A Rogue's Gallery of Haunted Spaceships

Though spaceships exist firmly in the realm of science and rationality, that doesn't mean they can't be invaded by fantastical visions and spooky ghosts. Here's a gallery of space vessels whose crews aren't entirely of this universe.

As I was putting together this gallery, I noticed a few themes in the depictions of haunted spaceships. First, the ships themselves tend to be spidery or spiked looking - or in the case of Event Horizon, the ship seems to have a skull-like face. But the interiors of the ships also share characteristics, such as long, weirdly-lit corridors, and giant windows whose view onto a bright universe leaves the crew in demonic shadow.

The videogame Dead Space has some of the most magnificent portraits of haunted spaceships and space facilities, which themselves seem to have giant wounds.

Many of the spaceships we see depicted as haunted, of course, are ultimately suffering from some kind of weird phenomenon that can eventually be explained. The most common explanation - which we see in Solaris, Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Blake's 7, and others, is that there is some kind of technology that manifests the contents of people's unconscious minds (this idea goes back to the Krell technology in Forbidden Planet). So people think they are seeing the dead, but they are just seeing what's in their own brains.

Thanks to TV Tropes!