7. An Amuse-Bouche of Ghosts

What turns a place into one of the most haunted locations in the world? This week’s tale spans across the globe and includes more than 150 spirits. Come on board this journey with us while we navigate the dark and storied history of one of the world’s most haunted locations, a luxury-liner, a warship, and now a museum and hotel – The Queen Mary. Underneath the ghosts, demons and poltergeists that can be found wandering the hallways and swimming pools of this legendary vessel, we uncover the intricate ways in which racism, the patriarchy and capitalism all play a role in this ship-turned-hotel’s dark past and present.

Content warning: suicide, anti-black racism, brief mentions of childhood sexual violence 

Sources

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Theme Song Title: Creepy Mood | Artist Name: Oleg Fedak

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Hello. Hello. How's everyone doing? Oh, you can respond to that.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

I could give you a few seconds to think about that and respond.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Just pretend like I'm sitting next to you and you can talk to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

I've I've gotten some feedback from people that listening to this is feels like they're part of a conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Aww.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah. But I feel like that's a compliment.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, I I feel like it is too. Uh I know my roommate will put it on in the background so that Oryx feels like I'm there when I haven't been home for a few days.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

That's really cute.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Yeah. It's it is pretty cute, and he's a needy little kitty cat.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

You know, separation anxiety is real with these animals raised in quarantine.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Yeah, yeah. And I think he was like that even before, so I think he has just like I think he's very overstimulated. So he has like sensory stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

I could see that. He is very like looks like there's a lot going on for him.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yeah, sometimes like you can't see my face right now, but sometimes he just has like this shocked look on his face. Uh, and I'm like, what's going on? What are you shocked about? And then if you look at him for if you like make eye contact with him for a little longer, he'll do this like hop thing.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Cats are so weird.

SPEAKER_03 2:56

It's a weird card.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

And they're so like flexible. It's it's kind of crazy. Yeah. How they can move their bodies. It's true.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Even Mocha, my chonky chonk.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Can squeeze through some narrow areas.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Mocha is such a sweetheart.

unknown 3:14

I know.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

What a boo.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

We should we we'll post more on our close friends with the kitties. We do sometimes post our kitties on the close friends. So if you want to see them, become a patron.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah. So thank you, Lindsay and Lauren and Vivian, for becoming new patrons. I am shocked and so heartwarmed every time I see that. I don't know, people just keep becoming patrons. I thought it would stop and like plateau with like a core or five people and just keeps going. So I thank you so much. I also want to give a special shout out to my friend Daphne, who sends some very kind support via our Cash App. Thanks, Daphne. Lots of love.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Lots of love to you. We do put in a lot of hard work, 20 hours per episode at minimum.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Oh, easy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

Like with all the all the stuff that goes into it. And we're both in grad school and have part-time jobs as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

So as we mentioned in the last episode, if you listen to it about Jack, Trash Jack, once we reach 10 patrons, which we did, we were gonna upgrade our Patreon to include merch. Stay tuned for that. Patr Patreon patrons will soon have access to merch things. I don't know what that all entails yet, but I'm thinking some stickers, maybe some mugs.

SPEAKER_05 4:44

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Mm-hmm. That's what I was thinking to start off with, too. So what are we talking about today?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Today. So today we're changing pace a little bit. Every episode has been pretty heavy. So this time we decided that we were going to do, you know, less serial killer and childhood trauma and more ghosts. It will creep you out though. But yeah, just a warning. And there's some legends. If ghosty stuff and legend stuff is not your thing, this might not be your episode. But if it is, get ready. You're in luck. And also there's some history stuff. It gets interesting, so even if ghosty stuff's not your thing, you might still find it enjoyable, whatever. Yeah. Okay. Well, so that's the disclaimer. Today we're talking about supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world. Definitely ranked as one of the top ten most haunted places in the US by a lot of websites. I don't know by what measures, but that's a consensus, apparently. It's a British ship that launched in September of 1934. The ship was so large that the River Clyde, located in Scotland, had to be specifically deepened to cope with its size. And according to the ship's logbooks, there have been at least 49 recorded deaths on board since it took off. However, it is also said to be home to nearly 150 ghosts.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

There's two women who are reported to be sighted, one in 1930s clothing, other in 1960s clothing by the pool. A little boy also haunts the passageway near the pool. A man with black hair in a 1930s suit can be spotted in the first class suite area. A lot of children can be heard playing near a storage room where ships' archives are kept.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

I don't like the children ghosts.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

A lot of people in vintage clothing appearing and disappearing. A woman in emerald green is spotted in the observation bar. People also report smelling strong men's cologne and like different kind of smells like that that show up out of nowhere. Shadow forms are also spotted on this ship. And even heard one story about someone going on an elevator around 6 a.m. and hearing a child say mommy, mommy, through the control panel, and then they also heard a dog bark, a cat meow meow, and then heard a kid say mommy mommy again, and there was no one there. So I'm gonna get into more detailed ghosts later, but those are just a few to get your appetite going.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

An amoose boosh.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Yeah, an amoose boosh of ghosts. If you will.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

So this haunted ship, if you hadn't already guessed, if you're from California, more specifically Southern California, you probably already have guessed what the ship is. If you haven't, we're talking about the Queen Mary. And it's an old-ass ship. I learned a lot doing this research that I hadn't I just didn't know. So the Queen Mary, along with the RMS Queen Elizabeth, they're part of the same luxury liner company. They were built as part of a planned two-ship weekly express service between Southampton, England, Cherbourg, France, and New York, which I think was pretty innovative for the time. Completion ultimately took about three and a half years and cost 3.5 million pounds sterling.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Which is then equal to 17.5 million US dollars, which is now equivalent to 334 million four hundred fifty-eight thousand nine hundred fifty-five dollars. Wow. Yeah. So I'm gonna describe to you a little bit about the interior and exterior of the ship so you have like a visual in your head. If you're not someone who can visualize things, I am sorry.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

That feels very targeted.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

This year I learned I didn't know that some people aren't able to visualize.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Yeah, and some people don't uh inner monologue. And some people don't have a fucking inner monologue, which I can't even fathom. Yeah, me neither. I'm like, so you don't just have constant chatter. My brain is so loud. Yeah, mine too.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Like, shut up.

unknown 9:31

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Impersonation of your brain.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Yep, that's how it feels.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Yeah, I feel that, especially before going to sleep. So now I'm aware that some people don't have an inner monologue and some people can't visualize things. So I'm sorry in advance for you not being able to visualize the Queen Mary.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Describe it to us.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

So in the Queen Mary, there were 50 different kinds of wood used on the interiors. There were two indoor swimming pools, beauty salons, libraries, and children's nurseries for all three classes. A music studio and lecture hall, telephone connectivity to anywhere in the world, which is also pretty wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was high tech. There's also outdoor paddle tennis courts and dog kennels, and the main dining room, the grand salon, spanned three stories in height. The ship had many air-conditioned public rooms on board, which I also thought was like, wow.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

For the time.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

For the time, yeah. The cabin class swimming pool facility spanned over two decks in height. This was the first ocean liner to be equipped with their own Jewish prayer room. Wow. Part of a policy to show that British shipping lines avoided anti-Semitism, evident at the time in Nazi Germany. Wow. This is pretty cool. This is like pre-World War II. So this is like they saw Nazi Germany emerging and they were like, this isn't us. Right. We're gonna This isn't us, we're going to put a Jewish prayer room in here. Which sounds like a lot of like performative allyship that we see with a lot of movements today. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

True. But it's still cool that they did that.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

It is still cool that they did that. I was just like, okay. They were like, how do we show? We're gonna put a pair. And um, the cabin class main dining room featured a large map of the transatlantic crossing. And during each crossing, a motorized model of the Queen Mary would indicate the vessel's progress en route. Whoa. So also very high-tech.

SPEAKER_03 11:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Mm-hmm. So this giant fancy ass ship began service from Southampton on May 27, 1936. A first class crossing in 1936 cost about $1,070, which to put it in context was more than a lot of people were making a whole year in the US at the time. The average US citizen was making $1,300 a year-ish. Also for just another way to conceptualize the money.

