We never planned for the moments that frighten us the most. They tend to creep up on us,

floating on chance and propelled by some twisted mixture of Murphy's Law and the worst

side of humanity. Thankfully, those moments are rare. In 2014, though, the people of Ireland

came face to face with a real scare. A ship was slowly approaching the western coast of the

Green Isle, and while countless ships do that every day, this one was different. This one, you see,

was a ghost ship. The Lubef or Loya began life in 1976 as an ordinary Yugoslavia cruise liner.

She was built to withstand sea ice and spent a good portion of her career as a tourist vessel

near Antarctica. But in 2010, the cruise ship entered troubled water, figuratively speaking,

and was taken out of service and docked in St. John's in Newfoundland. Turns out the crew of over

50 people hadn't been paid in over five months, and so to cover the $250,000 in debts, the ship

was impounded and sold for salvage. In February of 2012, the ship was pulled out of St. John's by a

tugboat headed to the Dominican Republic, but the tow line slipped free just a day into the journey.

They tried to reconnect it, but somehow it failed, and thus began a journey that even a scriptwriter

couldn't dream up, with the ship drifting back east and then west and north until it was finally

making its way toward County Kerry in Ireland. Oh, and one last detail. The abandoned cruise

liner wasn't empty. It was full of cannibalistic rats. Left unchecked, they had multiplied over

the years, and after they'd eaten every bit of food on the ship, they had turned on themselves.

So it was the thought of that, of thousands and thousands of starving, flesh-crazed rats

reaching their shores that left the people of Ireland in such fear.

Ghost ships are a lot more common than you'd think. The good news is most of them aren't overrun

with cannibal rats, but that doesn't mean there's a shortage of stories. And just like busy human

settlements, it's the ships that have seen the most action that always seem to carry

...