The Mystery of the Ghost in the Queen Mary’s Starboard Lounge

Something has been gnawing at me for a few years now. It has to do with a piano and a ghost they call the Lady in White that’s reputed to haunt the Queen Mary’s Starboard Lounge. Which, if I understood a section on Weird California‘s site about the ship, is now called the Queen’s Salon.

A Night Aboard the Queen Mary

My conundrum all started a few years ago when we took an Asia cruise. It was our longest and most involved voyage to date. The first leg meant getting from Nashville to Los Angeles to catch a flight to Singapore, which included a day layover in L.A. followed by a second, shorter, layover in China.

Since we had to spend the night in L.A., it was the perfect opportunity to book a spooky stay. If the Cecil Hotel had been opened, I might’ve been tempted to stay there. Instead, I opted to book us aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

And, of course, besides exploring the ship on our own, we had to take the ghost tour.

There were two to choose from. One was the Ghosts & Legends tour, which was only 30 minutes long and included special effects. It was more of a canned ghost experience. I didn’t want that.

I wanted to see some of the hot spots, hear some of the ghost stories, and still get a good dose of the ship’s history. The best way to do that was via the Haunted Encounters tour so that’s the one we took.

And that’s where I learned about the Lady in White and my conundrum concerning the ghost in the Starboard Lounge began.

The Lady in White, the Piano, and the Starboard Lounge

The Starboard Lounge —er, Queen’s Salon— was actually the first stop on the tour. Our guide told us about a Lady in White with dark hair who has been spotted all over the ship, including in the Starboard Lounge/Queen’s Salon. He explained she is often spotted near the piano.

During our stay aboard the ship, the piano was located in the Starboard Lounge/Queen’s Salon, which is near the registration desk. But he said it hasn’t always been there.

He went on to tell us about how her ghost had been caught on camera. Her reflection had shown up on top of the piano while the bartender was playing it. He told us to Google it when we had a chance because that image was one of the first that usually came up. It was pretty notorious.

Of course, I Googled it as he suggested, but it wasn’t until three weeks later when we returned to the U.S., which is also when I started reviewing the thousands of photos I took.

What I found, both online and in my own photos, has perplexed me ever since. I’ll briefly recap my odd photos, then dive into the conflicting ghost info.

Ghost or Guide?

In “Ghost or Guide: What’s Happening in These Photos from the Queen Mary?,” I shared a couple of photos that I took of the piano during the Haunted Encounters tour. One of them really gave me pause, because it looked like I had caught a ghost on camera —a headless apparition!

However, I’m fairly sure it was the tour guide, even though I don’t remember him standing there. I remember him standing to the right of the piano and more in line with it, not behind it like that.

The only thing I know for sure is it can’t be anyone outside that porthole window-door. There is nothing on the other side of it for a person to stand on.

And our guide was dressed all in black and had a black zip-up sweatshirt kind of hoody on —or did he? The only thing I remember for sure is that he was dressed all in black and he was a great storyteller.

Which is why I’m inclined to think that’s him behind the piano. I now believe that I was so enraptured listening to the story about the Lady in White in the Starboard Lounge that I didn’t realize he had moved behind the piano.

This was only the beginning of the mystery though.

The Queen Mary’s Haunted Bartender

Back in 2018, among the articles that a Google search turned up about a ghost image in the piano aboard the Queen Mary was a HuffPost article from 2011. It still comes up these days as a Page 1 hit too.

It was about a bartender named Leslie Schirmacher who had been working on the Queen Mary for 25 years. In 2008, one of her customers turned out to be a psychic medium and told Schirmacher she had a ghost standing next to her.

The psychic said his name was Bruce Brandon, he was from Aberdeen, Scotland, and Schirmacher reminded him of someone he’d once loved and that’s why he was often around her.

Schirmacher reportedly looked into whether such a person had ever existed, but as of the time of that article hadn’t found any such person. Maybe that’s changed by now?

But there it was. The photo of a man’s face clearly reflected in the piano. Schirmacher said some friends from England had taken it of her.

It’s interesting at first glance, but it also doesn’t look quite real. The Huffington Post had photography experts analyze it and determined “the purported ghostly image looks as if it’s most likely been photoshopped or manipulated in some capacity.”

But it was a man’s face, not a woman’s as the tour guide had said. So did I hear him right and he had his facts wrong, or was I confused?

The Plot Thickens: The Haunted Bartender’s Second Face in the Piano

In 2009, YouTuber Chris Morrow posted a video of their reactions and Schirmacher’s reaction after they photographed another face-reflection in the piano.

It doesn’t look like the first one, or Bruce as some took to calling him. In fact, the second one looks more like Jesus to me.

Here’s the YouTube video of the incident so you can see for yourself.

Could it be psychic Peter James?

Throwing another wrench into the equation…could the second image that Chris Morrow caught be that of psychic Peter James, who sometimes led investigations aboard the Queen Mary?

Phantoms & Monsters offered a compelling argument that perhaps it was. They included two photos, one of the face in the piano that Chris Morrow caught and the other of Mr. James, which for copyright reasons I’m not at liberty to share.

When you see the side-by-side of the two photos, you can see there are some similarities. (But the ghost face still looks more like Jesus to me, and I’m not even religious!)

Lingering Questions

Does a male ghost also haunt the Starboard Lounge/Queen’s Salon on the Queen Mary in addition to the Lady in White?

Was it just a matter that the guide was confused about the gender of the ghostly reflection, which then in turn confused me?

Or did he know it was a man, and I was so busy taking pictures of the piano hoping something would manifest that I missed that part and thought he was still referring to the Lady in White? (Because that’s who I thought had been photographed.)

Did something perhaps manifest in my photos after all, not as a reflection in the piano, but rather standing near it? Could it be the same ghost those people documented in their YouTube video?

Or was it just the tour guide?

I may never get answers to any of these questions and the mystery of the ghost in the Queen Mary’s Starboard lounge may haunt me forever. But that’s how the world of the paranormal goes, right? Constant searching. Very few answers.

Check-In

Have you ever taken a photo that gave you pause and made you wonder if you captured something otherworldly too?