Readers Stories The Queen is Haunted Launched by King George V and Queen Mary in September of 1934, the Royal Mail Ship Queen Mary, a luxury liner of the Cunard Line, shuttled celebrities, royalty and lesser-known passengers to various ports of call. During World War ll she was pressed into service as a troop ship. Given a coat of grey paint she became known as the Grey Ghost. When the war ended she was repainted and refitted to resumed her role as a passenger liner. In December of 1967 the RMS Queen Mary came to rest in Long Beach, California and now serves the public as a museum and hotel. During her long years of service, many people have died onboard the Queen Mary involving 16 crewmembers and 39 passengers. Her collision with the HMS Curacoa in 1942 resulted in an additional 439 deaths. Is it any wonder that she is thought to be a haunted vessel? In December of 2003, my husband, Roscoe, and I accompanied our 20-year-old daughter, Kim, and two friends onboard the Queen Mary for a day of sightseeing and window-shopping. We had heard that the ship was haunted, and during our first visit there we did experience a few subtle events which we considered very curious. On that occasion, Roscoe, Kim, and I had entered the rickety second-class elevator and depressed the button for the floor we wanted. The elevator doors opened and we found ourselves in the very busy ship's laundry where we were pretty much yelled at by the staff to "Get back in the elevator. You don't belong here!" We'd told them that the elevator had made the mistake, not us, but it didn't seem to matter to them. We finally made it to the floor we had wanted on the next try. Sometime during that initial visit we had been standing by the stairs to the ship's offices on the Sun Deck discussing where to go next. I started looking down the length of the open deck when I saw a rather corpulent person, dressed all in white, sitting in a white chair in the middle of the deck. The person was a ways away from us, near the 13th or 14th lifeboat. What struck me as odd was that there weren't any other chairs out on deck, and that the person was sitting in the very middle of the deck facing us but seemed to be totally disinterested in us. After a long time I looked away, thinking that I shouldn't stare, but then I looked back again a few moments later and the person was still there. Kim had followed my gaze for a while, too. Later, I asked her about what she'd seen and she told me that she hadn't seen anyone sitting there. Of the five of us who were there together that day only Rodney had seen what I had seen. He even knew the details that I left out in retelling it. Even so, the following April, Roscoe and I decided to spend the night of our 27th wedding anniversary in the Queen Mary Hotel. Our stateroom on A Deck was beautifully crafted in the Art Deco style. The walls were comprised of polished wood and adorned with lighting fixtures and other accouterment of the 1930's mode. It was fairly roomy, and two large portholes gave us a lazy view of the city of Long Beach. Our king-size bed was most comfortable. The bathroom was of a modest size and it's faucets and fixtures were in a 1930's nautical style. All in all it was a cozy and very quiet room that appeared to afford us complete insulation from noises out in the hall and from adjacent rooms. However, as we were unpacking I heard a brief, loud commotion that seemed to issue from a room next to ours, near the far wall, where a door adjoining our cabin with the next one stood bolted tightly shut. It sounded to me as if large, heavy trunks were being stacked hastily against the wall. I thought that perhaps we had noisy neighbors who were settling in, and I soon forgot about it. We caught the last Behind-the-Scenes Tour of the day with a young guide named Peter. He conducted us along the Promenade Deck and on to the Sun Deck. At one point he unlocked the outer door to the Verandah Grill where only the most elite passengers used to dine. It had seen the likes of Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and members of British royalty. After deadbolting the door behind him, Peter then told us all about the art, the egos, and the pomp of that room, and eventually escorted us out a rear door and down a narrow hall that runs past an eerily lit ladies room. We descended a well-worn staircase, and exited out through the "Staff Only" entrance. At the end of our tour, I asked Peter if he had seen any ghosts onboard, and he said that about a month earlier he had seen a door knob turn by itself and the door open when no one else was there. "Doors open and close by themselves all the time here." he said. Other staff members onboard later echoed what another tour guide had told us; that "one hears and sees some strange things on the Queen Mary." We talked a bit more with Peter, and then Roscoe decided to walk about the Promenade Deck while I did a little window shopping near by. We had reservations at Sir Winston's Restaurant for 7:00 and so we soon returned to our stateroom to dress for dinner. We then spent two hours enjoying a most wonderful dinner, which included a small, candle-lit anniversary cake. Being