SPEAKER_03 12:13

Wait, so this was for a what class ticket? First class. First class ticket, okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

Yeah. And also to conceptualize how much money this is, this could pay the average person's rent for over three years at that time. Oh. And it amounts to over $19,000 today.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

So $19,000 today. For a first class to get dang.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

So these people were rolling in the dough. For three years, the Grand Ocean Liner hosted the world's rich and famous among the Atlantic, including the likes of Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, George and Ira Gershwin, and Sir Winston Churchill, just to name a few. It was considered by the upper class to be the only civilized way to travel. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

You know that Sir Winston Churchill's ghost has even been spotted on the ship.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

That's what people say. Alright, Winston. And at the time the Queen Mary held the record for the fastest ever uh North Atlantic crossing. Before I get into the deaths that happened in its first round as luxury liner, I kind of was like, when I was reading about the Queen Mary, everyone was like, she set sail on this day, and she was so beautiful, and she was this. And I was like, why do men always name their vehicle she? I like went down a rabbit hole about this because I was like, I really hate that.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

It was like how also it's kind of like people in tech companies naming like the AI assistant. That's exactly what I was thinking about. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah. So my initial thoughts were the same thing: that it was sexist as fuck, that it was tied to notions of ownership, utility, and control. I thought it was a pretty apt metaphor for literally supporting a bunch of men on their like treacherous journeys. Oh my gosh. You know a metaphor for that one saying, like uh women are not collateral damage for romance. Journey to self-discovery, yeah. I was like, wow, look at that. When art imitates life. And also I was thinking it's real rich for them to say that, considering that women weren't allowed to be on ships for a really long time because they're deemed bad luck.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

So what I'm hearing is that like women have their place and men get to decide what that is, and it's always a supporting role, never a leader, decision maker, or breadwinner. One source said that traditionally ships are given female names because it's been surmised that in ancient history ships were once dedicated to goddesses.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

Oh, well that's cool. So that's kind of cool. I mean, it is kind of like godlike and magical that ships even just exist, you know, it's like going across water that way. Seems unnatural.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

That's true. I bet it I bet it felt very mystical.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

Yeah. Especially the first first times.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

People say that since the word for ship in the languages of the Mediterranean were feminine, the gender of the ship remained the same even when in the languages in which the word for ship or boat was male or gender neutral. Oh, that's that's another another theory. Some ships, like whaling ships, would be at sea for years at a time and would have a closer relationship with the boat than their mothers, wives, or sweethearts that they would leave behind on shore. Legend has it that ships would sometimes behave like women too, with their own personalities and the specific ways they like to be handled. Okay, so clearly we were right.

SPEAKER_03 16:08

How do you feel about that? You hate it.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Yeah. Oh man. I I read this article too, and it was like it started off with these ones, and I was like, okay, that feels a little more reasonable, I guess. But in the back of my head, I was like, there's still some misogyny in here. There has to be. And there it is.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

There it is.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Didn't have to look very far.

SPEAKER_03 16:30

No.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Helen from Strasbourg, France says, ships like vases, for example, generally symbolize femininity because they are vessels, like the womb. Supposedly a woman's defining characteristic. Their function is to contain. This is the flip side of the phallic symbols traditionally embodied in spires or towers, etc.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Oh, so it's all about genitals as per usual.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Why everyone's so obsessed with genitals?

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Yeah, I I really don't know. I I was really thinking about the other day. Like, wow, our entire society is built on our genitals. Like what genitals we have. It doesn't make any sense. Everything's about genitals. But then no one wants to see them because they're like sex is shameful, but then they build the entire society based upon our genitals. Even here it's like the womb, the missile, the spires, like everything is about genitals.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Freud would be very pleased with this conclusion. Yeah. He would be like, yep. Yes. I I was telling you this whole time, it's all about genitals.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

It's all about childhood. It's all about genitals. And in those respects, maybe Freud was right, but he was also a misogynist.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Oh, 100%. Never forget that the women that he diagnosed as hysterical were actually survivors of childhood sexual trauma. And they he couldn't say that because it's all of his it was all of his colleagues' children, and that would put a stain on their name. So he created a whole theory around penis envy to make up for the fact that he was working with a bunch of women who were sexually abused by their probably family members.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Really fucked up. Also, hysteria was a whatever mental illness for the longest time, and it was basically just like women who didn't want to fulfill like the roles that they were being forced to. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Everything's hysteria. I just I think about that all the time.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

Me too.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

It's not even like the things that were studied weren't even real. He made them up to like make up for the lies. That goes back to our conversation about like conspiracy theorists and how conspiracy theories come out of just having to justify a ton of fucking lies to yourself. Okay, so I have one more quote about ships being she. Okay. A ship is called a she because there's always a great deal of bustle around her. There's usually a gang of men about. She has a waist and stays.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

It takes a lot of paint to keep her good looking.

SPEAKER_04 19:37

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It is not the initial expense that breaks you. It is the upkeep. She can be all decked out, and without a man at the helm, she is absolutely uncontrollable. She shows her top sides, hiders, her bottom, and when coming to port, always heads for the buoys. Who wrote this or said this?

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Some asshole on some website. I hate it. I hate it so much. Whoever the fuck wrote that quote. I think you really need to reconsider.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Oh man. A lot of things. A lot of things.

SPEAKER_03 20:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Um, yeah. So I purposefully started off kind of mild and then built up to the built built up to the top misogyny. You know, you gotta, you gotta warm up to the misogyny.

SPEAKER_02 20:36

Yeah, just like we're gonna warm up to the scary ghosts.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, we're starting off slow.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

I think I prove myself right. It's about misogyny, first and foremost. And even if it didn't start that way, it became that way.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Because we live in.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

Yeah, maybe it did start out start out with the goddesses and then probably all the misogyny was added to it.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Men fuck up everything.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

They really do.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

They just twist everything. And I want to acknowledge that this whole conversation that we just had about the she in the ships was like very binary. And also like the descriptions, the reasonings behind ships being she comes out of like heteropatriarchy, which is very binary. Is very binary, so. Back to the Queen Mary after that long tangent. Fantastic. Yeah. It was carrying fancy people. It was doing its thing for the first few years. Some deaths that were recorded happening during the first round of transatlantic crossings is a man named John Henry, who may have been a member of the Queen Mary's original construction crew. He died in one of the boiler rooms, and the cause of death is uncertain. It was this is not a death that's documented on the ship because I think it happened before the ship took sail, so it's technically didn't happen when it was in service. On June 8th, 1936, Able Seaman J.G. Goldberg died of a skull fracture slash laceration of the brain. That's all the info we have. I don't we don't know how he got a skull fracture. Sir Edgar Britton was the first captain of the Queen Mary, and on October 28, 1936, he died of a stroke in his cabin, just two hours before it was set to sail. Wow. Mm-hmm. And then on September 20th, 1937, P. Chapman died of heart failure. In uh October 1937, an unnamed person died. They had uh incomplete records. And then the last one that was documented, at least, um, happened on September 1st, 1939. F Brandt died of a heart failure.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

I have some ghosts that are suspected to be from this point of time. Start off with John Henry's ghost is spotted pretty commonly in boiler rooms three and four. He is described as a bald man who likes to communicate with guests, and he actually doesn't like women to be in the boiler room areas, and you might think, oh, he's misogynistic, but um, that is associated with his ghost. He's uh trying to make sure that everyone's safe, probably because he died in there. And then the the first captain of the ship, Commodore Sir Edgar Britton. People say that he is sighted in various areas of the ship, including the captain's quarters. They've also seen him saluting a flag in the propeller area. There was actually another captain. His name was John Treasure Jones, and he was the last active captain of the Queen Mary. And his ghost is also sighted in the Captain's Quarters, and visitors report smelling cigar smoke. And he had a well-known affinity with cigars. And one of the psychics, I'm gonna be referencing her not a lot. Her name's Nicole, and she's like one of the resident psychics of the Queen Mary, and she says she's seen him in the engine room, and she confirmed with pictures that the man she saw was Captain John Treasure Jones. There is also a ghost known as the boy in blue, who's spotted at the pools and the boiler room areas, and he's suspected to be from this period of time because he's seen wearing a blue sailor suit. Tour guides have seen him in the first and third class pool areas and described him to have reddish-brown hair. He's a little kid, he's three to four years old, and he's believed to be an intelligent spirit, which I'm gonna go into what that means. So there's a difference between hauntings, it's not just like ghosts, there's different kinds of hauntings, and one of the kinds of hauntings known as intel intelligent activity, interactive activity, and what that's thought to be is like when we're alive, we have like we have a soul, we have an aura of our being. And when we die, it's said that that aura kind of remains, and often it ends up remaining because of the following things. Either the person died as a result of a traumatic event, like a murder or a car accident, uh, maybe they have unfinished business, maybe they have died suddenly and don't realize that they're dead, so that that could possibly be this little kid. Their loved ones are so emotionally distraught after they're died that they can't let go is another reason why their aura might still be lingering, the spirit might be emotionally connected to their loved ones, they can't rest due to an injustice done to them, or they might be fearful of what's on the other side. So they're kind of stuck in this limbo area. And basically, an intelligent ghost is one that can communicate with us, and it seems like it's responding to things that you're saying or things that you're doing. So, yeah, the boy in blue is said to be one of these intelligent ghosts. As I mentioned earlier, Winston Churchill's ghost is also spotted on the ship, but that's kind of interesting because he didn't die on the ship, he just was on it a few times. And so he's been spotted near his suite. When he traveled on the ship, the entire M deck was reserved for him and people who were part of his group. He's also been spotted on the promenade deck, the sun deck, and the sports deck. A tour guide said that one of his guests saw Churchill's apparition on the sports deck smoking a cigar. The psychic Nicole's mom has also encountered Churchill's spirit by smelling cigar smoke in multiple locations on the ship near his suite and near the sun deck. So, what Churchill's ghost on the Queen Mary is supposed to be is a what's known as a residual haunting, which is different from what an intelligent haunting is. And that's like either when someone spends a bunch of time in one place, or also when something traumatic or stressful happens and it imprints onto that space, so events kind of replay, like it's like a tape, it'll play over and over again. So it kind of looks like a movie, and like these entities, you can't interact with them, they're not aware of their surroundings. A lot of people seeing like apparitions in vintage clothing walking in and out could also be like residual haunting. I think a lot of the hauntings on the Queen Mary are residual, and definitely Winston Churchill's is because he didn't die on the ship.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Thanks for sharing the ghosts and the ghost vocabulary.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Yeah. So in late August 1939, Queen Mary was on its way back, and by the time that they arrived in New York, the Second World War had started, and Queen Mary was ordered to stay remain in the port until further notice. And during this time, I don't know who decided how does how it was decided, but Queen Mary would be changed from a luxury liner into a warship. So the Queen Mary left New York for Sydney, Australia, and along with several other liners converted into a troop ship to s to carry Australian and New Zealand soldiers to the United Kingdom. It was painted gray and renamed the Grey Ghost. Very fitting. Um and it was named that not only because it kind of blended in, it was gray, but it was supposed to be super fast. So you kind of like You don't see it. You don't really see it coming. Kind of sneaks by you. Yeah. During this time, the furniture and decor was removed and replaced with bunks. 220 cases of China, crystal, and silver. Tapestries and paintings were removed and stored in warehouses for the duration of the war. The Queen Mary would then hold up to 15,000 men at a time, going back and forth between Allied and not Allied locations. So in September 1942, the Queen Mary was on a trip from New York to Glasgow and met with another ship called the HMS Curacao, 200 miles off the coast, and they were going to escort the Queen Mary. And on October 2nd, 1942, there was a tragedy that happened. So the Curacao did a zigzag in front of the Queen Mary, um, which I guess was common practice at the time for ships that were escorting to, you know, confuse any U-boats that could be around. And the U-boats were German submarines. But uh this time the Curacao was too close and the ship was split in half by the Queen Mary, and it was engulfed in flames after the boiler exploded. Someone who was there during this whole thing said the Queen Mary sliced the cruiser in two like a piece of butter straight through the six-inch armored plating. And this it damaged the Queen Mary's bow area, but it was so giant and like hefty that it nothing happened.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Nothing really. It was like a giant going like stepping on a tiny human.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Yes. And at the time there was a policy not to stop for survivors, even if they were yelling for you because it was too dangerous to stop, I guess, um, in the event that there were U-boats around. Yeah. So the Queen Mary kept going. And some soldiers tried to help survivors in the water as the ship continued, and they pulled and they managed to pull like a good amount of people into the ship, but a lot of them didn't make it. I have another quote from someone named Ennik Foster, who was a soldier on the ship at the time, and he said, What a terrible sight it was. The sea was covered in oil, dirty and black, with hundreds of heads, just with oily faces and panicky white eyes, mouths opening and closing like fish, some shouting for their mothers and help, others choking on the fuel oil in their lungs and dying from drowning. Oh my god. Yeah. This would be a horrid way to die. Yeah. He said we picked as as many as we could, 97 out of the 650, the rest perished. On our way back to Ireland, five out of the 97 we saved from the sea died on board to the fuel in their guts and all this destruction in the time it takes to light a cigarette. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

