Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman (named after the legend popularized by Richard Wagner in an opera of the same name) is cursed to go Walking the Earth (or sailing or flying or...) forever. Most versions of this fall into one of two types: the Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail the seas, and the Wandering Jew, forced to wander the earth.

The Wandering Jew story can be traced to medieval Christianity—in particular, a reference to Matthew 16:28, wherein Jesus states that some of the people listening to him speak would not die prior to Jesus "coming in his kingdom," which some believe to be a reference to the Second Coming. Since many ordinary lifespans had passed between Jesus' speech and the time of its progenitors, the myth arose that at least one of those ancient audience members had been for some reason sentenced to immortality.

The Flying Dutchman variant (sources differ on whether Flying Dutchman was the name of the ship or a nickname for her captain) first popped up in the seventeenth century, and was said to be an old sailing superstition.

A more modern variant (though still quite old: Edward Everett Hale's short story The Man Without a Country dates to 1863) has the victims unable to ever stop wandering not because of being cursed by God, but due to lack of a passport, being an exile, or other bureaucratic bungle they just don't have the paperwork to stop. However, this also has variants where the character, instead of wandering, ends up stuck in an airport or the like, which moves it rather far from the original trope.

When done by choice, this becomes Walking the Earth. If the cause is pursuit, it's a Stern Chase instead. May also have overlap with Noble Fugitive. The cursed character can sometimes be co-opted as The Drifter, or if they're specifically out to do good, a Knight Errant. And if it's nobody's fault, they may just have No Sense of Direction.

Not to be confused with Wandering Dutchmen such as the traveling theologian and humanist Desiderius Erasmus.

Examples of Flying Dutchman include:

Flying Dutchmen

Anime and Manga

• Male Tsubasa (aka, Syaoran Jr.) of the eponymous Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle becomes this at the end of the story. As payment for continuing to exist after the paradox that is his parentage resolves itself, he may never remain for long in any one dimension, and will forever wander the multiverse. He can, however, stop by in his girlfriend's dimension for a booty call any time he wants, as long as he doesn't stay too long.
  • His time-travel duplicate, Watanuki, has it worse, having inverted the trope hard. Rather than being cursed to wander, he's cursed to be trapped in a single Inn Between the Worlds-type mysterious shop for the rest of his life, although to be fair it is anchored in one place and dimension. He just can't leave.

In the latest chapters, it appears he might be able to travel to certain places he's traveled to before, as a sort of dream travel/spirit/what have you.

• Slayers TRY has an episode about a ghost ship that is cursed to wander the seas because the captain neglected his duties in favor of his hobby: collecting vases.
• The Flying Dutchman appears in One Piece with a reversal of the legend: Instead of being unable to set foot on land again, the captain (who is a fishman) can never swim again due to eating a Devil Fruit.

Comic Books

• Captain Fate in the Marvel Universe. Fate betrayed his captain Maura Hawke, selling her to a satyr in exchange for untold riches. Maura was furious to learn that her crew had truly left her, and she cursed them all to never reach port, never enjoy their new found wealth, and to sail on forever, beyond time, beyond death. The Serpent's Crown lifted off the water into the sky, sailing the space winds for eternity it seemed. Fate and his crew became Space Pirates, occasionally returning to Earth to act as Sky Pirates.
• The Silver Surfer actually battled the Flying Dutchman's ghostly captain in one Silver Age story, and the captain has since appeared once or twice to bedevil The Avengers among others.
• A Romano Scarpa Uncle Scrooge story tells us about the Flying Scotsman, an ancestor of Scrooge's, a former vicious pirate who is kept alive by an oath to atone for the crimes he did against poor villagers. His ship literally flies because it's so old it's completely dried out.
• A The Mighty Thor story has him fighting a ship full of authentic Vikings that were cursed to sail the seas for 1,000 years... until they reached America.

Fan Works

• Douglas Sangnoir of Drunkard's Walk was ejected from his home universe by enemy action, and is searching for it by traveling at random from timeline to timeline (the titular "drunkard's walk").

Film

• Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest pilots a ship called the Flying Dutchman. His original purpose was to ferry souls across the sea at World's End. If his love was waiting after ten years, he could go on land again for a single day with her before returning to his duty for another ten years (and so on for eternity). His love was not waiting, so he abandoned his duties and became a Badass roaming pirate. His crew turned into half-men half-sea-creatures.
• Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a 1951 movie where the Flying Dutchman (James Mason) goes ashore in the 1930's and meets singer Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner).
• While we don't see the character-type, we do see a wrestler with this name in the first Spider Man movie.

