The Mysterious Vanishing of Merrian Carver While at Sea

Rarely does a missing person’s case embody the phrase “vanished without a trace” quite as much as Merrian Carver’s story.

The 40-year-old investment banker turned poet booked herself a luxurious Alaskan cruise in August 2004.

Merrian didn’t tell anyone she’d booked the cruise and kept the spontaneous vacation to herself.

The mother-of-one treated herself to a seven-day voyage on a Celebrity Cruise Lines ship named Mercury and set sail on the open ocean.

However, she’d never return from the trip.

When other passengers alighted the ship a week later, Merrian was nowhere to be seen. She’d undoubtedly boarded the cruise and was there for the first day or so.

Her belongings in her room proved as much. Then, she suddenly vanished, as if she’d never been aboard the ship in the first place.

The aftermath only added to the mystery of Merrian’s disappearance. The cruise company was made well aware one of their customers had vanished but did little to investigate.

In fact, they bundled up her belongings from her room and donated them to charity. They didn’t contact Merrian’s family or even acknowledge her disappearance until weeks after the fact.

Her family tirelessly tried to determine what happened to Merrian, though each line of inquiry was quickly shut down.

This is the strange (and still inexplicable) tale of Merrian Carver.

The Fateful Cruise

In late summer 2004, Merrian booked a last-minute getaway, telling nobody of her plans.

This was a little unusual for her, though Merrian was known to be introspective and quiet and perhaps needed a break from the hustle and bustle of life to enjoy a week alone at sea.

The former investment banker from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who left behind her 13-year-old daughter, took off on a mini adventure on the Alaskan coastline.

The avid poetry writer was perhaps looking to garner some inspiration for her prose since her book of writing was one of the possessions she took with her.

She’d never get to write anything in it, however.

Merrian set off from Seattle on the Mercury on August 28. She was captured on CCTV getting on the ship and appeared to settle in her cabin and put her belongings away.

After the first night, though, things turned sinister. She was never seen on the ship again.

The ship’s steward would notice Merrian missing from her room, her things untouched, and her bed unslept in. This caused him some alarm since there was nowhere else for Merrian to go but her room.

Unless, of course, she’d chosen to accept an invite to someone else’s room, though this seemed unlikely. He reported his concern to his supervisor.

The next day, the steward again noticed Merrian’s room untouched, with everything in the same place as it had been the day prior. For five days straight, the room remained unused.

The worker reported his concerns for five days straight to his boss, who simply told him to just “do his job and forget it.”

Although the stewards’ concerns were dismissed, there was no hiding his worry about the missing passenger. After all, there was only one way off the ship between taking off and docking.

When the cruise came to an end, everyone but Merrian alighted the ship. Her belongings remained as they had been all week: unused in her room.

Still, this didn’t spark a flurry of concern or make anyone question her well-being. The cruise company kept her things for a short while before giving them to charity.

At this point, no attempt was made to contact her family to give them her clothing and personal items.

Despite the cruise company’s knowledge that Merrian suddenly vanished while on the ship and didn’t exit the ship, no attempt was made to contact the authorities.

This inaction delayed anybody’s search for her. Her family was unaware she’d taken a vacation, and her daughter lived with her father, so she wasn’t privy to her mother’s day-to-day life.

However, when Merrian didn’t contact her child for over a week, the teenager became upset and concerned. Her mother always kept in touch regularly.

She rang her grandfather—Merrian’s dad—to see if he knew where her mother was. He had no clue; after he tried his best to track down his daughter, Kendall Carver contacted Massachusetts Police to report her missing.

The concerned father worked with the police to help retrace her movements in the weeks prior.

They used her banking records to determine that she’d booked the Alaskan cruise, but the trail went cold after that. At this point, Kendall Carver decided to take matters into his own hands.

He contacted the cruise company, who didn’t immediately deny or confirm that Merrian had been on one of their ships. It took them three days to admit to him that she had indeed gotten on Celebrity Cruise Lines ship Mercury. They couldn’t tell him anything else.

What began as a quiet break for Merrian soon turned into a nightmare for the Carver family.

Negligence At Sea

Hit with brick wall after brick wall by the cruise line, Kendall felt he had no choice but to hire a private investigator to help retrace his daughter’s movements.

The PI would do their best to try to find Merrian but were unsuccessful.

They were, however, able to highlight the cruise company’s indifference toward the woman’s disappearance and noted a number of their systemic failures that blocked anyone from finding out what may have happened to Merrian.

It was ascertained that she certainly did board the ship, but when asked for details about who exited the ship, the company asserted they didn’t have those details.

The Carver family felt this was standard information the cruise line should have had. As Kendall put it, if 2,000 people board one of their ships, the company should know if only 1,999 exited it.

**Celebrity Cruise Lines ship Mercury.**

The lack of cooperation from the cruise line was frustrating and tortuous for the family, but they didn’t give up their investigation.

More details came to light. The steward, who had told his boss about Merrian vanishing from night two of her stay onward, came forward to say he’d tried to draw attention to the issue.

This exposed how his superior decided not to raise the alarm at any point. It also highlighted how quick action could have helped piece the puzzle together: CCTV footage on the ship could have answered the questions surrounding Merrian’s disappearance.

However, their cameras automatically erase their footage after 72 hours.

Then, there was the cold and callous way the company discarded her items after she’d left them in her room. Not only was this morally questionable, but it also destroyed any potential evidence among her belongings.

Months and years passed, and the Carver family was still no closer to finding what had happened to Merrian.

There was little more the police could do, and the cruise company was offering no help. In fact, they—and the ship Merrian vanished on—continued business as usual.

Kendall Carver would still persevere in not only trying to find his daughter but also making the world aware of the potentially deadly safety concerns associated with cruising.

Kendall’s Fight For Accountability

“We’ve learned that if something happens on a cruise, you are on your own,” Kendall would say of his daughter’s vanishing.

“We don’t know if Merrian is alive or dead. We don’t know if there was an accident or murder or s*icide or something else.”

Spurred by his heartache, Kendall wanted to change the cruise industry, specifically its nonchalant approach to passenger safety.

In 2006, he founded the ICV, the International Cruise Victims Association, which aims to advocate for improved regulations and standards that ensure cruise passengers’ safety.

The charity recounts stories of people who have been victims of abuse or attacks while on a cruise and highlights cases where the policies of the cruise company prevented justice from taking place.

Kendall’s main priority when founding the charity was to hold these companies accountable and encourage better safety measures.

In 2010, he had a breakthrough: the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act was passed by then-president Barack Obama.

It mandated the reporting of crimes and missing persons and the preservation of evidence such as CCTV.

If both of these things had been in place in 2004, it’s likely the Carver family would have known what happened to Merrian. Or, perhaps, she wouldn’t have vanished at all.

The act also saw the implementation of new, life-saving safety measures onboard all cruise ships.

Although these changes may seem like regular safety measures to most people, they were hard-fought victories won by Kendall and fueled by his daughter’s disappearance.

Sadly, in 2019, aged 83, Kendall passed away. While he never found out what happened to Merrian, he made huge waves regarding maritime safety for passengers.

The more time passes, the less likely it is that we’ll ever truly know what happened to Merrian Carver. There’s no physical evidence remaining and no video footage to refer to.

Cracking this case would hinge on a witness coming forward, which isn’t likely after two decades.

Still, stranger things have happened, and no missing persons case can ever be truly closed for good.