I mean, just like yeah, I think a lot about the just the destruction that war brings, and this was just an accident, also. And they just couldn't save any of these people, even though they were like quote unquote on the same side.

unknown 32:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

Ugh. Terrible. A few years later, on June 6, 1944, the Queen Mary brought troops to the shores of Normandy for D-Day. And just within the first day, there were 400,000 Allied dead, with another 6,000 injured or missing. So I don't know. There's no records during wartime kept at all about the deaths on the ship or what happened on the ship. They said it was protocol to not keep a paper trail just in case the ship was taken over by the enemy side.

SPEAKER_02 32:38

Okay, so they probably just didn't record it at all.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Yeah. So we we really don't know how many people died on the ship or around the ship. Before I get into the deaths, I just wanted to note that I I kept running into sources, both personal statements and from like history buffs, that talk about how the trip troops from the US were like diverse. And I was like really reflecting on how fucked up it is that we had black folks in war with the US and would have they would have to go back to the US where there was like Jim Crow fucking laws. I wonder what experiences were had that we're not hearing about because the people all the people who had stories that were saved and documented and then uploaded to history sites or whatever is a bunch of white people. And it says a lot that we only ever see photos of white soldiers, especially when we glorify war.

SPEAKER_05 33:32

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

And I did some digging around this and wanted to share what I found. So uh the History Channel reported on this and said that the same Jim Crow discrimination in society was practiced in every branch of the armed forces. Many of the bases surprising. Yeah. Many of the bases and training facilities were located in the south, in addition to the largest military installation for black soldiers. They continue to say, regardless of the region, at all bases, there were separate blood banks, hospitals or wards, medical staff, barracks, and recreational facilities for black soldiers. And white soldiers and the local white residents routinely slurred and harassed them.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Fucked up. Yeah. Also, just like fucked up that the US government is like, yeah, please uh fight, fight for us in the military. For what? After we like for what? Enslaved your people and still murder your people.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

They said that black Americans weren't allowed to be on the front lines. They were only allowed to have supporting roles. And also I'm thinking about what qualified someone as like a true American at the time was like the like being some like all-American hero on the front lines. And so storied veteran. Right. So I wonder.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

Yeah, and especially in World War II, it's very much pushed as this narrative that like America saved Europe and like saved than without America, the Allies would have lost the war.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Yeah, this History Channel article does ha carry that vibe about it also, which I didn't pull those quotes, but important to note that that was a vibe that they were putting down. Yeah. But yeah. So Matthew Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth College and the author of Quotidian.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

Quotidien. It's a French word.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Oh, is it?

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Yeah, I mean it means like daily, right? They they use it in English, but it's like from the French word.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Quotidien. Quotidien.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Okay. That's what the book is called. The rest of the title is everyday history in African American newspapers. And he said the kind of treatment they received by white officers in the army bases in the United States was horrendous. They described being in slave-like conditions and being treated like animals. They were called racial epithets quite regularly and just not afforded respect either as soldiers or human beings. They said because the military didn't think African Americans were fit to combat or leadership positions, they were mostly relegated to labor and service units, working as cooks and mechanics, building roads and ditches, and unloading supplies from trucks and airplanes were common tasks for black soldiers. And for the few who did make officer rank, they could only lead other black men.

SPEAKER_04 36:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

And I'm imagining that a lot of these jobs are like really laborious and probably really dangerous.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Yeah. Like who worked in the boiler rooms.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Right. So I just wonder how many injuries and deaths were not accounted for during this time, knowing that it was a really dangerous it's just dangerous in general. Like you have the dangers of war compounded by like the fact that you were in danger amongst your like other soldiers on on the ship that you have to travel for how long?

SPEAKER_03 37:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Yeah. They continue to say in 1942, the black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, in response to a letter to the editor by James G. Thompson, a 26-year-old black soldier, in which he wrote, Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? launched the Double V campaign. The campaign highlighted contributions the soldiers made in the war effort and exposed discrimination that black soldiers endured while fighting for liberties that African Americans themselves didn't have. The 761 Tank Battalion became the first black division to see ground combat in Europe, joining Patton's Third Army in France in November 1944. The men helped liberate 30 towns under Nazi control and spent 183 days in combat, including the Battle of Bulges. So that that's the bit that I'm talking about with the whole like America saved everything and like kind of thing. But I wanted to highlight it because when we talk about World War II, we we never hear about black divisions being a big part of or any part of the US war.

SPEAKER_02 38:18

The effort?

SPEAKER_01 38:19

Efforts?

SPEAKER_02 38:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:21

I hate all those words to talking about war. But anyway. So uh they concluded by saying after World War II officially ended on September 2nd, 1945, black soldiers returned home to the United States facing violent white mobs of those who resented African Americans in uniform and perceived them as a threat to the social order of Jim Crow. Wow. In addition to racial violence, black soldiers were often denied benefits guaranteed under the GI Bill, the sweeping legislation that provided tuition assistance, job placement, and home and business loans to veterans.

SPEAKER_04 38:54

So vomit.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

When I was reading about this, I was like, I know some fucked up shit was happening. I just wanted to have context, you know, ready to go. And yeah, I'm sure this is like just scratching the surface, too.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Mm-hmm. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. I didn't know much of much about that. It's not surprising. It's not surprising. It's not surprising at all.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

It's also not surprising that people don't really know about it. Yeah. Okay. So back to the Queen Mary at the time. This is happening all at the same time. So some recorded deaths on board. There's a story. It's anecdotal. But again, World War II documents weren't kept. Apparently, during World War II, a cook was murdered in the kitchen by troops or by own staff because he was a jerk. I couldn't, there was mixed messages about what the context of this death was. But both stories say that the cook was stuffed into an oven and burned to death. On April 18th, 1943, Captain H.L. Fry died, and it's not recorded why or what he died from, but if it was a captain, I wonder if there's some. I don't know. I was thinking about the Circelle. And how you were like, maybe people like, how could you live after that? And they didn't record He died by suicide. That's what I was doing. Is that what you were thinking? That's what I was wondering. Maybe.