Literature

• The Flying Dutchman himself cursed God while trying to sail through the Cape of Good Hope, vowing that he would succeed even if it took him until Judgment Day. He did. And then was forced to sail the seas forever.
  • Wonderfully subverted in Tom Holt's Flying Dutch, where the Flying Dutchman and his crew had accidentally drunk some elixir which gave them immortality, but also the most outrageous body odor for all but one month in every 7 years. In the book, Wagner is said to have been given direct inspiration from the captain of the crew...as well as a weird little psychological hang-up causing him to laugh maniacally upon hearing the name "Philip II of Spain."
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a rare variation on the Flying Dutchman version of this trope, whereby genuine repentance allows the mariner to escape his fate, with the only requirement that he tell his story to other people to warn them off his path.
  • Well, he also still has to move like night from land to land. Repentance just gets him off the ship; it doesn't completely uncurse him.
    • So he's also a Wandering Jew.
      • Actually, he's a slight subversion. Though he is forced to retell his story to other people, he still has an normal lifetime. His curse occurs in his youth and by the time he tells his story, in the poem, he has aged severely.
• The Dune universe has the in-universe legend of Ampoliros: a starship whose crew experiences group psychosis and believes the human race has been wiped out by aliens. They elect to wander the galaxy, taking as many of the aliens with them as they can. The time dilation effect of near light speed travel makes them effectively immortal, every planet is hostile by definition, and any ship is a legitimate target. To make things worse, the men are sick of, and fatigued by, their endless voyage ("forever prepared, forever unready")... but in their minds at least, to stop would spell the end of the human race.
• Robert Bloch published a story in a 1940s pulp magazine in which the captain of the original Flying Dutchman vessel now hijacks a modern subway train, evicting all the passengers except one elderly man and woman. The story consists of a diary kept by the elderly man: he and the woman, captives on the runaway subway train, continue to grow younger as the ancient Dutch sea captain pilots it backwards in time to a rendezvous with his ship.
• Brian Jacques (of Redwall fame) wrote a book called Castaways of the Flying Dutchman, as well as a couple of sequels, which feature not only the original Dutchman but a boy and dog who were allowed to leave the ship because they were pure of heart. An angel grants them immortality and a psychic link with each other, but they end up Walking the Earth and leaving behind everyone they ever love so no one will notice that they never age. The one time the boy tells their secret, it leads to disaster. (Though, really, it seems as if everyone they meet can sense that he's extraordinary just by looking into his eyes.) They're also constantly haunted by nightmares about the Flying Dutchman. Add in that the boy is forever stuck at age 14, and this is a definite case of Blessed with Suck.
  • Well, there was a prophecy in the book where he tells earlier that said that they shouldn't leave until the "Dark Angel" falls. It's obvious that Serafina, a black girl who Ben rescues from slavery is not going to survive the rest of the book, because of how she fits with the prophecy. But its implied that Ben gets a Spirit Advisor, so it's not all bad.
• The titular characters of the Diana Wynne Jones novel The Homeward Bounders, one of whom is the actual Wandering Jew (and another is the actual Flying Dutchman).
• Daniel Pinkwater's book Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario is about a modern cursed Dutchman named Captain Van Straaten who sails Lake Ontario in a self sufficient submarine shaped like a giant pig. The curse is eventually broken not with The Power of Love, but with the use of hydroplaning and a corned-beef sandwich.
• The short story Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, on which a The Real Ghostbusters episode was based, featured a man who swore that if his carriage could not reach his Boston home one night, in spite of a gathering storm, that he might never return...
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Ghost Ship has the crew of a present day Russian naval vessel trapped as disembodied intelligences in a giant space going creature.
• Dragonlance has the Green Gemstone Man, condemned to wander the earth. He had a green gem from a column embedded in his chest; the gem prevented the gods from returning to the world of Dragonlance because the column was incomplete. He could be killed, but would be reincarnated.
• The legend of the Flying Dutchman is mentioned in Swallows and Amazons, in which it's noted that Peter Duck (a seaman who loves the sea so much he considers going in to port for supplies to be an unwelcome necessary evil) would be a perfect choice to captain it.
• In Andre Norton's Sargasso of Space, it's mentioned that the Solar Queen's Cargo Master collects space folklore and is very good at re-telling the stories, especially the story of a ship called the New Hope, which lifted off full of refugees, never landed anywhere, and now is only sighted by ships which are themselves in dire trouble.
  • The main characters of Norton's Galactic Derelict consider the idea that aliens planted legends such as the Flying Dutchman as part of a program to hinder human progress: "...things Man was not meant to know."

