Dennis Hale, center, smiles broadly as he shows the lifejacket that saved his life in the wreck of the Daniel J. Morrell. Looking on are Don Comtois, left, and Don Morin, officers of the Saginaw River Marine History Society that sponsored the talk. Daniel J. Morrell's Sole Survivor Dennis Hale Draws 300 to Bay City Program
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Do you believe in ghosts, or out-of-body experiences?
The only survivor of the sinking of the Steamship Daniel J. Morrell is still wondering about those phenomena 44 years after the tragedy.
Dennis Hale, 70, doesn't know who the man with a white beard was, but he thinks the supernatural apparition on the lifeboat off Pt. Aux Barques in November 1966 saved his life.
Hale, 70, told his tales from the heart in First Presbyterian Church on Saturday night before a rapt crowd of about 300.
The church was an appropriate setting for what amounted to a soul-searching confession of everything from a misspent youth to a troubled quarter century after the sinking when he couldn't bear to talk of it.
Hale was 26 when he miraculously was the only crew member of 29 saved when the 603 foot Morrell, built in Bay City in 1906, broke in two in a raging storm and plunged to the bottom.
She lies in two parts in Lake Huron off Michigan's Thumb where the eerie events transpired Nov. 27-29, 1966.
Nine years later a more famous shipwreck occurred in Lake Superior, that of the Edmund Fitzgerald. There are similarities such as the fact that both storms arose so fast and furiously that there was no time to send distress signals and the fact that both ships broke in two.
Hale is baring his soul and telling a tale that few men can reveal --that of being the sole survivor of a Great Lakes shipwreck.
An ironic twist of fate came before the last voyage of the Morrell. "I made a huge mistake," said Mr. Hale. "I had missed the ship in Lackawanna, New York, but I called the captain and caught her in Windsor, Ontario, at the fuel dock."
The empty ship was to load taconite in Chicago and return to Lackawanna. "We all expected a good trip and no trouble," he said of his shipmates.
Only a little spray was coming over the ship as the Morrell headed out for the last run of the season, and what would be the last run in its history, he recalled.
He went to bed at 10:30 that night, Nov. 27, 1966, and was reading when the books flew off his shelf and he was tossed out of his bunk. The horrible banging he heard was the ship being torn to pieces by the storm that mounted 60 mile per hour winds and 30 foot high waves.
Water temperature was 44 and air temperature was 33 when Hale and three shipmates climbed aboard the four foot by eight foot raft, about as big as a sheet of construction plywood. "We could hear the engine labor and the steam escape from her," Mr. Hale recalled.
Rivets popped and the ship was torn like paper all the way up to the hatches, he said. "Over my left shoulder I could see the two sections separate. I closed my eyes and hung on; the next thing I knew I was under water." Hale swam toward the raft, made of two by fours. "One spot in my lung felt like it was afire," he mused, and "the storm was throwing little slivers of ice at us."
His raft mates died quickly and Mr. Hale said he spent most of his time in prayer or playing math games, Monopoly or solitaire in his head. "I just wanted the whole thing to be over."
He told of shoving his hands as far down his throat as he could trying to keep them warm, or perhaps cause him to gag and end his pain. He also recalled rubbing a flare gun in desperate attempts to keep warm after he fired the flares in an effort to attract attention.
He is a maritime celebrity now, featured on a program called "Dive Detectives" on the National Geographic Channel, and is promoting his books "Sole Survivor," and a new issue "Shipwreck: Reflections of the Sole Survivor."
There are so many mysteries:
Why did he live when at times he wanted to die?
What physical phenomenon caused him to live 38 hours aboard a raft in icy temperatures while others quickly perished?
What happened to three of the 29 shipmates who disappeared without a trace?
Why did the Leviathan, one of the longest ships on the lakes, snap in two?
Why didn't residents of a nearby farm house on the shore in Sanilac County not see one of the six flares he fired from the raft?
Was he saved to tell his story and give faith to other humans in distress?
And, most of all: who was that strange, white, bearded ghostly figure who gave him advice after three companions on a small raft had frozen to death? The man had bushy eyebrows, a white complexion with a bluish tint and a neatly trimmed white moustache, he recalled.
The ghostly apparition told him not to eat the ice off his jacket, explaining that would lower his body temperature dangerously.
He theorized that he was near death when in his mind he was hovering above the raft looking down at his body and those of his dead shipmates.
"Suddenly I was spinning and very happy; I felt surrounded by love and was pulled backward into a bright light. There was a vivid green field and his mother beckoned him over a footbridge toward a fence where his relatives waited.
One dreamlike figure wearing a crown said: "Let's see what you learned," he heard them say. My whole life passed before me. My mother told me "I have waited so long to meet you." Shipmates also were at the bottom of a hill, "so innocent and childlike, laughing, crying and hugging me."
Suddenly, the Morrell's chief engineer was there. "Dennis, what are you doing here? It's not your time." He continued: "Then I was thirsty and I called to the guy who told me to stop eating ice. "He shook his finger at me."
Just then Mr. Hale recalled he awakened when a Coast Guard helicopter whirred overhead. He was taken to Harbor Beach Community Hospital and was given the last rites of the Catholic Church and a priest heard his confession three times.
He recalls doctors telling him the heart stops at 94 degrees and that his heart was then at 94 degrees.
His skin was blue with purple splotches.
A representative of Bethlehem Steel and a Coast Guard official came to see him and after five days he was transported by ambulance to Cleveland. On January 6 he took off his boots and his socks were full of blood. He had 11 surgeries in all on his feet.
The white-haired resident of Ashtabula, Ohio, the port where he shipped out in 1966, talks openly of seeing a psychiatrist and spending long agonizing years of post traumatic stress syndrome after the sinking.
Physically, he said, he is fine except for losing a couple of toes and part of his left foot from frostbite.
Some of the answers to the mysteries plaguing the incident have been pretty much resolved, according to Mr. Hale.
He lived because, unlike his companions, he was dressed only in his undershorts, a life jacket and a pea coat. If he had been wearing pants, they undoubtedly would have frozen and lowered his body temperature. Also, the lifejacket of kapok and heavy pea coat insulated his lungs and kept them from freezing. He theorizes that's what killed his mates aboard the raft.
The steel hull of the Morrell became brittle over the 60 years it was afloat and thus was susceptible to the 30 foot high waves that wracked it that fearsome night on the rampaging lake.
Although he saw the lights in a farmhouse ashore go on and off during his day and a half ordeal, he doesn't understand why the residents didn't see the flares. In fact, he worried that one flare he fired toward the house might set it afire.
Other lingering questions revolve around the priest who heard his post-sinking confessions and why he advised Mr. Hale not to talk of his out-of-body experiences. "After that," he said, "I had a problems with my faith."
He still wonders what prompted the strange query posed to him by a rescuing Coast Guardsman. Did you happen to grab your sailing papers when you left the ship?
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