Scary Unsolved Mysteries to Tell in the Dark: The Debut of Ghosts on UM
My love for ghost stories began when I discovered two cultural touchstones of an 80’s childhood: Unsolved Mysteries and the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I won’t say much about the latter here, except to point out that the books have the most frightening illustrations I’ve ever seen. Snuff films, I’d imagine, have nothing on those full-page, black-and-white sketches of grotesque yet skeletal figures and nightmarescapes. They scared me so badly that I often had to cover them with a sheet of paper just to read the stories. (Look here if you don’t believe me. And don’t blame me when you have nightmares tonight.)
I have never experienced anything remotely ghostlike, bar one possible time in high school. I heard my mother open the remote-controlled garage door to return from work, and, since my ears were peeled for that sound, I shut off the TV, or stopped doing whatever else it was that I didn’t want her to know about. As I picked up my homework where I had left off like any dutiful daughter, I waited for her to walk through my door and say hello. The minutes continued to tick by . . .
. . . until, more than an hour later, I witnessed the garage door slide open for the first time that afternoon and my mom swing her car into the empty space. To this day, I don’t know what it was I (thought I) heard.
The truth is, I don’t think I gave a shit about ghosts until I read Scary Stories, and I didn’t believe they were (maybe?? please please please let them be???) real until Unsolved Mysteries came along.
When we think of UM’s paranormal segments, the UFO stories are the most notorious. But the show began its lucrative (in the form of ratings) investment in the supernatural with ghosts. If Amazon Prime’s episode guide is correct, the first paranormal segment was about purported hauntings on the Queen Mary, the luxury ocean liner active in the 30’s to the 60’s.
It’s one of my favorite ghost segments, thanks to one particular scene: a dramatization of a sighting a female maintenance supervisor and her male colleague claimed to have witnessed in the first-class pool. The whole UM segment was filmed on the ship, giving it that extra frisson of luxurious authenticity. The supervisor, Kathy Love, describes how she and her co-worker had heard invisible children giggling and saw the water in the pool splash — and splash the water does on screen, although no one’s there to do so. Then — and this is the tour de force — small, wet footprints materialize on the pool deck, as if one of the children playing in the water had jumped out to head to the locker room to change.
Even now, I’m impressed with the quality of the production value — although, given how little I know about producing special effects, I’d be impressed with anything beyond someone moving sticks attached to wet footprint-shaped sponges.
It’s one of the most memorable scenes I’ve ever seen on Unsolved Mysteries, and that’s saying a lot; I’ve watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries episodes, and I have a good memory.
What I find fascinating about the segment now is how comprehensive and earnest an investigation UM gave its first foray into the paranormal. The tone of scientific objectivity is established with Robert Stack’s opening commentary, filmed on the deck of that infamous (to me) first-class pool. It’s the fourth episode of the first full season — which means it must have been 1988 — and Stack’s monologue acknowledges, in the politest words possible, that the whole thing could be bullshit:
How do we explain these sightings from reportedly well-balanced, level-headed people? Could they simply result from the power of suggestion, stimulated by an eerie location? Some parapsychologists believe that all locations are haunted — that is, they retain memories of past events that some people with psychic sensitivities or ESP experience as hauntings. Whatever the explanation, the Queen Mary seems to be inhabited by something ethereal . . . that has been seen — and heard — but not explained.
Stack may sound even-handed, but his words are an anachronistic lesson in shade. These “well-balanced, level-headed people” — including Kathy Love, with her story of the Phantom Pool Child — are only “reportedly” so. And, as logical an explanation as “the power of suggestion, stimulated by an eerie location” seems, the phrase not-so-subtly implies that most people are not susceptible to such “stimulat[ion].” It’s reminiscent of how western women had, for centuries, been deemed to suffer from “hysteria” whenever they appeared anxious, passionate, or any number of “too much” emotions that unsettled the men seeking to control them.
The sightings and sounds on the Queen Mary that the segment dramatizes vary widely, reflecting the decades and acres over which the ship ferried the well-to-do (1,001 times across the ocean, according to Stack). A woman sporting a 1940’s-era pale pink dress and brunette Victory Rolls sits at a table in one of the many dining rooms, only to vanish after a waitress brings her a cup of coffee. A black-and-white vision of an older, rotund woman dressed in a bathing suit appears, frozen in time and in a crouched position, forever waiting to cannonball into the aforementioned first-class pool.
