(Friday, November 21)

History or da day. Taken from another site.

The Queen Mary � The Grey Ghost The Queen Mary was one of the biggest and most fabled luxury liners of all time. During WWII, however, her job was to transport not tourists but GIs across the Atlantic. Her wartime service lasted from March 1940 to September 1946, during which time the ship sailed nearly 570,000 miles between Europe and the United States and ferried over 760,000 troops, carrying up to 15,000 soldiers at a time. The most memorable story about the ship, however, is not one of valorous wartime service but of a tragic accident that haunts the ship to this day. The Queen Mary was dubbed the Grey Ghost for the camouflage gray coat of paint she was given as a troop transport during the war. The ship so successfully evaded German U-boats on her Atlantic crossings that Hitler offered a $250,000 bounty and the Iron Cross to any U-boat captain who could send her to a watery grave. On October 2, 1942, as the Grey Ghost was making her way to the Scottish port of Gourock, she performed her normal zigzag pattern to confuse any lurking enemy submarines. This time, however, something went wrong. One of her escort ships, the HMS Curacoa, crossed her path and couldn�t get out of the way. The 84,000-ton Queen Mary plowed right through the 4,200-ton Curacoa, slicing the light cruiser in two and sinking her within a matter of minutes. Following her wartime orders, the Queen Mary sailed on without stopping for survivors. Only 101 of the 429 Curacoa crew members managed to cling to wreckage and get picked up by ships alerted by the Queen Mary. When the Queen Mary reached port, workers discovered that the collision had ripped a large hole in her hull above the water line. Within the lower bow was a more ghastly find�the body of a sailor who had been thrown from the Curacoa into the hull. Astonishingly enough, the man appeared to have survived the collision, only to perish from exposure. Over 40 years later, when the Queen Mary had moved to its new home as a tourist attraction at Long Beach, CA, John Smith, a carpenter on the ship, was working in the bow when he heard sounds of rushing water and voices. At the time, Smith was unaware of the tragedy that took place in the area of the ship where he was working. To this day, people visiting the lower bow claim to hear the ghostly sounds of water pouring into the hull, and pounding on the walls, and the screams of a man calling for help and wailing in pain. Some say the noises are just an old ship moaning beneath the strain of her own massive weight. Others claim it is the spirit of a man trapped forever in the belly of the Grey Ghost.