Queen of Scots

QUEEN OF SCOTS / CORONA QUEEN

Location: The ship in question is currently in the possession of the Crescent Cruise Line based in Miami, Florida where it is being restored.

Description: The nearly intact British Liner once exemplified the grandeur of high seas accommodations and offered the most in recreational and relaxation to travelers. Weighing almost 81,240 tons, it measures 1,020 feet from bow to stern with 150 suites and 320 cabins. It was driven by a twin-screw turbine engine and could reach a speed of 29 knots. Passenger luxuries included three restraints, a grand ballroom, swimming pool and deck activities such as croquet and shuffleboard.

Ghostly Manifestations: The Bermuda Triangle is a rather popular myth that has been long perpetuated by a long repetition of misinformation. Avoided facts like storms and weather conditions, transplanted locales and even fiction passed as fact as given this rather sinister area of ocean a false reputation of swallowing ships. UFOologists blame the disappearances of boats and planes on extraterrestrial life forms collecting samples of human life. Paranormal researchers believe that some sort of warps in space and time are trapping these crafts in other dimensions. Some theories even accuse sea serpents that somehow survived the end of the Cretaceous era. Common sense on the other hand dictates that the high percentage of ships and planes going through without incident versus the miniscule amount of craft to have reputedly vanished is not enough to suggest a supernatural location.

On June 18, 2001, the Queen of Scots was reported as having inexplicably turned up at a position floating 250 miles north of San Sebastian in the Bahamas after being reported lost over sixty years earlier. The reasons for its disappearance varied from the absurd (UFO, sea serpent, ancient civilization…) to the probable (mutiny, modern pirates, storm, German torpedo…) to the theoretical (subterranean gas pocket under the sea…). Its discovery would have been highly unprecedented if the Antonio Graza had not just appeared off Alaska the year before.

“I’ve been working on a boat of some type for some odd fifty years.” Captain Lou Morgan starts. “I’ve seen and heard a lot of strange things, but this topped them all. There is no way for a ship to have lasted sixty years on the high seas without being seen by the Coast guard, running aground, sunk by a storm or even getting seized by salvagers or pirates.”

On that day the ship was discovered, Morgan was carrying five passengers on a fishing trip around the Bahamas. He needed the money for repairs to his engine, but he mentioned none of that to his paying guests. Unfortunately, the trouble with the engine resulted in a short circuit in his radio and electrical system. His ship drifted a bit as he looked for assistance from another boat in the alleged Triangle.

“I should have known there was something wrong with the ship from the beginning.” Morgan continues. “When I first sighted it, I was wondering how we were going to get aboard to get to look for a radio and parts, but as I got closer, we noticed the ladder was down, almost like an invitation. Now, I don’t believe in ghosts, and I reckon I could have missed it, but…….”

While a ship being bounced and moved around by the current is expected to make a few noises, there were certain things coming from out of the Queen of Scots that could not be so easily passed off. Captain Morgan and Devane both made repeated references while on the ship that they felt as if they were being watched. First mate Charlie DuVal was constantly seeing people in areas of the ship, but when she turned her head toward them, they would be missing.

“I was down in the engine room with Lou when we heard someone coming down the stairway.” She recalls later on. “We thought it was one of the passengers as we looked up and saw this vague figure coming down, but as we turned to face the bottom of the steps, no one emerged. We figured it must have been a shadow.”

Morgan tried to get the engines started to supply power, but the repairs to the system were a bit more than he could do on his own. He ended up using the battery from his boat with the radio gear from the bridge of the bigger ship. Nevertheless, for a while after trying to get the engines going, the sounds of the engines rumbling or just trying to start up was coming from different parts of the boat. It would have been odd for the massive engines to have started up on their own after the futile attempts Captain Morgan put into to get them going, but yet the sensation of the boat running could practically be felt.

“It would have taken at least fifteen to twenty men working together from bridge to engine room to restart those dead engines.” Morgan later said. “I couldn’t do it alone and there wasn’t fifteen to twenty men hiding on that ship although sometimes we felt there was. I sent Charlie down to get my toolbox from down there and she came back later saying that she heard a lot of people down there. I heard it too. We all did. We stood at the door from shaft alley down into the engine room and heard the sounds of several men talking in conversation from far away, but we knew there was no one there. There never was.”