Marine engineer John Smith — who started working on the Queen Mary after it had docked permanently in Long Beach, CA in 1967 — describes hearing “frightful” moans of stretched metal and men’s cries, along with rushing water, in the bow of the ship. He later linked these sounds to a tragic wartime collision between the Queen Mary — painted grey camouflage and nicknamed the “Grey Ghost” as it carried Allied troops to victory — had with a British cruiser named the Curacoa. slicing the cruiser in half and killing almost 300 of its men.
A former guide on the ship identified only as “Nancy Anne” tells a story about taking an escalator up from the lower decks only to notice a man in dirty blue coveralls behind her; when she reached the top and stepped aside to let him through, he had vanished. Only later did she learn that a maintenance technician had died in“Shaft Alley,” that so-called section near the engine room, after getting caught in one of the watertight doors in 1966. (Whether or not he re-materialized for Nance is another question.) She ends her interview by making it clear that she’s not one who easily gets caught up in such things: “I don’t necessarily believe any other ghosts stories that other people have come up with. I only know what I saw, and I only believe what I saw with my own eyes.”
To verify this bevy of sightings — or to explain them away — the producers bring in six uncredited psychics and two parapsychologists, Dr. William Roll and Tony Cornell. From the beginning, Roll and Cornell distance themselves from the reputation that precedes their professions. Roll maintains that he “cannot answer” the question of whether or not the ship is haunted even after the investigation concludes. Cornell, for his part, declares in a lilting English accent that “I am a skeptic” before admitting that, despite his reservations, “I must allow for the fact that other people, who are very sane and sensible, have seen things and experienced things.” The segment shows both men in various states of expertise, setting up surveillance and recording equipment or organizing the psychics as they prepare to walk through the ship. Shadowy, silhouetted shots of the — mostly female — psychics are taken as they individually wander the ship, gathering impressions.
In tune with the broader experimental brio of the segment is a debriefing between Roll, Cornell, and the psychics that has all the gravitas of an important business dinner, or even a war room session. Stately tall lamps emit a dull yellow glow that illuminates the white-clothed round table at which the investigators sit. The carpet underneath has a scrolled pattern in yellows, browns, and creams, and a painting of two horses in similar colors towers over the empty fireplace of whatever first-class room the investigators are occupying.
The atmosphere is one of a group of professors debating a conference keynote speech long after the amateurs have gone home. Almost everyone at the table consults a notebook or paper packet, flipping through it as the group hears each psychic speak, like a committee going through an important report.
Stack’s voiceover admits that not all of the psychics sensed anything, although the segment only shows snippets of accounts that conveniently line up with the wartime collision and the worker who died in Shaft Alley.
In a statement that seems hard to believe, Stack also reveals that William Roll experienced a first in his 30 years of parapsychological investigation: hearing for himself an unexplained sound previously reported by a witness. To investigate further the disembodied conversation that he had heard, Roll left a voice-activated recorder deep in the bow’s bowels overnight.
“For most of the night,” Stack’s sonorous voice informs us as the steady hiss of speakers turned all the way up plays in the background, “this is what was recorded: nothing.” For two minutes, however, “the tape recorder picked up sounds where no sounds should be.” The results are strange vibrating bangs — gong-like echoes as if something was hitting the ship’s metal sides — as well a muffled melody reminiscent of a garbled PA announcement. Anticipating objections, Stack not only tells us that the bow had been sealed off for the night but also that the “researchers” couldn’t duplicate the sounds despite their best efforts.
For all these phenomena, neither Roll nor Cornell concludes that the ship is haunted; diplomatic as ever, these scientists simply acknowledge that more research is needed. “What we can conclude is that there is a physical source for the sounds” is the most that Roll will acknowledge, while Cornell says that paranormal phenomena “is a human experience. It’s gonna continue going on, and somebody’s gotta look at it.”
Stack’s closing words have even more bite than his opening ones, if that’s possible; this time, not only are the people who have reported sightings potentially prone to overreacting, but they are also perhaps schemers hoping to make a buck:
What can explain these hauntings? Overactive imagination? A quest for publicity?
But then, he pulls back on the skepticism:
Or [is it] something more intangible? Something . . . supernatural? Is the Queen Mary haunted? We cannot say yes . . . but we cannot say no.
With that equivocation ends UM’s first dive into the endless story pool of the supernatural, damp ghost footprints and all.
As ratings went up, the amount of hedging Stack provides as a preface to each ghostly segment went down. He never sounded as open to doubt again, although his intros also never insisted that ghosts or UFOs were real.