very full from our dinner we decided to walk some of it off around the Sun deck. It was about 9:00 p.m. by then. As we rounded the rear of the deck, Roscoe noticed that the door to the Verandah Grill just happened to be ajar and the lights were all on. Roscoe suggested that we venture inside and have a look around. I insisted that we weren't supposed to be in there unless we were on a tour and that we were sure to get in trouble. But, Roscoe insisted and we went in. We had the huge room all to ourselves. Roscoe play acted at talking to Greta Garbo and then walked about admiring the artwork while I nervously stood close by. We must have spent about 10 minutes in there when I suddenly heard the far-left interior door open and then close very loudly. We couldn't see the door from where we were, and I stood there waiting to get yelled at for being there unescorted. I even cautioned Roscoe with "Uh oh, we're busted!" No one showed up and he dismissed it entirely We finally locked the outer door and headed for the far door where we had exited earlier during the tour, the door that I had clearly heard open and then close. That door was now standing wide open. I mentioned this to Roscoe, but he again dismissed it. As we neared the eerie lady's room, he asked if I needed to use it. "Heck no!" I replied. He went to the men's room nearby, where the light was merely ambient, and I waited for him in the hall, watching for any movement or sound. We finally went down the narrow stairs and out the staff exit. "Whew!" I thought. It was then that we returned to our room. Roscoe kept saying that he wanted to walk about the Queen Mary at 2:00 a.m. when no one else would be around. I told him that that was a very bad idea, but that I wouldn't let him go out alone. I was afraid to be left behind in our stateroom, but I was terrified for him. Something told me that he would be in danger if he roamed the Queen Mary alone. At one point I suggested that we go down the hall to get some ice, and he agreed. I headed down the hall, ice bucket in hand, towards the ice machine, but Roscoe had started going the other way down the hall and he beckoned me to join him. "But, the ice machine is this way." I protested." But he insisted, so I joined him and he walked on down the hall towards the rear of the ship. We came to the very old, rickety, second-class elevator that had gotten us into trouble when we had toured the Queen Mary a few months before, in December. This time, as Roscoe pressed the elevator call button, I warned him that we shouldn't use it. He laughed as the doors opened and went in anyway, and I followed. It was even more rickety than I had remembered. Roscoe pressed a button for a lower deck as I protested, ice bucket clenched in my hands. "I want to see what's down here." he said. "No! Don't do that!" I protested. Too late; he depressed the button for D Deck. We descended from A Deck with a lot of thumping and jostling and I got really worried. When the doors opened we found ourselves looking out into a small, brightly lit, very white, circular anteroom with a closed door to our left. I said "Let's get out of here!" "Relax." replied Roscoe as he pressed the button for F Deck, one floor below us, while reassuring me that he just wanted a look around. The elevator jostled even more as we descended, and then the door opened out into another small, circular anteroom, which is the tube of the elevator shaft, only this one was unlit. Roscoe began peering out, moving slowly from the elevator, as I insisted that we leave that floor immediately. He leaned further out and as I moved to grab at him I could see an open door to our left that led into utter darkness. The feeling I got, looking out from our lit elevator into that open invitation into a totally black interior was one of intense foreboding. "That's it! Let's get out of here!" I yelled in a panic. "Okay, okay. I just wanted to see..." he said as he came back into the elevator. Roscoe pressed the D button. The doors closed, and we just sat there. He pressed the "Door Open" button and the doors opened. He pressed the "Door Close" and the D buttons again. He pushed them several times, and then he realized that the doors weren't closing completely, thus preventing the elevator from moving. He tried to push the doors together by hand. For several minutes we were stuck on F Deck while Roscoe tried to remedy our situation, and I was getting more and more nervous. Finally, after pressing buttons several more times the elevator violently jostled and thumped as it started to ascend. At last, the doors opened onto D Deck by then Roscoe didn't trust the elevator to work anymore so we exited into the anteroom and through the door on our left. I asked him if he had actually intended to leave the elevator and explore F Deck and he replied, "I was curious, but not crazy." We found ourselves in the lobby of the Queen Mary Exhibit Hall. That area, according to my investigations of it a few months ago, was self-enclosed and would not lead us back to the hotel. The gigantic outer doors were open, however, and afforded us our only way out. As we walked through the lobby, I noticed the stairs