by Aaron Mahnke
I could hear the sound of metal tearing, water rushing, and then, men screaming. It sounded like there’d been a rupture of the ship’s hull. It was frightful. I went up to the extreme bow section of the ship. The sound was there, but there was no water and nothing to cause it. I don’t believe in supernatural things, but in all my experiences as a marine engineer, I’d never seen anything like this.
John experienced these sounds a number of times during the two months he worked inside the bow of the ship, but try as he might, he was never able to connect those sounds with actual, physical activity. Nothing he could see with his own eyes, at least.
It was only later, about a year after he completed his work on the ship, that he stumbled across a description of the Curacoa tragedy. It was John’s knowledge of the ship’s structure, and how it would have behaved in the event of a collision, that ultimately convinced him of what he had really heard: it had been the sounds of that collision playing over and over again, like an echo from the past.
Another area of the ship with a history of unusual experiences is the pair of pool areas. In its ocean liner days, there was one in each of the first- and the second-class sections. And while much of the ship’s living areas have been modernized, these pool areas have been left exactly as they were decades earlier.
Only available on private tours, these pool rooms seem to contain echoes of their own. Witnesses have reported seeing visions of women in old-fashioned bathing suits, while others have heard splashing and the laughter of children, and even felt water spray their skin.
More than a few people have even claimed to see wet footprints on the floor. All of which is a lot harder to believe when you discover that the pools have been empty for over three decades.
One visitor to the first-class pool area reported more than just sounds, though. According to her, while she was walking through the changing stalls, her children and the tour guide all continued down the hall, while she herself stopped to soak in the atmosphere. The place seemed to vibrate with activity, and she couldn’t get over the feeling that, despite the private tour through a no-access area, she wasn’t alone.
She was turning to leave and catch up with the others when she felt something. She described it as the sensation of two small hands on her waist, with distinct thumbs that pressed into her kidneys.
Then, just as she was about to chalk it up to some kind of muscular sensation and a bit of superstition, something pushed her backward. Not a little, either. According to her story, she stumbled backward as much as a foot, and the force of the shove was enough to throw her balance off. She pinwheeled her arms and ended up catching hold of the doorway between two rooms.
Reports like this and many others have trickled in over the years, from the pool areas to the ship’s lounge, called the Queen’s Salon, and even the old kitchen section. Visions of men and women in clothing from another era, reports of voices and sounds in the inaccessible areas of the ship—all of it combines to paint the picture of a ship carrying the cargo of a painful past.
When push comes to shove, though, nothing leaves its mark on a place quite like death. And the Queen Mary has been around long enough to have picked up more than its fair share of deathly tales.
DRINKS AND DOORS
In the years after the Queen Mary’s service in the war, she transitioned back over to a commercial ocean liner, and for a while it was back to life as normal. The crew worked hard, and when they weren’t on duty, they enjoyed their downtime in much the same way the military crew before them had: card games, laughter, and a lot of drinking.
In the fall of 1949, officer William Stark ended his shift and returned to his quarters to change and relax. His captain had given him permission to enjoy a glass of gin, so he started to search for the bottle. After a few moments, though, he realized it was nowhere to be seen.
Considering that this potential glass of gin was practically an order from his captain, he decided to go ask the captain’s steward, Mr. Stokes, who always knew where everything was. That was his job, after all—to provide for the needs of the passengers and crew. And so when Stark told the captain’s steward about this dilemma, Mr. Stokes located a gin bottle and handed it to him.
According to the ship’s records, Stark took the bottle and returned to his quarters. The steward went back to his own work as well, but several minutes later, there was another knock at his door. Officer Stark had returned, and he didn’t look well.
It turns out, the bottle had indeed been a gin bottle, but it had already been emptied by someone else long before. The liquid inside wasn’t gin at all, but an acid cleaning solution. Apparently Stark had taken a deep swig of the contents before his taste buds alerted him to the danger. And by then it was too late.
Officer Stark died slowly and painfully over the course of the following four days. More than a few visitors to the captain’s cabin over the last three decades have claimed to have heard the sounds of someone choking. Stark’s death, some think, is set on eternal repeat.
Far below the captain’s quarters, in the belly of the ship, where darkness and grease once stood in for the brighter amenities of the passenger areas, there are tales of another tragedy. Today the engine room is empty, but when the Queen Mary was active, it was the heart of the ship. And that meant it needed to be protected.
Part of the safety system was a series of doors that shut automatically in the event of disaster. They’re called fire doors, but they were designed to fight far more than flames. When these doors swung shut, the compartments would become watertight, something that can help a damaged ship stay afloat.
In 1966, the ship conducted a routine fire drill. The alert was sounded, and safety systems were engaged, including the fire doors. But the doors closed slowly. Slowly enough, at least, to allow crewmembers to slip in and out of them a few times. According to the legend, eighteen-year-old John Pedder wanted to see how many times he could slip through before it shut.
