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The ghosts on the Queen Mary are haunting a ship they died on at sea. Ghosts can haunt the mind and lead to some very creative Halloween costumes for those open to their influence. We have amazing plus size costumes that will create a look that can be incredibly sexy or too scary to fathom. This year, think of the ghost ships and create a costume that will put a shiver down your friend’s spine. |
SHIP WRACKED
Our adventurer goes ghost-hunting
on the
Queen Mary
BY COREY LEVITAN
PHOTOS BY BRUCE HAZELTON/DAILY BREEZE
Last week I shared a gorgeous first-class cabin aboard the Queen Mary with a woman I met only a few hours before.
If only she had been alive...
At least 49 people have died aboard
the luxury liner, which voyaged 1,001
times between 1936 and 1967, the year
it permanently docked at Long Beach.
Many are thought to have never left.
Reports of paranormal phenomena are
frequent and consistent. There's the
little girl who swims in the pool
that's been empty since 1966, the woman
in a white dress who floats through
walls around the grand salon, the dude
in the T-shirt with the wrench who
hangs around the engine room.
Peter Serraino believes the
wrenchbearer to be 18-year-old John
Pedder, who was crushed to death in
July 1966 while trying to slip through
the rapidly closing watertight door No.
13.
"What's interesting about him is
that he goes about his business as
though he's still alive," said
Serraino, a punk-rock-looking psychic
from Hacienda Heights.
Serraino's name may ring a bell. In
a previous Adventures With Corey column, he was
the best of five mediums who agreed to contact former Beatle George Harrison
for his first posthumous interview. (Click
here to read it.)
When I asked the Queen Mary's
publicist, Robin Wachner, to recommend
someone familiar with the ghosts there,
she mentioned "this Peter guy."
Are there really any coincidences?
"John likes you because you're both
Welsh," Serraino told Susan, our guide
for the night of ghost-hunting I
proposed. (Assuming they're honest
about never speaking before, Welsh was
an astoundingly accurate guess; Susan's
last name is Gonzalez.)
"Can you ask him if he's ever tapped
my shoulder?" Gonzalez asked Serraino.
"He pulled you," Serraino responded.
"He almost knocked me backward,"
Gonzalez confirmed.
"Can you ask him not to do that to
me?" I requested.
We began walking as Gonzalez, a San
Pedro resident who has guided Queen
Mary tours since January, told us about
one night on M deck.
"I was giving a tour for about 45
people, and suddenly something came out
of the wall," she said. "It was wearing
either a dress or grey tails."
Gonzalez said she opted not to say
anything.
"Then two women on the tour started
giggling and said, 'What the hell was
that?'" she said.
We descended a stairway into a
ballroom area decked out for Shipwreck,
the Queen Mary's very manually haunted
Halloween maze event.
"Something's here with us," Serraino
reported. "Grab onto the handrails. You
never know what it might do."
At that instant, the hair on the
back of my neck stood up. What's weird
is that it wasn't all the hair but a
highly specific patch, behind my right
ear. The sensation was somewhere
between static electricity and a human
touch.
I shook the feeling out of my head,
but the skepticism remained.
When we arrived at boiler room 3,
Serraino said he sensed numerous fiery
deaths. We surveyed the large area from
a catwalk in silence, waiting for signs
from the other side.
Staring into the dark for five
minutes is like pressing your pillow
into your closed eyelids -- your
imagination begins playing tricks. Mine
invented two red points of light that
appeared to be eyes. When I looked
directly at them, of course, they
disappeared.
"Can we move on?" I asked. "I'm not
impressed."
"Did you see that figure below us?"
asked Kate, an adventurous journalism
student I recently met and invited
along.
"You mean the demon with the red
eyes?" Serraino responded.
That's not all. Two distinct shadows
then raced across one of the
rectangular slivers of dim light
visible on the hull. We were the only
ones in the room, and none of us was
moving.
Where are Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd
and Harold Ramis when you need them?
The first-class swimming pool is the
most famously haunted Queen Mary spot.
The previously mentioned little girl,
whose moans an old "Sightings" episode
allegedly recorded, is thought to have
drowned here.
I descended into the empty basin
first. Serraino hesitated, worried
about disturbing whoever (or whatever)
called it home. But he didn't sense
anything abnormal -- that is, other
than the gaggle of young soldiers
watching us from the overhead
balconies. (The Queen Mary transported
765,429 military personnel during World
War II, many of whom died aboard. The ship was repainted and renamed "The
Grey Ghost" during this era.)