Live Action TV

• Andromeda episode The Mathematics of Tears is heavily based on The Flying Dutchman, although the Pax Magellanic's crew are androids controlled by a rogue AI, not cursed humans. The Pax Magellanic draws the parallel herself, and plays the opera music frequently, considering it her theme song.
• The Peter Davison Doctor Who storyline Mawdryn Undead involved a band of alien scientists mutated into horrible pain-wracked forms and unable to die. The scientists sabotaged the TARDIS, leaving it stuck in orbit around the Earth and unable to travel forward or backward in time without killing Nyssa and Tegan, unless the Doctor agreed to sacrifice his life energy to help them end their wretched existence, at the cost of his ability to regenerate. Luckily, there are two Brigadiers wandering around, one from the past and one from the (then) present (it's a long story), and when they meet, they touch hands, causing a discharge of temporal energy at precisely the right instant, which ends the scientists' immortality, and allows the Doctor to remain a Time Lord.
• On an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, Gabrielle gets stuck on the ship of the legendary Cecrops (played by Tony Todd), who is cursed to sail the sea for eternity by Poseidon "until love redeems him." His crew isn't so lucky...they're stuck on the ship until they grow old and die. Cecrops hunts down pirate ships and gang-presses their crews to replenish his own. Xena gets involved, and manages to figure out how to break his curse and get them all off the ship.
• Night Gallery had a slight inversion of this. It involved a ship rescuing a man in a "Titanic" lifeboat, several years after the disaster. The rescuing ship turned out to be the Lusitania. The real curse was for any ship that would try to rescue him.
• The River gives us the Exodus, which also turns its crew into...something.

Music

• In Richard Wagner's adaptation of the legend, the opera Der fliegende Holländer, the title character can be saved by The Power of Love.
  • Wagner lifted the plot from Heinrich Heine's Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski (From the memoirs of Mr. Schnabelewopski, 1838), where there is an at the time entirely fictional play the protagonist sees in Amsterdam. He helpfully ends up the summary: "The moral of the play for women is to watch out not to marry a Flying Dutchman; and we men see from this play that women in the best case cause us to perish."
• Charlie in the folksong M.T.A. is doomed to forever ride the subways under Boston because he has insufficient change to pay the exit fare. He may be the victim of an insidious plan, though: according to the song, his wife hands a sandwich to him every day through the car window—but she never gives him the nickel he needs. Riders of Boston's modern transit system can pay their fares with a stored-value "Charlie Card," named after the song.
  • Again, this has older ancestry—it's based on an 1830 song "The Ship that Never Returned" which, in some versions, has the ship unable to return because it can't pay the docking fees.
  • Irish punk band Dropkick Murphys play an adaptation that replaces Charlie with "Skinhead On The MTBA"—When the conductor asks the skinhead to pay the exit fare, he responds by knocking the conductor out and stealing the train.
    • A variation of this can be found in They Might Be Giants' Shoehorn with Teeth: "He toured the world, with a heavy metal band/But they run out of gas/The plane can never land" which also owes a lot to Chico's speech as an Italian aviator, ending with and that's how we flew to America in A Night at the Opera.
• Invoked in the Jethro Tull song of the same name, which compares Vietnamese refugees and the homeless to the Dutchman.

Tabletop Games

• Used a few times in the Ravenloft setting, most notably with the dark lord Pieter van Reise (a Dutchman Expy) and the cursed Captain Garvin from the Ship of Horror adventure.
• Given a fantasy twist in the Dragon magazine #89 story "Dunkle Zee" by Troy Denning.
• Wulfrik the wanderer in Warhammer Fantasy Battles sails the world in his flying longship. He said that he was the best warrior in the world and was cursed by the gods to try to prove it.
• In the Traveller universe there is a Mythopoeia in-verse myth about the starship Robert-the-Bruce. At the founding of the Sword Worlds the ship had disappeared on a return trip to invite further settlers. According to Sword World's legend it wanders the stars forever and wherever it goes disaster follows behind.

Western Animation

• The Flying Dutchman in SpongeBob SquarePants is more a Peek a Bogey Man than anything else, but there is one episode that gives him a similar back story: his body was used as a window display, and thus never got a proper burial, cursing his spirit to forever wander the seas.
  • In another episode, aptly named "Shanghai'd!" Spongebob and Patrick are pressed into joining him as "ghostly ghost pirates."
  • He also seems to serve as the Grim Reaper of the seas, in the episode where Mr. Krabs's thriftiness goes overboard with the consumption of an extremely old Krabby Patty found on the kitchen floor.

Video Games

• Suikoden IV takes place in an archipelago, so naturally, there's an optional encounter with a particularly creepy-looking Flying Dutchman.
• The ghost ship in the third expansion of Final Fantasy XI, known as both The Black Coffin by the populous, and the Ashuu Talif by its crew and those who know the truth, is manned by a crew who had been killed when their nation was absorbed by the expansion's titular empire. Captain Luzaf's plot for revenge against the Empire is central to the expansion's plot.
• In Silent Hill 2, a magazine tells the story of a ship that disappeared on Toluca Lake, leaving the ghosts of the crew to reach up to boats that pass overhead. In Silent Hill 3, the Sinister Subway is haunted by the wandering ghost of a train suicide, which pushes unsuspecting people onto the tracks.

