The haunted Queen Mary

Cunard White Star Line launched the RMS Queen Mary in 1936, with the intention of making her part of the first weekly express Southampton to New York service. The construction began in 1930 by John Brown and Company in Scotland, but was abandoned during the Great Depression in 1931 and not recommenced until 1934, when Cunard and White Star merged as a condition of the loan given to them to complete the ship.

At 80,774 gross tonnes, she was the second largest ocean liner of her time and despite a traditional design both in terms of engineering and interior design, she proved to be the fastest and most popular. The ship was employed in transporting troops during World War II alongside her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, and the two were dubbed 'the grey ghosts' because of their new grey camouflage paint, their intrepid avoidance of German U-boats and their speedy unescorted passages to and from Australia and New Zealand with up to 15,000 men aboard.

After an adventurous role in the war, Queen Mary served as a passenger liner for another twenty years and then retired to her final berth in Long Beach, California. She functioned as a museum for some time, and now features a hotel, restaurants, a marina and shops.
The ghost stories only began after the Queen Mary retired and have been used to commercial advantage ever since, making it difficult to differentiate between exaggerations, inventions and apparently genuine paranormal occurrences. They include the ghost of an 18-year-old fireman, who was crushed by an engine room door during a fire drill, the spirits of small children crying in what used to be the third-class nursery, and a phantom dog howling for its dead owner.