The Mystery Behind the Sunken World War II ‘Ghost Boat’ on Shasta Lake
There have been plenty of historic structures revealed on Shasta Lake during severe drought. With multiple historic towns sitting underneath the water at Shasta Lake, there’s plenty of history to explore when water levels drop to extremely low levels. But when it comes to sunken items under the water on Shasta Lake, one boat stands above the rest as the most mysterious.
When water levels dropped on the lake in the fall of 2021, a sunken boat revealed itself near Bridge Bay Marina. A sunken boat in Shasta Lake isn’t that out of the ordinary, except when the boat is a relic from World War II, and no one knows how the heck it got there.
After a year of research, officials from the National Forest Service have identified the boat as one assigned to the Attack Transport USS Monrovia, which was General George Patton’s HQ during the invasion of Sicily. Dwight D. Eisenhower was also assigned to the ship during this time and it went on to a further 6 D-Day invasions in the Pacific, including the invasion of Tarawa.
How this boat arrived in Shasta Lake remains a mystery, but officials plan to restore it and display it at a museum in Nebraska. The boat will go under the name “Higgins Boat,” but locals continue to refer to it as the Ghost Boat.
Here’s video of the boat when it was found in September 2021:
So how the heck did this World War II relic sink on Shasta Lake? We may never know.