"Oh my God!" Kate screamed.
Just as Serraino entered the pool,
she reported, wet footprints appeared
on the matting around it. They began at
two screwholes (where a ladder or
diving board once attached) and
continued out to a locker room.
And they obviously belonged to a
small child.
"They're forming right now!" Kate
freaked.
"Those were not there a minute ago,"
confirmed Daily Breeze photographer
Bruce Hazelton as he snapped away. We each touched them; they were not
wet.
''This is beyond the call of duty,"
Gonzalez said, declaring this "the
scariest thing that has ever happened
to me here."
As I tried instantaneously
reconciling my scientific worldview
with the definitive supernatural
evidence unfolding before me, something
occurred to me: I've seen those
footprints before.
The Queen Mary exploits its
metaphysical rep not only with
Shipwrecked but with a spectacularly
tacky tour called Ghosts and Legends.
Many of its vaunted hauntings are
recreated from noon to 6 p.m. daily for
$19 ($17 for seniors, $15 for
children).
The evidence was all around us --
loudspeakers for the girl's cries, a
projector for her foggy apparition, and
a wire attached to the pool gate, which
automatically slams shut after the wet
footprints approach it.
"Well, yes, those are the same
footprints," Gonzalez admitted. "But
there's no way for them to be activated
without the machinery being on."
Suspicion set in deeper than any
footprints could. Gonzalez was about to
let me report that the footprints came
out of nowhere, knowing full well that
they were painted on the matting.
(Photos taken by Hazelton before we
discovered the prints reveal that they
were, in fact, present the whole time.)
And, if Gonzalez really did see a
ghost penetrate a wall once, how could
footprints be the scariest thing she
ever saw?
I flashed back to an earlier
incident, when a banister knob flew off
as we passed it. Out of the corner of
my eye, I thought I saw Gonzalez flick
it off before commenting on how it
happened by itself.
Actually, there were rational
explanations for everything we
experienced so far. My neck hair stood
up because I was scared. The red-eyed
demon was sheer imagination and
coincidence. And the shadows on the
wall came from the crewmen we saw working on Shipwreck in another room,
from a light source we didn't properly
identify.
Our final destination was the
isolation deck, which once housed a
hospital and morgue, where all the
Queen's dead men at one point lay. It
now features a display of rooms where
sick passengers were quarantined.
As Gonzalez unlocked a door marked
"Authorized Personnel Only," two loud
female voices emanated from the cabin
to our right, B517.
"No, tell me more!" one said. The
other laughed.
Serraino froze in his tracks.
"They're real people, Peter!" I
proclaimed, rolling my eyes.
To prove my point, I knocked on
B517. There was no answer.
I knocked louder. Still no answer.
"That's what they sound like,
Corey," Serraino said, "real people."
Still skeptical but spooked anew, I
followed the gang through an abandoned
tunnel leading to the isolation deck.
Kate posed Serraino for a picture in
front of a room dominated by a couch.
Just before she raised the camera to
her face, the red cushion on the couch
depressed.
"Oh my God!" she screamed again.
At least Kate SAID it depressed. I
was looking elsewhere at the time. But
the seat did hold a distinct and
unusual butt impression, which even
seemed to slightly move.
A good journalist would have
inspected the cushion.
Fortunately for me, I've never been
accused of good journalism, because I
wasn't going anywhere near that
friggin' thing.
Even Mr. Ghost Buster ran away.
"There's a putrid odor in that
room," Serraino said. "There's a man
there who is very sick."
Yes, dead would indeed qualify a
person as very sick.
"No," Serraino corrected me. "He's
just had some surgery done on his
bowels. It's ghastly."
There were still rational
explanations. Although the isolation
deck is not on the Ghosts and Legends
tour, the cushion could have been
mechanically rigged. Or Kate could
simply have been wrong about what she
saw and we could have imagined the
imprint's movement.
The voices in B517 could have been
crew members waiting for us to walk by,
or a recording triggered by the turn of
Gonzalez's door key. (I was not wrong
about which cabin they came from.)
And all the hot and cold spots we
simultaneously noticed about every 10
minutes for an hour could have been,
well, hot and cold spots.
All the rational explanations added
together, however, began to lose their
rationality. Even though Halloween
tourist traffic would benefit, it would
require an inordinate amount of
manpower, money and coordination to rig
an entire ship like an amusement park
visited by the "Scooby-Doo" kids.
