Category: Titanic

This year we’re excited to present a brand new tour, Titanic Graves of Woodlawn Cemetery, led by Titanic tour guide Dave Gardner. We sat down for a Q&A with Dave to get inside the head of this city’s foremost expert on the Ship of Dreams.

Boroughs of the Dead is excited to announce a brand new walking tour: Titanic Graves of Woodlawn Cemetery.

Inspired by the uncanny and ghostly tales associated with the Ship of Dreams, “Ghosts of the Titanic” explores the more mysterious and inexplicable aspects of one of the eeriest maritime disasters in history.

Every year I try to highlight the stories of one or two passengers or crew who particularly fascinate me. This year, I’m fascinated by Joseph Laroche, one of only two known passengers of color aboard Titanic.

When speaking about Titanic, phrases like “unlucky,” “ill-fated,” and even “star-crossed” get bandied around a lot. Yet for all the bad luck surrounding the boat, there were a great number of people who exhibited extraordinarily good fortune and were able to survive the sinking or even stay off the ship entirely due to one twist of fate or another. But what about the woman who survived not one but two seafaring disasters?

I’ve been reading a lot about Titanic lately, as I do around this time every year, and one of my favorite surprising recent discoveries has been that the real “Unsinkable Molly Brown” is actually far, far more interesting than movies and TV would lead us to believe.

There are several Titanic-related grave sites at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. (There are lots at Woodlawn, too.) One of the saddest is the grave of little Douglas Spedden, best known as the little boy in this photo: When Douglas saw the icebergs after boarding a lifeboat, he reportedly exclaimed “Oh, look at the beautiful North Pole […]

  Some of the most compelling Titanic first-person accounts come from Lawrence Beesley’s The Loss of the SS Titanic. Second class passenger Beesley was a scientist and author, and he’s one of those rare people who seem equally gifted in both fields. He writes crystalline clear prose that is devastating without being histrionic: “Imagine a […]

While reading Charles Pellegrino’s Ghosts of the Titanic, I came across the following intriguing footnote: “Only one cat is known to have been aboard the Titanic, and she is said to have disembarked before the ship left Southampton… A stoker named Jim Mulholland reported that he had cared for the ship’s cat, and for its […]