The SS Watertown Phantom Faces

The SS Watertown was an oil tanker of the Cities Service Company. The story has it sailing from New York City through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific.

Two of its seamen, James Courtney and Michael Meehan, were overcome by gas fumes while cleaning a cargo tank. As was the custom, they were buried at sea. The traditional date is 4 December 1924. The place, off the Mexican coast.

The next day. Shortly before dusk. The first mate looked over the port side and saw the two men's faces in the waves. They stayed for about 10 seconds. Then they faded.

For several days other members of the crew clearly saw the faces in the water, following the ship, as if swimming alongside. The Ghost Research Society records that the heads were seen on board ship as well. The sightings caused an uproar among the crew.

Captain Keith Tracy reported the sightings to Cities Service, and the company suggested he photograph the faces. Tracy bought a camera. When the faces returned he took six exposures, then locked camera and film in the ship's safe.

In New York a commercial photographer developed the film. Five frames showed only sea foam. The sixth showed the two heads "exactly as they had been seen on board ship." The Burns Detective Agency was said to have checked the negative and found no tampering. By the time anyone looked further, the crew had dispersed. The captain and first mate had died.

The image surfaced in the mid-1930s in the Cities Service in-house magazine, where psychic researcher Hereward Carrington is said to have found it. In 1963 Fate magazine printed a cropped, retouched version with added arrows, prepared by ufologist Michael G. Mann. Vincent Gaddis used it in his book Invisible Horizons, and it became a standard image in ghost books.

Blake Smith, a sceptic and co-host of the MonsterTalk podcast, worked on the case for about two decades and published "The Watertown Ghosts" in Fortean Times in 2010. Using deck plans of a sister ship, he photographed the sea from the same height. The heads, he concluded, would have been between 5 and 10 feet tall. With Joe Nickell he found sharp edges on the more indistinct left face, suggesting it was cut and pasted into place. Securitas, which had bought the Burns agency, found no record that Burns ever examined the photo.

Smith also confirmed something. Newspaper reports show Courtney and Meehan really did die of fumes, in January 1925 according to his research. Later he found the uncropped original. The faces are small, tucked into the upper right corner in the sea mist, even more blobby and indistinct. He discussed it with Karen Stollznow on MonsterTalk in 2021 and called the case a "hoax within a hoax": probably a tongue-in-cheek filler item, cropped and enhanced by later reprints.

Two sailors died. That much is certain. Whether their faces ever rose from the swell off the port side, the surviving record cannot say. The photograph still turns up in lists of the scariest real ghost pictures, sometimes under the wrong name, USS Watertown, and often in its cropped form.