Cleethorpes has more than one genuinely documented case of a vessel being found driven ashore along its coast with no one aboard, a small but real local tradition of ghost ship stories built not on invented legend but on actual, recorded maritime mysteries. The best recorded of these is the schooner Clio, found beached at Cleethorpes in March 1870 with her crew entirely missing, the vessel having last been known to have departed from Lowestoft in Suffolk before whatever happened to end her voyage so strangely.
What makes the Clio's case genuinely eerie rather than simply a routine shipwreck is a specific physical detail: her lifeboat was found nearby with its oars still lashed carefully in place, exactly as they would have been stored for an ordinary, uneventful voyage rather than launched in any kind of emergency evacuation. No trace of what actually happened to the crew between their departure from Lowestoft and the ship's unexplained, crewless landing at Cleethorpes was ever established, leaving a genuine maritime mystery rather than merely a folk tale.
The story sits naturally within the same broad tradition as the internationally famous Mary Celeste case from just two years later, a ship found sailing with no crew and no clear explanation, though the Cleethorpes incidents are considerably more local in scale and far less documented in the wider historical record than their more famous counterpart. They are included here as a genuine, if thin, piece of Lincolnshire coastal folklore rather than as simply an unsolved maritime mystery filed away and forgotten, the Clio's lashed oars a small, haunting detail that has kept her story alive along this stretch of coast for over a century and a half.
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