Real Life

• A garbage barge from Long Island temporarily became a victim of this trope, when it couldn't find a port willing to grant it harbor and accept its load of refuse.
  • Possibly the inspiration for Ben Elton's book Stark (and the short TV series based upon it). "Leper Ships," carrying highly toxic waste endlessly travel between ports, forbidden to unload. The Big Bad of the TV series intends to sink a few bringing about The End of the World as We Know It in a class-5 Apocalypse How. In the book, its observed that such an event is inevitable, given the poor state of repair the Lepers are in. All it would take is one bad storm, and the world ends up poisoned...
• The Mary Celeste was found adrift with its crew missing without a trace. A deserted yacht was found in an eerily similar situation in 2007.
• Some sailing ships had their entire crew wiped out by disease outbreaks.

Wandering Jews

Anime and Manga

• Most Mushishi have a variation of this: they tend to draw Mushi to their location unconsciously, and the only real way to keep it under control is to not stay in any one place for too long. Apart from explaining why Ginko is Walking the Earth, it also serves as a major plot point in the eleventh episode.
• Keel Lorenz, the head of the Government Conspiracy in Neon Genesis Evangelion, has several traits in common with the Wandering Jew; given the timbre of the series, this is pretty much par for the course.
  • Considering that the appendix to the manga version pretty much explicitly states that that's the case, Sadamoto clearly intended that, even if Anno didn't. (Anno wasn't involved in the manga version)
• Kurumi of Presents is cursed to wander the Earth without aging because she didn't receive any presents on her tenth birthday. Until she finally finds her present, she fills the time by giving other people the presents they deserve, or watching what ensues when they receive other presents.
• The man himself shows up in Franken Fran, his body so far gone that masses of insects have replaced his organs. Because he's an immortal bug-man, Fran & Co. think he might be a Nosferatu.^[1] They figure out who he is after he explains that his condition happened after he "mistreated a certain man" and Fran kindly restores his body and is excited at the fact that she can experiment as much as she likes on an apparent immortal; Veronica is less then thrilled, especially after the Wandering Jew says that he's "very tired and wants to rest". They both get their wish when, just as Fran gives him a clean bill of health, he sees a crucifix and liquefies. Veronica notes that he was very glad to see Jesus (he was staying as far from humans as possible and probably never seen a crucifix before) and finally rest.
  • Actually there is a bit more to that. He sees a vision of Jesus and begs for forgiveness. Jesus says something along the lines of "There is always forgiveness." And he dies. This is one of the few cases of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane that appear in the series.

Comic Books

• In J. Michael Straczynski's Midnight Nation comic book, Lazarus, after being resurrected by Christ, found himself without purpose. Finally, Jesus tells Lazarus to await his return, then goes off to the Last Supper. Lazarus, now a wandering homeless man, is still waiting.

David Grey: Jesus Christ!
Lazarus: Where?

• In Never Never, the Black Knight's back story is a Roman version of the Wandering Jew.
• In The DCU, one of The Phantom Stranger's purported origins—he has four, and DC will never say which if any of them is the real one—is that he is the Wandering Jew. (The other three also involve him being some kind of Flying Dutchman, but not the Wandering Jew. Clear?)
• The immortal Hob Gadling in The Sandman was once accused of being the Wandering Jew.

Tavern Boy: They say that once every century, the Devil and the Wandering Jew meet in a tavern for a drink.
Morpheus: I assure you, sir, I am no devil.
Hob: And I'm not Jewish.

• In Alan Moore's one-shot Majestic, set in the Wildstorm Universe, Superman counterpart Mr. Majestic is one of the last surviving beings at the end of the universe along with the Wandering Jew himself, who's lived so long he's forgotten his name, his species, his planet of origin (he DOES remember he and Majestic both spent a while on it, though)...
• Jack from Fables and Jack Of Fables is apparently of the Jack O'Lantern variant, except his deal with the devil will eventually expire—so he needs to find a different version of the devil every few hundred years in order to make a deal for more time.

