Ghost Stories

At one point on my first hitch on this rig, I overheard someone mention that it was haunted. I was instantly intrigued, and I also managed to hear what sounded to me like the rig was previously a hotel where a lot of people died of unnatural causes at one point.

Now this sounded rather far-fetched so I dismissed it as complete fiction, but I was still fascinated.

A couple of days ago I heard the full story. In 1988 there was a major disaster in the North Sea where the Piper Alpha production platform exploded, killing 167 oilfield workers. More info can be found here. According to the story, this rig (before they stuck a derrick on top) was the living quarters where much of the crew for the Piper Alpha lived, separately from the platform itself.

Of course this sounds almost as far-fetched as the hotel story, and it also incites me to dissect it. If the men were killed on the production platform, then why would they haunt the living quarters? And for that matter, how does one haunt an oil rig? The standard ghostly sounds would be completely drowned out by the constant background noise from the rig operations, and any cold chills one might get from a passing specter would be indistinguishable from the over-enthusiastic air conditioning.

I suppose the only effective haunting methods would be those of mischievous poltergeists. They could hide our tools or cause small failures to happen (or whip up the winds so that we cannot load the needed mud into the tanks?). Whatever it is, I'm still skeptical of the entire idea that this rig is haunted, regardless that the whimsical part of me wishes it were true.