My Family Spent The Night On The Most Haunted Ship In The World. This Is What Happened.

 

With spooky season stealing the light and darkness blanketing the world, spending the night on the haunted Queen Mary with our teenagers was an idea we couldn’t resist. Officially, 57 people died on the Queen Mary during the 31 years she operated as a luxury ocean liner. However, 105 different ghosts still prowl her insides. Guests, crew, and ghost hunters have reported seeing them in Queen Mary’s halls, engine room, and the now-empty pool.  

One night, a little girl who looked about seven years old wandered off the ship where it’s docked in Long Beach, California, down to the deck connecting to the Cruise Ship Terminal. When approached by a concerned security guard, she turned to face him and slowly vanished. This is where I decided our family should spend the night in mid-October. Here’s what happened.

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A Haunted Queen Mary History Tour

First, a little backstory to put these phantoms in context. Cunard Line started building the RMS Queen Mary in 1930. They spared no expense to make her the biggest and most luxurious cruise ship in the world. Though this was a time before stateroom balconies, may I add? She sailed between New York and Southampton, England. 

 

 

Celebrities, dignitaries, and royalty flocked to float on her decks. Even the second-class cabins, rebranded as Tourist Class, were nicer than most ships of the time. Executives even allowed Tourist Class passengers to use the First Class pool during the hours First Class would be dining. 

 

 

During the Second World War, the military used the Queen Mary as a prisoner transport ship. After the war, officials sailed wartime brides and babies from Europe to the US, but they couldn’t get off the ship unless they were “claimed” by their husbands or fathers.

 

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Our tour guide said one reason for the discrepancy in the number of ghostly residents and reported deaths could be that the military didn’t report the POW deaths, as they were classified, some tourist class drownings went unreported, and the possible suicides of unclaimed brides. Another reason, he mentioned, is that paradise for many of the deceased could have been the time they spent sailing on the ship, so their souls went back to relive those happy days forever.

 

Queen Mary Today

During the day, families can visit to explore the Queen Mary through tours and exhibits. There are three restaurants, two bars, and several quick-pickup food locations spread around the vessel. At night, some rooms are set aside as a hotel. 

 

 

Seasonal events, like Dark Harbor draw Los Angeles area residents for the freak factor. Where better to set up a ghoulish landscape than in and around the haunted Queen Mary, which Time Magazine called one of the 10 most haunted places in the world? So, we packed for an overnight stay, booked two rooms, and let the boys bring a friend each. We picked them all up right after school and threw ourselves into the mercy of Friday traffic.

 

Haunted Encounters Tour

We arrived at the ticket counter as guests already lined up for the Haunted Encounters tour. Our tour guide, who looked like he could have been part of the paranormal phenomenon, led us around dressed in an old-fashioned crew ship uniform. Here are the highlights of our tour, but every guide tells different stories:

• A woman in an evening gown appears in the Mauritanea Room where they held most of the social ship events. One time an older lady sat in a chair in the middle of the room while two ladies cleaned around the area. When they finally asked the woman to leave, she complied by disappearing. The women quit on the spot. About ten employees quit every year due to ghost sightings.
• One employee went into an elevator and saw the reflection of a woman with a formal dress in the reflection of the closing doors. He turned around to greet her but there was no one there. He quit too.
• They call him Walter. He died in Room B340 in 1949 from unknown causes. For a while the hotel kept this room in its inventory but guests kept complaining water kept being turned on, sheets would get pulled off the bed, and noises could be heard. They even tried renting it as the “Haunted Room” but guests still thought they were being tricked and after repeated complaints decided it would be easier to seal the room off.

 

 

• Seven-year-old Jackie giggles or sings nursery rhymes at the first class pool wearing her sailor dress. When that area was still open to the public, small, wet footprints would appear around it, though it had been drained for years.
• There is a piano in the lounge by the reception area. Sometimes, a woman in white appears at the piano, playing a sad tune. Her name isn’t in the official death registry but is believed to be one of the unclaimed brides who killed herself.
• An engine room mechanic got stuck between the locking doors and is seen wandering around with his wrench or looking for it.

 

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Tickets for the one-hour show are $47.70 for adults and $37.10 for kids and includes ship admission

 

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A Séance: The 57 Ghosts

This show is 16+, so the boys used this time to eat dinner in the onboard restaurants. Howard and I entered the darkened séance room in a single file line, passing by framed photos spotlit on a black wall of the 57 people who “officially” died on the Queen Mary. I was surprised to see how many of them were young. 

The walls in the room were also painted black. Only three small recessed lights lit the room. A u-shaped row of chrome legged chairs with black upholstered seats and backrests faced three skinny, tall glass display cases, red chairs, and a couple low end tables. Our host, Michael Rangle, warned us not to record the session. He pointed to the cases, each shelf holding an artifact, a doll or ball or book, and said they contained the possessions of the deceased passengers. He explained we would be contacting three spirits, a gambler who was thrown overboard for cheating, an unknown woman in white, and seven-year old, Jackie, who drowned in the pool. He warned us that if we needed to leave to just raise our hand over our head and he would escort us out.

