There's an ancient superstition that sailors still adhere to today.

Once a boat has been christened, you don't change your name.

Supposedly renaming a boat guarantees that bad luck will follow.

This may go a long way toward explaining how a luxury yacht turned wartime submarine chaser turned charter fishing boat, turned sightseeing cruise ship, which was renamed each time its job changed, ended up deserted and decaying.

2600 miles inland from the oceans she once proudly sailed.

This is the USS Sachem, the ghost ship grounded in a Boone County Creek.

That was referred to as the Ghost Ship.

And it's very creepy looking.

It's this old, you know, hulking mass of metal that's sitting in this little tiny creek.

And it looks sort of gray and a little bit spooky.

And I quickly learned it was not that and that it had a really rich, interesting history.

And so I kind of had to backpedal and learn a little bit more about why this huge boat is stuck in a tiny creek in Boone county.

The U.S. Sachem or the Sachem is a boat that was initially built as a luxury yacht.

They started building it in 1901.

I don't know too many vessels of that class that have the colorful history that that one does.

I mean, to go from one of the most expensive steam yachts ever built top notch everything to serving in two world wars and being, you know, metal plated.

A sightseeing boat in New York and then in a madonna video.

And then miraculously sail from New York to a creek in Kentucky.

That's just stuff that folk tales are made out of.

The whole is made of Carnegie Steel.

I mean, it was very well-built.

You can only see it from the river unless you look online and see it there.

Most people wouldn't know it was there.

You know, word of mouth potentially, but it's not visible from any sort of public space other than the river.

It attracts attention for people who are specifically looking for it.

Robert Miller came along and he was looking for an old steam yacht with visions of fixing it up.

And in living aboard.

And so that's why it was put into the creek in sort of a you know, it's sort of a private harbor that way when he was planning on on restoring it.

And then things changed.

So it remained there and the property also changed hands.

The current property owner and neighbors respect the Sachem's unique role in America's history.

But the people who come looking for the boat don't respect the private property or the no trespassing signs, which makes their safety a constant concern.

So the path that the Sachem took from New York to get to Boone County is is a route called the Great Loop.

And the great loop goes from the Hudson River in New York through the Erie Canal, up into the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi to the Ohio.

It spent most of its early history in the New York area, although it traveled quite a bit when it was first built.

It was a private vessel and it was luxurious.

But the interior sounds amazing.

It's mahogany and it's, you know, this luxurious vessel.

But when World War One happened, we needed boats.

And so the Navy would requisition private vessels.

And those boats were a little more agile than some of the bigger military boats.

And I think that's why they wanted them, because they were worried about the German U-boats.

And so they wanted vessels that could be light enough and agile enough to get away and get around them.

And so it was less about them being put into a combat position and more about them doing a recon job and warning other larger vessels.

Things like portholes were covered over and the extra plating put on where it needed to be.

It was armed, it had depth charges and a single light machine type gun on the front.

And then, you know, all the decking was plated and, you know, everything was stripped down to be a vessel.

Thomas Edison was on the ship during World War One doing experiments on submarine detection and and mine detection and and things like that.

So he actually had a lab on the vessel.

He lived in that ship in the course of both world wars.

It served as a training vessel.

It patrolled the waters of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico after the Second World War, and it became a fishing vessel.

And they would take fishing charters out because it could go farther out.

That's how it was built.

The Circle Line bought it, retooled it to be a tour vessel and be able to hold and seat hundreds of people on the deck.

And that's where it lived.

A lot of its life in the seventies and eighties was as touring New York Harbor.

The Madonna thing is probably the best known thing.

And so apparently the story is that.

Robert Miller was was working on it to get it running so he could bring it back to Kentucky.

And all of a sudden a black limo pulls up and.

And it's an assistant or something.

And they want to know if they can use the boat for the Papa Don't Preach video Some groups have formed to try to fundraise for this, and people who really believe in that and really want to see it back on the water again.

When Robert Miller got the boat, it was in the Hudson.

It was stuck in some river sludge.

It took ten days to get it out and they had to use bulldozers.

It's hard to imagine how much money it would take today to remove the Sachem from the creek waters that submerged her whenever the river floods.

And every time that happens, it causes a little bit more damage each time.

And in five years, you're not going to be able to pull it out of there, you know, unless you take it in pieces.

The vandalism might be the downfall of it before the elements are.

You know, you don't see a boat of that that that size and purpose here very often.

So it's I think that's part of the reason that people are so fascinated.

It was used for all these cool things and it has this amazing history and I think just nature took its toll and circumstance took its toll.

The years in Boone County haven't been kind to the Sachem, but she deserves to be remembered as she was in her glory years, sailing proudly through America's 20th century.