The SS Watertown Phantom Faces

The SS Watertown was an oil tanker owned by the Cities Service Company. Two of its seamen, James Courtney and Michael Meehan, were killed by gas fumes inside the ship. They were buried at sea, per the custom of the time.

That much is real. On 12 January 1925 the Pomona Progress Bulletin reported that the men "were overcome by poisonous gas while working in a cofferdam." The Los Angeles Times named crewman Costi Taviola, who "crawled three times through a 40-foot tube only 20 inches in diameter to drag his unconscious shipmates" out, and fell unconscious himself. "Meehan and Courtney could not be saved." The papers said nothing about ghosts.

In the legend, the burial took place on December 4, off the Mexican coast or off Panama, depending on the telling. The next day at dusk, the first mate looked out over the port side. The two men's faces were in the waves. They stayed for about 10 seconds. Then they faded.

They came back. Over several days, other crew saw the faces in the sea foam the ship created, following the ship. The dead men appeared "as if swimming, their faces clearly visible and recognizable." Some said the faces were bigger than a normal human's.

In New Orleans, Captain Keith Tracy told the company what his crew had seen. Cities Service suggested he photograph the faces if they returned. He bought a camera. When the faces reappeared he took six exposures and locked camera and film in the ship's safe. The film was developed in New York. Five frames showed nothing but sea foam. The sixth showed the ghostly faces. The sightings grew rarer. After a third voyage the crew was changed, and they stopped.

The story first appeared in February 1934, in Service, the Cities Service company magazine. The psychical researcher Hereward Carrington found the photo there, but the crew had scattered and the captain and first mate had reportedly died. A newspaper Sunday supplement brought the picture to the public in 1935. In December 1963 Fate ran a cropped version with arrows, in an article by Michael G. Mann. Vincent Gaddis put it on the cover of Invisible Horizons in 1965.

The legend said the Burns Detective Agency examined the negative and found no sign of tampering. In 2010 Blake Smith asked Securitas, which had bought Burns. It found no record. Using the sister ship SS Bald Hill to place the camera, Smith estimated the faces must have been 5 to 10 feet tall.

Joe Nickell and Tom Flynn compared three prints. Nickell found a "suspiciously hard, ruler-straight edge" on the left face, a rail that seemed moved or added, and arrows hiding further tampering. In 2021 Smith found the uncropped original in digitised newspaper archives. A ship in a gale. Two faces in the sea mist. His conclusion: "not an outright paste-up, but deliberate retouching."

Others have pointed to sailors' superstition, mass hysteria or an optical illusion in sea foam. Smith could not tell whether the 1934 piece was "a joke or a pious fraud." The deaths are documented. The faces rest on one retouched photograph and a story first told about ten years later. Still, the Watertown picture remains one of the classic ghost photos.