 

 

We started with a deck of tarot cards. Rangle passed out five cards to five random people he picked. He instructed them to choose one that spoke to them. Howard received the five cards and pressed one to his chest as instructed. Rangle then took back the cards and mixed them around. Then he asked the spirits to tell him which card belonged to which person and why. He then went through the cards, identified who had selected them, and told us all a bit about that person’s history, all guided by the spirit who was helping him. I can’t speak to the veracity of the other people’s stories, but the one he told about Howard felt accurate, though general.

He said Howard is kind and supportive, which he is. Rangle told one man he had been excluded by other kids  as a child during his school’s lunchtime but instead of using that as a reason to be angry, he made sure no one around him felt that way. The man didn’t protest and blinked several times. Maybe something like that happened, but I don’t think anyone wanted to ask him.

 

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Ghost #1

Then Rangle summoned our first ghost. He picked a man out of the audience who I swore looked like he was stoned. The man, Chris, had a shaved head and was wearing chino shorts and a long-sleeved shirt with a motorcycle brand logo. 

Rangle sat Chris in a lone chair in front of us. 

Rangle reached out to the spirits and said the gambler had joined us. The gambler had lived his life cheating at backgammon and sailed from coast to coast until his luck ran out and his fellow passengers threw him overboard after discovering his deception. Rangle took a pair of dice and asked Chris to roll them a few times to prove they weren’t loaded. He did, and they weren’t, proven by the several number combinations that came up.

Rangle asked another audience member to come up and look at the number after he rolled the dice again. Without showing Chris the roll, Rangle asked him if he had heard anyone tell him the number that came up. Chris said he had and told us the number was three. He was right. The next number was four, and then it was three again. Chris knew them all, and when Rangle asked how he knew them, Chris, who suddenly didn’t look stoned anymore, said he had heard a voice tell him.

 

 

Ghost #2

Rangle selected two women from the audience. One was dressed in a 40s-style period costume, with fishnet stockings and a fur stole. The other was from the group that came with Chris. They replaced Chris and the other guy in the front of the room in chairs sitting about 5 feet apart.

Rangle summoned the Woman in the White Dress to come and join us. He asked both ladies to close their eyes and picture her standing before them. They did. Then he asked the spirit to make herself known. He asked each lady if they saw her in their mind. One said yes, and the other said no. He again instructed them to breathe deeply and envision her standing before them. Then he asked the ghost to touch them. Both said they felt a finger poke them on their right shoulder. Then they stood before the room, holding an old, large key between their forefingers. While we watched, the female spirit turned the key until it dropped.

 

 

Ghost #3

Here, Rangle attempted to summon Jackie, the seven-year-old ghost powerful enough to wander off the ship. He said because she was a child, she was more playful than the others and sometimes wouldn’t appear or only appear to play a trick on an audience member. He asked to borrow someone’s smartphone and a woman gave him hers. Rangle then used the video recording feature to sweep the room in a circle. He said sometimes the cameras pick things up that our human senses couldn’t. He returned the phone to the lady and asked her if she saw anything unusual. She did. As the show concluded, we all walked by her to see what she noticed. Do you see anything in the video below?

 

 

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Dark Harbor

This is the real reason the teens came with us. Dark Harbor on the Queen Mary has really evolved over the 10 years since we last visited with friends. Ten years ago, there were a few mazes inside the Queen Mary, with people dressed as ghouls, dead people, and scary characters like clowns. 

 

 

Today, the event is sprawled out below the Queen Mary and there are rides, food stalls, concerts, fire breathers and ominous cast members walking around with chain saws or following unsuspecting tourists. There are thousands of people so the line to go through the mazes can be over an hour. However, VIP tickets like ours, allowed us to skip the lines so we got to do more mazes in a shorter amount of time. They also gave us access to the secret speakeasies, which took a while to find because they weren’t on the map and had no obvious signs. Someone finally told us to look for the projected symbol near the entrances.

 

Dark Harbor on the haunted Queen Mary has:

• 5 terrifying themed mazes
• 4 speakeasies
• 2 onboard bars with ghost stories in one, open to all, and VIP holders for the Observation Deck lounge
• Axe throwing in the Shipyard
• Pirates shootout in a action-packed immersive game, available as a stand-alone option
• A ghostly kick-off party at the Shipyard at 8 pm and then the wrap-party an hour before closing
• Performances of sliders, fire spinners, magicians, DJs, bands, and sideshows
• 5 bars and lounges that keep the horrifying theme alive
• 4 rides for $10 each, or an unlimited wristband for $30

This annual event starts September 20 and goes until November 2nd.

 

Our Haunted Hotel Stay

Finally, all the adrenaline and haunted horrors took their toll and it was time to slumber inside the haunted Queen Mary. We booked two rooms in the more haunted section of the ship. The boys shared two queen-sized beds and we had the same set-up in ours. The decor of the room felt like it hadn’t changed much since they initially decorated it in 1967. They refreshed many of the rooms to make it look like it must have when passengers first sailed.

 

 

Howard and I got ready for bed and talked about everything we had learned and seen that night. Curious, I went into the long, narrow hallway to see if I could spot any apparitions before retiring. I looked long in both directions and didn’t see anything. 

Inside the room, a blast of cold air made me wonder if I had passed through a spirit. One of the boy’s friends later told me he was woken up by a creepy sensation and a cold blast.

Maybe I’m not as sensitive to the other dimension as some people are, but I didn’t see anything. I know spirits are drawn to certain types of individuals. How could we know if we’re one of them unless we seek out the experience? Is your family brave enough to find out?