More significantly, it is
extraordinarily unlikely that the low-paid employees of the Queen Mary,
current and former, could keep such a
potentially high-paying, blackmail-friendly secret from the media.
Regardless, the scariest part of my
investigation still lay ahead: retiring
to cabin B461 -- hopefully just for the
night and not forever.
"You're sleeping here alone?"
Gonzalez asked. "You are so brave."
Not true. I originally planned to
share my bed with a girlfriend. But she
broke up with me the week before.
"It's probably because she didn't
want to spend the night here," Kate
said.
Not true, either. There are plenty
of better reasons to break up with me.
Gonzalez explained that the staff
doesn't rent out B461 because "the
guests end up calling in the middle of
the night to switch rooms, so it's not worth it."
According to Gonzalez, a housekeeper
once heard the shower when the room was
supposed to be vacant. After her knocks went unanswered, she summoned security.
"When they opened the door, the
shower stopped but nobody was
responding," Gonzalez said. "The shower
and mirrors were all steamed up but
there was no one there."
Remember that room Jack Nicholson's
kid was warned not to enter in "The
Shining"?
Before our hunt, I asked Peter to
case out the joint for any unknown
roommates. He entered the bathroom and
shook his head. It seemed my shower had
sorrow in it, in addition to shampoo,
conditioner and a tiny soap.
"It feels like a despondent woman
with some kind of a drug problem," he
said. "There was something about
infidelity and losing a child." He put
the period at late 1930s.
Gonzalez remarked that a pair of
recent occupants found their toiletry
bag knocked all over the floor.
"She was looking for drugs," Peter
said, adding that he believes she may
have committed suicide in the room.
(The Queen Mary has no record of it.)
After bidding adieu to the gang, I
retired at 11:30 p.m. to my cabin, which
I now
noticed was half a corridor down
from
the morgue and my lady friends in
B517.
I flipped on the TV for some much-needed comfort.
"This Halloween, the ship that went
through hell has come to take you
back," said the voiceover.
It was a commercial for the new film
"Ghost Ship."
Nothing much happened until Jay Leno
finished interviewing Salma Hayek.
That's when the lights flickered. I
opened the front door, not to
facilitate a screaming exit but to
gauge whether the lights in the hallway
were flickering. This would indicate a
shipwide electrical phenomenon.
Two minutes later, my lights did it
again. The outside lights did not.
I popped three times the recommended
dose of the stress herb Valerian and
climbed back into bed. Why was I
fearing exactly what I had come to
experience? Besides, maybe the woman
was attractive.
When Leno introduced his musical
guest, Rod Stewart, I heard water begin
to run in the bathroom.
Grabbing my digital camera, I
pussyfooted in to check the tub. It was
dry, and the water noise was faint, as
though someone was showering in the
cabin above me.
False alarm, I told myself.
When Conan O'Brien came on, however,
the water noise became louder. I
noticed the sign on my telephone: "Dial
'*' if you need help."
I imagined the call: "Yes, umm,
concierge? There's a dead despondent
chick in my shower."
The noise suddenly stopped, then the
room filled with the smell of perfume.
It was the flowery kind that old ladies wear.
Or ladies who were young in the late
1930s.
I opened my front door, not to
facilitate a screaming exit but to
gauge whether the smell came from the
hall. It didn't.
I hit the bed again, this time over
the sheets and with my digital camera
ready to fire.
At 12:49, the bed moved. Just a
little. Maybe it was a Valerian
hallucination, or maybe it was my heart
skipping two beats. But it got me to
thinking: What if I actually see this
woman?
She's only going to photograph as an
indistinct white orb, because they
always do. And even if she was clearer
than that, the only thing I could hope
to conclusively prove to skeptics is
that a) my camera doesn't work right,
b) I'm good with Photoshop or c) I'm
nuttier than a squirrel's lunch.
When I felt what I perceived to be
faint breath on my back, it was all I
could take. I opened the front door,
this time precisely to facilitate a
screaming exit.
By 1:15 a.m. I was racing home
faster than the family at the end of
"Poltergeist."
Although I believe there is some
energy aboard the Queen Mary that
science can't yet explain, I can't
offer any conclusive proof. (Can
anyone, really?)
What I can say for sure is this:
planning to spend the night aboard a
reportedly haunted ship, and actually
doing it, are two entirely different
things.