SPEAKER_02 40:25

Yeah. If it was around the same time, wouldn't be surprising. That's a lot of lot of guilt to hold.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On October 18th, 1944, a night steward, P.A. W. Hughes, was found dead in his bunk. On June 21st, 1945, P.H. Ashburn fell from the ship and died. On January 3rd, 1946, Private E. W. Simon was found dead in his bunk. On March 14th, 1946, a newborn passed away from a severe illness. There was a newborn? I guess it was still used as a warship even after World War II. And it was used to help they called them war brides, but basically the Queen Mary served as transport for soldiers, spouses.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Okay, so that makes sense that a newborn could have died.

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Yeah. There's also, like a historian said that troops died of heat prostration on the Red Sea. Like apparently a lot of troops, it just wasn't recorded. And they said uh when the ship was in the Red Sea, there was no getting away from the fact that troops were crowded below in 120-degree temperatures. There was no ventilation, port uh portholes were wheeled shut because of blackouts, and they were losing people from heat prostration. Holy cow, that sounds horrific. And again, I'm wondering who's being who's being held in those in the bottom of the ship in 120-degree temperatures, stuffed in like sardines. And then he went on to say that during this period there's a burial at sea every four hours. Oof. Um, there are stories of soldiers who would literally jump ship as Queen Mary left New York, and who knows how many of these people drowned or made it to shore. Bill Winberg said that, and he's not a historian, he's an archive archivist. Archivist for the Queen Mary. Got it. And most recently, Resident Ghostbuster.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

They have a resident psychic, they have a resident ghostbuster.

SPEAKER_01 42:30

I guess so. People were just hanging around looking for ghosts, chatting with ghosts. So by the end of World War II, the ship had carried more than 800,000 troops and traveled more than 600,000 miles. 5,000 German prisoners of war were also on board. And almost 13,000 quote unquote war brides and children were transported to the US and Canada. At least 10 stowaways were discovered when That's not that many. That's not that many. It's true. Um I think more I I saw like a list that I couldn't actually read that look longer. Yeah. And these are just the stowaways that were found. Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 43:09

Fair.

SPEAKER_01 43:10

How many stowaways were there? Again, how many deaths of stowaways? We wouldn't even know because they weren't even supposed to be there.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:17

Okay, so and as I mentioned, as part of the security protocol, there were no records kept during World War II. So that's six years of undocumented sickness and deaths. Um and the total number of soldiers and prisoners of war who died on the ship is not known at all. So apparently there was like a survey done with about a thousand US combat veterans. I think they interviewed them. I think they surveyed and interviewed them. And when they were talking about prisoners of war, only one admitted to shooting a prisoner, but one-third told the interviewer that they'd seen US troops kill German prisoners. Ugh. So I see I nobody knows how often this happened. But I imagine that prisoners of war often did not live.

SPEAKER_04 44:09

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

Yeah. Especially on a ship where there's like no oversight. There's no oversight on these warships.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

There's not yeah. I feel like even now there's like probably there's more oversight than there used to be then, but still there's like not that much oversight, especially when we're sending troops to Asia and the Middle East. So yeah, I would imagine a lot of things probably happened to those prisoners of war that we don't know about. And sure you'll you can say, well, they were Nazis, but you know, it's a slip slippery slope.

SPEAKER_01 44:44

It is, and also like I read one like firsthand account from a German soldier who was recruited to be a part of like well, not recruited, was like drafted to fight in the war, and he was like 18, and he said that at the time that he was drafted, you had a choice to choose between the SS or general troops, and he did was like, I'm not doing the SS. So, you know, a lot of a lot of German soldiers may very well just be in the same situation that US soldiers were getting drafted.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

Right, right. They didn't choose to be there. Yeah. Yep. So that's so true.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Like a lot of a lot of the like SS people were on the ground occupying spaces in Europe. Not to say that they weren't around on other places, but I think that the people that were sent away were the people who opted not to be part of the SS. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Well, that was my understanding of it. Yeah. So that's all the shit that has happened. About the war. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 45:49

Onto some ghosts that are linked back to this period of time. That story about the cook being murdered in the kitchen during World War II. I had that, I also had the same thing where either his cooking was so upsetting to the troops that they became violent, or you know, he liked to abuse his staff and they mutinied against him. Those were the two stories that I had. And it said the stories that I had said it was like specifically by Australian soldiers. Stories say that sometimes his screams can be heard from the kitchen. I don't like that. And actually, in the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode about the Queen Mary, they're sitting, like, I think in the auditorium or something, somewhere near the kitchen, and they're literally talking about the story. And um, you can hear clanging coming from the kitchen, and they like pause what they're doing to like talk to their film crew, and there's someone on the film crew who's like, Yeah, we just heard glass breaking there a couple minutes ago. Did you hear that? And e even Shane admits that it's it was unnerving to hear the glass break and the clanging coming from the kitchen. If you don't watch Buzzfeed Unsolved, there's like two hosts of it, and one of them is a skeptic when it comes to ghosts, and one of them is a believer, and Shane is a skeptic, and so he even he said that it was unnerving to hear these sounds coming from the kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

I think I remember this. I think we watched it together. Yeah. And like you see them like both pause and like look.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

Yeah, and they're like, Did you hear that? And then there's like someone who's just like, Yeah, we just heard some glass break. So Cook's still in there, clearly a little bit angry. I bet he was shoved into an oven.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

I'd be too.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

I would be too. I would be too. It is said that what haunts the kitchen is a poltergeist, and a poltergeist is a type of ghost or spirit that's responsible like for physical disturbances such as loud noises, like the clanging, objects being moved or destroyed, like the breaking of the glass. Poltergeist comes from the German name for noisy spirit, and poltergeists do knocks, bangs. The interesting about poltergeist is they're suspected to be either in places where there's a teenager who's who's alive, but is like manifesting a lot of activity due to their stress and like emotional teen angst? Yeah, teen angst maybe creates poltergeist, is one of the theories. And then the other theory is that there's just a lot of spirits in one area. And I'm suspecting that this poltergeist might just be the cook because he has a lot of anger. That guy was burned to death. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And we know that the ship has a lot of spirits in general. But the kitchen specifically is said to be haunted by a poltergeist.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

Poltergeist sounds way more cool than way cooler. Way more cool. The fuck am I talking about? Sounds way cooler than noisy spirit.

SPEAKER_02 48:54

Yeah, it does. Yeah. It does. Poltergeist. That's my attempt at the German accent.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

We're going back to the last episode. Jack episode.

SPEAKER_02 49:06

And I'm sure you're all wondering: like, are there military ghosts? And you would be right. Since the Queen Mary carried hundreds of thousands of servicemen, like Shayna said, German and Italian prisoners of war, the ship is haunted by both World War II servicemen and prisoners of war. International haunting.

SPEAKER_05 49:26

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

These ghosts have been spotted on A decks, B decks, M decks, and the cargo hold area. Nicole Strickland, which is a psychic, says that she's seen men clad in military attire from World War II. Guests and people have also seen groups of men roaming A, B, and M decks. Nicole has heard and captured EVPs of men talking about military duties. And if you don't know, EVPs are electronic voice phenomenon, so it's basically like maybe sounds that weren't heard in the moment, but you hear them in the recording afterwards, and so it's like auditory uh sounds of people talking. This one's creepy. There is there are stories of an Italian prisoner of war who is spotted in the first and third class pool room and he doesn't have legs. Oh. So that's uh pretty unfortunate. Nicole also once did kind of like a session where she was talking to one of the prisoners of war, and she let him know that he's free to move on to a better place and no longer feel confined to the mortal world. And she said that after she finished talking, she heard a disembodied male voice say thank you, and it she called it a sad encounter that made her cry. So, talking about what happened with the Curacao, people say that they hear splashing and screaming in the boiler room, and also the bow of the ship is said to be a hot spot for these particular hauntings because that was where the ship first made contact with the Curacao. A person who currently works on the Queen Mary was sharing a story on the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode about how there was a scavenger hunt going on with a bunch of kids, and so he was down in the bow, kind of just like waiting there in case any kids showed up, and he was by himself, and I guess he was just like trying to pass the time, and he knocked on the woodwork on near the porthold, and someone knocked back, even though no one else was down there. The last thing I'm gonna talk about is the isolation ward, and so I the isolation ward was for people who were quarantined when they were sick on the ship, but it was also a makeshift prison during the war times, and it's also supposed to be one of the hot spots of the ship. And during a YouTube video that I watched where this YouTuber Llo Elaine stays on the ship for a night, they like walk by the isolation ward and they can't get in because they've locked up most of the haunted spots on the ship, so you can only get to them if you go on a ghost tour. So they're basically just uh standing outside the isolation ward, and they have this app on their phone, which I don't know how much I believe it because it's like a phone app, but it's called Ghost Radar, and it like works similarly to like a spirit box where like uh voices will come out of it when like something's trying to talk to you. And she she says that she like believes it because there's like periods of time where she was trying to use it where it didn't say anything, but take it with a grain of salt. But while she was uh standing by the isolation ward, they got two words come out of the ghost app, and it was one of them was handsome, and one of them was softly.

SPEAKER_01 52:49

So was there some was was someone getting wild in the isolation?