that led down into the darkness of F Deck, the stairs we had been told never to go down. Those stairs had always been cordoned off by a thick red theater rope. With a jolt I saw that the rope was now hanging down at one end and that the way down the stairs was now open to us. I prayed that Roscoe wouldn't notice this, and he didn't appear to as we made out way up and out through the outer doors across the gangway to the parking lot. There we were, looking out from the landing at a very long construction wall that cut us off from our hotel entrance. At the far end of the museum parking lot, we could see the little tourist village we'd visited the last time, and so we headed there. We were able to get inside and walk around the now closed and abandoned shops, but all of the tall iron gates around the village were closed and locked. Luckily, we finally spied a wooden gate that had been propped open with a road cone and we quickly made our way through it. There, several hundred feet away, at the other end of the parking lot, stood the hotel entrance. We must have been a sight as we walked in out of the darkness in our leisure cloths, carrying our ice bucket, but no one batted an eye as we entered the hotel. We got to A Deck, got our ice, and went back to our room. By that time I was pretty tired, but Roscoe wanted to go out again and walk about the ship. There was no dissuading him, so out we went again. We encountered very few people out and about as we roamed the ship at about midnight. We ambled about the enclosed Promenade Deck, looking at the large photos on display of people who had inhabited the Queen back in her early days. Roscoe remarked that "These people are ghosts," which alarmed me greatly. He kept saying how that Queen Mary has a spirit, too. It was all very unnerving and sobering for me. When we reached the Sun Deck, Roscoe wanted to re-enact what I had seen back in December when we had toured the Queen Mary for the first time with Kim and our friends Alex and Rodney. He asked me to stand where we had stood that day, near the ship's offices, and I did. Then we figured out about where the corpulent person in white had been. Then we walked to that area where chairs and tables that were now set here and there along the rail of the ship. All of the chairs, including those in the cafe nearby, were dark green. There weren't any white chairs, like the one that the person had sat in, anywhere. I recalled how there hadn't been any chairs out on deck back in December because it had been too rainy and cold to sit outside then. I had really expected to see white chairs, at least in the cafe, and found it very creepy when we saw not one, anywhere. After a while Roscoe said he needed to find a restroom, so we went to the Promenade Deck and headed inside towards the men's room that is situated near the shops. I stood across the narrow passageway as he went in, with my back to the wall, and waited tentatively for Roscoe to return. To put me at ease he talked to me. Out of nowhere I heard an acute, loud, metallic click. It was very close and directly behind me. The sound of it was so sharp and so weird that I spun around immediately. I thought that perhaps I had leaned against some metal strip and broken it, but there was only the wooden passageway wall. Roscoe came out and asked if I was all right. I seemed a little unsettled to him. I didn't think to mention the sound I had heard and just said that I was okay. Eventually, around 1:45 a.m., we went back to our room for the night. Early the next morning, as I was in our bathroom applying my makeup and Roscoe was lying on our bed with a bad headache, I heard the clear, happy, giggling voice of a little girl. She sounded very close by, but not in the room with me. Roscoe yelled, "Did you hear that?" and I answered that I had. "Good." Roscoe replied. It was only later that we realized that the voice had not emanated from the hallway, nor from either of the rooms we were in, yet we had heard her very clearly. In fact, we had not heard any sounds from the hallway the entire time we'd been in there. Nor had we heard anything from the adjacent rooms, aside from the brief commotion next door the day before. Our room had been very, very quiet. Neither of us could place exactly where her voice had come from. It had been very clear and very close to each of us, though we were in separate rooms at the time. I asked Roscoe if he could remember what the little girl had said, as I hadn't paid close attention to it. He replied that what he'd heard was gibberish. We went to breakfast in the Promenade cafe soon after and one of the staff told us his ghost story, which we listened to intently. He said that he had actually embraced a ghost and it had made him very ill for a week afterwards. We eventually finished our breakfast and left the cafe. Roscoe was still baffled about the unlocked door to the Verandah Grill that we had entered the night before. "It's a deadbolt lock." He insisted. "You'd need a key to open it, and I know that Peter locked it from inside before our tour group left the room. So, why was it open? Why were all the lights on?" We went back to the outer door