There are A LOT of videos out there, that all have to do with the Queen Mary being haunted,
in fact I’m sure some of you could run circles around me with the stories and anecdotes of the
alleged hauntings on the ship. Since my channel continues to discuss a lot of Queen Mary history,
I get a lot of people asking me if the Queen Mary really is haunted, after all, I’ve been there
a few times, and shot plenty of footage of the ship. So for those of you with little patience,
the short answer is: no, scientifically speaking the Queen Mary is not haunted at all. However the
long answer is: well yes, maybe, depending on your definition of ghosts and restless spirits.
I’m not going to delve deep into the specific stories of the ship’s hauntings, first because
there are literally a hundred popular YouTube videos out there that do, and second, this video
is not about the specifics of the stories, it’s about how people react to being on the ship and
what constitutes our own definition of a haunting. Now, scientists across the globe are pretty
much in agreement that they have found no definitive proof of the afterlife, nor any
reason to believe that there are supernatural beings that represent forces of good or evil.
Many paranormal researchers have boarded the Queen Mary with fancy gadgets that claim to
be able to detect traces of ghosts or other beings we can’t normally see with our own eyes.
There was a time when most businesses were afraid of being labeled as haunted,
because less visitors would want to come and spend time at your establishment.
Take Disneyland for example. I have a short video series where I tell stories about times where I
felt there were ghosts in the various places I worked at in that park. And I’m not the only one,
hundreds of current and former cast members could tell you stories, but the Disney company will
never even acknowledge the presence of ghosts because it isn’t good for their business,
they WANT families and children to come to the park. But over the course of the last few decades,
there has been an uptick in people’s interest in the paranormal. During the 1980s and 90s,
television saw a boom in the amount of paranormal themed shows, and eventually in the 2000’s several
channels hosted reality tv shows that featured paranormal investigators going to places like the
Queen Mary and capturing evidence left and right. In 1988, the Walt Disney Company was in full
control of the Queen Mary after acquiring the previous company that held the lease to the ship.
Disney did not want their name slapped on the ship because it wasn’t a financial success due to poor
decisions always made by previous lease holders, and so until the ship became wildly popular,
the Disney brand would not specifically associate themselves with the Queen Mary.
The next year, someone on the managing team had the bright idea that if they marketed the
ship as a haunted vessel, they might be able to increase visitation and profits.
The ship already had a few stories of ghosts and such, so it wouldn’t be too hard to
convince the public that the old stately ship was a hot spot for the spirit realm.
Now yes, the idea of marketing the ship as haunted did originate from the Disney company,
but not everything Disney touches turns to gold. Do a little bit of research and you’ll find
that during these years the company made several billion dollar mistakes. What I mean is, marketing
the ship as haunted wasn’t necessarily a good idea in the long run, but we’ll get to that later.
There were already stories based on real events, such as the story of when the
Queen Mary accidentally rammed into her escort ship during the second world war,
slicing the ship in half and killing over 300 men on-board. And then there was the story of the
young crewman down below decks who got crushed between a watertight door as it was closing.
To this day, people still claim to experience paranormal sightings and sensations when around
these areas of the ship, but what I find odd is when people experience paranormal
sightings around allegedly haunted areas that aren’t actually haunted.
For example, there’s a story that in the former 3rd class garden lounge on Main Deck, that in the
year 1989 or 1988, I don’t remember which, that a group of cleaning ladies were preparing the room
for an event. A woman in a red dress was spotted sitting at a table and when asked to leave so the
cleaning ladies can prepare the room, the woman did not respond or react, eventually she faded
away before their very eyes, and the cleaning lady quit on the spot after witnessing this.
Then of course there are several other stories that also take place around the year 1989,
just listen to the tour guides, there are at least three stories that begin around this year, and yet
1989 just so happens to be the year that Disney decided to start marketing the ship as haunted.
In order to beef up the haunted nature of the ship, Disney created several fake stories,
such as the woman in the red dress, but also the girl that haunts the swimming pool.
Oddly enough, it is said that the little girl is named Jackie and she died in the
second class swimming pool and to this day she can be heard around this room...but
here’s the funny thing, this room she is often seen and heard in, is not the second class pool,
this is the first class pool, on the opposite end of the ship from where she died. And Cunard kept
an impeccable record of incidents on board the Queen Mary including a list of deaths,
and there has never been a reported drowning in either of the pools. To this day people claim to
capture evidence of Jackie’s spirit, a fairytale spirit invented by the Walt Disney Company.
Again I don’t want to go list by list of every story, but I DO have
to bring up the subject of room B340 which is reportedly the most haunted room on the ship.
It was said that the first haunting ever reported was by a woman who stayed in this
room during the final years of the Queen Mary’s transatlantic passenger service,
she retired to her room after spending time at one of the ship’s bars or lounges and when she
tucked into bed, she saw the figure of a man with red eyes standing at the edge of her bed.
Then there is the odd story of a man who was supposedly somewhat violent
and he was locked in this room until the master-at-arms could find a place to hold him.
