The REAL Ghost Stories of the RMS Queen Mary

i've been around the titanic artifacts for almost 20 years and i've been alone with them all of them not at odd times of the day but just alone in a vault and at no time did i ever have a premonition or an off-presence feeling of any kind positive or negative they were simply objects they were being studied and when i was done they went back in the box and they went back in the vault i have never had any paranormal feelings coming off of either the artifacts or being there at the rec site you know i didn't go down to titanic but i've been there and there's really nothing to report but um i've got to tell you that i saw some things on the queen mary that have really changed my mind about the other world my first job in life was a story out on the queen mary and once i was on board a few weeks you start hearing stories that the ship is haunted the attitude of the management at the time was just tamp it down don't discuss it don't bring it up [Music] if somebody does see something odd on the tour kind of talk them through it and talk them out of it it was definitely something that was discouraged i was a kid i was i grew up in a secular household and ghosts and that sort of stuff were mostly halloween fun i certainly was not prepared to see anything i didn't believe in that stuff i was strictly a rationalist now the odd thing about these incidents and there's three of them is first of all they're really not traditional hauntings they're more like trips to the night gallery odd things inexplicable things you see but nothing that you could actually construct you know a halloween story around all of these incidents occurred back in 1979 and they all occur in a space of just a few days the first incident is probably the most traditional haunting in that i was stationed in the first class swimming pool as a guide if you've ever been on the queen mary the pool is in the bottom of the gallery in other words you have the pool then you have the deck around the pool and then you have a balcony and then you have pillars supporting the ceiling and there's only one way to get from the lower platform to the upper platform and that's coming up a staircase that's in plain view this is taking place about 11 o'clock in the morning you know the unwitching hour and i was walking into the pool and as i walk in i see a young lady coming up the stairs she's a little early for being a tourist but not too early to be impossible and i look down the the length of the staircase and she's coming up and the first thing that strikes me about her is how completely unfashionable she's dressed she's dressed out of the 1960s i mean straight out of woodstock she's a young woman she's about 22. she's got long blonde hair it comes right down to her waist they used to iron their hair back in the day so that it hung straight down almost in an unnatural way she had that look she also was wearing very dark tortoise rim sunglasses so i never saw her eyes she was also wearing an orange vest that ended in a turtleneck it was a burnt orange that was real popular in the late 60s by the 70s it would have been 10 years past the expiration date you wouldn't look like a fool being dressed like that but really that style had moved past and we were deep in the disco era now i didn't see this woman out the corner of my eye i saw her face to face and i actually looked at her as she was coming up the staircase well what i did was i crossed the staircase and then my vision was interrupted by a pillar pillar's about three feet wide i got to the other side of the pillar i lean over the balcony to greet her and ask if she has any questions about the first class swimming pool and this woman is gone she can't have passed me and she could not have turned around and run to reach the entrance because the entrance is about 50 feet away from where she was standing she was only out of the field division for about a second two seconds that was it now i never actually got creeped out there was no feeling of being threatened or anything but i definitely got the impression i had seen an apparition so what i did is i went all the way down to the end of the balcony where you could see the entire room nothing then i started thinking about it and i realized aside from being really out of date this woman didn't make any noise as she came up the stairs the stairs on the queen mary are ceramic tile and at the time most of them were loose so that whenever you came up there was this clatter of tiles and shoes and all that nonsense this woman was perfectly silent the other thing that was odd about her demeanor is when most people came into the pool they look up at the ceiling because it's all a faux mother of pearl it's really quite impressive she was looking down at the tank her gaze never moved she looked down at the water's surface and that really is it it was just a strange vision there was no interaction between us like i mentioned as she walked in the pool her gaze was fixed on on the pool tank at the water surface she she was moving she did have locomotion coming up the steps and her gait was ordinary you know it was definitely a foot tread she didn't float through the ether but no she never looked up at me and of course by the time i greeted her she was gone the entire vision of this woman lasted two seconds it is the time it takes to walk oh four feet at a slow pace i will say that later when i was the the acting curator i went through the log books ship's log books must have all births and deaths on board as far as i could tell there were no deaths in the first class swimming