary Celeste might have been forgotten, too, if not for one significant difference.

According to Smithsonian, a young, pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle heard the story of the Mary Celeste and used the barest facts about it to write a short story called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” It was published in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine and was a sensation. It was complete fiction but was written in a way that made it seem like a true account by the lone survivor of the voyage of the “Marie Celeste.” The titular survivor explains that a vengeful ex-slave on the ship systematically murdered all the passengers, and he himself barely escaped.

Plenty of those who read the tale, including the Attorney General who had tried the original salvage case, thought it might be true. Many of the details in the story ended up mixing with the actual facts, until what most people think they know about the mystery today is a combination of the real and the totally made-up. More tellings, like a 1935 film starring Bela Lugosi, muddled things further. But the real story is weird enough, without later embellishments.