The RMS Queen Mary was the pride of the British ocean liner company Cunard White Star from 1936 until 1967. She is a niece to the infamous RMS Titanic, which sank only eighteen years before the Mary’s construction began. The Mary was designed to be one of the largest and fastest passenger liners in existence. She was the first to be built exceeding 1,000 linear feet, and she twice held the coveted Blue Riband prize for fastest trans-Atlantic crossing. The ship sailed between Southampton, England, and New York Harbor, with a stop at Cherbourg, France. This is a crossing she made 1,001 times. She played host to dignitaries, heads of state, captains of industry, and Hollywood celebrities. And during World War II, she ferried troops around the world for military service.

Her sailing days are now long behind her. Upon her retirement, the ship was sold to the city of Long Beach, California, for the purposes of becoming a hotel, convention center, museum, and attraction. She left England for her Last Great Cruise on October 31, 1967. This voyage took thirty-nine days, because the ship was eight feet too wide to pass through the Panama Canal. She had to sail around Cape Horn on her way to Long Beach. She arrived at her final home in December 1967 and opened to the public in May 1971. Over fifty million guests have visited the ship. The Queen Mary has now been in the waters of California far longer than she was in the North Atlantic.

These days, it isn’t just the ship’s positive history that people speak of. During her thirty-one years at sea, she carried more than two million passengers, 800,000 soldiers, and 20,000 war brides. Statistically speaking, of course, not everyone would complete the voyage safely. There were deaths aboard of passengers and crew members alike. Due to her still-classified wartime service, the exact number of fatalities is not known, and in many cases neither are the causes of death. The Queen Mary is a vehicle, not a hospital, and autopsies were not performed at sea. If the cause of death was not immediately obvious, the record would simply state “found dead in bunk.” Because the ship has had known casualties, it is natural for some to conclude that the ship must therefore be haunted. The ship’s operators are now eager to embrace this aspect of her history, running numerous haunted tours, after-hours paranormal investigations, and theatrical seances.

This is where I come in. I have a familial connection to the Queen Mary. My mother was a passenger in 1962, and my grandparents traveled aboard in 1937. I began my career on the ship in 2015 as a tour guide and was eventually promoted to ship’s officer with an emphasis on the paranormal. I am a vocal skeptic who has never had a paranormal experience (but like any good skeptic, I am open to the possibility, with the proper amount of evidence). My management knew this about me and hoped I could lend a rational voice to the stories being told. And so I did what I do best: research. I wanted to know the truth behind the tales. My main tool was the so-called Book of the Dead, a binder with all the known fatalities as documented in the ship’s log entries. I found it very enlightening information.

The deaths on board began before the ship was even named. Construction worker Malcolm Aitken fell from a scaffold at the stern of the ship’s hull at the John Brown Shipyard on June 5, 1934, and died. The first ocean-going casualty happened on the return trip of the maiden voyage. Able-bodied seaman Arthur John Francis Golding fractured his skull (presumably while scrubbing the decks) on June 8, 1936, and was buried at sea. The last death during the ship’s sailing life was on her final voyage to California. Leonard Horsburgh, a fish cook, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage due to heat stroke. The ship, designed for the cold North Atlantic, had just crossed the equator. Horsburgh succumbed to his injuries off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The single greatest loss of life involving the ship occurred on October 2, 1942. The Queen Mary, acting as a troop transport, was on approach to Northern Ireland with a full complement of soldiers. The threat of submarine attack necessitated a zig-zag pattern by the ship. The HMS Curacoa, a light cruiser escorting the Queen Mary to port, found itself directly in the path of the much larger liner. The two ships collided, causing the smaller craft to sink. Of the 439 men onboard the Curacoa, only 101 survived the collision.

With so much real tragedy surrounding the ship, there is no need to fabricate wild stories about her. I had the opportunity to revise the Haunted Encounters tour script and tried to include as many factual accounts as possible, with a few of our more well-known legends mixed in to keep the tour entertaining. Here are some examples of the prominent casualties.

John Pedder, a young greaser working in the aft engine room in 1966, was tragically crushed to death in watertight door #13. The circumstances around this event remain unknown. Any claims to know details are purely conjecture, because no witnesses came forward. In September 1949, Senior Second Officer William Eric Stark accidentally consumed carbon tetrachloride, which was stored in an old gin bottle. However, he did not pass away on the ship but in a Southampton hospital days after arrival.

As for the ship’s legends, they are stories that are told officially by the ship that don’t have documentation in the logbooks. Ghost hunters claim that the spirit of a little girl haunts the First Class swimming pool. She is said to be heard singing children’s songs or playing hide-and-seek in the pool’s changing rooms. The claim is that she died in the Second Class pool and “upgraded” herself to First Class. However, there were no deaths recorded in either of the two pools. The worst documented injury I could find was in August 1951 when Mary Walling Ford dove into the First Class pool and hit her nose and lip on the bottom. The story of the little girl has nevertheless become part of the ship’s lore and remains one of the most popular accounts.