Film

• The Angels of Dogma have been cast out of heaven and banished to Wisconsin for all of human existence.
• In Dracula 2000, Dracula himself is one. He is Judas Icariot, and only dies when the heroes discover who he is, and that the rope broke when he tried to kill himself. They hang him and he dies.
• In The Green Mile, Tom Hanks' character faces this for his participation in executing the Magical Negro who is implied to be Jesus. This is a combination of Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck, as while he retains youth beyond his age, he still ends up in a nursing home with all of his friends and loved ones long dead.
  • This one is probably a reference to some versions of the legend of Longinus.
• The Demi Moore vehicle The Seventh Sign features a priest who turns out to be the legendary wandering Roman. He is forced to wander the earth until the second coming, and is thus trying to bring it about.
  • He's actually cursed to wander the Earth until the end of days, which will come when there are no more souls to be born. There's a way to replenish the supply of unborn souls, and that is what he wants to prevent. Christ is already back, and is trying to stop him.

Literature

• Older Than Feudalism: The biblical Cain was cursed by God to Walk The Earth for killing his brother. The Mark Of Cain that goes with this immortal homelessness is supposed to show that he's under God's protection and any harm done to him will be avenged.
• In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is cursed to never be able to go home (though the gods later relent). Apart from being stuck on one island for a long while, he spends most of his ten years on boats. Which keep sinking. Making him a hybrid Ahauserus-Dutchman thing, though of course older than either.
• In Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, the three rioters are approached by an old man doomed to wonder the Earth - he is frustrated that Death has not come for him. One interpretation is that he was the Wandering Jew.
• As Hyperion is pretty much The Canterbury Tales In Space!, there is a man called the Wandering Jew by many people. However, that man, Sol Weintraub, is not an actual example; while he does search for a cure to his daughter's temporal illness, his wandering comes to an abrupt end when he finally meets the Shrike.
  • Illium by the same author also features a character called the Wandering Jew: her name is Savi and she's the last human left after the rest of the race was either wiped out by a virus, transformed into godlike "post-humans", trapped in a beam of blue light, or engineered into placid "eloi" and left behind.
• Baron Parok in David Eddings' Tamuli is subjected to an interesting variant, where he is not only put into an alternative, eternal time-frame, where he will wander forever in an unchanging world, but also set on fire with a flame that will never go out.
• There's a short story about a man who, as a teenager, had stormed out of his parents' house and vowed never to come home for a hundred years. The end result was that he stopped aging sometime in adulthood, became uneasy and restless whenever he became attached to somewhere he'd been staying, and eventually had to leave it all behind every time—and, since so many years had passed by that point, he'd long since forgotten the reason. It actually ends happily, though--his love interest chooses to accompany him on his endless journey.
• In The Riftwar Cycle, it is suggested that the actual Wandering Jew, cursed to be immortal by Jesus, was the father of Macros the Black, a powerful sorcerer who inherited his immortality. The description of the condemned man who cursed his father does sound like Jesus, right down to the holy artifacts that sprung up after his death including a cup (The Holy Grail) and a cloak (The Shroud of Turin). Considering that it's revealed later that Macros was lying about his origins when he told Pug and Tomas that story, the truth may be stranger still.
  • For that matter, Macros himself is a Wandering Jew figure, as most of the origins he gives for himself and most of the evidence to back them up suggest divine influence upon his life and wanderings.
• A variant seen on occasion has the Wandering Jew as Judas Iscariot, cut down after his hanging and resurrected by Christ with the promise of redemption once He returns. For an example of this, see Angels of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green.
• The titular characters of the Diana Wynne Jones novel The Homeward Bounders, one of whom is the actual Wandering Jew (and another is the actual Flying Dutchman).
• Each part of Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (which take place hundreds of years apart) features a very similar old Jewish man, and it's hinted that he might have been the Beatus Leibowitz from Twenty Minutes Into the Future. He explicitly denies this, but there are other implications that there's more to him than meets the eye.
  • At one point he scrawls the Hebrew letters for (at least the beginning of) the name "Lazarus" into the ground, indicating that perhaps what Jesus raised up was hard to put down. He apparently will make it to the stars with the surviving remnant of Mankind.
• In both Cryptonomicon (WWII to present) and The Baroque Cycle (Baroque period) by Neal Stephenson, a character named Enoch Root appears. This is a subversion, however, because he's actually a Jesuit.
  • In The Baroque Cycle we learn that he was an alchemist before becoming a Jesuit, and there are hints that he may have found the Philosopher's Stone, which grants eternal life... then again, there are also hints that he was just that way all along.
  • His name is a pun on the * NIX command "chroot" and the man Enoch in the Bible, who never died.
• The death of the Wandering Jew is an incidental part of Eugene Sue's massive potboiler, Le Juif Errant (1844–45).
• The Wandering Jew is the star of clergyman George Croly's Salathiel (1829).
• Nathan Brazil, the immortal guardian of the universe in Jack Chalker's Well World series, is said (in-story) to be the likely inspiration for both the Flying Dutchman and wandering Jew legends since he is Jewish and his favorite occupation is ship captain.
• The drifter Elijah in The Yiddish Policemens Union is representative of all the Sitka Jews' imminent exile. He is even described as speaking his Yiddish with a slight Dutch accent.
• In "A Terrible Vengeance", by Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol, a Cossack named Petro murders his brother, Ivan, and Ivan's young son. When Petro finally dies, God summons the souls of both brothers together and commands Ivan to choose his brother's punishment. Ivan decides that Petro should be sealed under the mountains and forced to gnaw at his own bones; once he has been punished sufficiently, he will rise up from the earth for a climactic brother-to-brother throw down. God, displeased, decrees Ivan will not be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven either until their final duel. Ivan - with his son tied behind him - is forced to wander eternally on horseback, waiting for Petro's punishment to be completed.
• The Mike Resnick short story How I Wrote the New Testament, Ushered in the Renaissance, and Birdied the 17th Hole at Pebble Beach goes for a humorous take on the story.
• The speaker of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer laments his roamings over the earth and sea as an exile, having lost his lord and his companions to war and fate. The images and devices of the poem invoke not only the Wandering Jew story, but also the lore of Wodan, suggesting archetypal similarities between the Germanic god and this trope. The similarity is not unprecedented: German philologist Karl Blind discusses the correlation in his paper, "Wodan, the Wild Huntsman, and the Wandering Jew."
• Simon Ark claims to be over 2000 years old and says that he was cursed by God for refusing to allow Jesus to rest while he was carrying the Cross. Whether this is true, a delusion, or an elaborate deception on Simon's part is left as an exercise for the reader.
• He appears as the main character of the short story titled "King of the planet" by Wilson Tucker.
• The title character of the Indigo series, on account of having let the sealed evil out of its can. Of course, it ends up being more complicated than that.
• Casca the Eternal Mercenary, a series by Barry Sadler, centers on Casca Rufio Longinus, the Roman legionary who thrust his spear into Jesus' side on the cross. He's cursed by Jesus to not only walk the earth til the Last Judgement, but to always be a soldier as well. While he can't be killed, he still feels pain when injured.