pool so who this woman was and what her connection to the place was it isn't the classic i was killed here or i drowned here but at the same time i have no idea the next thing happened basically next week the week following again i was i was assigned to the bow and in order to get there you have to walk through the pool um this was early in the morning again this was before the tour opened so i walked into the pool by myself nobody there and if you're familiar with the layout of the queen mary's pool the balcony has a bulge at the after end of it and maintenance had gone ahead and installed flood lamps probably so the room could be cleaned and that entailed drilling into vintage ceramic tiles and i'm kind of alarmed how badly did they damage the tile so i hopped the barriers and now i'm actually standing at the lip of the pool well because there's a bulge in the balcony the lip of the pool is here and what i need to see is about 18 inches over the pool over the water you know i was young and agile at the time and to lean out 18 inches was you know not a challenge and by the way it was the shallow end of the pool so i couldn't really get any major trouble if i fell in and i look up at the lights and then i simply lean over and i lean and i lean and i lean and all of a sudden i get the uh something grabbed me grabbed me by the shoulder and it meant business and what it did is it pushed me over the pool i lost my balance i'm now just on one foot and then as soon as i reached maximum i was pulled back i wasn't hurt i didn't fall in i'll tell you as a matter of fact i was afraid not that i was being touched by something but i was trying to think now well how am i going to explain being sopping wet with this uniform i'm going to have to admit to being somewhere i shouldn't pulled me back and in essence that is the end of the story now for the next hour or two i had red marks on both sides of my shoulder where i was contacted but aside from that just that prank that random prank that was it there was nothing to see i didn't hear anything and my hackles didn't go up you know i didn't get a sense of dread or foreboding or malevolence it was just an incident and it was over i went upstairs and i did my job the last incident was maybe about a week or two after that and now it's the end of the day at sunset we're getting ready to close the tour down and and all go home and i was standing up on the bow and the tourists are getting very sparse you know they're coming through every 15 minutes or so so there's just a lot of time standing there and admiring things you know it is california and it is it's summer so we're lightly dressed and i'm just basically looking back at the the superstructure of the funnels and sort of just zoning out and not thinking about anything in particular and then something happens and it's very difficult to describe because it happens in a moment as fast as you can clap your hands it's gone what happened was as i was standing there looking aft suddenly i was standing in that spot but it's 1966 it's the end of the ship's life and i can feel and see in in a non-specific way um [Music] the crewmen we're in new york it's the middle of winter i am freezing because i'm mistressed for the weather there's snow on the deck and the crew is getting ready to cast off we're heading back to england and i can feel this depression they've retired the mary they're going to retire the elizabeth and there's only one ship coming online and that means guaranteed at least 50 percent of the crew is losing its job in a matter of months what are they going to do that was the ambient feeling i picked up at the same time i was seeing this i was up in the wheelhouse in the chart room and i was looking over one of the ship's officers and i remember he was standing at a chart table and had the chart out and a pencil and paper and he was figuring something out i don't know what it was it was over like that and at the same time i'm down in the bakery and i remember seeing a baker pick up a tray and put it in an oven and then that was that image then i was down in the generator room i was on the platform watching a generator of watching an engineer parallel two generators because they brought a second generator online and now they're going to split the load and at the same time i was up in a cabin somewhere i think it was one of the second class cabins the steward had come in to run the cotton cold water taps before passengers arrived because if a cabin hasn't been used in a while there's a tendency for rust to collect and it will bleed rusty water for about 10 seconds you never want to see a passenger see that so the stewards had instructions to go ahead and do that and i saw that and bang that was done and in a moment all these these visions uh which occurred simultaneously no sound there's no no verbiage there's also really no motion it's like looking at a series of stills still pictures it was gone it was absolutely gone and ten seconds later up comes the last set of uh tourists and i give my spiel as usual and then five minutes later my supervisor arrives and i go home this is this is this is literally the only ghost stories from my life um [Music] i've never had anything else i want to let you know uh when i worked in management i was on board the ship all the time i slept on board many times i was in a lot of areas that are traditionally supposed to be haunted i never saw anything funny down in the shaft alley i never saw anything funny anywhere else this was it and at the end of that that third apparition there's there's never been anything else