Cruise Ship Secrets: Staff Reveal Most Shocking Incidents Kept Secret From Passengers

Some 28.5 million persons traveled aboard cruise ships worldwide in 2018, said the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA). That's a seven percent increase from 2017.

Americans and Canadians are the most avid cruise ship passengers in the world. In 2018, half this total -- or 14.2 million passengers -- came from the U.S. and the Great White North. North Americans like to travel to the nearby Caribbean, Bahamas and Bermuda -- all of them with warm, tropical climates. It's also this search for sun and sand that makes Mediterranean destination the fastest growing cruise ship destination for North Americans. More than 700,000 passengers from North America took a cruise on the Mediterranean in 2018, up 29 percent from 2017.

But there's a seamy side to this bright and warm picture. It consists of drunken fights, sexual escapades, suicides, murders and petty crimes that occur every year aboard cruise ships but are kept under lock and key and hushed up. Who wants to spoil a multi-billion dollar industry anyway?

When talking about cruise ship passengers, it would be wise to remember the average age of a passenger is 47 years-old, according to CLIA. This fact led one former cruise ship crewman to quip in a Reddit thread that "People drop dead all the time, especially on some of the nicer lines that are basically floating retirement homes."

One dark secret that keeps making the headlines are passengers and crew that jump overboard. Some of these jumpers apparently committed suicide. Others jumped ship. A few were murdered while there's a case of two people falling off a cruise ship as they were vomiting violently.

From 2000 to 2016, almost 300 people jumped overboard from cruise ships and ferries, according Ross Klein, a professor in the School of Social Work at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, who compiles this data. Of this total, Carnival Corporation confirmed 129 incidents on the various cruise lines it owns, including Carnival Cruise Line, Holland America Line and Costa Cruises.

Cruise ship staff 'Oh s--t' moments

In a thread posted on Reddit a year ago, one user asked cruise ship workers "what was the biggest 'oh s--t' moment on the boat, that luckily, passengers didn’t find out about at all?" The post has gotten over 40,000 upvotes and 6,900 comments. Among them are some interesting stories.

One Redditor claimed he had seen at least three deaths a month on the cruise ship he worked on. Cruise Ship Critic, a cruise review community website, puts the number of deaths on cruise ships at three per week worldwide.

It's not well known all cruise ships have morgues for just this eventuality. The bodies of deceased jumpers, or persons that die aboard the ship, are stored in the refrigerated morgue until the ship docks. Laws also mandate cruise ships carry body bags.

The size of the morgue depends on the size of the ship. Should there not be enough space, crews "get creative" and store the corpses in food refrigerators.

A former employee commented, "There were small refrigerators on the ships that, from memory, could take one or two corpses, but the contingency plan was to use a walk-in freezer. If it got really bad then the bodies can be flown back anyway."

Another redditor shared, "I used to be a crew member ... A lot of s--t happens onboard, I could write a book, maybe even more than one. Also, everytime we had ice cream at the crew restaurant, people would say it was because they had to empty the freezer to put a dead body."

The same user shared a story when an super drunk cruise ship crew member jumped overboard and was rescued several hours after by the coast guard. The incident was kept from passengers, until the captain accidentally announced over the PA system.

"Everybody was asked to be discrete in order to keep the cruise running smooth, and everything was fine until the captain came on the PA and said we were delayed because a crew member jumped overboard," he shared.

"The madness begins, rumors appear out of nowhere, and the rest of the cruise was pretty much guests asking what happened the whole time."

Another user noted how many cruise ship passengers die during a trip: "People drop dead all the time, especially on some of the nicer lines that are basically floating retirement homes ... One of the ships I worked on a guest jumped off an open deck while we were at sea. He survived though, I think he was super drunk more than he was suicidal."

Klein estimates 11 percent of cases involving people jumping overboard were confirmed suicides and said so in a 2013 written testimony for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.