SPEAKER_02 52:54

Yeah, or maybe they were trying to flirt. Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 52:59

Maybe flirty ghosts.

SPEAKER_02 53:01

Yep, yep. Maybe they were getting lonely in the isolation world in the quarantine.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

You know, that would be some juicy stories I wish I learned about them.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

You know there was there had to have been some of that on the ship that's so many troops.

SPEAKER_02 53:15

Definitely there was some hanky panky. There was definitely some hanky panky, some some queer hanky panky going on.

SPEAKER_03 53:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:24

Uh but those are kind of all the ghost stories I have from the war times. And I'll pass pass it back to you for what happened next.

SPEAKER_01 53:35

Okay. So after World War II, it resumes as a luxury liner after all that shit. It's repainted, all the shit's like not maybe not all the shit, but a lot of the shit's put back.

SPEAKER_02 53:48

Renovation station.

SPEAKER_01 53:50

Yeah, so from September 1946 to July 1947, Queen Mary was refitted for passenger service, adding air conditioning to more of the spaces, I guess. And on January first, nineteen forty-nine, the Queen Mary returned to service in sh in in France. So this is the time where most deaths were recorded. Doesn't mean it's the time most deaths happened. It just has most recorded. Most recorded, which makes sense because it's the most recent history that it has. And I'm not gonna name all of the deaths because there's a shit ton. Right here I have like I have 49 listed. And these are both deaths that are like formally marked on the Queen Mary plaque, but also some people that are said to have died from like tour guides and stuff. So take that as a well. Okay, like tour guide stories. Yeah, but I'll let you know which one's which. Pretty much all of them are documented except for a couple. There's mostly the people died from natural causes. There were some drownings, some unknown, undetermined, which always strikes me as a little like why is it undetermined? And some were gruesome. Wide array of deaths. Many deaths. I mean, it makes sense. It's was in service from what 1947 1949 to like the late 60s. So that's many years for people to die. I'm gonna name this, but we're gonna come back to it later. But hold this in your brain that a Walter J. Adamson is said by tour guides to have died in room B226, which is now B340, and it was a third-class passenger. Cause of death unknown. Hold that. Hold it in your brain. Don't forget. Don't forget. There's also a child who is not documented, Jaclyn Torin. She was five or six when she drowned in the ship's second-class pool, which is now the Royal Theater. Also, like a tour guide.

SPEAKER_02 56:01

Shared this story.

SPEAKER_01 56:03

On September 18th, 1949, up in the Captain's Quarters, senior second officer William E. Stark came into the captain's quarters and was like, I need some gin.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

He was having a rough day.

SPEAKER_01 56:17

He was having a rough day. He went in there, he found a gin bottle, and he took a swig of what he thought was gin, but was actually cleaning solutions stored in a gin bottle, and he accidentally poisoned himself with tetrachloride. Which sounds unpleasant. And he died like five days later.

SPEAKER_03 56:37

Because it took a while.

SPEAKER_01 56:38

Took a while to be fully poisoned. That's rare. Can you imagine the burn?

SPEAKER_02 56:43

Yeah. Yeah. This ship seems cursed to me.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

Some say it's cursed. Some some theories. Urban legends shit to to ruminate on.

SPEAKER_02 56:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

On March 15, 1950, a fireman W. Humphreys was found dead in his bunk. On July 26, 1950, someone in PH Davies was lost overboard. Oh man. Which don't know how that happened, but they are left. They're lost overboard. July 29th, 1951, a trimmer, A.J. Lee, was lost overboard also. And if you're I had to look this up. I was like, what the fuck's a trimmer? And trib trimmers were people who worked like mostly in the boiler rooms. They worked with the coal to make sure that the coal in the bunkers were evenly distributed so like the chip didn't move in any one direction. So maybe while doing some work fell overboard. I'm just morbid like this, but I wonder if how many of these were like how many people were thrown overboard?

SPEAKER_02 57:44

Right.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Were people thrown overboard?

SPEAKER_02 57:46

I don't know. Hopefully not.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

Hopefully not, but like I just feel like it had to happen at least once.

SPEAKER_02 57:51

Yeah. And I'm sure people also jumped off.

SPEAKER_01 57:54

For sure.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

I wonder what the details are with the undetermined, incomplete, or unnamed deaths. Also curious about cover-ups and how often they happened, whose stories are being left out. There are murders not mentioned or records doctored. It was a ship, but it also operated as a hotel.

SPEAKER_02 58:15

Right.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

And we know how wild hotels are.

SPEAKER_02 58:18

Yeah. And we haven't even talked about how wild cruises are. Oh my god, cruises are. And this is like a combo. This is stay on land.

SPEAKER_01 58:28

Stay on land. And be careful about hotels. As you know from our series. RC. I mean, if you don't know, yeah. Al Lethal Location series covers the CISO Hotel. And in the first one about Elisa Lamb, we I talk we talk about how often strange deaths happen in hotels. And it's pretty scary.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

Yeah, it was definitely a shock to me.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

It was a shock to me as well. I was like, oh no. Okay. So there were some babies that died during this time too. J.R. Maloney, master at arms, who was in charge of law enforcement, was found dead in his bunk. Oh. So I highlighted it because I was like, sounds like a person that was probably important to the higher-ups, you know? Whoever was whoever was keeping documentation of like deaths that happened. I feel I feel like there are more details available for people with titles. And so I was wondering why J.R. Maloney, master at arms in charge of law enforcement, was found dead in his bunk with no other details listed.

SPEAKER_02 59:43

So I was like, none of these say suicide. So I'm w wondering whether debts that don't have anything listed could also be that. Because I don't doubt that people died from suicide.

SPEAKER_01 59:56

Oh, yeah. Especially during the wartime. People just jumping off left and right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:01

Could also just be like poor record keeping. Could be. Who knows? Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:06

In on July 10th, 1966, an 18-year-old crewman, John Petter, was accidentally crushed and severed in door number 13 of the engine room during a routine drill. According to the according to the official version, whatever that means, it's what it said on this website. Crew members had this tradition of trying their luck hopping back and forth through the doorway as many times as they could. Why would you want to flirt with death like that? That is so it's a water.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:36

It's some toxic masculinity shit.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:38

Yes, it is. But John Petter tried one too many times, and the the story goes that that's when the door crushed him.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47

Oh man. That's also a horrific way to die.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:51

Yes. And apparently, like once the once the door was going, there's no way to stop it because it was like a gear operated, so you just had to like watch it continue. Close your eyes. Yeah. Split in half. Severed. There's another tale of a John Mackenzie being killed by the same door in 1942. Legend says that he may have been held there by co-workers that didn't like him.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:15

That's very mysterious.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:16

It's very mysterious. And also it wasn't documented, it's just another Yeah. It's another tale. And it says 1942, so it could be during the war and all.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

Yeah, so those are just some of the many deaths that I recorded.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:32

Okay, so I'm sure you're all wondering. So many deaths. Are any of these ghosts? There are a lot of ghosts, some of which are of the ones that sh the deaths that Shayna mentioned. Firstly, to start off with, the most celebrated little spirit of the Queen Mary, our young Jackie. Is she the most celebrated? She is quoted as the most celebrated little spirit of the Queen Mary.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:01

Celebrated.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Very weird. People like her a lot. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:04

Nicole Strickland, the resident psychic of the Queen Mary, has communicated with Jackie a lot and she says, quote, picture Shirley Temple. Jackie is about six years old and sometimes seen wearing a blue or pink dress or a nightgown. She has short and curly blonde hair and is often seen or heard laughing and dancing within the pool's confines and other areas of the liner. She is very friendly and loves to play games, sing songs such as London Bridge and Ring Around the Rosie. Very classic child ghost, you know. It is just being cute and creepy, singing songs, playing games. So Jackie's been sighted in the first and third class pools mostly. People report feeling a child squeeze their hand.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:53

No, I don't like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:57

Splashing in the pool when no one's there, calling for her parents, and she even responds to questions sometimes. Some visitors believe that Jackie has a friend, Sarah, who also drowned in the same pool in 1949. Some people also report that Jackie likes to play hide-and-seek with them, which is just really, really creep. Nicole says, after spending 15 years working with Jackie, I feel like she's a highly evolved spirit who may just be the Mary's spiritual ambassador. You mentioned our poor friend JP John Petter. It's an 18-year-old man from Yorkshire who worked as a fireman/slash bilge cleaner. Found at 3 55 a.m. trapped in the watertight door number 13 in the aft engine room. At the time of the accident, the vessel was in fog and all the watertight doors in the boiler and engine rooms were closed on bridge control and working properly. No one knows exactly what happened. He actually passed away later in the ship's hospital. So he was alive when they found him.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:08

Oh my god. I didn't know that. Yeah. How long do you stay alive severed?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:15

Or do you think he's exaggerating when they said when they said probably you you know how when like there's car accidents and stuff like that, they tell you not to pull people out because like they might bleed out because the thing that's putting pressure on it is keeping the blood inside. So maybe when he was like stuck in the door, like he wasn't bleeding out because the door was like putting pressure on it. Oh and so like he needed time to bleed out after being.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