There were many stories in the Book of the Dead I had never heard before. Among the reports of heart attacks and strokes, I found one page that especially intrigued me: a handwritten copy of a newspaper article. Two names in the article stood out: Dana and Penny. They sounded vaguely familiar. I had heard other guides and guests say the names on rare occasions as a pair of young spirits. A search of the old haunted tour scripts yielded nothing. I then randomly found the answer in one of the books sold onboard:

According to the late [paranormal investigator] Peter James, two sisters were murdered by their father in room B474 sometime in 1959. The father was distraught for an unknown reason and murdered his wife and two daughters and then killed himself. Dana, four; Penny, two; and their mother were found in bed, strangled by a ligature, and the father was found in the bathroom, victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The girls have been seen and heard in the room on B deck and in the surrounding corridors, oftentimes playing with each other. Dana has been spotted in the cargo hold area and has been heard playing in and around the Archives section in the forward areas of the ship. Both girls have been heard calling out to their mother, so it is assumed that she has passed on while her children have remained behind. Odd as it may seem, these two little girls have been reported in the Green Room area of the ship and have been caught playing in the boiler rooms as well. Other favorite haunts of theirs are the former second-class pool area and the Royal Theater. (Clune and Davis 2014, 79)

Some things about the story didn’t make sense. For starters, there was no room numbered B474 during the ship’s career. The room that currently holds this number was originally two Second Class cabins: B162 and B164. During the ship’s 1967–1971 conversion, walls were knocked out in some of the smaller cabins to make larger, more hotel-appropriate spaces. It was at this time that all existing room numbers changed to their current designations. It is unclear from James’s telling of this account in which of the two rooms he believed this story to have occurred. Also, an event of this magnitude surely would have been recorded in the ship’s logs. Using the information contained in the handwritten article, I was able to track down the full story.

Here are the details that Peter James got right. Frazier Leon Tingler, twenty-eight, did indeed strangle his wife, Jill Johnston Tingler, twenty-five, and their two daughters, Dana, six, and Penny Lee, four, before taking his own life.

However, there is one major problem with James’s story: it didn’t happen on the Queen Mary.

On July 22, 1964, Tingler hanged himself with an extension cord after taking the lives of his wife and daughters, but the murder/suicide happened at the family’s home in Roanoke, Virginia. Tingler was suffering from acute depression as well as financial problems. His employer had filed a larceny charge against him earlier that day. Tingler had a note in his shirt pocket attempting to justify his actions.

What does any of this have to do with the Queen Mary? I did find some entries in the ship’s log that answer this question. Jill’s mother, who had been visiting the family from England, boarded the liner that morning for her return trip home. Once at sea, the ship received news of the event by telegraph.

07/23/64   1949 Fr: Cunard Line London

P/L Have been advised that son in law, daughter and 2 grandchildren of Mrs. Florence Mary Johnston T/C passenger have all been killed in USA. Please do everything prevent news reaching her. Other daughter will meet her on arrival. If information has already reached her please instruct Doctor look after her as nervous disposition. Let us know position.

Unfortunately, she had already received the news from Frazier’s brother, Loyd (the logs mistakenly identify him as Roy).

07/23/64   0940 To: Cunard/White Star NY

Voyage 437 East — Decode: Mrs. F.M. Johnston T/C C-15 has received information by radio telephone from Mr. Roy Tingler of Salem, Virginia, that his brother has killed her daughter and her two grandchildren and killed himself. Request confirmation

That entry lists Mrs. Johnston’s cabin as T/C C-15. That is Third (or Tourist, as it was then known) Class cabin C15. This was two decks down and nearly the entire length of the ship away from the location of B474.

Peter James did make the claim that the two little girls can be heard playing all around the ship, which is rather vague. The location of C15 is now part of the forward Archive section mentioned by James, so the story could be told that they are calling out for their grandmother instead of their mother—but that’s not an assertion any of the ghost hunters have made.

Some investigators claim that they have recorded audio of a disembodied argument taking place in B474, saying it is residual “energy” of the tragic event. What is not said is how sound travels on the ship. The walls are very thin to save on material weight. In the sailing days, the engines would create white noise, affording some privacy. Now, without the constant hum of the engines, conversations can very easily be heard from room to room and occasionally from deck to deck. The claimants make no effort to locate the source of the disturbance.

Peter James conducted investigations aboard the ship from the early 1990s until his death in 2007. He most likely had access to the ship’s archives and logs. One could argue that he learned of this story and reconfigured the details to be more beneficial to his narrative. Is this accurate? Why did he choose B474 to begin with? There is no way of knowing for sure. But all investigations of B474 since James’s initial telling have begun with the premise that his account of the story is true. None have attempted to verify his findings. Had they done so, they would have discovered very quickly that the account didn’t occur as James claimed.

I cannot in good conscience let this stand. These are real people who died tragic deaths, and their stories deserve to be told accurately.

Reference

Clune, Brian, and Bob Davis. 2014. Ghosts of the Queen Mary. Haunted America series. Cheltenham, UK: The History Press.