of the Verandah Grill and found that it was locked, just as we had left it. Then we went looking for the back way in. After a few false starts Roscoe found the "Staff Only" entrance and, sure enough, there were the stairs that led to the back of the Verandah Grill. We nonchalantly passed a cleaning lady and headed up the stairs and then down the narrow hallway. The eerie light of that foreboding lady's room was still aglow as we passed it and entered the rear door to the Verandah Grill. About 15 feet into the room we turned around to face the door that we had heard open and close the night before. "I do remember hearing it open and then close last night, and that it was standing wide open when we approached it." He said. As we stood there, discussing it, the door very slowly began to close, creaking loudly, right in front of us. There was no one there but us and no wind to push the door closed. We left the room soon after that, exiting the way we had come in. Before long Roscoe headed for the men's room near the shops and I did a bit more window-shopping. When I saw Roscoe again he looked concerned. He told me that while he was in the men's room, in one of the stalls, he had suddenly heard a distinct, loud, sharp, metallic click. He thought that perhaps someone had turned the lock in the men's room door and locked him in, which was very disturbing to him. Had someone locked them in with plans of messing with him? But no one else was there. When he exited the stall and investigated the lock, turning it several times, he realized that the lock couldn't make that sound. When he related this to me I told him that I had heard something weird the night before as I waited for him to leave that particular men's room. The more we described it to each other the more we realized that we'd hear the exact same sound. We soon returned to our room. As we were packing to leave, I happened to be standing near the locked door at the rear of our room that adjoined ours to another room. I suddenly heard the door being noisily and forcibly agitated. Someone in that other room was trying desperately to open the door. It rattled violently for several seconds and then stopped, but I never actually saw the door move. When it subsided I yelled "Yeah, I tried it, too." thinking it might be a cleaning lady. Again, someone tried and tried to open the door, seemingly with all their might, but it held tight. On later reflection I realized that a cleaning lady would have had a key to that door, and that she probably would not have entered our room from there. I also remembered that that was about where I had heard the commotion coming from the previous night, and that I had easily dismissed it thinking that we simply had noisy neighbors. I tried the door myself and found that it was bolted fast and that I couldn't make it generate any sound or movement at all, but what we had heard when the door was tried by another hand was that of a loose door being wrenched back and forth vigorously. Roscoe verified that it wouldn't move at all, as he had tried it earlier, too. Usually, when I was in our stateroom bathroom, I would leave the door a little ajar, just in case, but that morning I decided to shut the door behind me. Soon I began to notice a sensation of restlessness and agitation, and the longer I was in there the more intensely I felt it. Within a few minutes of being in the bathroom I bolted out of there in haste, feeling very unnerved. Despite all of the eerie occurrences we'd encountered we left our stateroom with great reluctance. After checking out of the Queen Mary Hotel, we headed for the nearby Russian submarine, the Scorpion, for which we had self-guided tour tickets. When we eventually exited the sub we noticed Peter, our tour guide from the day before, out at the gangplank entrance conversing with the ticket agent. He recognized us and asked how we were doing. When we told him about our experiences with the second class elevator, he said that he had been late to work early one morning when he'd gotten stuck in that very same elevator. He said that it sometimes stops between floors for no reason at all and that it usually tends to malfunction early in the morning or when people are alone in it. It was then that I recalled that there is no emergency phone or alarm button in that elevator, and that no one be able to hear a call for help from there in the wee hours. We also told Peter that we'd found the Verandah Grill's outer door ajar. He replied "Yeah, that happens sometimes." "You locked that door, right?" Roscoe pressed. Peter said that he had locked it, and that ours had been the last tour of the day. Out of all that occurred during our stay aboard the Queen Mary, the many questions that stand out for me are these: What's is on deck F and why were we being invited to the pitch-black underworld of Deck F? Who was the little girl whose giggle and sweet voice we heard? Why did that door rattle so loudly in our stateroom though we couldn't even budge it? And, lastly, why have they never installed emergency equipment in the second-class elevator?
J. Teal (Dedicated to 'Rosco')
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