The ships that responded to the SOS were reported to have discovered all the crew dead with their eyes open and their faces frozen in shock, as if they were witnessing a horrific scene.
As they subsequently prepared to tow the Ourang Medan to port, a fire reportedly broke out in the hold resulting in its eventual sinking, hiding it and its mysteries forever.
The 1940 version of the story describes rescue vessels approaching the ship listing in the water, and upon boarding locating multiple crew dead at their posts.
According to one version of the story, at some point of time in or around June 1947, two American vessels navigating the Straits of Malacca, the City of Baltimore and the Silver Star, among others passing by, picked up several distress messages from the nearby Dutch merchant ship Ourang Medan.
[10] When the Silver Star crew eventually located and boarded the apparently undamaged Ourang Medan in an attempt at a rescue, the ship was found littered with corpses (including the carcass of a dog) everywhere, with the dead bodies found sprawled on their backs, the frozen (and allegedly badly-frightened) faces of the deceased upturned to the sun above with mouths gaping open and eyes staring straight ahead, with the corpses resembling horrible caricatures.
[7][11] Some versions of the story attribute further details to the sole survivor, an unnamed German, of the Ourang Medan crew, who swam to safety, and was subsequently found by an Italian missionary and natives on Taongi Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
According to the story, the Ourang Medan was sailing from an unnamed small Chinese port to Costa Rica, and deliberately avoided the authorities.
Bainton and others hypothesize that Ourang Medan might have been involved in smuggling operations of chemical substances such as a combination of potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin or even wartime stocks of nerve agents.
According to these theories, sea water would have entered the ship's hold, reacting with the cargo to release toxic gases, which then caused the crew to succumb to asphyxia and/or poisoning.
Escaping carbon monoxide would have caused the deaths of all aboard, with the fire slowly spreading out of control, leading to the vessel's ultimate destruction.
[7] One of the earliest incarnations of the story is first recounted in Il Piccolo, the local paper of Trieste, in a series of “I drammi del mare” (Dramas of the Sea) authored by Silvio Scherli from 1940.
While author Roy Bainton states that the identity of the Silver Star, reported to have been involved in the failed rescue attempt, has been established with a high probability, the complete lack of information on the sunken ship itself has given rise to suspicion about the origins and credibility of the account.
Bainton and others have put forward the possibility that accounts of, among others, the date, location, names of the ships involved, and circumstances of the accident might have been inaccurate or exaggerated, or that the story might be completely fictitious.