Laura Wright 
Urban Legends
She was built for elegance.
For decades, the RMS Queen Mary carried passengers across the Atlantic in a world of formal dinners, evening gowns, polished wood, enormous engines, and first-class luxury.
Then war came.
The elegant ocean liner became a troopship.
Thousands of soldiers crowded aboard her instead of wealthy passengers. German submarines hunted Allied shipping across the Atlantic, and the Queen Mary’s extraordinary speed became one of her greatest defenses.
She survived the war.
She survived the dangerous seas.
She survived retirement.
And today, permanently moored at Long Beach, California, the Queen Mary has acquired another reputation entirely.
Some believe that not everyone who once traveled aboard her ever left.
The Birth of the Queen Mary
The Queen Mary embarked upon her maiden voyage in 1936.
She represented an extraordinary period in ocean travel, when great liners competed not merely for passengers but for prestige.
Crossing the Atlantic aboard one of these ships wasn’t simply transportation.
For wealthy travelers, the voyage itself was part of the experience.
The Queen Mary carried passengers between Europe and America until the beginning of the Second World War changed everything.
The luxury liner was needed for something much more important.
The Grey Ghost
During World War II, the Queen Mary became a troopship.
Her speed made her particularly valuable.
It also helped protect her.
German submarines presented a constant threat to Allied shipping, but catching the Queen Mary was difficult. The enormous ship could move remarkably quickly across the Atlantic.
Her wartime appearance was radically different from the glamorous vessel passengers had known before the conflict.
She was painted gray.
The luxury liner had gone to war.
And she survived.
The Wave
Enemy action wasn’t the only danger faced by the Queen Mary.
The Atlantic itself nearly destroyed her.
During the war, the ship reportedly encountered an enormous wave that caused her to roll dangerously.
For a vessel of the Queen Mary’s size, the experience must have been terrifying.
But she recovered.
Again, the Queen Mary survived.
When the war finally ended, she returned to civilian service.
But the great era of transatlantic ocean liners was already beginning to disappear.
Aircraft could cross the ocean in hours instead of days.
Eventually, even the Queen Mary became obsolete.
The Last Voyages
The Queen Mary continued carrying passengers until 1967.
Then retirement came.
Various companies became interested in purchasing the enormous vessel. According to the original account, an Asian scrap-metal company nearly acquired her.
Had that happened, the Queen Mary might simply have been dismantled.
Instead, another possibility emerged.
The ship was purchased and brought to Long Beach, California.
Rather than disappearing into a scrapyard, one of the great surviving ocean liners became a permanent landmark.
A Ship Becomes a Building
Transforming an ocean liner into a permanent attraction required enormous changes.
Machinery was removed.
Propellers were taken away.
Spaces originally designed for operating a ship could now serve completely different purposes.
The Queen Mary eventually contained restaurants, museum spaces, and a hotel. The permanently moored vessel even came to be legally treated as a building.
She would never cross the Atlantic again.
But people could still walk her corridors.
They could sleep in her cabins.
They could explore portions of a ship that had carried generations of passengers and soldiers.
And almost as soon as the Queen Mary settled into her new life in California, people began telling ghost stories.
The Ghosts of the Queen Mary
Reports of unusual activity became associated with numerous portions of the ship.
People claimed to see apparitions.
Others heard voices when nobody was nearby.
There were even stories about a ghostly dog wandering aboard the vessel.
With decades of history contained inside an enormous ship, almost every corridor seemed capable of acquiring a story.
But one haunting was associated with a very real death.
The Death Behind the Watertight Door
In 1966, near the end of the Queen Mary’s active career, an eighteen-year-old crewman was working aboard the vessel.
He was a fireman.
Something went terribly wrong.
A watertight door closed while the young man was passing through it.
He was crushed to death.
The accident became one of the best-known tragedies associated with the Queen Mary’s paranormal reputation.
Later visitors and employees began connecting unusual experiences in that portion of the ship with the young crewman.
Among all the Queen Mary ghost stories, his has an uncomfortable advantage.
There really was a death.
The door was real.
And a young man never left the ship alive.
The Children’s Nursery
Other reported hauntings have no such straightforward explanation.
The Queen Mary once contained a nursery for children traveling aboard the liner.
The space eventually became a playroom.
But visitors claimed that children could still sometimes be heard there.
Crying.
At other times, people heard laughter.
Nothing necessarily appeared.
A visitor simply entered an old room aboard an old ship and heard children who weren’t there.
That leaves an obvious question.
If the sounds belonged to ghosts, whose children were they?
The original story doesn’t tell us.
And perhaps that uncertainty is better than inventing an answer.
The Empty Swimming Pool
Then there was the first-class swimming pool.
During the Queen Mary’s days as an ocean liner, the pool would have been among the ship’s more impressive amenities.
Eventually, it was drained.
There was no water left to swim in.
Yet according to the stories, people continued hearing the sounds of swimmers.
They heard splashing.
They heard the unmistakable noises of people playing in water.
Except the pool was empty.
That became one of the Queen Mary’s classic paranormal stories.
Perhaps it is also one of the most evocative.
A swimming pool without water.
An enormous old ship that can never sail again.
And the sounds of people enjoying both as though nothing had changed.
The Queen Mary on The X-Files
The Queen Mary’s remarkable appearance eventually made her useful for something else.
Hollywood.
The ship has appeared in numerous productions, but the original article singles out The X-Files.
The Queen Mary was used during the episode “Triangle,” in which the story involved a mysterious ship associated with the Bermuda Triangle.
With its preserved interiors and unmistakable atmosphere, the Queen Mary could convincingly become a vessel from another age.
In a sense, that is exactly what she is.
Searching for the Queen Mary’s Ghosts
The paranormal reputation eventually became part of the Queen Mary’s attraction.
Ghost hunters visited.
Investigators brought equipment aboard.
Visitors explored corridors hoping to hear a voice or glimpse something that couldn’t easily be explained.
The original article notes that paranormal investigation became popular enough for special access and tours to be offered.
That is an unusual fate for a vessel constructed to cross the Atlantic.
The Queen Mary began as transportation.
She became a troopship.
Then a hotel and museum.
Eventually, she became a destination for people hoping to meet the dead.
The Haunted Queen Mary
There are countless ghost stories surrounding the Queen Mary today.
Some are old.
Some are probably much newer.
And with a tourist attraction as famous as this one, separating genuine older traditions from stories accumulated through decades of paranormal tourism can become difficult.
But perhaps the Queen Mary doesn’t need an enormous catalog of ghosts.
The ship itself provides enough atmosphere.
Imagine what has passed through those corridors.
Children traveling with their parents.
Wealthy passengers dressed for dinner.
Crewmen working below deck.
Thousands of soldiers wondering whether they would survive the war.
Men maintaining enormous machinery deep within the vessel.
Then, gradually, silence.
The engines stopped.
The propellers were removed.
The swimming pool was drained.
The Queen Mary reached Long Beach and never sailed again.
But according to the stories, occasionally the old ship seems to forget.
Children still laugh in the nursery.
Water still splashes inside the empty pool.
And somewhere below deck, a young crewman killed during one of the Queen Mary’s final years at sea may still be making his rounds.
The Queen Mary survived the Atlantic.
She survived the Second World War.
She survived the end of the great ocean liners.
She even survived the scrapyard.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that some of her passengers and crew proved equally reluctant to leave.
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