I've probably got far too much time on my hands, but thought that I would check out the archive of Lloyds Register of Ships online to satisfy myself that there was no Ourang Medan ever registered.
There wasn't. The nearest I did find though was a Dutch-registered merchant steamer simply called Medan in 1923:
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That's some 17 years before the first account of the Ourang Medan mystery.
I found a few other Medans and a couple of Orangs in subsequent years, but this was the only Dutch one.
OK, so clutching at straws I know, but if the (Indonesian?) radio operator was desperate to call for help before his final words "I die" and referred to the number of people (Orang in Indonesian) on the Medan, could it have become conflated with the ship's name?
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Or was it all just a made-up story anyway?