watertight door 13 in the stern where they say someone got cut in half isn't that not even originally 13 no it is that is the correct numbering uh for the time of the accident and it was a real accident the man's name was john petter he as i remember these are old memories as i remember he was recently signed up to the ship and they were closing the watertight doors as a matter of routine and those doors have a bell that rings in advance before the door moves i don't remember what it is but i remember it being generous it's like 30 seconds or a minute and better for whatever reason and we'll never know why decided that he was going to chicken the door and and jump through it and the door caught him and he was crushed as i recall the the nature of the the damage the injury was from the collarbone across the sternum to about where the liver is and he was i he was not pinched in half but you know that's there was nothing left of that midsection supposed to have two people um to actually control the door one holds the handle open the guy one his partner goes through he holds the handle the other side while the other one goes through well this kid tried to do it on his own and he got caught and it uh and it completely crushed him uh we had to uh we had to make room it was on the way out so we had to keep the body uh in our freezer we actually have to empty out a fruit locker freezer and put the body in there now i've been down there several times i have never seen anything go on that's weird there the queen mary has really taken on the identity of one of the most haunted places in the united states if not the world perhaps it's the fact that it's an old ship it's a relic of an era that is completely gone there are no more oceans yeah yeah the past in her huge long history just like any famous old hotel that was once dilapidated perhaps that's in a major city you know it has a history of violence or death or anything traumatic events you know they generate some sort of stories throughout its career death on ships is very common in fact every cruise ship there is has actually body storage facilities i hate to say it but a lot of people who are in their retirement come on board those ships they drink excessively they have a very exciting few days and it does sometimes take its toll on these old ships they um they had similar situations death was common as was birth on these ships and uh the old ones are still dangerous places too yeah it wasn't safe always to travel across the ocean back in the the 30s 40s and even the 50s especially not the 40s but yes in the 40s of course we had a little thing i like to call the second world war it was a little thing yeah yeah and um i mean it was carrying troops on board the queen mary and uh some of them were killed they had wounded on board and she had a couple of accidents too during world war ii that were resulted in a major losses of life so the queen mary certainly has the colorful history you would expect with any sort of haunted house so we've each been on board the queen mary a few times but this last time had three incidents they were three for me and you had one it was a shared one yeah together maybe all right he's still skeptical i enjoy a good story uh it's a story it is a good story but maybe we'll see jury's chronologically speaking though my first two incidents happened earlier one of which was i think the second night i was on board the ship on my most recent visit which was a few months ago maybe back in like in february or march and in my room in my cabin which was one of the old period rooms i heard music this was late at night they wouldn't have had music playing out in the hallways because people were trying to sleep and everyone knows those walls are really thin but it was music it was old-fashioned 40s music and i could actually identify the musician it was glenn miller it's one of the most common musicians of the era but still it was glenn miller it sounded like in the mood which is again one of the most popular songs from the era so i was listening around the room i was trying to uh listen up against the walls see if it was maybe the neighbors playing it or maybe it was coming from above or below and i was listening into the vents and the only place i could actually hear it was the center of the room and i was not the only one who witnessed this either this music lasted for at least a minute or two or potentially as long as the song it's not that long of a song so i i don't know and it just kind of faded out but it was 40s music now i was listening to 40s music earlier on my ipod so i don't know maybe it was my imagination maybe maybe someone was playing and i just couldn't pinpoint the source the following night emma and i were out exploring the ship at about 12 30 and no one else was really about we were wandering and we went down to our deck which is the lowest level of the main staircase and this is the level where the dining room is behind the stairs and where it comes out into the swimming pool which is locked off but you can go up to the doorway it's dark in there you can't really see much but you can look through the glass and we were we were looking in we were trying to peek through and as we were doing this we heard a footstep coming down the stairs behind us and it was a high heel on linoleum it was so distinct and clear that we just kind of turned around expecting to see someone else coming down the stairs but no one was there and there was only one footstep and it took a few seconds for it to actually dawn on us the stairs are carpeted but they were linoleum at the time of the queen