I don't like it. Yeah. Can you imagine?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:46

Ugh. So John Petters sighted in the boiler rooms and in the engine room. People say they see a young man in crew attire. They say he has a beard, sometimes greased hand marks show up on the windows. Nicole has seen him twice, once in the aft engine room, and another time in boiler room number three. People report seeing his shadowy figure lurking between the boiler room and the green room. But he is also said to be very friendly and he likes communicating with guests, so he's an extrovert. Okay. Some report to have spoken with him, and apparently he audibly responds to questions about beer. So I think he misses getting fucked up with his friends. Oh, little John. Oh JP. Next ghost is also one of the other unfortunate deaths that occurred on the ship. William Eric Stark, senior second officer, who accidentally drank some tetrachloride thinking it was gin. He's been sighted in his personal quarters on the sun deck and the engine room. A former tour guide said he once saw him in the aft engine room on the control panel with a clipboard in his hands. So he's been sighted as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:06

It's very specific.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:08

Very specific. Another really famous ghost that people don't know who it is, but she's known as the lady in white.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

Kept saying that. What's up with the lady in white?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:19

Yeah, she's a she's thought to be a first-class passenger, and she's sighted on the deck area, in the piano, in the A-deck lobby bar, the cabin class lounge, or the Queen Saloon. People say that they see a woman in a white flowing dress in the Queen Salon, sometimes dancing alone. Other times she floats towards the piano. A tour guide said he once saw her exit Portside B deck staterooms and start walking towards the isolation ward. He believes that she might have been a nurse who worked on the ship. Nicole has also seen a tall woman with dark hair and a white gown on the first class stairway. And while I was doing research, I actually found some photographic evidence of the lady in white. Ghost hunter Valentina Lomborg captured it. She checked into the hotel, started taking photos, and when she later looked at the picture, she found like a ghostly figure standing in the doorway. And I saw the picture, and it's pretty creepy. I will say though that this evidence was published. In the UK newspaper The Sun, which is historically great at publishing things that aren't real. So could be real, also could be totally fake. And then there is also a ghost named Amanda.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:44

Um what's up with the names? How do people name the ghost?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:47

So they know that this person's name is Amanda because she identified herself as such in an EVP, but they don't know the context of her. She believes that uh they believe that maybe uh she passed away after the boat was retired. But she's seen in the first and third class pool areas, the boiler room areas, and people report hearing her singing in the boiler rooms, and one time an EVP was captured of her saying, It was nice talking with you in the boiler room. She's said to have a calm, gentle nature, and she's drawn to women. Something that's pretty cute, which I will share, is that there's also ghost cats on the Queen Mary. Nicole Nicole has heard ghost cat meows on several occasions in the pool area, and she once saw it in the changing room, and there's multiple documented EVPs of cats meowing on the ship. So I know we've been talking a lot about how a ton of these ghosts are in the pool area. It is actually suspected that the pool is a portal to another dimension.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:57

This is what people are saying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:59

Okay. People are saying that, and it's for a few reasons, probably because there's a ton of ghosts that are sighted there. And also, shadow forms are frequently cited in the first and third class pools.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:11

I do not like the shadow shit. I saw some photos of shadow shit like in the pool.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:18

Oh, you did?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:18

Yeah, that people posted.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:20

That's really great.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:21

I mean, hard to tell with photos.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:23

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:24

But they did look creepy.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:25

People on guests, including Nicole, have seen dark gray, black, humanoid figures on the upper levels of the pool. She also suspects that maybe it's because of the energy of the pool and the water, but also the ceiling of the pool is quartzite mother of pearl, which is also like attracts strong spiritual energy. Just to kind of go into what shadow forms are, it's a type of haunting activity that really doesn't have a very strong explanation. They are different from ghosts because they're usually shapeless, dark masses, mostly seen with your peripheral vision. They're known to do things that are different from ghosts. They can move between walls, they don't have human features, they don't wear clothes, or sometimes they don't wear clothes, other times they do. People who encounter them say that they feel dread. Clairvoyance who encounters them said that they feel that they are not human. Shadow people don't have any mouth, nose, or facial expressions. Some are seen as child-sized humanoids. Some people say that they seem to be made up of dark smoke or dark steam. At times when they move, they appear to be moving on an invisible track from one place to another, like a train. They have been seen to hop or do a strange dance. They're also known to just kind of like stare at the floor.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:48

So very, very creepy. Very, very creepy.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:52

This is really, really creepy though. There's a ghost named Grumpy the Growling Ghost.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:59

No, I don't like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:01

In the pool area.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:02

Oh, I don't like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:05

Identity unknown, but apparently he growls at visitors and lurks in a room under the stairs near the first class swimming pool, and other times can be heard in the boiler room as well. Demonic entities are associated with growling. Some people believe that they are fallen angels and that they can actually look angelic to manipulate you. Other times they can look horrific and scary. Other times they can also look like a black mist or fog. When there's a demonic entity around, people report rotting smells or growling, pushing, shoving, hitting, even scratching. No! And in areas where a demonic entity is supposed to be present, there's also reported to be like an oppressive feeling or like an oppressive air around. So I suspect that Grumpy the Growling Ghost is actually a demon, especially since he's in the same area as the portal to the other dimensions. Portals are thought to be doorways to other worlds in which entities travel through, and it's speculated that they're not usually limited to one location or region. The places experience a wide array of different types of anomalous activity, which the pool area definitely does. There's ghosts, there's shadow forms, there's growling ghosts, odd creatures, strange shapes, unexplained myths. And so I think probably because of all of this is why this uh medium suspected that the pool area was a portal to another dimension.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:50

That's a lofty claim.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:51

Mm-hmm. It is a lofty claim.

unknown 1:12:54

Growling.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:55

I really hate that. Yeah. I really hate that there was enough people who who've reported hearing growling for it to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:03

That they named Grumpy. The growling. Yeah. Grumpy the growling ghost.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:07

There's just like enough growling. That that bothers me.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:11

It bothers me too.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:12

I don't I don't like that. What the fuck? Back to the luxury liner. I'm gonna list some more deaths. These are just speculation. I couldn't find anything that confirmed any of these. So take the stories with a grain of salt. So uh I watched one of the tour guides who said that in the 80s they found new documentation that suggests in 1948 someone named Walter J. Adamson, who was a third-class passenger, died in B226, which is now B340, and the cause of death was unknown. And then another legend says that sometime in the 60s, a man brutally murdered two women. They call him Samuel. They say that his crimes were discovered and he was locked in his third-class stateroom, either B222, B224, or B226. It's one of these three because it's they're not sure which one because it's now like one big room. Ooh, yes. The door was locked and a guard was posted outside. A little while later, he started pounding on the door saying someone was in there with him trying to kill him, and the guard ignored him, thinking that he was just trying to escape. And the next day when the ship arrived in New York, the crew reached out to NYPD detectives and they went to appre apprehend him, but when they opened the door to the stateroom, they found that the man had been ripped apart and his entrails and limbs spread all over the room. That's yeah, so that's the story of the world. Yeah, and they also they also speculate that these three third-class staterooms were used to house POWs during World War II. Ooh, okay. So this is this is the energy that's supposed to be occupying B340.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:10

Not great.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:11

There's also another room that has some history. It's it's on the B deck as well, it's B474. And the legend has it that a family was murdered by their father. The tale goes that he strangled the mother and sisters and then shot a little girl named Dana in the room's bathroom. Some stories say that he also shot himself. So those are the two stories of those rooms. And then after more than 1,000 transatlantic crossings, the Queen Mary retired from service in 1967. This was likely due to the fact that airplanes started being built in 1958, and so like the the demand for a transatlantic ship was not not super high.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:53

Yeah, it was probably more affordable. Yeah. Like air airplanes were probably more affordable.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:57

Yeah, a lot of factors. Shorter. Right. Right. All the things. Yes. So and in that same year, the Queen Mary was sold for 3.45 million to the city of Long Beach, California, for use as a maritime museum and hotel. Significant restructuring, refurbishing, and renovating was performed, including the complete gutting of the lower section of the ship below the R deck, and the removal of the boilers, forward engine room, and stabilizers. The three third-class staterooms that I mentioned earlier were combined into the larger guest room, B340. So formally B2224 and B226. On May 8th, 1971, after all of the renovations were done, Queen Mary opened its doors to tourists and hotel guests. By the time the 1980s came around, B340 was closed for booking because guests would leave in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:53

Ask for their money back.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:55

Yeah, and ask for their money back. According to Nicole Strickland in her book Spirited Queen Mary, the legend. Hey, Nicole! Yes. The legend specifically that we named about like the guy whose like body parts were everywhere. Apparently the legend was invented in the late 80s or early 90s by employees of the Walt Disney Company, which owned the hotel at the time. Wow. Um and a few cast members wanted to scare guests who were asking about the unavailable rooms. So we still don't have a clear story or like there's no there's no real stories as to why it's like so But if prisoners of war were kept in there. Oh you know bad shit happened to them. Yeah, not not not good vibes, worst vibes. Yeah. Um torture vibes. And also I just wonder I don't know, if it was like third class and it was one of the more neglected parts of the of the ship, if people felt like they can get away with things more down there. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:57