Jesus: "Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again. As I go now to my Father, you must one day come to me."

• In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the dead businessman Jacob Marley is punished for his selfishness by being forced to spend eternity as a ghost walking the Earth, burdened with heavy chains.
  • And he has a lot of company, whom Scrooge is briefly enabled to see. All of them are also cursed with greater than human empathy, so they are eternally tormented by their inability to lessen the suffering of others.
• The legend of the Wandering Londoner in The Caves of Steel.
• In George R. R. Martin's s-f novella "The Way of Cross and Dragon," a controversial faith of the distant future identified the Wandering Jew as a repentant Judas.
• Played for laughs in The Little Golden Calf with Ostap telling a humorous story about the Wandering Jew's final death. He was shot by Red October era Ukrainian nationalists, who were hugely antisemitic and hugely ignorant about Christian folklore, so when the Jew complained and tried to tell he's immortal, they didn't listen and shot him anyway.

Live Action TV

• In The Incredible Hulk, Doctor David Banner is forced to Walk the Earth because he is wanted by the federal government and military, whereas, in the comic, most of the wandering was done by his alter ego leaping from one location to another.
• Dr. Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap. A botched time-travel experiment is the "curse" here.
• The Big Bad of the mid-90s adventure show Roar was Longinus, the Roman Centurion who stabbed Jesus with the Spear of Destiny, and who was therefore condemned to remain alive until he could be stabbed by the Spear again.
• Thomas Veil in Nowhere Man. A documentary photographer has his entire life erased by...we don't know, after he takes an incriminating photo, and must evade capture while trying to find out who is responsible. Veil (subtle, that) meets many different people whom he petitions for help, though he's never sure who he can trust, as he tries to stay one step ahead of whoever is pursuing him.

Music

• Lupe Fiasco's character Michael Young History. After being killed, he was denied entry into Heaven for how he lived his life. Since he didn't want to go to Hell, he came back as The Cool, who haunts The Streets.
• The country song "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky," covered by Johnny Cash among others, concerns a cowboy who sees a group of men on horseback chasing a herd of demonic cattle across the horizon. Apparently, cowboys who sin in life are condemned to ride after the Devil's herd unto eternity.
• The folk song M.T.A., (the best known version is by The Kingston Trio) tells the story of Charlie, who boarded a Boston MTA subway and couldn't get off at his stop due to not having the money to pay the exit fare^[2]

When he got there the conductor told him,
"One more nickel."
Charlie could not get off that train.
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned.

