In 1872 a ship was found drifting, empty. The 1913 "solution" was absurd.

In 1913, the Strand Magazine invited contributors and readers to propose solutions to the mystery of the Mary Celeste, the ship found sailing crewless in 1872. One answer arrived from an apparently impeccable source: A. Howard Linford of Magdalen College, Oxford, headmaster of Hampstead's largest prep school, who claimed an old servant named Abel Fosdyk had left him papers on his deathbed. The Abel Fosdyk papers claimed to solve the whole thing.

Fosdyk's account, per Wikipedia: Captain Briggs and his mate argued over "how well a man could swim with his clothes on," then "exchanged clothes, jumped overboard, and began swimming around the vessel." A shark attacked one swimmer. The crew rushed onto a special viewing deck the captain had built for his wife and daughter, and "it promptly collapsed, tossing them all into the sea and leaving no one on board the Mary Celeste." Sharks took everyone but Fosdyk, who floated to Africa on the wreckage.

The debunking was straightforward. None of Fosdyk's names appear in the ship's records. "Fosdyk says that the Mary Celeste was a ship of 600 tons, when in fact it was less than a third of that." He described the crew as English when they were mostly German and American. And his story never explains the missing lifeboat, papers, and navigation instruments.

Previously:

• The Zuiyo-maru carcass and Japan's plesiosaur craze
• The 10 most unsolvable unsolved disappearances