PACIFIC PRINCESS

Location: The Pacific Princess is from the Princess Cruise Line operating out of Los Angeles, California.

Description: The Pacific Princess is a 20,000-ton passenger liner with 320 varying staterooms and a grand restraunt-style dining room on board featuring dazzling shows and restraunt revues. Passenger accommodations include a movie theater, casino and a complete health and beauty center featuring a gym, two saunas and two outdoor pools. Maintained by a crew complement of 350, the 950 foot long ship has seven decks, one funnel and can attain a top speed of 25 knots.

The stateroom in question was Room 350 on the Promenade Deck. Formerly the Suite Royal, it was later named the Honeymoon Suite for newlyweds. However, since then, the rooms have been renumbered and another Honeymoon Suite has been developed. No record has been made to locate the original Room 350.

Ghostly Manifestations: From those who have sailed on her, many agree that traveling on the Pacific Princess compare its elegance bestowed on its passengers to the experience of high society. Guests often forget the hectic dalliances of their private lives and become lost in the crew’s all consuming goal for the comfort and pleasure of the guests. However, among the hundreds that sail her every month, there is the limited few who receive more than they expected.

Some of the guests who have stayed in Room 350 have reported a few odd occasions and circumstances that have been whispered in covert discussions from the crew. Senator Burl Smith from California worked as a Yeoman-purser on the ship when he was starting out and at the time, he covered most of the complaints from the passengers. In a Halloween interview that covered the so-called hauntings of the ship during its refitting, he was kind enough to relate some of the stories he recalled more than others to a magazine reporter. According to Smith, it seemed that one out of four to five of the couples that stayed in the Honeymoon Suite had experiences that they were not quite alone in the room.

Smith recalls one couple that complained that the housekeeping staff was going through their belongings and moving things around where they couldn’t find them. Smith talked to the housekeeper on that floor and she denied any such goings on, but he advised her to be more aware of what she was doing in case something she wasn’t aware she was doing was actually bothering the couple. That seemed to be the end of it. One night, however, while Smith was on the late shift that same honeymooning couple came to his station in their robes to report that they had seen the maid slipping in and out of the stateroom as they tried to sleep. Smith then tracked down the housekeeper who was off work and ashore that night and produced her to the couple that had claimed seeing her. She was not the woman they had seen.

The woman they described was an older woman in her middle-aged years with short blonde hair and a long out of fashion dress from the early Seventies. The maid was a short brunette young woman in her late twenties of Hispanic descent. Smith started wondering if another confused guest was wandering in and out of the wrong room. The Captain and his men searched and inquired of all the women of that’s description, but never did locate her.

Isaac Washington, the ship’s chief bartender from 1977 to 1985, however, confided to Smith other strange occurrences. He reported that on some cruises in the past he was getting infrequent phone calls from the honeymoon suite even when it was empty for drinks to be delivered to it. He as well as the assistant bartenders would take the request down to the room, but no one was ever there, or the young couple there claimed that they hadn’t ordered anything. In June of 1980, someone actually called Isaac specifically asking for Ramon Delacruz, the former bartender, to send a gift of champagne to the honeymooning couple in the Honeymoon Suite. When he asked who was sending the gift, the woman hung up the line. Since then, somewhere between thirty to forty anonymous bottles of wine and flowers have been sent to the Honeymoon Suite that are believed to come from the ghost of Room 350.

At some point, one of the crewmembers began referring to the ghost as the “Spectral Bride.” They reported her wandering the corridor outside the Honeymoon Suite as well as the deck outside the room. The ship’s doctor, Dr. Adam Bricker, was casually walking the deck glanced upon her passing by him as he reached the vicinity of the Honeymoon Suite. He briefly acknowledged that she was pale and morose as trapped deep in thought and absent-mindedly just wandering the ship. To him, she looked very much like a real flesh and blood person. He noticed her in the matter of a brief seconds and then thinking she was attractive and lonely, he whirled around to offer his companionship to her. As he turned, she was nowhere in sight.

Despite her distant generosity, honeymooners who saw her did not always support her existence. One couple request to be moved to another room because they had woke up and saw her sitting in a chair watching them sleep. The husband had asked her to leave and the Spectral Bride responded by just fading into nothing. Another woman on another cruise woke to see the Spectral Bride opening and closing the drawers in the room as if she were looking for something. Before the female witness could say anything, the woman just silently placed her finger to her lips as if instructing her to be quiet and then turned into the room and vanished. Other guests have reported waking and finding clothing that had been strewn around neatly folded in a chair as if someone else had been inside the locked stateroom in the middle of the night.