• • Of course, given that the last verse explains that his wife comes to the station and passes him a bag lunch through the window every day so he doesn't starve, one has to wonder why she doesn't pass him a nickel so he can go home.
• Saxon's "Midas Touch" (from the album Power & the Glory) is about a man who has to fight against evil until the time of armageddon.

Oral Tradition

• The Wandering Jew (sometimes instead a Roman) mocked Jesus on the way to the cross and is forced to wander the earth until the second coming.
  • Other versions have it as some random guy who was present when Jesus said the second coming would be in the lifetime of at least one of his audience.
  • It's also implied that the Wandering Jew is Cain himself.
  • In the Mormon tradition, they believe that there are three disciples of Jesus Christ, otherwise known as "The Three Nephites", whom were chosen to wander the Earth until his second coming. However, their purpose is benevolent, as there have been folklore about their appearances, helping dozens people along their journey.
• The Soldier and Death, a Russian folk tale told in the first episode of The Storyteller, ends with the titular soldier being unable to enter either heaven or hell, and thus condemned to walking the earth forever. To the story's credit, mentioning this doesn't actually give away anything that makes it interesting.
• In medieval legend, King Herla and his court visited The Fair Folk. He was given many gifts, including a dog, with just one condition—he couldn't touch the earth again until the dog died. Naturally, that never happened. Herla and his court were doomed to spend the rest of eternity on horseback, eternally wandering as The Wild Hunt.
• There is a myth of a man in southern USA who tricks the devil multiple times so the man doesn't die when he is supposed to. The man thinks that all he has to do is become religious in the extra time, and the devil won't be able to take him anyway. Unfortunately the man blows it each time he tricks the devil and gains more time (he spends all the extra time drinking) When he finally dies completely, heaven refuses to let him in. Then hell refuses to let him in because the devil doesn't want to put up with him after all the tricks. The man begs a lantern from the devil to let him see his way back to the land of the living, which is supposedly all you can see of him now.
  • That's basically the old Irish tale of Jack O'Lantern, whom the cute little Halloween pumpkins (originally turnips) were named for. The tale was used to explain why there are these floating fires in swamps.
  • This is similar to the old one-liner, "Heaven won't have him, and Hell is afraid he'd take over."
• Count Saint Germain allegedly discovered the alchemical formula for immortality, and still walks the Earth today. This is presented as a blessing rather than a curse.
  • He appears as a character in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.
• Dionysus, for a bit. Hera curses him with insanity after the death of his lover Ampelus, and he wanders through Egypt and Asia Minor for a bit. Then he gets better, but he keeps wandering around, presumably just for kicks.

Tabletop Games

• Vampire: The Requiem has the Lancea Sanctum, who revere Longinus as Vampire Jesus. The story goes that Longinus was turned into a vampire when he stabbed Christ's side and the savior's blood dripped onto his lips; after that, he wandered for years until God revealed the purpose of vampires—to harrow humanity back into righteousness.
  • And on that note, Vampire: The Masquerade has Caine, who was cursed with vampirism for slaying Abel. He wandered the earth and eventually settled a city of his people... and then God sent the Flood.
  • The Changeling: The Lost book Grim Fears: Night Horrors has Jack of the Lantern, who is pretty much a straight retelling of the folk figure of the same name.
• In Promethean: The Created, it is difficult to play a character who isn't a Wandering Jew on account of a curse that all Prometheans share that gradually spoils the land and turns the locals against them.
• The Vistani, a gypsy-like folk from the Ravenloft setting, are unable to reside in one place for more than a few nights without losing their supernatural powers. Averted in the case of the Zarovan tribe, darklings (outcast Vistani), and occasional exceptions like Hyskosa.

Theater

• Underneath the Lintel features one character—the Librarian—who receives a book that is 113 years overdue, laying a path through a series of clues and items that eventually lead the audience to believe the mysterious man he has been pursuing is the Wandering Jew of legend.
• Besides the Flying Dutchman, another Wagner character based on the Wandering Jew is Kundry in Parsifal

Web Comics

• Embi, a minor character in Girl Genius, swore an oath to his gods when he was young to see the world before he died.

Embi: When I was young and rash, I made a sacred vow to see the world before I died. Frankly, I didn't know how big it was at the time.

• • This is mostly played for laughs though.

Agatha Clay: ...But what has that got to do with your long life?
Embi: One of the problems with people here is that they do not take sacred vows at all seriously!

• In Zebra Girl ^[dead link] , Jack curses vampiric mage Harold DuVase to become a Wandering Jew with a twist:

Jack: He'll move around. Wherever he doesn't want to be... that's always where he'll go.

• • This was more of an And I Must Scream, since Du Vase is teleported to a series of increasingly worse hells and doesn't actually do much wandering.
• Somewhere Niels Bohr walks among us unobserved and immortal.