Who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:58

But um this is when like a staff capta captain found record from 1948 about the Walter Death. You can still visit and stay at the Queen Mary. I have definitely visited the Queen Mary many times as a child, and I Did you go on one of the scavenger hunts? I did not I don't think they had those when I was a kid. I think that's a more recent thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:21

Wow, I would have been so excited to go on a field trip to a haunted place.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:25

Well, I didn't even know that was a thing for a long time. They don't like at least on the on the tours that I was brought on as a kid.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:33

They didn't tell you it was haunted. Maybe there was like kid friendly.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:38

Yeah, yeah. And then sometimes kids would ask staff members, like, Oh, I hear this place is haunted. Do you have any ghost stories? And it does feel very creepy, especially as a kid, like in like the low like in the engine rooms and shit.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:54

But one of I remember one of the ladies who was working at a convenience, like one of the little shops, said that sometimes her items would disappear. She didn't like after she knew that she placed it in a particular place. At first she thought it was her co-workers just farting around or her being forgetful. But she started putting things like where she knew they would be and they'd still disappear.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:18

Um, she also said that sometimes the elevator would get stuck and she'd hear like like laughter, like it was like some like a mischievous ghost.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:28

Yeah, like like that ghost that said mommy mommy through the elevator intercom.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:35

Maybe she does say that she feels like it's like a maybe a child.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:40

It seems like a lot of kids died on this ship. There's a lot of ghosts. A lot of kid ghosts. At least they have each other.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:46

Yeah, that's true. They're not lonely. They're not lonely.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:49

They're not lonely.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:50

So I don't know if they tell staff to just have a few stories in their head to like give to visitors or if th those were things that happened to her, but that's what she said. And also a friend from high school who as a kid went with her family and said, like when they were out still outside, like on one of the decks, that there was a little girl with like a cool coat, and she was like, It's a cool that little girl's coat, I love that little girl's coat. Um, was trying to tell her parents about it, and her parents like didn't know where this little girl with the coat was.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:26

Oh my gosh. Umbe, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:30

But she said that I'm not now I'm trying to make sure I have the story right. I think it that she was kind of freaked out about it because the most recent time she went to the Queen Mary there was a plaque. Because now there's plaques everywhere telling stories of ghost sightings, and there's a plaque in the same place that she saw that little girl, um, and it said that people see a little girl in a in a funky coat. In a in a period coat.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:56

There. I think it was a distinct color too. I just don't remember the details, so I don't want to mess them up. But I thought that was pretty creepy.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:03

That is really creepy.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:05

Yeah, so you can visit and stay at the Queen Mary. It's uh still a hotel and tourist attraction.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:12

When the pandemic's over.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:14

Yes. Non-COVID times. Yeah. So it's still a still a hotel and tourist attraction with tours, exhibits, a theater, fine dining, a bar, and it's also an event and wedding venue. Wow. So people get married on the Queen Mary too. Wandering the ship, you can find history everywhere, the original shopping arcade designed to look like London's Piccadilly Circus, a display of menu cards from the ship's early days, photographs of beaming celebrities arriving on board. Elizabeth Taylor brought her poodles. I guess there's a photo of that.

unknown 1:21:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:48

The ship's playroom with dusty vintage toys. Though not every part of the Queen Mary is accessible, both the original swimming pools are now off limits. You can visit much of the ship without a guide. Down a staircase, you can visit the engine room, now eerily silent. And in 2018, Queen Mary reopened B340 for hotel stays. So this is after the BuzzFeed Unsolved episode. In the first week it was open to reservations, there were 40 bookings. So people really want to stay in this haunted ass room. Yeah. And now outrageous. And now for a payment of $499 a night, you can stay in the room too. And provided to you is a Ouija board, tarot cards, ghost hunting equipment, and electric candles. And the walls are covered with pictures of ghost stor ghosts and stories of guest encounters.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:48

Which is wild that they provide a Ouija board to guests and that they're just like.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:53

I don't think they believe that they're actually haunted. I think they're just capitalizing on the totally right.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:00

It's $500 a night to stay. Like I I I saw that what the room looks like now, even, and it looks like it's a very basic hotel room. Very basic hotel room. It is not fancy by any means. So I'm gonna share a little bit about the B deck. They were third-class cabins that are now used for guests at the Queen Mary Hotel. When you see pictures of it, it's shiny wood panelings, burgundy carpets. Cabin B340 that Shayna mentioned, yes, used to be three third-class state rooms that were then converted to one large suite. Just has like basic furnishings, uh, two portholes. It's in the lower level. This is one of the most haunted decks in the ship. B deck. This room they stopped accepting guests for almost 30 years because of all the complaints that they were getting, and people not wanting to stay in the room anymore, people asking for refunds, people reported hearing footsteps, faucets turning on and off, toilets flushing on their own were common, beds shaking.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:10

Ew, I don't like the bed shaking.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:11

Yeah, I don't like that either. It's like you wake up in the middle of the night, it's like no. The the hauntings are said to have begun in 1971, which is when the ship was a hotel. People would hear knocking on the door when no one was there, bathroom lights turned on and off by themselves. There is a rumor that it maybe uh was haunted by an officer on the ship who kept the accounts, but I I only saw that in one source. Like Shayna said, records do show that a Walter J. Adamson was found dead in one of the rooms that's part of B340, B226. Hauntings also include bed sheets being thrown across the room. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:54

Bed sheets being thrown across the room.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:59

That would that would be so upsetting to me. I would not stay there. Because I feel like for myself, I could be like, Shayna, you're making this shit up in your head. There's so many things that I could say I'm making shit up and like deal with it and like stay.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:12

Yeah. But um threaded. Beds shaking, things being thrown. No.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:17

Oh, I would fucking tell myself that the bed shaking was an earthquake.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:20

So Buzzfeed Unsolved actually stayed in this room um when it wasn't available to the general public. They were the first people to stay in that room in like 30 years. And uh when they stayed in there, it looks really gross because the the floor was ripped out. There's like literally nothing in there. So they like put down like their own sleeping bags and blankets. At 3:50 a.m., they start to hear weird noises that sound like animals fighting or static is what they said it sounded like. And then at 4 10 a.m., Ryan wakes up again and says that he heard a voice talk. Uh so those are the two things that happened when they stayed in that room overnight. But they begin the episode by basically saying how Ryan ha had visited the ship before as well. Like so when he was 17, he was interested in the paranormal but was a skeptic before he stayed at the Queen Mary. He stayed in room B44, so also on the famously most haunted deck. He said that throughout the night he was repeatedly poked in the face while he slept, and he thought that it was his friend, but then he woke up and saw that his friend was fast asleep. His friend saw the faucet of the sink turn on by itself, and then there's a video that they show in the episode where Ryan's brushing his teeth, and they had a camera set up because his friend had seen the faucet turn on on its own, and you see this plastic bag like fly up into the air and onto the floor, and it doesn't look natural at all. It literally looks like someone picked picked it up and threw it to the floor. Ryan says that he didn't believe in ghosts before that experience happened, and to quote him, he says, I've never doubted it again, and I swore I would never return to this ship, but clearly he did for the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode. That is so dramatic. He clear was creeped out by being poked in the face, and you know, all that.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:13

I swore to myself never again.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:16

I swore I would never return to the ship yet. Here I am. As you mentioned, room B474, there's a legend that that whole family was killed, and Dana's ghost can be found with the other ghostly children near the second-class pool, and sometimes joins Grumpy and John Henry in the boiler room.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:40

So Alright, it's a party.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:43

Yep. Those are some of the ghost stories related to the B Deck. I I did watch another YouTube video that I mentioned earlier, Lloe Lane's channel. She covers a lot of ghosty, supernatural stuff, and there's actually a Buzzfeed Unsolved episode about her apartment. So she and her roommate London Victoria, who's also a YouTuber, they stayed in room B340 in October 2018. So after it had reopened to the public. Six months later, they got the $500 or $499 deal with all the stuff. But um they they didn't use anything except for like I think the spirit box that comes with it. But creepy stuff that happened while they were in the room that they hear floors creaking and high-pitched noises coming from the closet in the room. This happens pretty frequently. They hear a lot of little knocks. Um, sometimes you can hear it, hear it on the video, and other times you can't hear it. And they they say that it happens a lot when they start talking about it more, and af right after they turn off the camera, it also happened. They experienced a lot of cold spots within the room, which was weird because they describe the room to be a lot hotter than other areas of the ship in general. You said how there's an electric candle that they they give with the box, and so they had just like kind of left the box to the side, and she goes over to it at one point, and the candle is just like on, even though no one had turned it on. Right before they're about to start the spirit box session, they're kind of just talking about it, and you can hear it on the video the faucet turns on by itself in the bathroom, and they're like, What is that? Is that water? Is that the toilet? And then they go look in the bathroom, and then there's water in the sink. Like the the faucet had been on, but it was off by the time they went to the bathroom. And you can hear the water turning on while they're talking in the room. Very weird. And they were like, neither of us use the bathroom. Like they had just come back from like wandering around the ship by themselves while Loi's doing the spirit box session. London is asleep, but Louis says that she feels a cold breeze grow across her legs multiple times. She says that. And the only thing, like, there's EVPs that she says that she hears on the spirit box, but like I just didn't hear them, so I only noted the one that I heard. And the one that I heard was pretty creepy, and it was, we've been expecting her. While she was doing a spirit box session, she also says she saw sees a shadow like in the room. London the next morning wakes up and shares that she heard someone going ts t from the corner of the room. Very, very creepy. Lowy shares that she was able to sleep probably for like a couple of hours, and she actually had a sleep paralysis while sleeping in this room.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:39