mary's career so again that as an isolated incident might not have been much but um following the previous night where we heard music it was it was starting to get a little weird i was asleep yes you were you were asleep i invited you to come out because we had work to do but we were you weren't going to do any work i recorded sound effects [Music] anyway we were exploring the ship having a little bit of fun there was no one that's not recording sound effects okay were you there uh i heard were you there yeah um yeah maybe i was maybe i was the ghost continue and you were wearing high heels which doesn't matter don't that's what i do in my spare time on the queen mary is none of your business and then finally the next night which i believe was the final night we were spending on the ship we had a very successful business meeting it was a great day and we went to the observation lounge i said you know what let's celebrate for a little bit let's go back to my room and we'll have a bottle of wine we'll talk about the meeting today and we'll talk about our plans from here and that was the plan so i brought a bottle of wine and i got three glasses from the lounge and we brought them back to my cabin and we sit down i open the bottle and i'm starting to pour the glasses none of us have taken a sip yet i'm making that very clear none of us have taken a sip yet and the world knows you love your wine the world does so the cabin is oriented where there's the side of the ship the hull and there's the bed and then there's the bathroom down the corridor down down a corridor and my back is to the bathroom facing the hull of the ship and it's emma to my left and matt to my right and i'm pouring the bottle and earlier in the day at like seven in the morning the cleaning lady came to the door and was knocking and said do you want me to do the room up and this was a very odd hour for them to have come i think you're just talking about her before this happened yeah i was just talking about how this the cleaning lady came at such an odd hour this time and we were also making you're also playing music again i was playing music so we thought we were being loud i was playing creepy 30s music yeah so we thought we were being too loud and that we were gonna we're about to get in trouble so the doorknob rattles very aggressively and i'm thinking it's uh the cleaning lady again what is she doing it's it's it's 10 o'clock at night i thought it was security trying to like come in and be like turn down that music yeah that that too um but emma looked in the direction of the door and she distinctly saw it was the door handle to the bathroom and then it swung open now that door doesn't fall open or anything like that it did not have a tendency to do that um and even if it did why would it rattle so much before it does i'm not happy about this at all so i'm gonna go back to my modernized state right now this can we come back with you the door to our bathroom was closed i the scariest thing is i heard the door not turn that was the doorknob turning the doorknob turned and then it opened they put the lights on tonight now it's 1206 and um we were sitting here in my cabin b447 on the queen mary i'm upset on the queen mary well that's it that was it yeah the ship settled made noise open the door the end the wind came in and gripped the doorknob there's a lot of dust no there are dust orbs you know there's got to be a logical explanation for this yup it might have been the cleaning lady trapped in the bathroom and then she jiggled it really hard panicking and then she found another way out she's she got right out of there as fast as she could yeah another story though which was not a ghostly experience for myself but instead for other people on the ship while we were there emma and i dress vintage sometimes we love dressing from the 40s or even 30s sometimes it's just something we like to do we like taking vintage style photographs especially on board the queen mary where you're in the proper setting for this and we decided just for fun i was going to throw on some 1940s style pajamas and she did the same and we just walked around the ship we wandered the hallways a little bit and we come to one of the corridors where you can see a decent length of the ship not the whole length but at least a few a few uh a few hundred feet and then we're standing there looking down that way and then a group of teenagers or something come out from a side corridor about 100 feet down and they're looking at us and they freeze and they're like oh my gosh and they're terrified and then they start walking away across the ship now you can you can go to the other side of the ship and there's another corridor identical but mirrored and we stood there until they disappeared and then we ran to the opposite side of the ship and now we were here on the other side of the ship in the other corridor and then we stood there and we stopped and we were able to freeze before they got across to this corridor and then they came there and they saw us again and they freaked out and ran so fast in the opposite direction it was great and we actually managed to jump away before any of them peeked back so if they did peek back we were gone so um i'm sure they are telling that story to other people and it's just adding to the legacy of how haunted the queen mary is and maybe they've watched this video and now they have closure it went insane you

Channel: Part-Time Explorer

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Id: GisORZTjIgo

Length: 28min 4sec (1684 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021