Web Original

• In the Whateley Universe, a character named Arturo Mucro Cursor shows up in Merry's stories, and carries with him a business card saying, 'AKA: The Guy Who Nailed Christ To A Tree; Rank: I don’t need no stinkin’ rank... I was there.' Sure enough, he's the Wandering Jew.

Men Without a Country

Anime and Manga

• Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic: Syaoran Li and his "progeny" Watanuki are men without/outside the time-space continuum due to a magician creating clones of Li and his girlfriend Sakura that eventually became Li's own parents. When Li left his "home" dimension (where his parents lived) his absence created Watanuki, who subconsciously knew he shouldn't be alive. Eventually they defeated the magician but that didn't resolve the fact that Li and Watanuki shouldn't even exist. In the end, they paid a price to be able to live: Li would dimension-hop until he found a world where he, Sakura, and the clones could live while Watanuki would remain in The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday until Yuuko returned -- unlike most of the examples their fates are presented as choices rather then punishments or unfortunate side-effects. At least they'll be able to visit each other/have visitors often, respectively (unlike some interdimentional lovebirds).

Film

• Most of the people in Casablanca; the place was a gathering spot of People Without A Country.
• Laurel and Hardy made their last movie in France, with a supporting cast of French actors. The movie has been distributed in English under several titles, including "Utopia" and "Atoll K." One of the characters in the movie is a stateless refugee without a passport, whom no country will accept. When Stan and Ollie start their own nation on an obscure island, they are forced to accept this man as an immigrant because they lack the resources to deport him and there's no country they can deport him too. As the movie ends, he gets eaten by a lion: the fade-out gag in the very last Laurel & Hardy film.
• The Terminal is a Tom Hanks film about a man being detained at JFK airport because while he was in flight his home country fell to a civil war and effectively ceased to exist. He can't leave the airport to go to New York, and he can't fly home, since his country technically doesn't exist anymore. So he starts living in the airport terminal, making friends with various workers, and developing feelings for a flight attendant named Amelia. Very Loosely Based on a True Story about a guy who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years.

Literature

• Edward Everett Hale's short story The Man Without a Country (1863) is probably the earliest version of the modern variant of the trope. In it, a man is exiled from America due to his expressed hatred of it, and is forced to live on U.S. Navy ships for the rest of his life, without ever hearing about his home country.
  • At least, not directly. There is one point where, upon receiving some news from another ship, the Captain tells the man "You may now remove Texas from your atlas."
  • That said, "The Ship that Never Returned" (because it couldn't pay the docking fees) (1830) straddles the line between this variant and the Flying Dutchman one.
    • Later inspired the song "Charlie on the M.T.A"—see below.
• In Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo claims the sea (and a tiny, uncharted island or two) as his only country.

Live Action TV

• In the Doctor Who revival, the Doctor has become one of these: his home planet has been destroyed, and, although he tries to be upbeat about it, he's weary of traveling.
• In The Winds of War/War and Remembrance, Aaron Jastrow and Natalie Henry spend large parts of the miniseries being shuffled from paperpusher to paperpusher before the US government loses track and they end up going to Auschwitz. Multiplied by the fact that there is a World War going on and no one else is interested in rescuing them except Natalie's husband and her ex-lover.

Video Games

• For his crime of starting the Elf Wars, Dr. Weil was locked into a biomechanical suit that made him immortal. He also had his memories converted into data so that he would never forget his crimes. He was then exiled to the wastelands. This turned out to backfire spectacularly.

Real Life

• Iranian Merhan Karimi Nasseri was stuck in Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years after a mugger took the papers proving his refugee status.
  • This was fictionalized into a Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal.
• This happened a lot in World War 2. Refugees because of a mixture of bigotry, an admittedly reasonable fear of espionage, buck-passing and simple red tape, never could get enough passports to just get out of the war zone to-wherever. They would pile up in towns along the way like containers in an overstuffed warehouse and just sit there. After the conquest of Germany a lot of Jews were liberated, so to speak. However they had to remain in camps, often the same concentration camps they had been held in while waiting for passports to Israel. Because officially there was no Israel yet.
  • Several of the recipients of the Yad Vashem (Righteous Among the Nations), an award for those who helped Jews, were recognized for their work in assisting such refugees. This includes the great Raoul Wallenberg.

1. ↑ You know how Oogie-Boogie is actually a mass of bugs and Dracula turns into a mass of rats? German vampires traditionally can do that to escape being burned
2. ↑ For a number of years, rather than retool all the turnstiles to accept a new, higher fare, the conductor simply collected the difference between the fare you paid to get on and the total fare when you left the train. The nickel that Charlie didn't have was this "exit fare".