he Phantom Clipper Ship

aron Von Lodge was the head of a small country known as Lilliland near Switzerland. The time was the early 1900s.

Three or four times a year the Baron would receive reports of a ghostlike object that hovered above Castle Lake. Castle Lake was a very large lake and Lilliland Castle was built very near the shore. The Baron could see the lake from nearly every window in the castle and was very concerned about any unusual activities on or near the lake.

The strange object that was seen hovering above the lake looked like an old clipper ship that sank over 100 years ago in the Mediterranean Sea directly south of Lilliland. The ship went down in a storm with the entire crew and a cargo of precious gold coins that were minted in 1707. Each coin had an image of a swan engraved on it. The clipper ship seemed to just vanish off the face of the earth.

The images over Castle Lake were always sighted during a full moon at midnight when there was an eerie layer of fog and mist coming off the lake.

The baron called on his chief advisor, Professor Hamblin, to investigate the sightings. The Professor ordered and received the manifest of the crew, cargo and description of the lost vessel, the "Kinnear." The manifest contained the names of some of the people who were ancestors of some of the current residents of Lilliland. After the Professor spoke with the relatives, he discovered that each of the families told and retold the story of the clipper ship from one generation to the next.

The Baron and the Professor stood in the exact spot near the lake where people saw the phantom clipper ship hovering over Castle Lake. They waited until midnight of the next full moon. The night they selected was the right time and exact location as a thick mist began to rise over the lake. As the moonbeams reflected from the snow covered Alpine Mountain tops and filtered through the mist, it made a strange formation. The shape looked like many things and it was possible that some relatives of the ship's crew might see it as the phantom clipper ship.

The Professor knew that all the sightings had been made by relatives of the crew of the "Kinnear," and since they all knew the story as told to them in their childhood, the suggestion was what really made them see what they wanted to see, and it was very real to all of them. But, in reality, it was only the moonlight reflecting off the mountain and through the lake mist. But after the event, the Professor was shown two gold coins that had been minted in 1707 with swans engraved on them. They had been found in shallow water near the edge of Castle Lake.