Your True Tales
May 2007 - Page 14
Haunted Cruise Ship
by Chibi
On the 11th of January this year, my family and I boarded the Sapphire Princess from Sydney, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand. The cruise was to last 12 days and we stopped at seven ports along the way, two in Australia and five in New Zealand. To combat boredom, settle nerves from being a first time cruiser and to make friends, I joined a "club" for teenage passengers between the ages of 13 and 18. The club was really a room that had been fitted out with various forms of entertainment for us and we were free to come and go as we pleased. It opened at 9 a.m. and closed at midnight every day, with several breaks in between. The room was mainly supervised by a staff member, who I shall call David, and during the duration of the cruise, David asked if we wanted to hear some stories about his adventures on numerous cruises over the years.
Everyone was happy to listen so he warned us that we might not want to listen to one story in particular if we were scared easily, so the group was divided into those that wanted to listen, and those that didn't. We initially thought it was a just a stupid ghost story, but I was proved wrong several nights later. According to David's story, the Sapphire Princess was constructed in Japan several years before, however, during construction, a fire broke out on the 13th floor and killed hundreds of workers working on this floor of the ship at the time. Due to Japanese tradition, the place where a person dies in tragedy must be preserved out of respect and made into a sort of mausoleum because the deceased does not realize they are dead. So, the 13th floor was made to replicate how one of the normal corridors would look, sealed off from the public areas of the ship and the ashes of the dead were placed in the rooms.
David told us that maids are sent down there every three days to service the rooms as apart of paying respect, unlike normal rooms that are serviced and made up every day. No electricity will work down there, even though it has been wired correctly and many people working there have reported ghost sightings of the charred bodies writhing in the beds.
Needless to say, the story scared as us all immensely, and I was afraid to go back to my cabin that night, even though it was two floors above the 13th floor and my brother and sister were in the room. When I told my dad the next morning, he was very skeptical and laughed it off, saying that David was just trying to scare us, so I forgot about it for a few days.
Two days later, at around 12:30 - 1 a.m., the ship was completely abandoned as usual for this time and my friends and I were on our way down to the 24 hour buffet restaurant for some dessert. I had forgotten my purse up at the club and was alone on my way down from retrieving it when I stopped in one of the stairwells. I noticed that this landing was very cold and the lighting was flickering, thinking nothing of it, I continued on my way until I looked back to see that the people in the paintings against the wall had bleeding eyes and faces twisted in agony that certainly weren't there before. By now, I was absolutely terrified and I hurried to get back to my friends in the restaurant.
After we had talked and eaten, we decided to go up to the pools to find some other friends that had gone for a spa and on our way, we traveled up the same staircase. Upon observation, I realized that the paintings had returned to normal, the lighting was behaving and the landing was in fact located in between the 12th and 14th floors. The ship did not have a 13th floor. To this day, I am still very chilled by this experience and as much as I enjoyed my vacation, I will never step back on that ship again.
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