6 | HAUNTED: The R.M.S. Queen Mary

In this episode of Beyond the Unknown, hosts Joli and Quinn explore the haunting history of the R.M.S. Queen Mary, a ship that transitioned from a luxurious liner to a military transport during World War II, and now serves as a haunted attraction. They discuss its construction, transformation during the war, post-war renovations, and the numerous ghost stories associated with the ship, including infamous hauntings and tragic incidents.

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Transcript

Joli (00:01.163)
Welcome listeners to another chilling episode of Beyond the Unknown, the podcast where we delve into the mysterious, the unexplained, and the supernatural. I'm your host Joli

Quinn Prescott (00:11.776)
and I'm Quinn.

Joli (00:13.653)
And together, we are your guides through the realms beyond reality. Tonight, we set sail on one of the most haunted vessels in American history, the Grand RMS Queen Mary. Once a luxurious liner that transported the rich and famous, troops during wartime, and even the deceased. This ship is now known for its ghostly inhabitants. From eerie footsteps and empty hallways to spirits that refuse to leave their cabins, the Queen Mary has seen it all.

Joli (00:47.835)
Quinn, do you know anything about the Queen Mary? No, sorry, not the Queen, but like the ship.

Quinn Prescott (00:51.534)
So I literally, I kind of figured. I don't know anything about the person. The Queen Mary, I think I'm getting it confused with the Queen Mary 2, which is that at the time was like a massive cruise ship. And do remember when it came into the St. John port and it was like a big deal and Nan had it on her calendar all highlighted. I think that's a different ship, right? Like this is the number two and this is the number one. Is that?

Joli (01:11.607)
yeah.

Joli (01:15.893)
Yeah, definitely a different ship.

This is the OG, yeah.

Quinn Prescott (01:21.174)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I don't actually know a lot about the OG. could tell you, talk your ear off about number two, but not number one.

Joli (01:27.921)
great, because I know nothing about number two except for that it was a big deal.

Quinn Prescott (01:30.911)
It's a cruise ship. It was just a really, at the time, was a really big cruise ship, but then literally within like a year or two, the Royal Caribbean line built a way bigger one. So it's not even, yeah. It's kind of a sad existence, honestly.

Joli (01:45.439)
I'm not even worth it.

And then every year since, think every cruise company just keeps building bigger and bigger ones.

Quinn Prescott (01:52.61)
bigger. Yeah, so this one doesn't even I don't think it ranks highly on large ships or has any particularly special features other than being number two of what you're about to talk about and I think that's what makes it so special.

Joli (01:59.019)
you

Joli (02:05.463)
Yeah, well, I'll give you a little bit of backstory on the original one. So the construction of the RMS Queen Mary began on December 1, 1930 in Clydebank, Scotland, at the John Brown and Company shipyard. So the ship's building process was

stop riffing so early on. However, the ship's building process was delayed due to the Great Depression and work was halted in 1931 when funding ran out. But luckily, construction resumed in 1934 and the ship was finally completed in 1936. The ship was originally going to be named Queen Victoria. The shipbuilder wanted to name it after what they said was the greatest queen and because it matched

their other ships names which all ended in like IA. But when they told King George, who was king at the time, that it was going to be named after the greatest queen, he said, my wife will be so happy. And his wife was Queen Mary. Awkward.

Quinn Prescott (03:13.851)
awkward my gosh that is i love that drama i had no idea

Joli (03:17.057)
Yeah.

Joli (03:20.531)
Yeah, so instead of upsetting the king they named it the Queen Mary. Had they kept to the original plan it would have been Queen Victoria. So maybe Queen Victoria number two would have been the one our grandmother was so excited to see.

Quinn Prescott (03:33.644)
Yeah, stupid question. The queen that just passed, she was a Queen Victoria, right? Yeah. Was she numbered? Elizabeth. Okay. I was getting all confused. Right. Okay. Okay. Wow.

