Although cruise ships are normally the setting for a fun vacation getaway, they have also been the site of a surprising number of mysterious and unsettling disappearances.
YouTube user Dark5 has put together a look at five of the most baffling cases of people vanishing while sailing aboard these luxury liners.
Despite attempts by the cruise ship industry to attribute such incidents to people unfortunately falling overboard by accident, there are several instances which may indicate a darker reason for some disappearances.
And, perhaps even more troubling, evidence that suggests cruise line companies do their best to make sure mysterious disappearances themselves vanish from the public eye along with the victims.
This may be the case with the vanishing of James Scavone, who disappeared while aboard a cruise ship in 1999.
Although the FBI determined that he had fallen overboard, a stunning and bizarre twist to the case occurred seven years later when a new witness emerged.
This fellow passenger on the ship that night claimed to have received a phone call from a mysterious man who was crying out for help and then screamed.
According to Scavone's family, when the witness reported this to the cruise line, they strangely made up a story about a man committing suicide after his fiancé had left him.
A subsequent call from the woman to the cruise line was met with even more obfuscation as now they merely told her that no one had gone missing on the ship during that time!
As one can surmise, the true fate of James Scarvone remains a mystery to this day, along with many other unsuspecting vacationers that simply vanished while on the high seas.
Coast Insiders can learn much more about the vastly underreported and extremely worrisome phenomenon of cruise ship disappearances by checking out the 12/16/2012 edition of the program featuring Kendall Carver, chairman of the group International Cruise Victims.
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