No, that would be the worst.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:42

And it's actually really, really creepy sleep paralysis. She said she had like an out-of-body experience where she was like kind of like floating above her body, and she saw a woman coming closer and closer to her body, and she said that the woman said, Look what he did to my eye. And then she woke up and she was back inside her body, but she was still experiencing the sleep paralysis, and she saw like the woman again coming like straight to her face, and she looked at her and said that her face was all mangled. And you told the story of that dude who like killed his entire family.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:23

That's what I was thinking about, but I don't like that. I don't like it at all. She said it was like a very short experience, but it was like very frightening. And the two things that they said that really scared them was one that sleep paralysis and then the faucet turning on by itself. So that was kind of what happened in Lowy Lane's episode. Another place where I went searching for ghost stories is my favorite place to go searching for ghost stories, which is Reddit. So I found two stories on Reddit about the Queen Mary that were super, super creepy that I'm going to share with y'all. And these will be the last stories that I share. So this first story is titled, I think something possessed or used me as a conduit on the Queen Mary, and it's by user Charo Haas. I'm not sure the gender of this user, so I'm just gonna use neutral pronouns. So the user, their mom, their sister, their stepdad went to the Queen Mary to celebrate their mom's birthday. They're all paranormal enthusiasts, said that a lot of bizarre things happened while they were there. They went on a tour, and their tour guide was talking about the entity that haunts the room. The user doesn't remember the name that the tour guide used, but they they just used Jim as like a filler. While the tour guide was talking, the user felt like they got violently enraged and they felt like they wanted to tackle or beat someone senseless. They say that they're usually completely nonviolent and a very passive person, but over and over again they could hear in their head, my name is not Jim. My name is not Jim. And they couldn't stop hearing that, and they felt angry and dizzy and nauseous and overwhelmed, and like they were either gonna pass out or kill someone, is what they wrote. And because of that, they left the room before the tour group did, and they said that they immediately felt, quote, released and better. Pretty creepy.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:18

That is creepy.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:19

This next story is very creepy. Titled, I used a Ouija board on one of the most haunted places on Earth and recorded the whole experience. Unfortunately, the recording that they linked on there is like no longer, it was like on a website that doesn't last forever, so I couldn't hear it anymore, sadly. But user Garden198 said that they'd only used a Ouija board one other time, the year of their grandma's death in 2007, and said it worked really well and freaked them out a lot, and they said that they didn't want to use it again after that. But this is October 3rd, 2014. They actually didn't have a Ouija board with them, they made one using two small pieces of paper taped together with band-aids and used a band-aid box as a pointer. So it seems like they were very desperate to make this Ouija board.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:13

One of the people present's brother had died by suicide a few months prior, and the friend wanted to do a Ouija board session to relieve like stress and grief that they have been feeling about this. As soon as they started the session, they asked if anything was there. It immediately answered yes and spelled out Zach 27. They were laughing and apologizing about having such a makeshift board, and apparently they heard on the recording someone say it's okay, which they didn't hear in like real time. They at one point heard someone who sounded like they were standing outside the door of their room say, It's Zach very clearly. One of the friends got very creeped out, started crying. Other friend went to bed. There was like three other people, I guess, who were there who decided to continue playing with it. They say that apparently they talked to their friend's friend who had died. The user who posted the said said they talked to their grandparents, and apparently they got a lot of information from the board. Next morning, they wake up, and apparently, the previous night, their friend had woken up screaming. One of their friends had woken up screaming, and the user thought that they had slept through the whole thing, and so they were kind of like, Oh, like what happened? And their friend was like, You don't remember, and they were like, No. Apparently, the user was awake and praying while his friend or while their friend was screaming, and and both the friend who was screaming and the user who was like praying don't remember any of this happening. What? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:52

Okay, what was the what was the friend screaming about?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:55

They were just screaming.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:56

Just screaming.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:57

Just screaming. They like woke up screaming.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:59

I don't like that at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:00

There was a girl there who uh left the Ouija board session early and went to bed, and she said that she felt something pulling on her bed the entire night. I think it was a demon because I always think that when you use a Ouija board, you're talking to a demon because it's actually a demon board, and you're opening like a way of communicating with very, very negative energy, and they pretend to be your loved ones just to get access to you. So creepy creepy creepy. That is the last story that I have about the Queen Mary.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:35

I actually there was actually another recorded death in 2011 on the Queen Mary. Whoa. Yeah, and this woman was so apparently a 26-year-old woman fell 75 feet off the ship and died. She had been drinking and it was ruled an accident. Um, a bystander said that they she like heard her and her boyfriend arguing, and she said, I don't want to live, I don't want to be with you anymore, I don't want to go on.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:02

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:03

Which, yeah, that's really sad. I also wonder what was going on in their relationship to make her feel like jumping off the ship was like the way out. Yeah. You know, to me, in my brain, I'm always like, was there domestic violence? Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know enough about any of that, but that was something that is reported very much. Very sad and unfortunate. Okay, away from deaths. So, like m like we mentioned, there's you can go there. So they have many tours. Um, there's the Haunted Encounters Tour, which is the detailed overview of the most haunted areas on Paranormal Hotspots, and you hear stories about all the famous ghosts. I went on this tour with my aunt, and it was very disappointing. Oh. Because they put like smoke machines and lights and like no, that's that that's just ruining it. Like audio sounds.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:04

It's really ruining it.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:05

Yeah. It's like super dramatic. It's like that haunted places podcast in a in person. Yeah. Yeah. So I was disappointed in it. I don't know if it's changed since I've been there. Last time I was there, I think I was maybe a teen. Evening events. There's Illusions of the Past, which is a theatrical seance with some dude named Aidan Sinclair, who's apparently an illusionist and apparitionist who was like on America's Got Talent. It's an up is an illusions show that's supposed to bring like the ghosts to life and shit. There's Dining with the Spirits, which is a first class dining experience that comes with the Haunted History tour. So we can be fancy with the ghosts. There's uh your there's your classic paranormal shipwalk where they just walk you through with the history. It's probably like the haunted encounters tour at night.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:03

Maybe they don't do all the extra stuff on that tour.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:07

Hope so. What the heck?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:09

And then there's paranormal investigations where you can go with resident paranormal investigator, Matthew Schultz. He guides guests into active locations, including those not available to the public, like the ones that are closed off for the tour. And you try to contact some ghosts and shit. Something I've always wanted to do is go to their Halloween event, and I've never been able to go for I don't know. There's always just been something I've just never been able to go. Um, but it happens through the course of like September through November, I think, maybe the first weekend of November, and it's called Dark Harbor. It's um Queen Mary's annual Halloween haunted attraction featuring six haunted mazes, a 4D theater experience, hundreds of monsters, live entertainment, resident DJs, themed bars, and private creepy cabanas, concession style food, along with an R.I.P. lounge experience. They said all of our mazes, with the exception of Circus, are directly tied to spirits characters who allegedly truly haunt the ship. And we've taken some creative liberties with our characters, but they're all inspired by ghosts that haunt the ship, and there are more that we haven't tapped into. So we look to those for inspiration as we produce the mazes. That's pretty cool. They said that they said we have elements of movement of the floors, we have elements of claustrophobia, of being off balance. Like you're walking under the deck of the ship and she's capsized, so you're walking at an incline. Uh, you have elements of being on the side or upside down, so they fuck with you psychologically that way, which is kind of cool. Yeah. They have, oh, this is my favorite part. We have secret bar experiences in some mazes, and you may or may not gain access to them as you walk through. We try to make everyone a make everyone a different experience. We have entertainment throughout the night on fire stage and aerial stage as well as specialty performers, which is I just want to.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:07

Sounds like I had a lot of fun. Yeah. Maybe we can go this year.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:12

Maybe.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:12

If it is a thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:13

I would love to go. I did want to close with a quote from a psychic lady in 1934 that was quoted on their website. It says that when the ship launched in 1934, an English psychic named Lady Mabel Fortescue Harrison. What a name. Indeed. Said that the Queen Mary will know her greatest fame and popularity once she never sets sail another mile or carries another fair-paying passenger.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:39

Whoa, she knew. So there's That is pretty creepy. Yeah. That's all we have for today. That's it. I would recommend incense your apartment. Or do whatever you do to get the good energy going. I incense my apartment.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:54

You might do something else.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:56

Or you could do nothing because you don't believe in ghosts, and that's okay too.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:59

That that's true. I'm not pushing my beliefs on you. You can do whatever you want to do. But I can tell you what I would do is incense my apartment. Thanks for listening, y'all.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:11

Yeah, thanks. We'll be back with another another story soon.