Joli (03:41.589)
Yeah. No, she was Queen Elizabeth.

my god! Yeah, I don't know who her mom was, so I'll cut that out.

Joli (03:56.375)
The RMS Mary embarked on its maiden voyage on May 27, 1936, departing from Southampton, England, traveling five days to New York, which I don't think is that bad.

Quinn Prescott (04:11.266)
But I feel like that's the typical for crossing the Atlantic, right? Because that's the Titanic was about a week or so of a supposed to be about a week.

Joli (04:12.353)
I

Joli (04:19.095)
That makes sense. Yeah, I have no idea. It was a crowning achievement in American shipbuilding designed to rival the grandliners of the area. Designed to rival the grandliners of the era, including the Titanic. Though built many years after the Titanic's tragic sinking in 1912, the RMS Mary

was part of the same lineage of ocean liners created to dominate the transatlantic route.

And as a fun fact, because of the Titanic tragedies, it kind of set forth a lot of new safety standards for when they were building newer ships, which they implemented on the RMS Queen Mary. Yeah. And I'm not going to give away any spoilers or I mean, like I'm not giving anything away by saying this, but it never sinks and it's still floating to this day.

Quinn Prescott (05:02.86)
Makes sense.

Quinn Prescott (05:14.65)
OK. Did it have lifeboats?

Joli (05:20.873)
I'm assuming it had plenty, but I don't know. It had to have.

Quinn Prescott (05:23.81)
Good. Well, that was that was the shtick with the Titanic. They took off the lifeboats because they didn't like the way it looked. That was the thing. They took them off because they were like, it takes up too much space on the deck.

Joli (05:33.042)
Well.

Joli (05:38.505)
Yeah, well, it said safety standards influenced it, yeah, also didn't hit a iceberg.

Quinn Prescott (05:44.12)
Good. I like where this is going. That helps. We're so morbid. We just laugh, laugh, laugh. God.

Joli (05:58.965)
Much like the Titanic, the Mary boasted extravagant interiors complete with grand dining rooms, lavish staterooms, and a glamorous ballroom. It became a favorite for high society, drawing in celebrities and royalty abhorred.

Quinn Prescott (06:15.584)
Did it have like a class system the way the Titanic did? So like the richer you were, the nicer your ballrooms were? Cause like, I feel like a lot of these ships at the time, like they were so grand and they were so beautiful, but actually getting to step foot in those sections of the ships would mean that you'd have to be like money.

Joli (06:37.331)
Yeah, I couldn't find anything on it, but I would imagine that it did, just because it was not too far off the Titanic.

Quinn Prescott (06:42.143)
That makes sense.

Yeah.

Joli (06:50.291)
So yeah, it had some nice things obviously for the rich and famous, probably less nice things for those with cheaper tickets.

It was during this glamorous era that the ship earned its reputation for elegance and indulgence as it transported the world's elite across the Atlantic. However, the ship's luxurious voyages came to an abrupt halt in 1939. Can you guess why?

Quinn Prescott (07:19.918)
I'm gonna go ahead and guess because I kind of know what this boat ended up being used for in the end. It got reconfigured or whatever to be used as a warship, right? Yeah, okay. That's what I thought, because I was actually surprised to hear the boat started as a cruise ship type passenger thing. I didn't know that.

Joli (07:25.374)
Joli (07:31.36)
Yeah.

Joli (07:40.787)
Mm hmm. Yeah, so it was World War Two that halted the ship's luxurious voyages and it was drafted into military service for the British. They believed that the boat's massive size and a credible speed would keep her safe from the lurking German U -boats, which I think we covered during like one of our Halifax explosion episodes. And they were right, because obviously the boat never sank.

And there was a rumor that Adolf Hitler himself put a $250 ,000 bounty on the ship offering it to any submarine captain who could sink her. But nobody ever collected.

Quinn Prescott (08:19.372)
Wow. Wow. Okay.

Joli (08:27.415)
The Queen Mary was pushed to the brink when it was transformed for military service because it was cramming as many as 15 ,000 soldiers into spaces that were originally designed for 2 ,000 passengers.

