There are many ways to suffer for one’s craft. Some men trek through the Amazon. Some freeze in Antarctic tundra. I, however, took on an assignment far more harrowing: spending the night aboard the HMS Perseverance, a rotting, listing corpse of a ship whose greatest supernatural feat to date is continuing to pass safety inspections despite being one stiff breeze away from toppling into the harbor.
The Perseverance is a decommissioned luxury liner from the 1930s, now permanently docked at Fog Harbor, California. It’s rumored to be “the most haunted ship afloat,” according to absolutely no one with a working brain. Tourists flock to see flickering lights (poor wiring), hear disembodied footsteps (the ship is made of metal), and catch glimpses of “the Lady in Gray,” a so-called ghost that bears a suspicious resemblance to the costume guide who works Tuesdays and Thursdays for minimum wage.
The Perseverance bills itself as “the most haunted ship in the Western Hemisphere,” a claim made boldly on sandwich boards, in neon lights, and by tour guides who look positively desperate to avoid another shift at the Sizzler. For the low, low price of $149.99 (plus a $10 “spirit activity surcharge”), you too can shuffle through rusting hallways, hear the groans of fatigued metal, and mistake your own reflection in a porthole for a malevolent spectral entity.
Our evening began, as all exercises in mass delusion must, with a solemn pep talk about the ship’s storied history of tragedy and terror. Lost sailors. Tragic accidents. Unexplained disappearances. At no point was it mentioned that every single recorded death aboard the Perseverance involved either drunkenness, mechanical failure, or—my personal favorite—a tragic misadventure involving an industrial kitchen mixer and a complete lack of common sense. Nevertheless, the guide’s voice dropped to the requisite theatrical whisper, assuring us that “tonight, we might make contact.”
Contact with what, precisely, was left mercifully vague. Bad plumbing? Ferrets? The mold that surely bloomed behind every elegant-but-flaking panel of the first-class lounge?
Issued an EMF meter—basically a dollar-store toy that lights up when confronted with things like static electricity, cell phones, and the mournful sigh of logic leaving the room—we set forth on our grand expedition. Within moments, the group began gasping and squealing over every tiny flicker, every breath of cool air, every sudden creak. I, meanwhile, became intimately familiar with the ship’s greatest horror of all: the mildew stench of decades-old carpeting, an aroma so aggressive it felt like a sentient entity in its own right, perhaps more deserving of exorcism than anything else aboard.
At one point, we were herded into the infamous “Gray Lady Ballroom,” where participants were encouraged to call out to the spirit world. There, in the dark, illuminated only by the soft, unflattering glow of a cheap LED lantern, our guide breathlessly asked, “Is there anyone here with us tonight?” I assure you, the silence was profound. Even the rats, I suspect, were too embarrassed to respond.
Later, armed with an overpriced “spirit box” (read: a detuned radio spitting out static and the occasional snippet of Top 40 hits), we wandered the engine room. Here, naturally, every pop, click, and mechanical wheeze was declared to be the whisper of a sailor named “Jonathan” or “Seamus” or whatever name could be easily fabricated on the spot. At one point, someone declared they heard a voice say, “Get out.” It was a car commercial.
The evening wore on. The tour wound down. No spectral figures emerged from the shadows to deliver messages from the great beyond. No cold skeletal hands brushed my shoulder. No hidden knowledge was imparted. Just the low, steady hum of credulity vibrating through the bulkheads like a mournful dirge for critical thinking. Eventually, the group disbanded, each soul giddy with the conviction they had brushed the fringes of another world, their pockets lighter and their brains, somehow, even lighter still.
And the Perseverance? It remained stoic, steadfast in her mission to lure the gullible into mistaking bad acoustics for paranormal phenomena. If ever a ship deserved to sink out of sheer embarrassment, this one surely qualifies.
You will not find the afterlife aboard the HMS Perseverance. You will, however, find plenty of ghosts—of better judgment, of abandoned IQ points, and of every hard-earned dollar lost to this bobbing carnival of manufactured mystery.