Even guests who have not seen or been touched by the Spectral Bridegroom have felt her presence. Many honeymooners have found the same exact faded and yellowed bridal veil in the room left in a drawer, draped on a chair or on a rod in the bathroom. The veil has been taken to lost and found numerous times to be claimed, but somehow, someway, it always turns up again in the Honeymoon Suite.

Despite the sheer volume of stories, the crew stays tight-lipped on the ghost stories. Cruise Director Julie McCoy specifically instructs her staff not to repeat the stories so as to not to scare the guests. Nevertheless, the story somehow left the ship and Professor Julian Garfield, an expert on anthropology, booked the Honeymoon Suite with his wife for the sole purpose of researching the ghost. Future Senator Burl Smith was with him as they tried to prove or debunk the accounts. While sitting in a darkened room, he was actually able to get a photo of the Spectral Bride actually peeking in through the window of the stateroom from the deck outside. The photo, which has since been lost, reportedly showed a translucent shadowy face of a woman covered in a veil. The veil at that time that was constantly turning up in the room was in lost and found at the time.

In 1985, Ship Photographer Ashley Covington took the only other known photo of the ghost. Developing a roll of interior shots shortly after starting on the ship, he was developing pictures from near the Honeymoon Suite when he noticed the image of a grayish woman floating without any legs in the hall behind some guests. He was supposedly so scared that he reportedly nearly turned over the developing pan, but then someone shone a flashlight on it and that ruined the photo.

Amy Shepard, one of the ship’s dancers, had heard the rumors of the so-called ghost but never paid much attention to them for the eight years she danced in the ship’s casino. She left to get married and she actually returned to the ship with her husband to stay in the Honeymoon Suite. Her husband, Dean Clark, a practicing veterinarian on the cusp of starting his own animal clinic, was returning to the Honeymoon Suite when he found himself locked out of it and without the key. He knocked for his wife and heard her in her own voice say, “I’m in here.” Waiting for her to open the door, he stood outside the stateroom for what he called twenty minutes before Amy turned up returning to the room from sunbathing with her old friends. Realizing that someone was in their room that had not come out, they found a purser to unlock the door and then searched the stateroom for the intruder. There was no one in there.

During the years the ship was being refurbished and modernized, there was one odd occurrence that defied explanation. It took three years from 1993 to 1996 to retool and refit the ship from the engine room, to the staterooms and to the bridge. Everything was covered in shifts with three to five months to refurbish the Promenade Deck where the Honeymoon Suite was located. All the Promenade staterooms were being done at the same time with the Honeymoon Suite included. In the beginning, there was a report that the number of staterooms differed from the ship schematics. They had counted sixty staterooms from the layout of the schematics, but only counted fifty-nine in a door-to-door search. The Honeymoon Suite had somehow vanished and was excluded from the count despite the room-by-room search. Wondering how such a glaring omission could have gone on for years, the refurbishing started and the error was noted. However, after exterior work began, one workman looked in a random window from the deck and noticed a strange woman in one of the staterooms. He said she was sitting and resting in a chair in the room with her back to them. He told his supervisor that there was an unsupervised stranger on board and ten to twelve men entered the promenade deck to confront her. As they went to find her, they discovered the Honeymoon suite, which had persistently evaded their count of the rooms, but there was no one in it.

Today, another room serves as the Honeymoon Suite and the rooms are renumbered, but as yet, no one can figure out how eight people working separately managed to overlook one stateroom.

History: Built in 1971, the Pacific Princess has been escorting guests and tourists up and down to Puerto Vallarta and back for fifteen years. Most of the hauntings occurred under the helm of Captain Merrill Stubing who married and retired in 1986. The ship was taken out of service and completely refurbished and refitted from 1993 to 1996. Her most recent captain to date is Captain Jim Kennedy III, a retired Navy Commander.

Identity of Ghosts: According to Julian Garfield, the Spectral Bride is supposed to be the ghost of Ramona Franklin. She and her husband, John, were the very first honeymoon couple to sail on the ship on its maiden voyage. According to rumor, she caught him flirting with another woman and jumped overboard to drown herself. It is unclear if she drowned or if her body was never found. Nevertheless, her ghost reportedly starting returning on just her anniversary or whenever someone was using the room to search for her husband. She seems intent on looking after brides and making sure no unhappy marriages start. However, while records show that Jim and Ramona Franklin did sail on the maiden voyage, more extensive research proves that Ramona was still alive and married to John as late as 1983. The truth about the Spectral Bride if she still exists is unknown, but she has not made herself known since the refurbishing.

Comments: The Love Boat (Episode: “The Phantom Bride”) Hauntings based on the La Posada in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ship’s specifications from The Unofficial Love Boat Web-Site .