No one remembers his final count, but they remember how it ended. When door #13 slammed shut, Pedder was halfway through. And these doors don’t stop. Pedder was crushed instantly.
During the months the ship was being converted into a stationary hotel, the ship was patrolled at night by guards with dogs. One guard spoke of an experience he had while on the job. According to him, while walking through the corridor near door #13, his dog whined and growled at the darkness ahead, and then came to a halt and refused to walk farther.
That’s when the guard heard the sound of metal rolling across metal, as if one of the fire doors happened to be closing between compartments. The guard did what most of us would have done in a similar situation: he ran for his life.
In the late 1980s, one of the tour guides was closing up areas of the ship after the last evening tour. According to her story, she was near one of the hotel escalators when she looked up and saw a man standing high on the escalator. She described him as dressed in filthy work overalls, with a young, bearded face.
She glanced around the area to see if anyone else was nearby. She wondered if maybe it was nothing more than a prank, or if there was a new construction project she hadn’t been made aware of yet. When she turned back to the escalator, the figure had vanished. She had no idea who the man was, where he’d come from, or where he’d gone. But the experience left her feeling very unsettled.
It wasn’t until many years later that this woman had a chance to see some old photos of crewmembers from the ship’s history. In one of those photos, she recognized the youthful face and beard of the man she had seen on the escalator. The photo identified him as John Pedder.
BREADCRUMBS
Places where large numbers of people have lived—and died—have a habit of becoming a hotbed of unusual activity. The places with the reputation for being the most haunted often turn out to be locations where a constant stream of pain and suffering has taken
place. Hospitals, hotels, old battlefields, and the ruins of ancient structures. Buildings that have stood for centuries in harsh environments. Places where people have suffered tragedy and unrest over and over again. Yes, we can debate whether or not these locations really contain ghosts, but it’s clear that they harbor something, be it dark memories and tragic tales or actual ghostly figures.
These memories, though, have a way of bringing the past back to life. It’s almost as if these stories shine a light on something from long ago, casting shadows in the present. Or maybe it’s something deeper. Maybe when events are painful enough, some piece of that pain and loss is left behind, like a scrap of paper or a breadcrumb, pointing the way backward in time.
The stories that circulate today among guests and tourists on the Queen Mary certainly point toward the past. So it’s ironic that a tale from the birth of the ship should be so significant.
On September 26, 1934, as the ship was being prepared for her maiden voyage, newspapers scrambled to cover the events. They spoke with engineers and members of the crew who would staff the vessel. And they spoke to a guest at the launch ceremony, a woman named Lady Mabel Fortescue-Harrison.
Aside from being from a family of creative English entertainers, Lady Mabel had developed a reputation over the years as a popular astrologer, offering up predictions to those who would listen. So there, with the enormous Queen Mary looming behind her, she spoke words that, looking back, have an eerie weight to them:
“The Queen Mary,” she said, “launched today, will know her greatest fame and popularity when she never sails another mile and never carries another paying passenger.”
THERE’S A CAVE near the Red River in Adams, Tennessee, that’s a lot like any other cave you might find in the middle of the country. That is, except for its connection to a local legend that refuses to let go.
You see, the cave is on land that once belonged to a man named John Bell. He and his family had moved to the Red River area back in 1804, and in the years that followed, they endured one of the most mysterious, more horrifying experiences in American history. Specifically, they were assaulted by an unseen spirit that identified itself as Kate, although history and local legend have always given her a different name: the Bell Witch.
The cave was probably used by the family as a storage room, which was a common practice two centuries ago in the days before refrigeration. With a constant temperature of about 55° Fahrenheit, it’s the perfect place to store perishable food through the hot Tennessee summer.
There’s a local legend that tells of how young Betsy Bell, along with some of her friends, went to the cave one day in 1817. Maybe she’d been sent there by her mother to retrieve some supplies, or maybe they just wanted to explore. Either way, the group of children found themselves in the cave, in the dark.
While they were in there, one of the boys managed to get himself stuck in a hole. The others tugged on him and tried their best to pull him free, but he seemed completely and utterly stuck. And that’s when a voice spoke up. A voice without a body.
“I’ll get him out,” the voice of a woman said. And then, as if by magic, the boy was yanked free from the hole while everyone was watching.
Some think that was Kate’s entrance to our world, that this was the event that connected her to the Bell family, for better or for worse. In the months to come, she would be unusually focused on Betsy. That focus would become the core of the Bell Witch story, but the cave…well, it seems to have drifted into the background.
Until, of course, the Bell Witch events wrapped up. Because when Kate finally left the Bells, legend says that she retreated back to her cave. And as a result, many think this dark hole in the side of the rocky bluff is, in fact, haunted.
