story and photos by Kayte Deioma

We meet our guide, Yolanda Muńoz, near the entrance to the Engine Room. Along on the tour are Deborah and Joey Lane of Arizona Paranormal Investigations and their 14-year-old son Jordan. They have their Queen Mary Passports handy, ready to participate in the Ghost Sighting Scavenger Hunt. They have already seen an unusual orb appearing in their digital images shot near the engine room.

The tour starts with a film introduction in a small theatre that used to be the second class swimming pool. We get our first introduction to the ghost of a little girl who seems to have the run of the ship and beyond. She has been heard and seen in this area. As we leave the theatre, Yolanda tells us it’s best to stay silent to experience the atmosphere of each location.

We head down a stairway to an area known as Shaft Alley. Yolanda tells us of a young sailor who was found crushed by one of the water-tight doors after a fog alarm prompted all doors to the boilers and engine rooms to be closed. “Rumor has it…” she says “that the sailor was playing chicken to see how many times he could jump through the door before it closed. He made it six and a half times…” she concludes, with a ghoulish lilt to her voice. The specter of a bearded young man in coveralls has been seen in various parts of the ship and heard whistling through the boiler rooms.

We are led through an exhibit hall that used to be a boiler room. Apparently when the ship was purchased, part of the agreement was that it had to be dismantled so that it could no longer travel under its own power. The boilers where taken apart and removed through the smoke stacks. Now there’s a dance floor where there used to be a boiler. An apparition of a little blond girl in a bonnet has appeared to various workers here.

The little girl has also appeared in boiler rooms 1 and 2, which are used for the Ghosts and Legends Show. Joey Lane of Arizona Paranormal Investigations, who normally has no fear of heights, experiences a sudden inability to look down crossing the wide platform over the boiler rooms.

We are back in the first class swimming pool. The pool is a popular hang-out for spirits. The little girl, a young woman in a tennis skirt and a woman in a bridal gown have all been spotted here as well as miscellaneous other paranormal phenomena. I finally learn why the pool is not in use. Even without resident ghosts, the 12 foot depth of the pool is too deep for California State Code.

Yolanda leads us in groups of four to the changing room area adjacent to the pool. There is reported to be a vortex here, “a whirlpool of energy circulating in a spiral motion, which allows the spirit to enter and leave this dimension.” We extend our hands over the spot to see if we can feel it…an electric tingle, a breeze from nowhere.

Next stop is Room B340, one of the staterooms that became part of the hotel. It is no longer used as a hotel room because too many visitors and cleaning crew complained of disturbances in the room. Lights and water faucets go on by themselves. Bedding flies around on its own. Knocking is heard in the middle of the night. Although this room is no longer available to hotel guests, other haunted rooms and suites can still be reserved by the paranormally curious.

After the tour, three of the visitors discuss whether the child they heard laughing in the hall on R Deck was real or not. The rest of us didn’t hear anything. Yolanda doesn’t think anyone would have been in the area besides us.

“In certain areas I felt electricity going through my skin,” reports Deborah Lane, one of our paranormal investigators from Arizona. “Other areas felt very thick,” she adds. “It’s definitely haunted.”

Theoretically, our Haunted Encounters ticket also entitles us to a visit to the Paranormal Research Center located on A Deck in the bow (front) of the ship near the exit from the Ghosts and Legends Show. We follow a maze of signs to a pair of plain brown doors which are firmly locked.