Post by paulam on Apr 1, 2006 8:50:56 GMT -4
I posted this on the TAPS board a long time ago but figured I'd repost it here (and yes, it can be used in the stories section of the website if you want ;D )
This happened in the late 1980’s (I can’t remember the exact year for some reason). A friend of mine called me and asked if I wanted to with her and several of her friends to do some preliminary research for a documentary proposal about the hauntings on the Queen Mary. Two of her friends had access to areas of the ship that most people don’t see. I’ve withheld all names to protect the guilty as this wasn’t exactly an “authorized” excursion. My friend and her friends were Wiccans and very in tune to the paranormal. I wasn’t a disbeliever. I just never had any experiences to make me a 100% believer. It was always “in the realm of possibility”. I also knew very little about the ship itself. The only thing I knew was that the pool area was supposed to be haunted.
The first place we stopped was what I would call the map room. It was actually one large room divided into smaller rooms where the top half of the walls were glass or plexi-glass with either no doors or the doors that could have the upper and lower halves closed/opened separately. In one of these smaller rooms was a room with a lot of maps. It was obvious no one had been around in a long time because the dust was inches thick everywhere. I stepped into the room with the maps and just stood and looked around. That’s when I noticed a smell, something like a musky aftershave. I knew it wasn’t any of us as we were all women and none of us wore scents of any kind. Plus it just smelled more like something a man would wear. After a few moments of me sniffing around like a bloodhound on a hot trail, the scent disappeared. My friend got a whiff of it but by the time the others got there is was gone. I left that small room to explore the others. Not find anything of interest after a bit, I went back to the maps. I sniffed around but didn’t smell anything. So I stood in the door way talking to my friend. Next thing I know I felt a light breeze, like someone makes when they walk by you, and the aftershave smell was back. My friend felt and smelled it too so I knew it wasn’t my imagination.
The next place we went to was below several decks at the front of the ship. As the others talked about what they were experiencing, I noticed another smell. This time it was a citrus-soapy smell. My friend told me that the crew who worked on the ship during wartime would use a citrus soap to help clean the grease of themselves and that this was an area where a collision with another ship caused a breach in the hull. Several people apparently died despite the efforts of the crew. I don’t recall if the ones that died were from the QM or the ship with which it had collided.
We made our way further down into the ship, down a hall way which led into a room that was being used to store chairs. A chain link fence separated the storage area from a narrow path leading from one door, across the width of the room, and to another door. I was second to last in line, with my friend bringing up the rear as we walked through one door heading toward the next. I stopped abruptly at the second doorway. My friend would have ran right into me except for the fact she had the same feeling about the area we were getting ready to enter as I did. And that was that we just didn’t want to go there. I can’t describe what made me so hesitant. It was a feeling that the boiler room that we were heading into wasn’t a very friendly place. My friend got brave and stepped through the door way first. I lingered back for a few more seconds then headed after her. As I went through the door, I was torn between wanting to sneak really quiet through the area in hopes not disturb anyone/thing and want to run like heck just to get through it. The latter was out because I didn’t want to plow over the others. So I settled for a brisk but quiet stride through the boiler room. The whole time I felt as if someone had their hand on my back and was pushing me. The minute I step through the doorway out of the boiler room, the sensations were gone. I didn’t have the nerve to look back at any point.
Leaving the boiler room eventually brought us to a cargo hold. By this time we were as far down in the ship as one could go and well away from any other people. We decided to take a break and sit down. Where we sat you could look up and see several decks up. A person would pretty much walk off the edge of one of the decks above us and they’d land on us. We sat there for a while, maybe 15-20 minutes before we heard the first sound. It was footsteps, coming from above us. They sounded like someone pacing on gravel. We sat and listened to the sounds for a bit when we heard something even stranger… a baby cried. It was a short cry lasting maybe 5-10 seconds but it was very distinct. Again, we were at the bottom of the ship, where no one else, much less infants, would be. The hair stood up on my arms and the back of my neck. It was explained to me that this part of the ship was used to carry the war brides and babies to the States from over seas.
We decided we had stayed long enough and headed back up through the ship, stopping at the famous haunted pool. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me until we reached the end of one set of dressing rooms. It was there I smelled something I can only liken to rotten eggs. To my knowledge no one else could smell anything. Something I did not know about this area before, a man was apparently murdered in the very spot I could sense the foul smell.
The last place we visited was one of the only, if not the only, stateroom that was never converted to a modern day hotel room. Everything has been left as it was when the ship had been a luxury liner. As we walked in, I began smelling the same foul stench as I had in the pool area. The others were looking at and talking about a large round mirror as I wandered about the small room trying to find the smells strongest spot. It got stronger as I neared the bathroom and one of the people I was with said flat out “Don’t go in there.” Now I figured that maybe the smell was a result of “leftovers” in the toilet. But I was told no, that this is never used. None of the staff want to be in this room. According to the stories, maids would come in to clean, place stuff in a certain spot, leave and come back moments later to find it had been moved. Some time during the Queen Mary’s luxury liner service, a mother and daughter were murdered in the room. The murderer either committed suicide or was killed here as well. It is his spirit that still remains and who, my companions told me, was in the bathroom. He was angry and very evil and they felt he could very well hurt someone if they had gone in there.