Quinn Prescott (08:41.688)
Wow.

Joli (08:44.097)
Gone were the grand ballrooms and fine dining, it was now completely stripped down to just bare essentials to make rooms for bodies.

Quinn Prescott (08:53.582)
Like dead bodies or like the living 15 ,000 people? you said that. okay.

Joli (08:57.179)
living for now and dead. Yeah, like they're trying to cram as many people so people are literally like sardines in there like they're sleeping like shoulder to shoulder next to people on the ground and stuff.

Joli (09:15.576)
Her once bright red smokestacks were painted navy gray and her portholes painted black and welded shut. This dark transformation earned her the new name, the Grey Ghost.

Quinn Prescott (09:29.068)
Ominous.

Joli (09:31.059)
Mm hmm. Summers aboard the Merry were now brutal. Soldiers slept, like I said, shoulder to shoulder on deck or took shifts in the suffocating heat below deck. Without proper airflow, because the windows didn't open anymore, it became sweltering and hellish. Some men even died from heat exhaustion. Others, desperate to escape. Yeah, well, if you know,

Quinn Prescott (09:55.586)
boat?

Joli (10:00.425)
It's so hot and there's no ventilation because they welded the window shut.

Quinn Prescott (10:04.878)
That's wild.

Joli (10:09.586)
Others, desperate to escape, jumped overboard.

The Queen Mary was no longer the luxurious liner she once was. It had become the coined floating hell.

Quinn Prescott (10:24.116)
my god, so many names. The Grey Ghost floating hell.

Joli (10:27.071)
Yeah.

Joli (10:31.511)
There are even more stories that the crew started to lose their grip on reality. One chilling rumor claims that the galley crew locked the chef in his own oven and roasted him alive. Well, no official records confirm the chef's gruesome end. What we do know is that over 300 men met their deaths because of the Queen Mary. And these aren't deaths attributed to them being brought to shore to fight war. Obviously those numbers are much higher.

Quinn Prescott (10:58.806)
Yeah, this is just the ship itself.

Joli (11:01.942)
Mm -hmm.

One of the most tragic incidents occurred 19, no.

Joli (11:15.767)
One of the most tragic incidents occurred in October 1942. The Queen Mary, while sailing near the Irish coast, accidentally collided with one of her own escorts, the much smaller HMS Curacoa. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

The Kurakoa was continuously positioning itself to protect Mary from potential missile strikes. So it was like moving back and forth. Some say it's like zigzagging literally like all over the coast just to protect the ship. But maneuvering went horribly wrong. The 82 ,000 ton Queen Mary plowed straight into the cruiser, snapping it in half.

Yeah, some men died instantly while others drowned or froze in the icy waters. Very similar to the Titanic, you know? The Queen Mary, bound by a wartime protocol, couldn't stop to rescue them. So in total, just from that incident, 329 men lost their lives that day. And the details of that disaster... sorry.

Quinn Prescott (12:04.184)
Quinn Prescott (12:07.596)
Yes.

Quinn Prescott (12:15.629)
What?

Quinn Prescott (12:21.58)
What wartime?

You go ahead.

Joli (12:25.983)
and the details of the disaster were kept secret until after the war.

Quinn Prescott (12:31.118)
What a wartime protocol would make it worthwhile to lose 300 and some men versus just stopping a sector rescue them. don't get it. Like wouldn't.

Joli (12:41.015)
I don't know, mean 1942 and that's close to, I was gonna say, that's close to when it ended, that's not. I guess maybe the battles were just so intense that they were like, we need everybody on board. Maybe they're also carrying ammunition, I'm not sure.

Quinn Prescott (12:48.866)
No, like you think the...

Quinn Prescott (12:56.918)
I guess I just would have thought the protocol would be like, keep as many bodies alive as you possibly can to fight this war. Like that just seems so crazy to me and also so devastating.

Joli (13:02.422)
Yeah.

