The Queen Mary

History

The Queen Mary sailed for 31 years, and she has spent longer than that tied up in Long Beach. The Cunard line had her built at John Brown & Co. in Clydebank, Scotland. Work began in 1930, stopped in 1931 because of the Great Depression, and started again in 1934. That September, she was launched by the wife of the reigning king, Queen Mary, whose name she bore. She made her maiden voyage in May 1936. By August 1938, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and she kept it until 1952.

In March 1940, at the request of Britain’s Ministry of Shipping, she was painted grey, stripped of her furnishings, and sent to Sydney, Australia, to be fitted out as a troopship. She became known as the “Grey Ghost.” Bunks went into her drawing rooms, her lounges, and even her swimming pools. By the end of the war, she had carried more than 800,000 soldiers. On October 2, 1942, on the last leg of a troop crossing to Scotland, she rammed and sank one of her own escorts, the British cruiser HMS Curacoa. Only 101 of the cruiser’s 439 men survived.

Cunard sold the Queen Mary to the City of Long Beach in 1967, and she has stayed there as a hotel and attraction. She was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. In June 2021, the city took back full control of the ship for the first time in more than 40 years, after the company leasing her gave up its leases in bankruptcy. She stayed closed for repairs, then reopened to visitors in stages, in December 2022 and June 2023.

Hauntings & Lore

The Queen Mary sells her own ghost stories. Her Haunted Tour promises “a blend of verified history, crew accounts, and reported paranormal encounters,” and she rents out staterooms themed to her ghosts.

Door 13

A sign listing the crew members who died on board, drawn from the Queen Mary’s archive, records that a fireman named J. Pedder was “crushed in watertight door” on July 10, 1966. In the TV series Unsolved Mysteries, his first name is John. The show says he died during a routine fire drill, in what’s called shaft alley, deep in the ship near the engine room.

The show talked to Nancy Anne, a former tour guide on the ship who once called herself a hardened skeptic. As lead guide, her job was “to close down the tour route and make sure that there weren’t any stragglers behind.” Once, for no reason she could name, she turned around, and a man was standing on the step right behind her. “He had on blue overalls and they were dirty,” she said. When she stepped aside to let him go by, he was gone. Some people believe Pedder still haunts shaft alley, the show says, and Nancy Anne is sure of it. “I only know what I saw, and I only believe what I saw, with my own eyes.”

Legends of America, a history and travel site, calls the door that killed him “Door 13.” It says a bearded young man in blue coveralls has often been seen walking the length of shaft alley before he disappears by that door.

Jackie and the First-Class Pool

The ship’s own website calls her Jackie, “the giggling child spirit from the First-Class Pool.” Kathy Love, a maintenance supervisor on the ship, told Unsolved Mysteries what she and a co-worker heard when they came into the pool area late one night. “We came into the pool and I heard giggling. The sound of a little girl playing in the area,” she said. Then she noticed splashing. “The splashing stopped, the giggling continued, and we observed the wet footprints of a small child walking across into the locker room.” She can’t say why, only that it happened: “I know that I saw what I saw. I’m not sure exactly why I saw it. But I know it was there.”

Legends of America says Jackie is supposed to have drowned in a pool during the ship’s sailing days. It also quotes the author and paranormal investigator Cher Garman, who points out that no one has ever drowned on the ship, though she still says Jackie is there. The ship now rents out a stateroom named for her: B326, Jackie’s Room.

Stateroom B340

“Several of the cabins onboard the Queen Mary are considered haunted,” the ship’s general manager, Stephen Sowards, said in 2018. “But, the stateroom with the most infamous reputation is room B340.” The ship says its logs hold many reports from that room, among them knocks on the door in the middle of the night and bathroom lights turning on by themselves. Others tell of the sink faucet turning on and off on its own and bathroom doors opening and closing. The ship began renting B340 again in April 2018. Its last guest before that, Sowards said, had stayed in the 1980s. In the ship’s sailing years, the space was three third-class staterooms, and it was later remodeled into one large suite.

The story behind it, as Charly Shelton first heard it, is a murder. Shelton told it in the Crescenta Valley Weekly, a local paper, that April. In the 1960s, on one of the last crossings before the ship came to Long Beach, a man “brutally murdered two women.” He was locked in his third-class stateroom with a guard at the door. Later he started pounding on the door, saying someone was in there with him, trying to kill him. The guard ignored him. The next day, in New York, detectives opened the door, and “they found the man had been ripped apart.” When the ship was docked in Long Beach, the story goes, his cabin and two others were made into B340.

Shelton heard other versions over the years, and nobody could trace what actually happened. “The ship’s records show nothing happening in any of those rooms,” Shelton wrote.

The author Nicole Strickland offers another beginning. In her book Spirited Queen Mary, as Shelton reports it, she traces the legend to Walt Disney Company employees in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when Disney owned the hotel. By her account, a few of them made it up to scare guests who were asking about a room that couldn’t be booked because it was being renovated.

Book Stateroom B340, which the ship sells on its own website as the B340 Suite.