So that’s my story. I have no hard proof that any of this occurred. We had taken tape recorders but they recorded nothing. Oddly enough, not even the baby crying. I’ve told very few of this story. Usually just friends who wouldn’t think I was crazy
This happened in the late 1980’s (I can’t remember the exact year for some reason). A friend of mine called me and asked if I wanted to with her and several of her friends to do some preliminary research for a documentary proposal about the hauntings on the Queen Mary. Two of her friends had access to areas of the ship that most people don’t see. I’ve withheld all names to protect the guilty as this wasn’t exactly an “authorized” excursion. My friend and her friends were Wiccans and very in tune to the paranormal. I wasn’t a disbeliever. I just never had any experiences to make me a 100% believer. It was always “in the realm of possibility”. I also knew very little about the ship itself. The only thing I knew was that the pool area was supposed to be haunted.
The first place we stopped was what I would call the map room. It was actually one large room divided into smaller rooms where the top half of the walls were glass or plexi-glass with either no doors or the doors that could have the upper and lower halves closed/opened separately. In one of these smaller rooms was a room with a lot of maps. It was obvious no one had been around in a long time because the dust was inches thick everywhere. I stepped into the room with the maps and just stood and looked around. That’s when I noticed a smell, something like a musky aftershave. I knew it wasn’t any of us as we were all women and none of us wore scents of any kind. Plus it just smelled more like something a man would wear. After a few moments of me sniffing around like a bloodhound on a hot trail, the scent disappeared. My friend got a whiff of it but by the time the others got there is was gone. I left that small room to explore the others. Not find anything of interest after a bit, I went back to the maps. I sniffed around but didn’t smell anything. So I stood in the door way talking to my friend. Next thing I know I felt a light breeze, like someone makes when they walk by you, and the aftershave smell was back. My friend felt and smelled it too so I knew it wasn’t my imagination.
The next place we went to was below several decks at the front of the ship. As the others talked about what they were experiencing, I noticed another smell. This time it was a citrus-soapy smell. My friend told me that the crew who worked on the ship during wartime would use a citrus soap to help clean the grease of themselves and that this was an area where a collision with another ship caused a breach in the hull. Several people apparently died despite the efforts of the crew. I don’t recall if the ones that died were from the QM or the ship with which it had collided.
We made our way further down into the ship, down a hall way which led into a room that was being used to store chairs. A chain link fence separated the storage area from a narrow path leading from one door, across the width of the room, and to another door. I was second to last in line, with my friend bringing up the rear as we walked through one door heading toward the next. I stopped abruptly at the second doorway. My friend would have ran right into me except for the fact she had the same feeling about the area we were getting ready to enter as I did. And that was that we just didn’t want to go there. I can’t describe what made me so hesitant. It was a feeling that the boiler room that we were heading into wasn’t a very friendly place. My friend got brave and stepped through the door way first. I lingered back for a few more seconds then headed after her. As I went through the door, I was torn between wanting to sneak really quiet through the area in hopes not disturb anyone/thing and want to run like heck just to get through it. The latter was out because I didn’t want to plow over the others. So I settled for a brisk but quiet stride through the boiler room. The whole time I felt as if someone had their hand on my back and was pushing me. The minute I step through the doorway out of the boiler room, the sensations were gone. I didn’t have the nerve to look back at any point.
Leaving the boiler room eventually brought us to a cargo hold. By this time we were as far down in the ship as one could go and well away from any other people. We decided to take a break and sit down. Where we sat you could look up and see several decks up. A person would pretty much walk off the edge of one of the decks above us and they’d land on us. We sat there for a while, maybe 15-20 minutes before we heard the first sound. It was footsteps, coming from above us. They sounded like someone pacing on gravel. We sat and listened to the sounds for a bit when we heard something even stranger… a baby cried. It was a short cry lasting maybe 5-10 seconds but it was very distinct. Again, we were at the bottom of the ship, where no one else, much less infants, would be. The hair stood up on my arms and the back of my neck. It was explained to me that this part of the ship was used to carry the war brides and babies to the States from over seas.
We decided we had stayed long enough and headed back up through the ship, stopping at the famous haunted pool. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me until we reached the end of one set of dressing rooms. It was there I smelled something I can only liken to rotten eggs. To my knowledge no one else could smell anything. Something I did not know about this area before, a man was apparently murdered in the very spot I could sense the foul smell.
The last place we visited was one of the only, if not the only, stateroom that was never converted to a modern day hotel room. Everything has been left as it was when the ship had been a luxury liner. As we walked in, I began smelling the same foul stench as I had in the pool area. The others were looking at and talking about a large round mirror as I wandered about the small room trying to find the smells strongest spot. It got stronger as I neared the bathroom and one of the people I was with said flat out “Don’t go in there.” Now I figured that maybe the smell was a result of “leftovers” in the toilet. But I was told no, that this is never used. None of the staff want to be in this room. According to the stories, maids would come in to clean, place stuff in a certain spot, leave and come back moments later to find it had been moved. Some time during the Queen Mary’s luxury liner service, a mother and daughter were murdered in the room. The murderer either committed suicide or was killed here as well. It is his spirit that still remains and who, my companions told me, was in the bathroom. He was angry and very evil and they felt he could very well hurt someone if they had gone in there.
So that’s my story. I have no hard proof that any of this occurred. We had taken tape recorders but they recorded nothing. Oddly enough, not even the baby crying. I’ve told very few of this story. Usually just friends who wouldn’t think I was crazy