Joli (13:07.382)
Mm -hmm.

Joli (13:11.159)
When the war finally ended, the Queen Mary was transformed once again. She underwent a 10 month, you know what I forgot to mention that I wanted to earlier? I wanted to include some unconfirmed stories, but apparently, you know, they're transporting ship or like bodies to the east or like Europe. Sorry. They're transporting men to fight in the war, but

typically the boat would go back where it came from empty, at least empty of living bodies, but sometimes they would transport dead bodies of the soldiers that needed to go back home if they could. And it's also rumored that they would, in the very bottoms of the ship and cargo areas, transport prisoner of war, so German soldiers that they had captured. Sometimes they also had killed.

Quinn Prescott (13:55.169)
Mm

Quinn Prescott (14:07.275)
Hmm.

Joli (14:10.325)
And that's important because their ghosts might be lurking aboard.

Quinn Prescott (14:16.429)
Not surprising.

Joli (14:18.871)
Yeah, so when the war finally ended, the Queen Mary was transformed once again. She underwent a 10 -month renovation to erase every trace of her military service. Her elegant paintings were rehung, fine china set out, and the art deco furnish... and the artwork returned. I can't, I don't want to say art deco.

Quinn Prescott (14:41.964)
Really? They've made her back into a cruise ship. I had no idea that this Queen Mary, like the first one went like cruise, or back to crew. I had no idea.

Joli (14:54.021)
-huh. And I have no idea if they like unwelded, you know, or opened up those windows, but I'm assuming so because it became like a luxurious, yeah, became a luxurious liner again. So the ship was back, ready to carry the rich and famous across the Atlantic once more. And to this day, Queen Mary is now a floating hotel, an attraction, a wedding venue, and they even have like ghost tours.

Quinn Prescott (15:00.626)
must have. Yeah. Yeah.

Joli (15:23.701)
And it's in Southern California now, I think like off of Venice Beach.

So if you want to check it out, check it out.

Quinn Prescott (15:31.986)
Like, but you could you just tore it you don't actually stay on it.

Joli (15:36.415)
I don't know if you can stay the night on it, but there are restaurants and stuff. So if you wanted to just visit it and you weren't going for like a wedding or some other type of scheduled event, like you could just go, apparently has like really nice famous restaurants. Yeah.

Quinn Prescott (15:50.594)
We have to do it. We gotta do it.

Joli (15:56.279)
So obviously to the spooky bits, I've alluded to many people dying as a result of this ship or being transported while deceased, but I didn't talk about any of the sightings or reportings yet. So the Queen Mary is said to be haunted by over 100 spirits with one of the most infamous hauntings centered around stateroom B340.

Quinn Prescott (16:09.176)
Mm -hmm.

Quinn Prescott (16:20.991)
Okay.

Joli (16:22.335)
The activity in this room is so intense that some crew members who actually like work on it because it's still kind of a functional ship refuse to go inside.

Stories vary on who haunts that room in particular. Some say that in 1948, a third -class passenger, Walter J. Adamson, mysteriously died there. Some say it's his ghost, while others believe something far darker is responsible. Another theory involves a man locked in the room after murdering two women in the 1960s. Guards heard him screaming all night, claiming something was in there with him.

By morning, his body was found mangled and bloody.

Quinn Prescott (17:09.386)
you

Joli (17:11.244)
1B3?

Quinn Prescott (17:12.342)
Is there any other entrance into the room besides like a single door? Is there a window in there? you know?

Joli (17:20.745)
There is a window to the outside of the ship, but I don't know how you'd get in from the outside unless you were like mission impossible, rappelling down. Yeah.

Quinn Prescott (17:28.292)
Scaling it. Okay.

Joli (17:32.983)
So when B340 was reopened as a hotel room in 1967, so it might actually still be a hotel, I'm not sure, guests reported strange occurrences like covers being ripped off of them while they slept, a man looming at the foot of the bed, phantom voices, and faucets turning on by themselves.

