Episode 36: When the Bow Breaks

This is the story of the one.

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We never plan for the moments that frighten us the most.

They tend to creep up on us, floating on chance and propelled by some twisted mixture of Murphy's Law and the worst side of humanity.

Thankfully, those moments are rare.

In 2014, though, the people of Ireland came face to face with a real scare.

A ship was slowly approaching the western coast of the Green Isle, and while countless ships do that every day, this one was different.

This one, you see, was a ghost ship.

The Liubov Orlova began life in 1967 as an ordinary Yugoslavian cruise liner.

She was built to withstand sea ice and spent a good portion of her career as a tourist vessel near Antarctica.

But in 2010, the cruise ship entered troubled water, figuratively speaking, and was taken out of service and docked in St.

John's in Newfoundland.

Turns out, the crew of over 50 people hadn't been paid in over five months.

So to cover the $250,000 in debts, the ship was impounded and sold for salvage.

In February of 2012, the ship was pulled out of St.

John's by a tugboat headed to the Dominican Republic, but the tow line slipped free just a day into the journey.

They tried to reconnect it, but somehow it failed.

And thus began a journey that even a script writer couldn't dream up, with the ship drifting back east and then west and north until it was finally making its way toward County Carey in Ireland.

Oh, one last detail: the abandoned cruise liner wasn't empty.

It was full of cannibalistic rats.

Left unchecked, they'd multiplied over the years, and after they'd eaten every bit of food they could find on the ship, they turned on themselves.

So it was the thought of that, of thousands and thousands of starving, flesh-crazed rats reaching their shores, that left the people of Ireland in fear.

Ghost ships are a lot more common than you'd think.

The good news is, most of them aren't overrun with cannibal cannibal rats, but that doesn't mean there's a shortage of stories.

And just like busy human settlements, it's the ships that have seen the most action that always seem to hold the most legends.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

In the century between the mid-1800s and the end of the Second World War, the primary method of transportation between Europe and North America was the ocean liner.

Today, we can easily hop on a plane and zip between locations, but in an era before powered flight, enormous ships did the job for us.

Ocean liners were different from the cruise ships of today.

They were stronger, could hold more fuel, typically carried cargo and mail along with paying passengers, and they had thicker thicker hulls.

They could hold thousands of people at once and made their round-trip journeys constantly, week after week, year after year.

America is a country of immigrants, and the vast majority of that immigration was aided by the ocean liner.

My paternal ancestors boarded a steamship in Bremen in 1893 and rode it all the way to Ellis Island in New York.

I even have a copy of the ship's manifest with their names printed right on it.

My guess is that most of you could tell a similar tale.

And at the core of all of those stories is the ocean liner.

In the early 1930s, a new ocean liner was being built at a shipyard in Scotland.

Legend tells of how the shipbuilders approached King George V and told him that they wanted to name the ship after England's greatest queen.

They meant, of course, Queen Victoria.

But before they could clarify, King George said, my wife, Queen Mary, will be delighted to hear that.

And how do you say no to that, right?

The RMS Queen Mary set sail from Scotland on September 26th of 1934.

She was over 1,000 feet long, weighed in at just shy of 82,000 tons.

Through her 12 decks, she could carry over 2,000 passengers and over 1,000 crew members.

And she was fast.

Very, very fast.

Between 1936 and 1952, there was was only one year where a ship was faster than the Queen Mary.

And that speed caught the attention of the British military when World War II broke out.

In 1940, she was converted into a troop ship, bumping her passenger capacity up from 2,000 to over 15,000.

For an empire with troops scattered all across the globe, the Queen Mary became invaluable in getting them all to Europe to aid in the conflict with the Axis powers.

In October of 1942, as the Queen Mary was approaching Britain, an escort ship was sent to protect her during the final leg of the journey.

The HMS Curaçoa was tiny in comparison, but that wasn't unusual.

The Queen Mary was enormous.

What was unusual, though, was the navigational error that the Curacaoa made.

She mistakenly crossed directly in front of the larger vessel.

and was essentially run over like an elephant through a small wooden fence.

The Kirasoa was sliced in two, and 331 of the ship's 432 crew members perished in the disaster.

The Queen Mary, though, was essentially unphased and never dropped speed out of fear of a possible German submarine attack.

In December of 1942, over 16,000 American soldiers boarded the Queen Mary, headed to England, and in doing so set a world record for the most passengers on a single vessel.

The record still stands today.

But along the way, a freak wave nearly 100 feet tall crashed against the ship and pushed her over.

