The White Rose

The seas and oceans do not have an exclusive contract with the universe for mysterious events, but rivers and lakes also hide their secrets. Okay, some lakes like Lake Michigan are the size of an ocean, so shipwrecks are not a rare occurrence.

But some shipwrecks are still unique for many reasons. In 1875, the schooner Rosa Belle with 10 people on board capsized for unknown reasons. After some time, the capsized ship, retaining some buoyancy, was thrown by the winds and currents right into the harbor of Grand Haven, a grotesque situation when the ship appeared on its own at the dock (!?). But there was no trace of the ten passengers and crew members and their fate was never clarified.

And all of that would have been just another tragic mysterious episode, a footnote in local history if the ship hadn't been preserved long enough to make it worth repairing and renovating. And if a cult hadn't gotten involved...After they renovated it, the ship had been in service for almost half a century. In 1921, it was chartered by the House of David sect, a Russian cult known for its progressive views, orgy affairs, founding a godly baseball club, building its own town, and requiring all men to wear beards.

And when a Russian cult boards a ship with the word Rose in its name, even White, nothing good can come of it.

In the fall of 1921, the ship again appeared on its own in a harbor, this time Ann Arbor, again capsized and again without any of the people on board, in this case without the 11 sectarians who had chartered the schooner. The sectarians suffered the same fate as the unfortunate ones of 1875, disappearing without a trace for all time and eternal memory. The reasons for the capsizing were not known. The weather and conditions were quite good, although the ship after its appearance was slightly damaged, the cabin with the steering wheel was almost destroyed and there was a hole in the hull above the waterline. This led to the conclusion that it was a collision, but no ship reported such a thing and no witnesses ever appeared to witness such an event, nor was there any word about repairing the damaged ship that could have possibly participated in the collision.

It was never determined which mysterious ship hit the Rosa Belle. Or maybe it was the Ascension, a long-awaited religious event by the better-informed Russians when the righteous souls would be taken directly to heaven while the wicked would remain on earth...Regardless of the capsizing, as the crowning of the bizarre, the ship in both cases remained above water and in both cases no one was saved and not only that but everyone completely disappeared without a trace.

After this incident, rumors began to circulate that the ship was taking victims at a certain time, as if it had a mind of its own and one of the theories later was that the passengers from 1875 entered a time hole, appeared in 1921, rented an old dilapidated ship, waited for the Rosa Belle to sail to the same place where they disappeared (and indeed the capsizings occurred almost in the identical place) - and at full speed crashed into their former-present enemy ship. Or was it a future one?

Time paradoxes have always given me headaches, so I'm not sure the latter theory makes any sense. After the second incident, it was decided not to risk the Beautiful Rose again, the ship was dismantled just in case and ended up as a source of firewood, sending the final symbolism of the hellish fires where it may have sent the sectarians for their heresy, orgies, and sectarianism.

(Roger Mortis, 074)