‘Gray Ghost’ Harbors Some Ghoulish Tales

Stephen Young’s ghost story begins in the men’s room. He finds a woman in there, brushing her hair. He tells her she’s in the wrong place and she does not even look at him--just stares blankly at the mirror and turns slowly toward the door.

He glances away and when he looks back:

“She’s totally gone,” Young says.

He’s so startled he searches the area outside this Queen Mary restroom. “I race out into the lobby,” he says. “I go around to look for her.” Here he switches to the past tense: “She was nowhere to be seen.”

Young, a 37-year-old teacher from Westwood, is reluctant to sound like a nut and concedes that the incident may have a logical explanation. A film crew was aboard the old British luxury liner that summer afternoon in 1998, shooting for “The X-Files” TV show. The woman might have been “some method actress trying to freak me out.” She might have ducked into a doorway, or slipped down the stairs. But, he says: “She would have had to sprint. I did not hear any footsteps whatsoever. That is a true story. What it is, I don’t know.”

No one is sure what is, or isn’t, happening aboard the Queen Mary, a landmark described as possibly the world’s “best-known and best-documented haunted ship” by the authors of the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings. “There have been literally hundreds of sightings of various ghosts throughout the ship, and they continue to the present day,” the book says.

The accounts fill a hefty file in the offices of the ship’s publicity staff. Some are short declarations scrawled by tourists and hotel guests. Others are detailed letters like the one from Ronnie J. Johnson of Temple Hills, Md.

He was a guest last June in the Queen Mary Hotel and reported waking one night to see the light flickering above the shower--even though the switch was off. Two nights later, the bathroom was inexplicably bathed in a reddish glow. Johnson got up, fiddled with the switches, and went back to bed. He awoke again, he wrote, “to find a white, spiral-like form [like a snake] coming toward me.”

It glowed like neon, he said, and vanished as soon as he turned on the lights.

Disney Embellished Spooky Reputation

There is no sense trying to discern the truth of such tales. The important point is they are part of the ship’s lore--and have been since soon after the 1,019-foot liner docked permanently in Long Beach in 1967.

Some stories are wilder than others. They come from eccentrics and teenagers as well as business professionals leery of signing their names. They involve disembodied voices, moving objects, lights drifting through hallways, and even full-bodied spooks: for instance, the young man in coveralls said to be seen every so often down in the engine room.

During one of the final voyages, an 18-year-old crewman was on duty deep in that maze of girders, pipes and catwalks and was crushed to death in hydraulic door No. 13. Reports of strange activity there began while the ship was being converted to a hotel and tourist attraction, says Ron Smith, the Queen Mary’s historian. A security guard was unable to coax his German shepherd to pass through the door.

A tour guide, some years later, was said to be closing up the engine room when she noticed a man behind her on the escalator, Smith said. When she stepped aside to let him pass, he vanished.

April Baxter’s story is not nearly so dramatic, but she retells it just as she wrote it down well over a year ago. She, too, was a tour guide. One day doors kept opening. She heard voices from empty spaces. Finally, she says, she entered the first-class lounge and saw an overstuffed chair balanced on its back legs.

“We tried for some time to get the chair to stand like that” again, she says, “and it was not possible.”

During the Queen’s years of service, from 1936 to 1967, at least 16 crew members and 41 passengers died of various illnesses and accidents. Some fell from stairways. Some were elderly. A number of the names and causes of death are lost to history.

The ship was repainted and known as the Gray Ghost throughout World War II, when it ferried American troops to and from Europe, using its speed to elude German U-boats. On one crossing, a British escort ship, the Curacao, was knifed in two by the Queen Mary’s bow, drowning more than 300 men. No one aboard the Queen Mary was killed, but the tragedy has attracted the interest of psychics. A few have hauled equipment into the Queen’s bow and reported picking up faints screams and sounds of ripping metal.

This, however, may be where the spectral hand of marketing begins to show.

Smith cautions that the Walt Disney Co. managed the ship for the city of Long Beach for several years and apparently considered some of the existing ghost stories too mundane. According to Smith, who worked for Disney at the time, information from the psychics--who seemed serious about the task--was used by Disney along with other material developed by scriptwriters to heighten the ship’s “ghoulishness.”

‘GhostCAM’ Offers View of Art Deco Pool

Writers embellished the account of at least one ghost and invented the murder of a ship’s purser in cabin B 340, Smith says. The fabricated murder drew mention in the Field Guide to North American Hauntings: “The purser has returned in the form of a restless poltergeist that hurls objects, shakes the bed, rattles drawers, knocks on walls and even grabs visitors. The unexplained disturbances are so severe, in fact, that the hotel has closed the room to guests.”

No cabin was ever closed because of a poltergeist, the historian says.

Current management, Joseph Prevratil’s RMS Foundation, still exploits the supernatural theme in a year-round marketing program. For the $19 admission price, guests get the “ghosts and legends” tour, complete with strobe lights and ersatz apparitions. A Web site--ghostsandlegends.com--was outfitted in September with a 24-hour “GhostCAM” aimed at one “vortex of ghostly activity”: the ship’s Art Deco indoor pool.

The camera is real and drew 72,000 hits in its first 12 hours on the World Wide Web, says spokeswoman Robin Wachner.

Elyse Bova was 12 when she stayed overnight a year ago. But she talks with assurance of what she thinks she saw: a pale face in the darkness. It made her roll over, and she felt a hand touch her shoulder.

She freaked out and woke up her mother.

“She was like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ ” the teenager recalls. “I stayed up the rest of the night. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”