The Queen Mary: The Grey Ghost of Long Beach and the Escort She Cut in Half
Of all the things human hands make, only one is baptized. We do not christen bridges. We do not give cathedrals a name and a gender and break a bottle across their brow. We build them, we use them, and when they fail we blame the engineering. But a ship — a ship is launched the way a child is delivered. She is named. She is she . A crowd gathers, wine is broken over the bow, and the hull slides into the water for the first time while grown men weep on the slipway. Every seafaring culture that ever existed has done some version of this, and none of them can quite tell you why. The RMS Queen Mary is moored permanently at Long Beach, California. She has not moved under her own power since 1967. And she is, by a wide margin, the most thoroughly haunted object in the state. The Ship They Named for a Queen She was born on the Clyde, at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank, and her birth was very nearly a stillbirth. Construction began in 1930, and then the Depression fell on Britain and...