Today the land is owned by a man named Bill Eden. Sometimes people will travel to the area in hopes of getting a glimpse of the cave, and Bill is pretty accommodating. Sometimes he even gives tours. And it was what happened on one of those tours a few years back that leaves us with more questions than answers.
Bill was leading a group of more than a dozen tourists down the winding path to the entrance of the cave when one of the women abruptly sat down, right in the middle of the trail. And she couldn’t stand back up, either. When she was asked why in the world she’d decided to take a seat, she told the others that she hadn’t.
Something heavy, she claims, had pressed down on her. So heavy, in fact, that she couldn’t overcome it and stand back up. In the end, a number of the others had to pick her up and carry her back to their car, where she could recover.
Most would think it’s all nerves and exaggeration. And maybe it is. But Bill Eden thinks there’s something going on, mostly because of what he once witnessed inside the cave. While he was there by himself one day, Bill claims to have heard footsteps. When he looked up, he said he could see the shape of a person standing a few yards away, back turned toward him.
Bill was about to call out and ask why that person was in his cave uninvited, but he stopped when he noticed two very unusual, very disturbing details. First, the person was all one color, a pale, snowy white. Bill said he couldn’t see through the shape, but at the same time, it just didn’t seem normal.
But it wasn’t a trick of the light or a wisp of fog that was fooling his eyes. Bill said that the shape was, in every way, just like a person. He studied the back of the head, and then slowly lowered his gaze, examining the pale white details of the body.
And then stopped. That’s when he noticed the second disturbing detail. The figure, he said, had no feet. Instead, where the feet should have been, there was nothing but open space.
The figure, if that’s what it was, was floating.
THE TOWN HAD gathered in the meetinghouse for a day of focus. They prayed. They fasted. They talked quietly and encouraged each other. They did the best they could.
It was June 1676, and they were living on the edge of the frontier. While others had called the coastline of Massachusetts home for decades, their little village of Hadley had only existed for seventeen years.
They’d broken off from a community settled in what is now Wethersfield, Connecticut. They struck out in 1659 and followed the Connecticut River north for about fifty miles. The river was a safe place to be. A boat could take you south. South to Old Lyme and Old Saybrook, although those communities wouldn’t exist for another two centuries. And the river could take you to the Atlantic.
But in Hadley, they were about as far as you could get from safety. Their sea, if you want to think of it like that, was a nation of indigenous people who had lived in Massachusetts for thousands of years. It was their land, and the people of Hadley were stealing it from them. There’s no other way to put it, so let’s not be coy. The English were thieves.
So the Native Americans fought them. They fought the English all over Massachusetts that year, actually. The leader of the Native Americans was a man named Metacom, but he’d been on good terms with early Puritan colonists and had started to call himself King Philip in an effort to build trust and also earn respect. But relations soured, and so he led his people to war.
And now war had come to Hadley.
So the people of the village had gathered to pray and fast. They felt endangered. They felt threatened. The original inhabitants of the area wanted the English to go away, and they were delivering that message with the sharp tips of their arrows and with the vicious curve of each tomahawk blow.
They had been in the meetinghouse for some time when a stranger burst into the building. No one had ever seen him before. He was deathly pale. His white hair hung limp and unkempt around his neck. To the people in the room the stranger seemed immeasurably old.
And this stranger told the people of Hadley to prepare themselves. An attack was coming that very hour, an ambush led by the tribes outside their borders. But they could stop it, if they acted fast.
Some of the peo
ple panicked at the news. Some were in disbelief. But many of them heard his words and fell in line. This stranger—this visitor from some other place, dressed in white and bringing a word of hope—had a plan. Within moments he was leading them out, calling them to arms, and instructing some of the men of the village how to operate the old, disused cannon that sat in the square.
Those villagers repelled the ambush that day. Yes, the Native Americans were on the side of right, but the English survived and lived to talk about it for centuries to come. They spoke about the battle and their victory over their attackers with pride. But they also whispered tales of the angel who saved them all. The angel of Hadley.
REGICIDE AND REFUGE
Decades earlier, when the English Civil War broke out in 1642, England was divided by military and political conflict. In 1649, fifty-nine military leaders signed the death warrant for King Charles I. Among those men was a young officer named William Goffe. He and the others succeeded, King Charles was executed, and soon Oliver Cromwell took over as lord protector.
For a while, at least. The king’s son, Charles II, returned to London in 1660 and regained the throne. He granted amnesty to nearly everyone involved in the war, but not the fifty-nine signers of his father’s death warrant. Those people were labeled with the name “regicide,” or king-killers, and their fate was to be more in line with the execution they had demanded for his father.
As a result, many of the regicides fled the country. William Goffe, along with a friend, headed across the Atlantic to disappear into the wilderness of Puritan Massachusetts. They spent some time in the colony at New Haven, and then headed north. But through all of it, the key for Goffe was to remain in hiding.