When they opened the door to retrieve the man, they found him dismembered in a bloody mess.
Well first of all, it’s true there was a woman who thought she saw a spirit with red eyes at the edge
of her bed, however she was extremely drunk after spending the night at the cocktail bar
and even then her room was actually on the other side of the ship. And there is no record of a
dismembered body being found aboard the Queen Mary on one of her voyages, not even in newspapers.
Again these were stories crafted by Disney to fit with this specific room. The room used to be a
bunch of third class rooms, and when the Queen Mary was converted into a hotel, all the third
class rooms on the ship were gutted, even this one. The room was never turned into a hotel room,
it sat dormant for decades until Disney rigged it up with special effects and turned it into
the famous room B340 which was only available for viewing if you purchased their ghost tour.
The stories of the room have grown from a few stories to several dozen.
People claim to be scratched, or harmed in different ways, often showing their injuries
on camera for the public to see...but oddly enough, this room was never actually haunted,
it was a Disney attraction. So now you have to wonder what kind of people would physically
harm themselves in order to make a video. And it's not just one person, it’s dozens.
While marketing the ship as haunted has helped boost the ship’s annual income,
it has never made the ship wildly successful, if anything it has caused harm to the ship.
Installing props and sets for the annual haunted maze has caused damage and fire hazards.
And while the tourism industry continues to move toward family entertainment, the Queen Mary is
now pigeon-holed into a niche marketing ploy. Not very many families step aboard the ship,
it’s mostly older folks who have a love for ocean liners, and then there’s a few young visitors who
want to go ghost hunting. No haunted business model for a tourist attraction of this size
can result in success, the ship is simply too big and expensive to be a year-round haunted house.
Younger generations are becoming less religious, and therefore less of them
believe in the supernatural. Eventually the Queen Mary will fall into obscurity.
And this is why earlier this year I set out to create videos about the ship’s history, in order
to show people there is more to this beautiful monarch of the sea, than a bunch of ghost stories.
Now I know I’ve spent the first part of this video kind of debunking some of the ghost stories,
and believe me there are a lot of them that don’t make sense. But there are perfectly sane
and normal people who come to the Queen Mary and walk out with a genuine story to tell.
People who never speak about their experiences publicly because that’s just no who they are.
These people are the real victims or witnesses of ghostly events. Some of them are guests aboard the
ship, some are employees. They could swear beyond a doubt they experienced the supernatural, and I
believe most of them, but let me explain why. First, the world we perceive is in a way,
a construct of our minds. Our brains take the information gathered by our senses and
interpret them in a way that makes sense to us. Our eyes see the world upside down,
but our brain lets us know it’s actually right side up. So there’s a certain amount of our
world that’s not what it appears to be, but your brain will invent its own interpretation of it.
People sometimes hallucinate not because they’re drugged up or because they’re crazy,
but actually from time to time, our brains make a mistake when interpreting information and it
leads us to believe we are seeing or experiencing things. Just because in the physical world it’s
not there, doesn’t mean you didn’t experience something, you did, it’s just that no one else
around you did. If you find a dollar on the ground, you might feel happy, but anyone around
you who didn’t claim that dollar might not feel the same way, they might feel jealous.
Emotions don’t really exist, they’re a chemical and psychological construct, but emotions determine
our decisions and behavior so in essence, happiness and jealousy are real things to us.
And lastly, when it comes to ghosts and other supernatural beings, many people think of them in
terms of the Christian or monotheistic definition, meaning the being was once a human or a demon.
And that evidence of a spirit means there might be a heaven or a hell.
But I don’t think of it that way. Right now physicists are researching particles of dark
matter that interact with things in the fifth dimension. They even found evidence of dark matter
that can move in and out of our dimension and go to other dimensions. This is something that has
happened probably thousands of trillions of times over the course of the existence of the universe,
yet we are barely learning about it just now. So just because we don’t know
everything about this universe, doesn’t mean that seemingly impossible things can’t happen.
I mean, what if ghosts are just the dark matter versions of us that are lost between dimensions,
I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is, when someone tells me that they experienced something
supernatural on the Queen Mary, and I can’t find a blatantly obvious way to debunk it...then
I don’t discount their story, in my mind,
there’s a possibility that what happened to them, in some way, shape or form, DID happen to them.
So is the Queen Mary haunted? Scientifically speaking, no it’s not haunted at all, but then
again science is breaking new ground every day and there might finally be an explanation for
ghosts and spirits sometime in the future. But in terms of how you define a ghost, well then yes,
I think the Queen Mary is haunted. I’ll end with this...
last time I was on the Queen Mary, my friends and I were walking through the starboard shaft alley.
As I was filming I saw something to my left, it looked like a person was walking on the
abandoned catwalk between the propeller shafts. I was talking to my friends at that moment and I
didn’t want to claim I saw a ghost without trying to capture it on video, unfortunately, I couldn’t
get it on video, so I said nothing until now, but I know what I saw...and it was real to me.