She came within three degrees of capsizing, and the events of that night went on to inspire the classic 1969 film The Poseidon Adventure.

At the end of the war, the ship stayed on call to transport American troops home, as well as making more than a few trips with war brides.

Over 20,000 European women and their GI-fathered infants were transported to the U.S.

on the Queen Mary, allowing them to reunite with their loved ones.

They call these trips, bride and baby voyages.

In 1947, she was refitted for luxury passenger travel and operated in that capacity until 1967.

Nine years earlier, the first transcontinental passenger jet had crossed the Atlantic, sounding the death knell for the world of ocean liners.

After completing her thousandth passenger voyage, the Queen Mary left port one final time and arrived in Los Angeles, California on December 9th of 1967.

There, she was converted into a luxury hotel, museum, and tourist attraction.

She's never left port since.

One last detail that should be mentioned.

Due to her dark colors and stealthy missions around the globe, the Queen Mary was nicknamed the Gray Ghost.

But rather than leave behind that ghostly reputation, it was after her arrival in sunny California that seemed to trigger countless echoes of her dark past.

In a lot of ways, turning the Queen Mary into a hotel made sense.

Economically, it was much less expensive than building a new one.

This was a ship designed for long-term accommodations, so converting it didn't require reinventing the wheel.

And having transported over 2 million passengers during her career, there were a lot of people interested in staying aboard a ship they never thought they'd see again.

Former passengers could see a lot of familiar elements on the retired Queen Mary.

The indoor pools remain untouched, as did the first-class lounge.

They could, in theory, tour parts of the ship that few passengers ever witnessed, including the engine room and the boiler room.

It's a hotel today, but the ship truly is a piece of living history.

And with that history, apparently, comes ghosts.

That was a reality that an engineer named John Smith came face to face with in 1967, shortly after the ship arrived in California.

He was contracted to come in and help with some repairs to the bow of the ship.

structural damage left over from the war.

And it was during one of his times inside the ship that he heard sounds.

I could hear the sound of metal tearing, water rushing, he would later say, 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 that 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 Curaçoa 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 some echo from the past.

Another area of the ship with a history of unusual experiences is the pair of pool rooms.

In its ocean liner days, there was one in each of the first and second class sections of the ship.

And while much of the ship's living areas had been modernized for the hotel, these pools 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 on 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 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, she said, and she couldn't get over the feeling that, despite the private tour with 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 weird, muscular sensation and a bit of superstition, something pushed her backwards.

Not a little, either.

According to her story, she stumbled backwards as much as a foot, and the force of the shove was enough to throw her off balance.

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 rooms to the ship's lounge called the Queen's Salon and even the old kitchen sections.

Visions of men and women in clothing from another era.

Reports of voices and sounds in inaccessible areas of the ship.

All of it combines to paint the picture of a ship that's cargo is full 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 her fair share of deathly tales.

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 that 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.

and so he started to search for the bottle.

After a few moments, though, he realized it was nowhere to be seen.

Considering his potential glass of gin was practically an order from his captain, he decided to go and ask the captain's steward, who always knew where things were.

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, the man, a Mr.

Stokes, located a gin bottle and handed it to him.

According to the ship's record, 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 the bottle wasn't gin at all, but an acid cleaning solution.

Apparently, Stark had taken a deep, urgent swig of the contents before his taste buds alerted him to the danger.

And by then, it was too late.

Officer Stark died a slow, painful death 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, something,

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 that it needed to be protected.

Part of the safety system was a series of doors that shut automatically in the event of a disaster.

They're called fire doors, but they were designed to fight more than just flames.

When these doors swung shut, the compartments could become airtight.

something that could 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 they closed slowly.

Slow enough, at least, to allow crew to slip in and out of them a few times.

According to the legend, 18-year-old John Petter wanted to see how many times he could slip through before the door shut.

No one remembers his final count, but they remember how it ended.

When door number 13 slammed shut, John Petter was halfway through.

And these doors don't stop.

Petter was crushed instantly.

During the months the ship was being converted into a stationary hotel, it 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 area of darkness ahead.

and then locked its legs 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 the chambers.

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 higher up the steps.

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 that 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 had been, where he'd come from, or where he went.

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 the crew members from the ship's history.

In one of the photos, she recognized the youthful face and beard of the man she had seen on the escalator.

The photo identified him as John Pedder.

Places where large numbers of people have lived and died have a habit of becoming a hotbed of unusual activity.

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.

Sure, 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 into 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 26th of 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 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 today, 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 passenger.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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