RMS Queen Mary

There is a door in the engine room of the Queen Mary that the crew still call Door Thirteen.

It is a heavy steel watertight door, the kind designed to slam shut in an emergency and seal one section of the ship off from another, so that if the hull is breached, the water can’t spread. On the night of July 10, 1966, during a routine drill, an eighteen-year-old crewman named John Pedder was caught as the door closed. He was crushed.

The Queen Mary has not sailed in more than half a century. She sits permanently moored in the harbor at Long Beach, California. But people who walk through her engine room — tour groups, staff, security guards on the night shift — say that Door Thirteen is where they most often see a young man in blue coveralls, with a beard, walking along the passageway. He walks toward the door. Then he’s gone.

The Grandest Ship Afloat

When she sailed from Southampton on her maiden voyage on May 27, 1936, the Queen Mary was the pride of Britain: more than a thousand feet long, with three great red-and-black funnels, Art Deco interiors of rare woods, two swimming pools, a dog kennel, a synagogue, shops, a hospital and ballrooms. She carried movie stars, royalty and millionaires across the Atlantic in about four days. Within months she had captured the Blue Riband, the prize for the fastest crossing.

For three years, she was the most glamorous way to travel in the world.

Then came the war.

The Grey Ghost

In 1940, the Queen Mary was stripped of her luxuries, painted a dull battleship gray and turned into a troopship. Her ballrooms became dormitories. Her staterooms were crammed with bunks stacked six high. Because she was faster than any U-boat, she sailed without escort for much of the war, zigzagging across oceans to throw off the submarines that hunted her. Adolf Hitler is said to have offered a reward to any U-boat captain who could sink her. None ever did. Her crews nicknamed her the Grey Ghost.

She carried hundreds of thousands of soldiers. In July 1943, she set a record that still stands: more than sixteen thousand people aboard on a single voyage, the most ever carried on one vessel.

And on October 2, 1942, she was part of the worst disaster of her life.

The Curacoa

The Queen Mary was approaching the coast of Ireland, carrying about ten thousand American soldiers, when she met her escort, a British anti-aircraft cruiser called HMS Curacoa. The two ships were zigzagging to avoid submarines. Somehow their courses converged.

The Queen Mary, more than four times the cruiser’s size, sliced straight through the Curacoa, cutting her in two. The cruiser sank within minutes.

The Queen Mary did not stop. She couldn’t. Her captain was under strict orders never to halt for any reason in submarine waters, because a stopped troopship carrying ten thousand men was the easiest target in the ocean. Soldiers on deck watched the sailors of the Curacoa struggling in the cold water as the giant liner sailed away. Other ships came back later to pick up survivors.

More than three hundred British sailors died. The collision was kept secret until after the war.

Some of the people who work on the Queen Mary today say they have heard, deep in the bow of the ship — near the spot where she struck the Curacoa — the sounds of tearing metal, rushing water and men shouting. When they go to look, there is nothing there.

Long Beach

After the war, the Queen Mary returned to passenger service. But by the 1960s, jet airliners could cross the Atlantic in hours, and the great liners were losing money. In 1967 she made her final voyage, around Cape Horn to California, where the city of Long Beach had bought her for a little over three million dollars.

She arrived on December 9, 1967. Since then she has never moved. She was converted into a hotel, museum and tourist attraction. Her engine rooms were partly gutted. Her staterooms became hotel rooms.

And almost immediately, people began reporting that she was not empty.

The Pool

The most famous haunted place on the ship is her first-class swimming pool — an Art Deco chamber of tile and columns that has been drained for decades.

Visitors and staff report hearing splashing in the empty pool, and children laughing. Wet footprints appear on the tiles around the pool’s edge, leading to the changing rooms, and then fade. Some describe a little girl in an old-fashioned bathing suit, or a woman in 1930s swimwear walking along the deck of the pool before vanishing.

The little girl is often called Jackie. According to ship lore, she drowned in the second-class pool. Investigators and visitors claim to have recorded a child’s voice in the room. Another girl, sometimes called Sarah, is said to have been killed in the first-class pool area.

I have not been able to find documentation of either child’s death, and the ship’s history doesn’t confirm them. But the stories are consistent, and many of the people who tell them — tour guides, engineers, security guards — have been on the ship for years.

Cabin B340

On the ship’s B deck there is a stateroom, B340, that was closed to guests for years.

The stories about it vary. Some say a passenger died there. Some say a crew member. Guests who stayed in the room reported that taps turned on by themselves in the middle of the night, that the lights flickered, that the bedsheets were pulled off them while they slept, and that something knocked on the walls. According to hotel lore, the complaints became so frequent that management simply stopped renting the room.

In recent years, the hotel reopened it — as a themed “haunted” room, complete with a Ouija board and a crystal ball. You can book it, if you dare.

The Woman in White and the Captain

There are other ghosts, if you listen to the staff.

In the Queen’s Salon, the ship’s old first-class lounge, people have reported seeing a woman in an elegant white evening gown dancing alone in a corner, as if to music no one else can hear. In the first-class staterooms, guests have described a man in a 1930s suit walking the corridors. Some have reported seeing officers in old-fashioned uniforms on the bridge and in the engine room. In the ship’s kitchen, there are stories of a cook who was killed during the war — some versions say by soldiers who rebelled over bad food — and whose screams can still be heard.

Again, many of these stories can’t be confirmed in the ship’s records. But there were deaths aboard the Queen Mary — passengers and crew who died of illness, accidents and natural causes over more than three decades of service. A ship that carries more than two million people over thirty years will see its share of death.

The Living and the Dead

There is something about ships that makes them feel haunted even when they’re not. They creak. They groan. Their pipes knock and hiss. They are full of narrow corridors, watertight doors and dark compartments below the waterline, where the only sound is the hum of machinery.

But I think the Queen Mary is something more than that. She is a time capsule — a floating piece of the 1930s and the war years, preserved almost exactly as she was. The Art Deco wood paneling is still there. The brass fittings, the mahogany, the long promenade decks where soldiers once leaned on the rails and watched for submarines.

Perhaps that’s why people see so many ghosts aboard. Everything else from their time is still in its place. It would be stranger, somehow, if they weren’t there too.