Quinn Prescott (17:50.892)
Joli (17:59.991)
It became so infamous that it was closed for over 30 years and only reopened in 2018 as a haunted attraction.

Quinn Prescott (18:09.632)
Okay, so you like can't even stay there just be to like visit.

Joli (18:13.725)
Yeah, and even the current captain of the ship will not enter the room.

Quinn Prescott (18:18.56)
I wouldn't want to either if it was somewhere I worked or regularly had to be.

Joli (18:23.179)
Yep.

Other haunted spots on the Queen Mary include the first class swimming pool, boiler room number four, and the doorway where crewman John Petter was crushed during an emergency drill. Petter's Goat. I'm not sure what happened. You know what? We have time. Let's Google what the emergency drill was.

Quinn Prescott (18:38.466)
Like by his crewmates? Sorry.

Joli (18:58.495)
A mechanical door.

Quinn Prescott (19:02.666)
Okay, so it was a door. not like he was trampled by his co -workers.

Joli (19:06.709)
Yeah.

Joli (19:15.831)
trying to find the specific thing.

Joli (19:21.995)
Yeah, just as he was crushed to death by a mechanical door. It's very unfortunate.

Quinn Prescott (19:25.666)
Okay.

Joli (19:29.825)
So Petter's ghost, often seen in blue coveralls, is known to whistle or ask guests for his wrench before vanishing.

Joli (19:40.095)
And the first class swimming pool I mentioned was also a spot where I've heard that they had like used kind of to put bodies in sometimes when they're transporting it.

Quinn Prescott (19:53.262)
kind of makes sense like a big hole.

Joli (19:54.995)
Yeah, yeah. The Queen Mary is now dubbed the most haunted ship in the world by Time Magazine, so you know it's legit, drawing paranormal, drawing paranormal enthusiasts as much as history buffs. Despite her grand design and the excitement she once stirred, the ship now holds dark secrets shaped by war and tragedy that no renovation can erase.

Quinn Prescott (20:04.522)
yeah. Very.

Joli (20:26.444)
Okay, I completely skipped like adding in this whole German prisoner of war thing like I mentioned earlier where they transported them but there's another like I shouldn't say like ghost sighting but a lot of people

Quinn Prescott (20:38.392)
Just.

Just tell it now and then just stick the clip in somewhere.

Joli (20:44.053)
Yeah, I'm gonna add it in. So related to the German prisoner of war piece, a lot of people hear like ghostly whispers, but some people specifically say that they're hearing like German whispering where no one can figure out where it's coming from. And people likely think that it's from those prisoners of war who likely died aboard the ship.

Quinn Prescott (21:08.596)
sense because it's like why do all the ghosts that we seem to interact with seem like speak English like they should be speaking other languages and come from different you know backgrounds depending on what the situation is so that makes sense

Joli (21:18.017)
Yeah.

Joli (21:23.179)
Mm

Joli (21:29.144)
But no amount of expensive decor could hide what was happening during the war. Or, I'm gonna say that over again. But no amount of expensive decor could hide what had happened during the war. The Queen Mary wasn't just a ship anymore. She had become a haunted relic, carrying the weight of those who died on board. To this day, many say the spirits of her tragic past still roam her decks.

Joli (22:00.501)
And that's it for today's dive into the haunting history of the RMS Queen Mary. We hope those ghostly tales have stirred your imagination just as much as a ship once stirred the seas on its legendary voyages. If you enjoyed this story, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends. We'll be back with more tales this spooky season.

Quinn Prescott (22:24.15)
And don't forget, follow us on Instagram, at Beyond the Unknown Pod for photos of the RMS Queen Mary and Room B340. I'll just say it again, it's so much easier for editing. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, at Beyond the Unknown Pod for photos of the RMS Queen Mary and Room B340. Until next time, stay curious and remember that the unknown is always just beyond the shadows.

Quinn Prescott (22:56.076)
Bye!

Joli (22:56.907)
Bye!