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| Creepy hallway to our room. Seriously, the only thing down here is our room. The hall is as long as it looks… and dark! |
As much as we enjoyed our romantic time on the Queen Mary, we also dipped into some of it’s more mysterious fun. The boat has a long and colorful history, starting as a luxury liner and then being commissioned as a troop transport in World War 2 before, again, becoming a luxury liner. When you’re an active mode of transportation for over 30 years things happen and sometimes those things are tragic.
A simple Google Search shows how popular stories of haunting on the ship are and the owners of the boat have definitely done their best to capitalize on that. There are multiple ghost tours on the ship, including some very high end (read: expensive) ghost investigation tours. All of them travel into the deep bowels of the ship and explore the haunted places. We did two of the tours: The Ghosts and Legends Show and the standard Haunted Encounters Tour. After we make a couple more movies/TV shows maybe we’ll do the Dining with the Spirits experience.
Before we go much further I feel like I should let you know where I sit on the whole idea of ghosts and spirits.
I’m a skeptic.
This will probably surprise many of you who knew me years ago, but with age comes wisdom and even though I cannot deny that I have seen somethings that were not readily explainable (I’ve been thinking about doing vlogs of those stories for Halloween) I’ve definitely come down on the side of skeptic. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe that strange things happen, quite the contrary. As I mentioned, I’ve seen some crazy shit – undeniable, crazy shit – but what I doubt is that there is an intelligence behind it all from the “other side.” There are so many things that we don’t know about electric fields and how they interact, hell, there’s a physics guy that can make a whole room full of furniture flip out, just like poltergeist activity (video coming when I find it). Point is, people coming back from the dead? No. Strange energy phenomenon that we don’t understand yet that freaks us out? Yes.
Still, the paranormal has always fascinated me since childhood, and I still get that giddy feeling when it’s time for ghost stories. So how could we turn down tours of one of the most famously haunted places in the world?
The first show, The Ghosts and Legends show is truly just a show. They go through the history of the ship, there are special effects, you visit the “super haunted” first class swimming pool, but it’s all, literally, smoke and mirrors. If you want safe spooky fun, this is definitely the way to go.
The next tour we took was the Haunted Encounters tour. This was much more our speed. It’s an extensive tour of the ship and it’s bowels and as you walk the guide tells you stories about the ship in general, not just the ghost stories – although the ghost stories take center stage. I don’t want to recount those stories, cuz you should go on the tour yourself, but here are the pictures we took. Let me know if you see anything in them, I certainly didn’t, but it was a very good tour.
OK, actually there is one weird thing that happened to us on the tour that was not a part of the tour. You decide what it means. We left the first class pool through a side door on the lower level and proceeded down into the recesses of the ship. Right outside the door to the pool there was an office door; a regular modern office, as we’d come to discover. As I walked past the door it opened and closed very quickly. It startled the rest of our group and one man asked if I had done it. I told him no and that I assumed someone was going to come out but saw us and decided to wait until the tour had passed. The man who asked walked back to the door and opened it, revealing the office inside and no one there.
Honestly there was probably a person there before and they did have enough time to walk to the other end of the office and leave another way, but it was creepy and a very neat experience to have on a ghost tour.
Is the Queen Mary haunted? I don’t know, but it is spooky and spooky can be a lot of fun! Enjoy the pics!
Many of these are from the first class pool because we had lots of access and it was a super dark. Oh, and here’s a short video:
These pictures are of the exit to the changing rooms. A lot of activity happens here apparently.
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| This is a replica of the old spa service menu. |
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| Original furniture |
The engine room.
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| This isn’t haunted, it’s just the propeller and it looks like it’s haunted. |
These pictures are from the old boiler room. Top right is one of Rene’s pictures with a mysterious white streak zooming through it.
See you next time!