In addition to sounds, things moved too. In his quest for valuable collectibles to loot, Stu Sheridan broke into the wine room off the on-board kitchen and collected several fine bottles of champagne. He placed them all in a box and pushed them under a table out of the way (or in his way of concealing things) and the bottles vanished on him as he returned.

“He went nuts trying to find them.” Thomas Devane describes. “He accused us of taking them, called us every dirty word in the book and then went back to get more, and there they were. He had even been drinking from one and the cork had been placed back into it. Now, at the time we kidded him about karma and ghosts being upset with him, but we didn’t know how right we were.”

To keep from getting lost on the huge ship, Devane had taken to blocking doors open with chairs and tying off routes from deck to deck to lead the way he was going from engine room to the bridge, but someone was tampering with things as he left them. Chairs were moved back and ropes were undone. The line tying the Blue Jay to the liner was even undone and Morgan had to dive off the boat and tie the line back to prevent from losing his craft. A piece of equipment that Morgan had detached on the bridge slid itself out of the way when he wasn’t looking. Even Stu had a bad scare when a self deposit box filled with valuables from the ship’s safe ended up moved from a table outside the safe back to a steel table inside the safe.

“I recall a phantom boy.” Julia Lee recalls her experiences. “We turned a corner as we were exploring the ship and he was standing right there. The second he saw us he darted into the empty cabin right there and vanished. It was very chilling, but later, we were all sort of thrilled by the experience. He looked very real and non-threatening, but to actually live through an experience like that. Wow.”

The juvenile spirit turned out to be very shy as it popped up all over the ship staring down forlornly from stairways and appearing briefly at the end of corridors. Gus Gruber wasn’t at all thrilled by the experiences. Taking medicine for his heart condition, he just stayed in the ballroom and relaxed as he heard what was going on around him. He eventually started imaging things like people passing by him that weren’t there and then decided he didn’t want to be left alone. Following Thomas around, he nearly collapsed from a stress attack on a few occasions.

“Gus was with me the last time we went down to the engine room.” Devane answers frankly. “We were going down the steps in the dark with just the flashlight when suddenly he got the feeling that we weren’t alone. I didn’t see a single thing, but he just froze and grabbed the railing and wouldn’t go any further than we were. He begged me to take him back to the ballroom and I did, but as we left, just for a second, I could have sworn there was someone else on the catwalk ahead of us.”

David Shaw, the owner of the ship, also experienced a few things when he came to claim his boat. Accompanying him was a news crew led by Julie Largo (Largo had covered the discovery of the Antonia Graza the year before) and several salvagers he had hired. They also experienced the young boy that Lee and the others experienced. Described wearing exactly the same small sailor suit, the shy spirit ducked and hid in the children’s nursery on board and vanished from sight. Although he failed to appear on video, they did manage to get on tape the sight of the rocking horse in the nursery rocking by itself.

“I don’t believe in ghosts.” Shaw admits. “But there was a lot going occurring on the ship that didn’t make sense. We heard doors closing by themselves from empty hallways and there were constantly extra shadows that didn’t seem to come from anyone. One of those cameramen said he was getting a lot of extra feedback for some reason as if there were more people on board than there really was. I don’t try to explain it, these things happen.”

In his work to get the ship’s engines restarted, Ian Fields was inexplicably electrocuted from a wire he had just registered as dead. Loosing on the nerves in his right hand as a result, he had to work with his left hand while he worked to get the ship going again. His best friend, Eldon “Daz” Dazinger, heard a inter-ship phone ring as he was working on the oil pressure in the engine room. Someone told him to go help Fields and he did. Although he discovered Fields was hurt, he never figured out who called him.

Randall Banks, Largo’s cameraman, just happened to get some of the best footage from the haunted ship. As Largo was interviewing Captain Morgan and Thomas Devane in the ballroom on their experiences, Banks’ camera stopped working and refused to work until he got back to the mainland. When he reviewed the footage he had caught before the problem, he noticed the strange figure of a woman in a wet dress stride into the ballroom behind Largo, Devane and Morgan and just stare into the camera as it stopped filming. She had not been there during the interview !

