SPIRITED LIFE OF ORIGINAL QUEEN MARY

WHAT do you do when you’re aboard a ship and with no one behind the counter of the cafeteria, plates of cakes and scones suddenly start hurling themselves across the room?

Or you enter a locked swimming pavilion deep in the bowels of the ship to investigate sounds of a raucous pool party – only to find the room immaculate, but with wet footprints leading from the empty pool and under a door that’s been bolted shut for a decade?

Or you get on an escalator and exchange greetings with someone who follows on behind you, yet when you get to the top you’re totally alone?

With the visit to Sydney by the world’s biggest ship, the 151,000 tonne Queen Mary 2 and her “little sister” QE2 this week, we were reminded of these stories of flying plates and mystery pool parties and disappearing escalator riders, that are just a few of the myriad tales of the supernatural aboard the original liner Queen Mary, now a hotel and museum in Long Beach, California.

Launched in 1934, RMS Queen Mary made 1001 Atlantic crossings and sailed 916,000kms on every ocean of the world in a 31-year career that included coming to Sydney twice during the Second War as a drab grey troop carrier.

Tales of spirits aboard the old Queen Mary are countless. That ghostly plate-thrower is believed to be the spirit of a cantankerous cook wreaking havoc for his grisly disappearance in the days when the ship was a troop carrier. Investigating officers could find no trace of the argumentative cook, despite interviewing his fellow workers who had obligingly attended in line for questioning.

But had those officers delved a little deeper they would have twigged that where the kitchen workers had so willingly lined up, was across the doorway of a steaming walk-in cake oven…

And the pavilion where that mysterious pool party has allegedly been heard on numerous occasions was originally the Queen Mary’s First Class Pool, shown today to visitors as an example of what life was once like for better-heeled guests on the grand old liner.

More than one security guard sent to investigate, has reported finding the pool empty – but with wet footprints leading to the securely bolted door.

And a tour guide on the ship, Nancy Wozny told us about the escalator incident when she was coming out of the ship’s Shaft Alley after the last tour of the day.

She says that when she mentioned it to a fellow guide, he said: “Oh yes, John Pedder… poor fellow was running to his position at the top of the escalator during a crew fire drill. An automatic fire door slammed shut, crushing him to death… still likes to hang around today, even though he’s been dead forty years.”

Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic several times on the first Queen Mary, and his regular stateroom is still shown to visitors today.

But Churchill also met with his staff over cigars in other cabins that are now guest rooms of the Queen Mary’s onboard hotel, and on several occasions guests in those non-smoking rooms have reported coming back after a day’s outing to cabins smelling of cigar smoke…

And visitors and Queen Mary staff say that many times they’ve heard a baby’s cries in the one-time Third Class children’s playroom… the room where Leigh Travers Smith died just a few hours after his mother gave premature birth.

How long, we wonder, will it take for QM2 to generate similar ghostly tales?

(To stay in the Queen Mary Hotel at Long Beach, and for information on travel to and within the USA, phone Canada & Alaska Specialist Holidays on 1300 79 49 59 or (02) 9080 6705.)