History: The British Liner known as the Queen of Scots had its keel laid in 1925 and set sail on its maiden voyage on March 18, 1929. Ten years later on October 19, 1939, it set sail from Southampton, England to Nassau in the Bahamas. Five days into the cruise, the captain radioed that the ship seemed to be sailing into a yellow haze. It was reported missing on October 30, 1939, eleven days later. No trace of the ship or the passengers was ever found.

On July 18, 2001, Stu Sheridan, Thomas Devane and Gus Gruber hired Captain Lou Morgan of the Blue Jay to take them out for some deep-sea fishing, but he didn’t tell them of his inevitable engine or money troubles until they were already out to sea. Along with First Mate Charlotte “Charlie” DuVal and Julia Lee, Stu’s girlfriend, they ended up stuck out at sea when the faltering engine caused a short circuit through the Blue Jay that ruined their radio. The current meanwhile took them toward the ruined ship, which from the few legible letters from the bow they erroneously believed was the Queen of Scots. Making their way aboard, Morgan managed to jerry-rig the radio for one message to the Coast Guard as Sheridan started collecting whatever booty he could carry. A non-licensed salvager, he could not claim the boat.

The ship, however, was not the Queen of Scots as was believed. A more thorough analysis revealed that she was the Corona Queen which had been lost in a storm 25 miles NE of Bermuda a mere 27 years earlier on May 13, 1972. The sixth ship in the Crescent Cruiseline series of ships, it had made its maiden voyage on January 22, 1968 and had been officially reported lost in June of 1972 along with 325 passengers and crew. Captained first in the early Seventies by seasoned former Naval Officer Leonard Townsend, it was being piloted by Captain Stan Moore when she vanished. The likelihood of a ship drifting for only thirty years became a lot more believable than one drifting for twice that.

The year before, the Antonia Graza was found drifting off Alaska after believing to have been trapped in the Northwest Passage for forty years.

Following confirmation of the ship’s identity, David Shaw, the owner of the ship, flew out with a salvage crew to reclaim his errant craft. Accompanying him was Miami News Correspondent Julie Largo who had gotten wind of the discovery and took a film crew and a team of parapsychologists. One of the parapsychologists was noted Bermuda Triangle buff, Aaron Roberts, whose father and stepmother had vanished on the Corona Queen. Much like Captain Morgan and the people who had discovered the ship, they also experienced seemingly paranormal events which they attributed to their imaginations, but they were much more successful in restarting her engines and getting the ship to Miami. Despite some legal hassle with the Coast Guard, Shaw was able to retain the ship and have it restored.

In 2001, two different movies told the story of the ship’s discovery. “Triangle” starring Luke Perry, Dan Cortese, Dorian Harewood and Olivia D’Abo told a very atmospheric tale about the Queen of Scots, but in its conclusion, the hero destroyed the ship. “Lost Voyage” was a very cerebral plot starring Judd Nelson and Lance Henriksen and incorporating a lot of triangle mythology. While the first movie adhered much closer to the truth (except for the destruction of the ship) and used both Morgan’s and Sheridan’s money troubles as a sub-plot, the second was much more sensationalistic in its story-telling. In truth, the ship is being restored and updated and expected to be sailing again in 2005.

Witnesses: Stu Sheridan, Julia Lee, Thomas Devane, Charlotte “Charlie” DuVal, Gus Gruber, Captain Louis Morgan, Dana Elway, Julie Largo, Randall Banks, David Shaw, and a salvage crew of twelve including Ian Fields and Eldon “Daz” Dazinger

Identity: When it vanished, the Corona Queen was carrying 325 passengers and crew. While no is quite sure what happened to all of them, the main theory is that a subterranean pocket of methane gas opening under the ocean affected the buoyancy holding the ship and it seemed to start sinking. The crew and passengers started fleeing the ship but were sucked under by the weird whirlpool effect just as the Corona Queen quickly bobbed back up unattended. The problem with this theoretical hypothesis is that this scenario would have taken at least eight to twelve hours which is more than enough time for Captain Stanley Moore piloting her to call for help. The only other scenario involves a mutiny by the crew, but the lack of forensic evidence conflicts that. Contrary to both the movies, no human bodies have ever been located on board.

Comments: Triangle (2001) and Lost Voyage (2001). Structure based on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Hauntings based on both movies and on other various cases.